Rnordman

KITCHENER, Ont. – When Tom Cruise introduced the concept of gesture-control technology to audiences more than a decade ago in the film “Minority Report,” the idea of operating computers by waving your hand through the air seemed like Hollywood fantasy.

But Kitchener, Ont.,-based Thalmic Labs has bridged the gap between science-fiction and reality with the Myo, an armband that let users control their laptop, phone and television with simple hand and wrist movements.

Next month, the Myo makes its debut on the retail market under a distribution pact with Amazon. Its creators say their device has the potential to shake up how we use our computers.

“It was never really intended as a replacement for the computer mouse,” said Stephen Lake, co-founder of the Thalmic Labs, in a recent interview.

“It’s more for how you interact with things out in the world.”

Lake, 25, sees big opportunities for the Myo in the medical industry and beyond, but he’s starting with baby steps in the consumer market where the armband is being pitched as a new way to interact with PowerPoint presentations, video games and remote controlled vehicles.

The Myo uses eight sensors to measure the electrical signals generated by muscle movement in your arm, while another tracks arm motion. The device recognizes five distinct gestures programmed to specific functions: a wave right can move you forward through a photo gallery and a rotating clenched fist can control the volume on your music player.

The technology grabbed attention from early adopters, who helped the company pre-sell 50,000 Myo devices through its website.

In March, Thalmic Labs will bring the technology to an even bigger audience through Amazon, which will sell the device for US$199 a unit, a price comparable with other wearable technologies like fitness tracking devices and smartwatches.

Wearable technology has the potential to change how people think about the virtual world, Lake said.

“I’m not talking about a dystopian cyborg future. If you do it right, the technology will be there when you need it — and out of the way when you don’t,” he said.

While the Myo’s functions are somewhat basic at this point, the company is collaborating with third-party app developers to find new ways the armband can make jobs easier.

In the medical community, the Myo is being tested with surgeons as a tool that helps them interact with medical images during surgery without contaminating their hands.

Workers in oilfields have tested the device as a way to handle paperwork in even the messiest situations.

The concept was born after Lake and fellow University of Waterloo graduates Matthew Bailey and Aaron Grant spent months working together on a wearable technology project for the mechatronics engineering program.

They came up with a waistbelt that could be worn by blind people to help navigate physical obstacles. While the technology never took off, it got the group talking, and one night at a bar they began to brainstorm new ideas.

“It got us interested in this whole idea of wearables,” he said. “We could give everyone else new abilities or superpowers using this idea of merging humans and technology.”

Thalmic Labs was founded in 2012 through $1 million of startup money from a group of small investors and, the following year, secured another $14.5 million from Boston-based venture capital firm Spark Capital and an investment wing of chipmaker Intel Corp.

Since then, the company has grown to more than 50 employees and doubled its office space in Kitchener.

Parts of the Myo are manufactured overseas, but the device itself is assembled in Canada, and Lake said he has no intentions of moving the company’s office or manufacturing outside the country.

“We had potential investors early on who thought we should be in Silicon Valley, but we said we’re going to stay in the Kitchener-Waterloo area,” he said.

Follow @dj_friend on Twitter.

The post Canadian-made Myo armband aspires to change how we interact with computers appeared first on Canadian Business.

Caterina Rizzi, 34, and Julien Smith, 35, founded Breather in 2012 to help nomadic workers find better places to do business. Last September, they received $6 million in funding, led by RRE Ventures. Rizzi tell us how the service works and how it intends to grow.

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“Breather works a bit like Airbnb, in that people approach us with empty commercial spaces they’re not using and we help rent them out for an hour or two at a time. But unlike other office-sharing services, we go in and design the spaces. Other platforms will put existing spaces on a map, in God knows what state. We make sure ours are affordable and well-designed. You won’t find any fluorescent lighting.

“The way it works is you download the app to reserve a Breather. Fifteen minutes before your reservation, you’re given a unique unlock code to access the space. When you’re done, the door locks behind you and your credit card is charged. Most of our Breathers cost between $15 and $40 an hour.

“Right now, our focus is growth. We have about 40 Breather locations spread between New York City, San Francisco, Montreal and Ottawa. And we’re planning to expand into Boston, Chicago and Washington, D.C., this year. But we need to go deeper in the cities we’re in, especially in New York. We only make an impact when there are Breathers everywhere our users are in a city. It doesn’t work when there’s just one or two.”

MORE CB CHANGE AGENTS:

• How Imaginea Energy founder Suzanne West is greening the oil business
• How Tangerine Bank CEO Peter Aceto gets his whole company to pitch in
• How Marie Josee Lamothe helps brands transform their marketing for the age of Google
• How Jonathan Suter built a company by letting customers pay what they want
• Why Roger Hardy refused to outsource Coastal Contacts’ eyeglass manufacturing

The post How Julien Smith and Caterina Rizzi are growing Breather appeared first on Canadian Business.

If you’re new to AdWords, or you’re fulfilling your New Year’s resolutions to finally get a handle on your AdWords account, one of your first questions will be deciding how to leverage the search and display networks. While the Search network can be a great way to catch customers who are actively searching for your product or service, it can be difficult for new and niche businesses to reach people who aren’t already familiar with their product and may not be actively searching for them on Google. For advertisers looking to generate that initial interest in their product, display advertising is a great way to get in front of the most prospective customers at minimal cost.

AdWords advertisers should be happy to hear that the Google Display Network has, by far, the largest reach of any display network in the world. 90% of global internet users are reached by GDN, including 94% of all US internet users – 64% of which are reached every day – and 89% of US smartphone users. The Google Display network is your fast track to show your ad on 120 of the top 200 trafficked websites, including the #1 video platform, YouTube; the #1 blog platform, Blogger; the #1 email service, Gmail; and reach to 50 billion apps downloaded via Google Play. In total, the Google Display Network serves 2+ trillion ad impressions each month to 2.5 billion internet users across 2+ million websites.

Source: Think With Google / Data: Comscore, 2013

Targeted Audiences on the Google Display Network

Advertisers have literally millions of different targeting options to find new customers on the Google Display Network, and it can first seem overwhelming to choose the right targets for your display campaign. However, each targeting method effectively falls into one of two camps:

1. Website-based targets: Which target a set of websites, based on some criteria, and show ads to all users on those sites.
2. User-based targets: Which target a set of users, based on some criteria, and shows them ads to on all sites they visit on the Google Display Network.

Website Based Targets: Target all users who visit these websites.

Managed Placements: A managed placement target isthe most direct way to target a website. Simply choose the website(s) or pages you want to show your ad and you’re done! You can use the Display Planner Tool to get traffic and cost estimates for a certain domain, see which ad formats the site supports, and get ideas for other similar placements.

Topic Targeting: Topic targeting on the Google Display Network allows you to target all sites and pages about a certain pre-defined topic. Topic targeting is similar to managed placements, but considerably less restrictive. Topic targeting allows advertisers to reach a wider audience than they can reach with just managed placements.

Major categories of topic targeting available on GDN; subcategories can be more specific.

Keyword Contextual Targeting: Keyword contextual targeting on GDN is similar to topic targeting, but less restrictive. It’s perfect if your topic isn’t one of the hundreds defined by Google in the topic targeting. Simply create a list of keywords and your ads will be matched to page that have contextually similar content.

User-Based Targets: Target certain users across all the sites they visit on the Google Display Network.

Remarketing: Remarketing is one of GDN’s most powerful targeting tools. Google display remarketing allows you to serve ads to previous visitors of your site as they navigate the web, keeping your product and brand at the front of their mind, even after leaving you site. Remarketing also allows you to engage with high-value visitors, such as those whom have purchased from you in the past, viewed key pages (such as product or pricing pages), or have had the most engagement on your site, differently than those whom have not.

Similar Audiences: Similar audience targeting allows you to attract new users to your site who have similar browsing and search behavior as those already on your remarketing lists. Similar audience targeting is a great next step for those advertisers who have seen success with remarketing to find their next best audience to target.

In Market Audiences: In market audience targeting shows your ad to users whose search and internet browsing behavior indicates that they may be “in market” for a certain product or service. For example, a user whom starts repeatedly searching for “Temp Jobs” and starts visiting related postings on Monster.com could be identified as “in market” for a temporary or seasonal job. In market audience targeting works best for products or services that have longer buying and researching cycles.

Interests: Interest targeting matches your ads to users who recently started viewing sites of the same topic. It’s ideal for finding new customers whom have just begun to be interested in something. Consider matching your offer and promoting beginner or novice level products or services for these casual users.

Major interest categories on GDN; subcategories can be more specific.

Affinity: Affinity targeting is similar to interest targeting, but it matches your ads to users whom habitually visit sites of the same topic. Think of them as long-term interests. These are your more experienced, hardcore users. Consider matching your offer and promoting more advanced or specialty products or services for these experienced users.

Major affinity targets on GDN.

Demographic Targeting on the Google Display Network

In addition to the various website- and user-based targeting methods, we can also layer on demographic targets for a user’s gender, age range, and parental status. Advertisers can either exclude or create custom bid adjustments for users based off these demographics. The implications for certain advertisers with a strong homogenous key demographic are clear. If your industry leans heavily on one gender, age range, or parental status (say, women’s clothing, retirement services, or baby care), demographic targeting may be a powerful tool for you to leverage.

The Google Display Network is a powerful medium to expose your brand to a wide range of new users who might not yet be searching on Google for your product. Sophisticated website and user based targets as well as layered demographic targeting allows you to experiment and find your audience, no matter how niche it is. Be sure to plan ahead though! The Google Display Network has over 3,000 predefined targeting options and is adding more all the time. We’ve compiled the most up to date list of GDN targets for download here to help you best plan display efforts and find new successful methods of targeting.

Getting the right number of qualified leads is a challenge for many marketing teams in the business-to-business sector.

Attracting the best prospects may come down to the lead generation methods you’re using.

Here are some tips for generating more qualified leads:

1. Revamp Your Landing Pages

High converting landing pages have a major role in lead generation. Reducing the amount of text on the page is the first step to refining your website for lead generation, according to ClickZ.

Studies have indicated that people spend very little time actually reading on the Internet, so condensing the copy as much as possible can get visitors to the call to action sooner.

Bullet points are great for improving readability. You can also link to other pages on your website so people can get more information if they’re interested.

The call to action is crucial for meeting the goal of any landing page. A simple page layout can actually bring more attention to the CTA. Images shouldn’t distract from the CTA, so placement is really important.

Although other links can be helpful, it’s important to consider the offer and context of the page. It may be beneficial to make the CTA the only clickable element on the page.

A/B testing can help you determine which approach is more effective.

2. Use Video

Video has skyrocketed to popularity in a fairly short amount of time. It’s one of the most effective ways to engage potential leads, and using video on a landing page eliminates many of the concerns about placing text, images and the CTA.

Originally, marketers used video to raise awareness and increase interest in complex products, but now it’s more widely used for lead generation, The Content Standard stated. Many B2B buyers are watching videos to learn about business products. This is an excellent way to connect with people who may be unfamiliar with what your company does.

Video is so effective because it’s different from the average lead generation tactics.

Marketers have nearly limitless ways to present their solutions to potential customers. Plus, video makes it easier to describe a complex product offering in a shorter space time while maintaining a higher level of comprehension from viewers.

Since people tend to skim the text on a landing page, this is a great way to make sure the benefits of your product stick with leads. You can convey a great deal more in 30 seconds or a one-minute of video compared to someone reading copy for the same amount of time.

3. Revamp Your Forms

Forms are essential for lead generation, but difficult to get exactly right. A best practice for forms is to only ask for the information you need to reach leads in the future, Jake Baadsgaard said.

Sometimes just an email can be effective, especially if prospects are downloading gated content like an e-book or white paper. Based on the content they downloaded,you can send them related information via email. As you build a stronger relationship with leads, you can ask for more information.

Although we’ve already discussed landing page CTAs, a form needs its own call to action. Conveying a sense of urgency can increase the completion rate.

Forms can work best when there’s something in it for the lead, like a free trial, for example.

Implying that people only have a certain amount of time to redeem this offer can cause them to take action right away. Sending a short email immediately after someone fills out the form ensures the lead won’t forget.

What are some lead generation tactics you use on your website? Tell us in the comments!

It seems like a self-evident truth, doesn’t it? One of the consistently effective b2b sales strategies is to sell the way your customers want to buy. All you need to do is to understand their buying decision process.

According to research published last year by Hank Barnes of Gartner, your prospects may be more willing than you think to help you understand how they go about making purchase decisions. Not unexpectedly, a quarter said that they view that sort of information as confidential.

But to varying degrees, and depending on how they were asked and on the quality of their relationship with the the vendor and their representative, the remaining three-quarters of the clients Gartner surveyed expressed some degree of willingness to share the information with a sales person…

Three-quarters are willing to help if asked

You can read Hank’s full article here. But in summary: nearly half of their clients expressed a willingness to share information at a high level, and to identify the major gates in the buying decision process. More than 10% would go further and share the granular details of the process, and nearly 15% would additionally be prepared to share details about who owns each decision point.

So - three quarters of your prospects are willing, if they trust you and if you ask them appropriately, to share at least some invaluable intelligence about their buying process. But you have to ask. I think that statistic proves that it is always worth asking.

If it’s worth asking, it’s worth asking right

The obvious conclusion is that every sales person should be brave and bold enough to ask. The timing needs to be right: if the prospect has no reason to trust you, they are far less likely to share the information, and may regard your request as impertinence.

Hank quotes a great example of a well-structured enquiry about the key stages in the prospect’s buying process in his article. It focuses on the enlightened self-interest of both parties to help each other in their respective responsibilities. But what if, despite your best efforts, your prospect is completely unwilling to share any information?

What if they refuse to tell?

Your prospect might position their unwillingness to provide any insights as a consequence of a highly regulated buying process. But even in those situations, a complete unwillingness to illuminate the buying decision process is likely to be an unpromising sign.

In fact, a reluctance to explain their process should cause you to evaluate whether you ought to be pursuing the deal at all. It implies an imbalance to the buyer-seller relationship that will surely cause you grief later on in the buying process.

Unwillingness - or ignorance?

It could also indicate that you’re engaged with someone who actually doesn’t actually understand their firm's buying decision and purchasing processes - ignorance, rather than unwillingness - and that you are operating at completely the wrong level in the prospect organisation.

Either way, you might be better off declining the opportunity, rather than running with the deal completely blind. Whether the reason for refusal is ignorance or unwillingness, there are likely to be opportunities out there where you have a better chance of collaborating and winning.

The value of generic buying-based stages

Thus far, I’ve focused on understanding customer-specific buying processes. But there is also tremendous value to be had from aligning the stages in your pipeline around a series of genericised stages that reflect how your typical buyers typically buy.

In effect these generic stages act as a useful working hypothesis for how individual prospects are likely to buy. You might, for example, use the following stages:

• At first, the prospect seems satisfied with the status quo
• Then something happens to make them open to the possibility of change
• Then they need to decide whether they need to take action
• Then they need to define their decision criteria/shortlist
• Then they need to select their preferred option
• Then they need to validate their decision

The great benefit of starting with a buyer-centric generic process is that it allows you to anticipate what most buyers are most likely to prioritise at each stage in the cycle, and to align your marketing materials and sales tools accordingly.

A skeleton, not a cage

Sales people can then build on this foundation and adapt and adjust it to what they have learned about the specifics of each given active sales opportunity. In the hands of intelligent sales people (and intelligent sales managers!) the framework becomes a valuable skeleton, rather than a restrictive cage.

So - how much do your sales people really understand about their prospects buying decision processes? And how clearly do they understand what stage each of their prospects has reached in their respective buying decision prospects? And if the answer is (as it often is) “not enough”, how much better could they be doing if they really mastered this essential skill?

In my last blog post, I talked about how selling to hot prospects instead of time wasters makes you five times more likely to make the sale and how to tell the two apart. I also promised to show you a really simple way to find more hot prospects.

Finding the hottest prospects is simply a matter of being first in with those who recently experienced an event that triggered them to become dissatisfied with the status quo. I call this trigger event selling.

Don’t mistake a pain or a circumstance with a trigger event. It’s crucial to understand the difference.

For example, a married man who’s going bald wakes up every day older, heavier, grayer, and balder. These are circumstances that he doesn’t do anything about until he experiences a very specific trigger event -- becoming single once again. Now he buys a gym membership, new clothes, a new car, and Rogaine. 

The same is true in B2B sales. For B2B decision makers, a circumstance might be a company’s falling stock price or shrinking margins. Maybe for some reason they’re unhappy with their current solution or vendor, but not deeply enough to change their priorities and all of a sudden buy something different. A trigger event has to push their hand.

Identifying the hottest prospects is simply a matter of finding opportunities where a decision maker has recently experienced or is about to experience a trigger event that makes them want to change. This is easy as ABC because these events fall into three discrete categories.

A: Awareness

Awareness trigger events are driven by a seller’s organization. Salespeople try to move prospects into a window of dissatisfaction by attempting to make prospects believe their offering is better, faster, or cheaper than the current supplier's.

Some salespeople even try to challenge a prospect’s status quo by sharing good ideas or valuable advice. The problem with this approach is that if you have the best ideas but someone else has the best relationship, your ideas are often borrowed and given to the salesperson the prospect would rather do business with. In other words, even if this gets you a first meeting, your odds of getting a second are about 7%, according to Sales Benchmark Index.

My experience is that challenging a prospect’s thinking is 10 times more effective when one of the two following trigger events has happened.

B: Bad Experience with the Current Supplier

This type of event is driven by your competition. There are three ways a prospect can have a bad experience: 

• People. For example, a change in the salesperson responsible for the account. Remember this the next time a salesperson for the incumbent supplier to a prospect changes jobs.
• Product. An example here is when a supplier announces it will no longer be supporting or end of lifing a product.
• Provider. A material change in the provider is often created by mergers or acquisitions. You would be amazed how often a merger or acquisition triggers mass customer exodus.

While bad experiences are effective in prompting buyers to make a change, they tend to be hard to identify and difficult for salespeople to track. Here are some suggestions to make detection easier:

• People. Document the current vendor and account executive of each of your opportunities in a marketing automation or CRM system. When you get wind that an account executive quit, search their name in the system and reach out to their former customers.
• Product. Keep track of which specific products each prospect uses. If an offering undergoes a major change, send a message to gauge if the customers are still happy with it.
• Provider. Reach out to all customers whose providers have recently experienced a merger, acquisition, or another major organizational shift.

C: Changes Within the Prospect

As evidenced by the description, these events are driven by the customers themselves. Similar to bad experiences, they come in a few forms:

• Change in People. A new decision maker is up to 10 times more likely to switch vendors than their predecessor, and research by DiscoverOrg shows that of those who will make a million dollars worth of decisions in their first year in a new job, 80% of them will do so in the first 90 days.
• Change in Places. When a company opens a new location, it might have to comply with new legislation or local requirements.
• Change in Priorities. If one player in the industry moves, the rest won’t be far behind. Watch for competitive shifts that create shockwaves of urgency across the industry.

It’s very important to reach out as soon as you know a trigger event has happened because trigger events turn on what I call selective perception (I believe the scientific term is reticular activation). Just like when you buy a new car and start seeing it all over the road or you get pregnant and suddenly start noticing pregnant women everywhere, prospects that experience trigger events see all the advertising and content marketing of companies that can solve their problem that they never noticed before. Now it jumps out at them. 

There are many specific forms of trigger events that make prospects want to change and move them from status quo into the window of dissatisfaction, but they all fall into one of these three categories.

To fully capitalize on the trigger events that create hot prospects, you need to conduct a special form of sales analysis that will show you exactly which work best for what you sell. I’ll cover this in my next blog post.

When you love being a sales rep, or a business development rep, or a regional account rep, or a national account rep, you know it. This Valentine’s Day week let’s talk about loving your career and why it is so important to you and others around you.

First of all, you know that sales is admirable and regardless of the noise about how you should stop selling and start helping, or stop selling and start serving – you have been helping and serving for years.

You know that the profession of business-to-business selling is a real career – not something “in-between” until you go back to school, or get a more “respectable” position. You get it. Nothing happens until someone sells something.  You don’t struggle when someone asks you what you do for a living. “I’m helping build an amazing company called ____”

You are a student of learning. The best sellers are. Every day you learn new things about your buyers which helps you to understand if they might be a good fit for what your company sells.  You learn about new ways to connect and about ideas that don’t work as well as they used to. You refine.

You know it takes a lot of potential opportunities to find true win-wins between buyer and seller. Just because you could help someone or their company, it does not mean that it is mutual. You are willing to work hard, with grit and tenacity to build up the potential.

You close a deal and feel how thrilling it is for doing all the hard work helping guide your buyer to a good decision and at the same time creating revenue that helps the economy and it helps you too.  It is worth the commute into the office, and all of the follow-up it took to get you and your buyer there.

You have high integrity and honor. You are building the company you own or work for through ongoing outreach to those who can benefit from your products and services. Accounting can’t do this, and engineering can’t do this, and HR can’t do this, and some of your executives can’t even do this. You are the powerful and helpful intermediary that makes everything happen.

When you don’t love what you do, it lowers your quality of life. It certainly lowers the quality of the work environment for those around you who ARE happily building their territories. Don’t be a downer to them. If you are unhappy for days or weeks on end, do everyone a favor and LEAVE or transfer to another department if your company is big enough.  Get selfish and demand more for your career and find something you CAN love – a team you CAN support and a company you are PROUD to work for.

Today – when you feel bummed out because of a poor call or lack of response to your email – look inward and ask yourself if you LOVE what you do. If so, share your enthusiasm with those newer on the sales team. Take 5 minutes to help someone. Write a three-sentence, handwritten note (you know what those are, right?) to someone who has mentored you and helped you grow and learn.

Embrace your role – or move on. Forget that excuse you’ve been hanging on to about your territory or that deal you lost (you never had) or that manager who doesn’t “get” you. There is nothing mediocre about professional selling. It is not marketing and helping others as a professional seller is NOT NEW. Be proud and love what you do. Support yourself by being positive and encouraging to yourself every day. If you do that, your numbers will grow, you will be happy, and so will those whose lives you touch.

Lori Richardson is recognized on Forbes as one of the “Top 30 Social Sales Influencers” worldwide. Lori speaks, writes, trains, and consults with inside sales teams in mid-sized companies. Subscribe to the award-winning blog and the “Sales Ideas In A Minute” newsletter for sales strategies, tactics, and tips in selling. Increase Opportunities. Expand Your Pipeline. Close More Deals.

email lori@scoremoresales.com | My LinkedIn Profile | twitter | Visit us on google+

The post How To Love Your Sales Role appeared first on Score More Sales.

A recent study by Marketo and The Economist found that the majority of marketers feel their positions will encompass sales in the near future, as reported by ClickZ (link to full article).

The study of 478 CMOs suggests that 55 percent believe that marketers will be responsible for the customer journey in three years.  The article also quotes the Marketo CMO “Marketing is really the new sales function” and that “In three to five years marketing is going to be the de facto owner of the entire customer journey.”

The marketing-only emphasis of the article is further down the path than I am prepared to go, especially with surveying only CMOs. However, there are considerable changes taking place in the role that marketing plays in an organization, and the seat that marketing has or does not have at the “C” level needs to change.  

Most organizations have moved past seeing marketing as being only responsible for development of sales sheets, websites, trade show set-up and branding. Marketing is now tasked with measured expectation for lead generation.  With budgets more tightly connected to leads, marketing campaigns must track lead source throughout the sales process and out past closing.  In addition, in some organizations the marketing spend on technology (marketing automation, web-site, and analytics) is outdistancing the technology department itself.

I do believe we will see more shared CSO-CMO roles in the futures, and perhaps the emphasis should be CMO-CSO. However, marketers must be will to step up their game in this new role.  They need to provide the data to a sales-dominated organization that the world has changed.  Having “hunters” may not be the only (or most effective) means for prospecting. Being “hunted” through in-bound marketing efforts may be the organization’s future as we compete world-wide. 

If marketers are held responsible for lead generation and customer retention, then they must be the ones to step up and take charge of the CRM system.  This means data management and working to a clear alignment for the sales and customer retention process with solid reporting.  To paraphrase that famous management consultant Joan Rivers, “Can we talk – seriously now?”  Sales just doesn’t have the orientation, interest or attention span to develop and manage data.  A measurement is essential in this new sales world.  Marketers must be out in front and truly become the architect and general contractor for building sales growth.  

 

ClickZ article link

http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2393776/in-the-future-marketing-and-sales-could-mean-the-same-thing?

 Also reference my past blog post on markers taking charge of technology

Marketing Must Master Its Own Technology

http://blog.infogrowcorp.com/sales_marketing_effective/2011/08/marketing-must-master-its-own-technology.html

OK, so there are a handful of tools out in the marketplace for sales acceleration. They help you email and phone call and turn prospects to demos. These are heavily focused on outreach. But what if your organization gets a bunch of inbound leads? How are you going process them all?

We think we can help.

In this article, Tyler Bliss, our second inbound sales development rep will walk you through his process. We think you’re going to love it and that it can help leverage your inbound sales development process.

Let’s begin…

Prior to using SalesLoft Cadence, I would reference Salesforce.com for every new lead, input each lead into an email tool, hopefully remember to set a reminder, make sure the email format was correct, and then send the email.

On average, one lead would take about 2 minutes to input. With 65 new leads a day (on average), this process would take 130 mins- that’s 2 hrs and 10 minutes- out of an eight hour workday.

I had a hard time juggling appointment scheduling, responding to new leads quickly, answering prospects questions, and sending follow-up emails. Most of the time, day 3 emails in my cadence would fall through the cracks, which meant lost prospects and ultimately lost revenue.

Without hiring another inbound rep to relieve the load, it was impossible to keep up with all the inbound leads. Fortunately, Cadence removed the busy work that came with the inbound job title. I can get work done more efficiently without spending time on tedious tasks, like manually setting reminders and sending one-off emails.

Here’s exactly how Cadence helped:

1. Following the Inbound Process Is Easier

Prospects are instantly pushed to the second and third email, and I can immediately see if prospects replied, or viewed an email.

I can then add or remove them from a specific outreach process within Cadence, without having to set a separate reminder.

2. Keeping Up With Touches is a Breeze

Before implementing Cadence, the process involved sending two emails over four days.

Using Cadence, we had time to test more emails, adding a third that in turn got responses like this:

This email came on the ninth day after first contact and made an impact that prospects didn’t forget about us.

Responses like the one below showed that this was a prospect who might have moved on otherwise:

3. There is More Time for Personalized Emails

With so many leads, I struggled to find time to add a personal touch to emails. This could be anything from finding a favorite sports team on Twitter to referencing their alumnus from a LinkedIn profile.

Cadence gave me more time to add personal touches, which in turn led to more conversations like the one below.

This company’s website said “Be The Smartest Marketer in The Room,” so I tweaked the subject line of my email to read: “Be the Smartest Salesman in the Room.”

The prospect’s response:

SalesLoft knows how important inbound leads are to the success of your organization. Just like outbound, follow-up can be crucial to setting an appointment and not letting a prospect get away.

The post How To Manage Inbound Sales Development With SalesLoft Cadence appeared first on SalesLoft.

Customer and employee referrals have a key influence throughout the business-to-business (B2B) sales funnel, from generating a lead to creating an opportunity to finalizing a sale. According to recent research, B2B lead-to-deal conversion rates from referrals are 3.63%. Nearly 25% of leads generated from customer and employee referrals result in an opportunity, and 14.7% of leads from referrals converted to an opportunity end in a sale.

As a B2B Sales Leader, or as a Partner in a Professional Services firm, we understand that making our goals relies heavily on new business lead development.

Over the past few years, the lead generation process for new logo business has become much more complex and challenging, compared to the process for new/increased business from existing accounts.

• Traditional lead development techniques, including targeted account penetration, cannot keep pace with the annual increases in new business goals.
• Social selling is receiving a lot of hype, but the jury is still out regarding results, scalability and impact to personal productivity.
• Marketing-generated leads represent a huge volume of leads but with low quality; the leads become more of a distraction for us than a savior. It’s just too time consuming to qualify everything they generate, so we don’t!

Where should we focus our energy for maximum Sales impact within the next six months? It all revolves around the Buyer, so let’s start there.

The Buyer Purchasing Journey

B2B and Professional Services buyers have become self-educating. The buyers, and/or the members of their teams that influence the final decision, have direct access to a wealth of information about industry challenges, vendor solutions, vendor reputation, and more.

Sales Process versus Buyer Process

With the help of mobile and social platforms, the buyer completes up to 70% of their purchasing cycle before calling any vendor representative. We need to somehow influence all of these buyers early in their online process so they have a pre-disposition towards our solutions.

The typical Sales Process or New Business Development process is focused on what we do in Sales; and not what the Buyer does. It’s internally focused; not externally focused. It is based upon an outdated premise that we control the flow of information to the buyer, or at least most of the information that the buyer consumes.

We are no longer in control; the buyer is. So we can no longer figure out where the buyer is in their journey based solely on what our reps do!

Even if we get involved early with the buyer via our lead development efforts, or even social selling, throughout the process the customer will be consuming information from the internet.

All of us have walked into a customer meeting and found ourselves on the defensive regarding information the buyer uncovered prior to our meeting. Maybe they read a bad customer review, or a well written competitor white paper, or a pundit’s blog post, or even some content developed by our own Marketing department (that we didn’t know about). We need to become better aware and prepared for online information that talks about our company, products and services.

Finally, if we do interact with a buyer, and subsequently determine that the lead is not sales-ready yet, what do we do next? Unfortunately, we stop interacting with the prospect and move on to another lead that can hopefully make our goals for the quarter. We need to have a more effective process that keeps these potential prospects moving through their decision process and pre-disposed to our solutions until they become sales-ready prospects.

If our sales process was based upon Buyer actions, and not our internal actions, we would have a much better qualification process for all our lead generation activities:

• Lead qualification would be more accurate: it would be based on observed Buyer actions (or inactions) and less on “happy ears”.
• Sales productivity would be improved by focusing on higher quality leads rather than chasing poor leads.
• Forecast accuracy would increase and become more reliable, with fewer surprises at the end of each quarter.

While this will increase sales productivity for Sales-generated leads, it doesn’t close the gap or fully compensate for the volume of poor quality Marketing-generated leads. So what can Sales do to impact this?

Marketing Process versus Buyer Process

A quick look at the Marketing process shows that their process is also focused on their internal actions and not the Buyer’s actions. The Marketing process also happens to be a different process than the prevailing Sales process.

Wouldn’t it be a lot better for everyone concerned if Sales and Marketing both adopted a buyer-centric process?

Buyer-Qualified Leads

While Sales may not be able to convince Marketing to change their process with any sense of urgency, you should be able to define what constitutes a quality lead that Sales is prepared to accept.

Marketing can adjust their campaigns to essentially deliver buyer-qualified leads, or at a minimum, leads with much better qualification information regarding who, what, when, where, why:

• Which industry challenges was the buyer interested in learning more about? How many times did they download content directly related to industry challenges and solution options?
• Which industry solutions were they interested in learning more about: Solution A or Service C? How many times did they download content directly related to product solutions and customer case studies?
• What specific products were they interested in learning more about: Product B or Product D? How many times did they download content directly related to product functionality and comparisons, or, best practices for evaluating and choosing their solution?
• What size of company needs this solution:10 person company or a 10,000 person company?
• Who was the buyer persona that downloaded the information: Financial, Business or IT? Specialist, Manager, VP?
• What was their role: influencer, recommender, decision maker?
• Why are they looking: new installation, replacement, upgrade?
• When were they planning to implement: not sure, within 3 months, within 6 months, next year?
• Where will the product be delivered/implemented?
• How many times were they offered, but declined, to speak to a product representative, view an explainer video, participate in online demo, or schedule a meeting with a sales representative?

If Marketing agrees to provide this level of lead qualification information, the quality of information associated with an MQL will be much higher, and Sales will be in a much better position to “sales qualify” the leads and take the right action.

If Marketing is unable to deliver better leads within 3-6 months, you may have a strong case for the CEO to approve extra funding to increase the Sales Development / Inside Sales groups to “re-qualify” and “hand-hold” the high volume of poor quality leads from Marketing.

The Best Leads For Achieving Sales Goals

If Marketing does align their process to the buyer, as discussed in my prior post on Best Marketing Leads For Increased Sales, Sales will end up having the best new business Sales leads, ever!

• The quality of leads would sky-rocket and Sales productivity would increase.
• Marketing would have an effective lead nurturing process for any early-stage leads, whether it was Marketing-generated or Sales-generated.
• Since both Sales and Marketing would essentially have the same buyer perspective, Marketing-generated content and Sales Enablement content would be essentially the same! With better Sales tools in hand sales quota production would increase and the sales cycle would shorten.

Marketing and Sales would have a common perspective of the buyer, a common revenue process, and they would start working more as a revenue generating team, finally!  For more information, see my prior post on the Marketing and Sales: Alignment, Integration or Collaboration.

The Best Next Step

The best investment your VP Sales can make, for both shorter and longer term results, is to align the Sales organization to the buyer.

We need to give our sales process a much needed tune-up. It’s within our control; Sales doesn’t have to wait for Marketing input before aligning our sales process and lead qualification efforts to our target buyer’s purchasing journey.

The qualification criteria and questions that the Sales VP needs to give to the Sales reps to improve their qualification and forecast skills, is essentially the same criteria and questions that needs to be given to the Marketing group to improve their lead quality.

To be in the strongest position internally, the qualification criteria that you send to Marketing must be easily defensible and represent something that Marketing can reasonably be expected to implement within 6 months. You may need the help of a Sales consultant, who also has a deep understanding of Marketing capabilities, to assist you in this process.

Let’s take action to ensure we consistently achieve our quarterly and annual goals! Please share this post with your colleagues.

The Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs publish a yearly study on benchmarks, budgets, and trends for North American B2B companies using content marketing. In October, they released their fifth annual B2B content marketing study for 2015 – a must-read if you’re in charge of content marketing for your organization.

And what consistently shows up every year is the large percentage of firms that don’t feel their content marketing efforts are effective. This year, only 38% of B2B companies surveyed felt their efforts were effective – a drop from 42% in last year’s study.

If you’re among the 62% who don’t rate their efforts as effective, you probably want to know how to get into the 38%. CMI Founder Joe Pulizzi says the answer is to document your content marketing strategy: “B2B marketers who have a documented strategy are more effective and less challenged with every aspect of content marketing when compared with their peers who only have a verbal strategy or no strategy at all.” (Emphasis is mine.)

Of course, it’s better to have a documented strategy. Writing your strategy gets everybody on the same page, leaving no doubt about what you should be doing, when you should be doing it, how to do it, and how often.

But what else should you be doing? What can you do to generate leads, help close sales, promote your brand, delight your customers, and become a content marketing leader in your industry?

How do you get into the 38%? I suggest the following 10 best practices.

1. Promote your content

Chad Pollitt, Co-founder of Relevance, recently said he found that the content marketing efforts of top B2B brands are becoming progressively less effective. One firm in particular embarked on an expensive content marketing engagement, but after six months and hundreds of fresh, well-written articles, its “blog was, and still is, a ghost town.”

The problem? Content saturation. Companies are producing content in massive quantities, creating a mountain of material that doesn’t get read because nobody knows about it.

That’s why Pollitt wrote The Content Promotion Manifesto, a blueprint for promoting your content so it gets noticed and consumed by your target audience, driving the business results you sought in the first place.

Pollitt recommends making content promotion a central part of your content marketing strategy, even if it means de-emphasizing content frequency in favor of promoting the content you already have.

2. Create a content marketing mission statement

Company mission statements have been a mainstay in business for decades, giving your organization a purpose and getting everybody rowing in the same direction. But you should also adopt a content marketing mission statement.

Joe says the purpose of a content marketing mission statement is to define:

• Your core target audience
• What kind of content you’ll deliver to your audience
• The outcome you hope to achieve for your audience

A content marketing mission statement will help you differentiate your content, giving it a unique voice that provides your target audience with a reason to consume your content instead of somebody else’s.

3. Create a content marketing shiny object

The term “shiny object,” as it relates to content, was coined by inbound marketing expert Amanda McGuckin Hager of PeopleAdmin. It refers to “something of value people want, like a white paper, piece of collateral, or how-to document.”

But the content must be newsworthy, such as an original piece of research, the overarching guide to whatever topic you want to own in your space, or a unique perspective on a topic that represents a fresh approach. In other words, the content provides real information that people find valuable. I mean really valuable.

Doug Kessler from Velocity Partners calls this “home-run content.” To learn more about it, check out his presentation called Hitting Home Runs in the Age of Crap.

4. Cascade your content

As a content marketer, time is not on your side. Content marketing is pretty labor intensive. But content marketers typically have not had the budget to hire the staff they need to do everything (that’s changing, however). So the embattled content marketer is doing five jobs at once.

The solution? Cascade your content.

Conversion scientist Brian Massey coined the term the “content cascade,” which involves repurposing your content into many formats for distribution on several channels. The cascade starts with a webinar, which he recommends you record and upload to YouTube or Vimeo. Then post the slides to SlideShare, get the audio transcribed, and turn it into an eBook or white paper, several blog posts, and dozens of social media shares. Finally, create an infographic with images from your slide deck and share it on your social media channels and your blog.

5. Document your strategy

Let’s talk about Joe’s original solution for getting into the 38%: documenting your content strategy. How do you do that?

The Content Marketing Institute has written THE eBook on the topic. You can download it here. Boiling it down to its essential elements, you need to document the answers to these questions:

• What’s your business plan for innovation?
• What’s your business case for content marketing?
• Who are your personas and how does your content map to them?
• What’s your brand story?
• What’s your channel plan?

By answering the questions detailed in the eBook you can achieve peace of mind, knowing you finally have a strategy document that can keep your content marketing on track.

6. Adopt the lean content approach when you’re starting out

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries took the start-up world by storm when it was first published. It taught start-ups how to test the market and “fail fast” before investing resources producing a product that won’t sell.

Content marketer Arabella Santiago applies this concept to content marketing: Use content to gauge whether you’re on the right track, then go back to the drawing board if you must.

A variation of this, as conceived by Brian Clark of Copyblogger, is to build a minimum viable audience to learn what content your readers really want, what they want to buy, and how to sell it to them.

7. Measure, measure, measure

Content marketing is all about storytelling, right? But even a story has to resonate with an audience and generate results (go ask a Hollywood movie executive). To learn what works (what sells) and what doesn’t, content marketers must become adept at measuring their content because, as my old boss said, “what gets measured improves.”

For a crash course on how to become a content measurement guru, I recommend reading Taylor Cimala’s super valuable post in Andy Crestodina’s blog of Orbit Media Studios: 8 Ways to Use Google Analytics to Measure the Success of Your Content Marketing.

8. Create a buyer legend

By now every content marketer knows how important creating audience personas is. If you don’t know to whom you’re writing and if you can’t picture their wants, needs, idiosyncrasies, tastes, and vocabulary, you might as well be shouting into the wind. A persona profile can solve that problem by giving you a specific focus for your writing so your content resonates and creates an emotional connection with your readers.

But a buyer legend is even more powerful than your run-of-the-mill persona description. Conversion marketing experts Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg recently published a book on creating Buyer Legends (a must-read). A buyer legend is your persona at the moment when a person decides he or she needs your product or service. It’s the story of how your target personas find you, how they interact with your website, what could possibly turn them off, what you might publish that can turn them around, and what you can ultimately do to turn them into customers.

The Eisenberg brothers said that buyer legends are the one tool that, if their customers did nothing else, has had the most impact on their marketing. Buy the book. Trust me.

9. Implement an automation system

2015 is the year of the automation system. Marketing automation tools such as HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, Infusionsoft, and Eloqua have enabled you to create “if/then” sequences to guide your prospects to content that’s appropriate for where they are in your sales funnel. But these tools have traditionally been pricey.

Email marketing tools such as AWeber, MailChimp, Doppler, and many others have added automation capabilities to their traditional enewsletter capabilities in the lower end of the price spectrum, but they lack the sophistication of the traditional players.

Now a new crop of automation systems has hit the market, offering more sophistication and better graphical user interface so you can set up the “if/then” decision trees without programming experience.

10. Adopt the content strategy discipline

I’m not referring to content marketing strategy, I mean content strategy as a discrete discipline. The foundational book on the topic, Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach, lays out the basic tenets of content strategy.

And in 2015, content strategy is all about adaptive content: How to create a structured content ecosystem so your content is smart and can adapt perfectly to the right people, devices, and context.

I recommend this overview of adaptive content from Melissa Breker and Jenny Magic’s Content Marketing World presentation: Getting Started with Adaptive Content.

Conclusion

Content marketing has reached a crossroads of sorts. Seventy percent of content marketers are producing more or significantly more content this year than last year, but more than half of them feel their content marketing is ineffective. And as Michael Brenner of B2B Marketing Insider succinctly suggested, “…content marketing is the top priority for many CMOs and yet most have no idea what to do about it.”

If you want to get into the 38% who are actually experiencing success, it’s time to get serious about your efforts, and this list can help you know what to do about it.

Want to learn more about how to get into the 38%? Check out the CMW 2014 sessions available through our Video on Demand portal and make plans today to attend 2015 CMW.

Cover image by Desi Mendoza, Unsplash, via pixabay.com

The post 10 Ways to Get Into the Content Marketing 38% appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

I’ve been involved in a number of discussions on prospecting recently. One sales exec complaining to me when I suggested he and his people needed to be prospecting. His response was, “Marketing has the responsibility for generating and giving us high quality leads.” When I asked, “Are you getting enough to make your numbers,” from the look on his face, I knew he wasn’t, but I also knew he wouldn’t listen to me–he was firmly entrenched in his position. (Needless to say, I didn’t get that project, but suspect I will in a few months with his successor, the CEO was on the phone as well).

In another, I saw a tweet, “When are people going to realize that publishing content is the new prospecting….” My thought was “Well, yes…. but…. what happens when that doesn’t generate enough?” I tried to engage in a twitter discussion, it seemed it was headed down a social selling path.

I constantly run into people who want to find the miracle cure for prospecting (or actually to avoid prospecting), again the current fads seem to be social is all we need, everything can be solve with content, or others that say “not my job.”

Somehow, my comprehension level may not be what it should be, but I struggle to understand a lot of what’s going on. I tend to think it needs to be no more difficult than “Prospecting is the new prospecting.” Fundamentally, things haven’t changed in a long time.

We know marketing is supposed to be generating leads, but what if they don’t develop enough? We still have to find enough opportunity to fill our funnels.

We know marketing is supposed to be generating quality leads, even if they are generating enough, we still have a certain amount of prospecting and qualifying to do with the lead. Depending on how they define MQL/SQL, the phone call a sales person makes may be the first verbal communication we have with the customer and it is a prospecting call.

We know social is very powerful, but what if our customers aren’t social? A not so surprising number of senior executives may have a nominal social presence(e.g. a LinkedIn profile and a Facebook account), but their social activity is virtually non existent. But social can be very powerful if that’s where our customers hang out.

Or even if your customers are hanging out on social, what if you aren’t getting enough qualifies prospects through your social prospecting?

We know, at least research shows us, multichannel prospecting strategies are the most effective. So social, combined with email, combined with phones, and so forth is very more effective. But we’ve know this since before “social” existed. The literature from the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s all spoke to multichannel, multi impression as being key to driving awareness, interest, leads, and prospects.

We know that we have a lot of tools available to us, and we probably should be leveraging as many as we can–social, email, voice, trade shows, webinar, “smoke stack hunting,” conferences, networking events, referrals, direct mail, advertising, websites, mobile, SEO, and others. This is not new, we know effective prospecting can seldom be limited to just one channel.

We know we have to have something meaningful and relevant in each communication, regardless of the channel. I guess that’s what we call content. Sometimes the most impactful content is the highly customized and personalized discussion we have face to face, over the phone with a prospect.

We know the balance between the tools and channels we leverage is always dynamic, at a particular time, a few channels may have heavier investments than others. At another time, other channels take higher priorities.

We know that new channels and technologies arise, they may displace others.

We know we can use tools to refine and better target our prospecting efforts. Or leveraging certain events better target our prospecting efforts.

Finally, we know that sales people don’t like prospecting. Prospecting does not come naturally or easily to us. We struggle with who do we see, what do we say, how to we get them to respond. We struggle with the fact we probably get far more “No’s,” a few, “Hell No’s,” than “Tell me more’s.” So prospecting is not easy. But if we don’t do it, eventually our pipelines go dry.

All this was true last year, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 100 years ago…….

But, somehow the fundamentals never change. We have to find and qualify enough prospects to fill our funnels. We are most effective in leveraging multiple channels and tools simultaneously. And we can never stop.

So it seems to me, once you strip away all the fancy words, Prospecting Is The New Prospecting.

Am I missing something?

You’ve heard the term “Decision Paralysis.” Heck you’ve probably encountered any number of prospects who suffer from the malady. Decision paralysis leads to long sales cycles and is the bane of most salespeople. But there is another phenomenon that affects the sales process in equal measure. It’s when buyers out-right make the wrong decision.

Buyer’s all-to-frequently make sub-optimal choices. They might wait longer than they should. They might choose the competitor with the inferior product. They might decide to do nothing. The question has to be asked, “If prospects are so smart, why don’t they make the best choices?”

How people make decisions and how they exercise choice is highly relevant to the sales process. So much of sales skills training is based on rational thought and logic. However, research shows that rational thought and logic are only bit players. There are several books that can help you understand why buyers don’t always make optimal choices. “The Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz may be familiar to you. I also like the book “Decisive” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The issue of decision paralysis doesn’t just lead to delayed decisions, it leads to making the wrong decisions as well as you can read about in this Huffington Post article by James Clear.

The point is that “Selling” involves much more than simply conveying the logic and  reasons why it’s the right choice for your buyer. Even if a buyer agrees with you, it doesn’t mean that they will buy (as evidenced when your hot prospects go radio-silent).

Here is my list of “The Top 10 Reasons Prospects Don’t Make Optimal Choices.”

#10 They don’t view it as an optimal choice. We all have different perspectives. Of course we as vendors have to believe our product would represent the optimal choice for them. If we didn’t, then we should move onto other prospects for whom we DO believe it is the optimal choice. But even for those prospects where the logic fits, there are other reasons why it may not be viewed as optimal from the prospect’s perspective.

#9 Adversity to risk. Doing nothing is almost always less risky than doing something. Most of us are rewarded for short-term results. If something requires us to move backward for any amount of time, with positive results delayed until some point in the future, then we are likely to see that as too risky. We are judged first and foremost by what we’ve done lately and that keeps us from making choices that are optimal only in the long-term.

#8 Risk vs Reward. This is a different beast than #9. If a prospect isn’t convinced they’ll experience the rewards as promised, then no amount of risk will be accepted. That applies to something as basic as downloading a software trial. There is a clear risk/reward factor at play. If the odds of downloading, and experimenting with the software only to find its taking too much time and not turning out well, are higher than the odds of the opposite occurring – well, guess how many people are likely to trial your software.

#7 Instant-Gratification. I received an e-mail solicitation today from a very large company. They were pitching a discounted price of $99 on a list of companies you could use for prospecting purposes. The normal price is $295. Now that’s a great savings and may be worth it. I would’ve made an instant decision whether I wanted to take advantage. The problem? No where to click to learn more. Only a phone number to call to “purchase while supplies last”. Where’s my instant gratification? I wanted to instantly know what kind of information was included. Surely it’s not just a company name. So what else is there? I have to call to find out? No way! Sorry, I’m no longer interested. Purchasing a powerful list at 1/3 the cost may have been the optimal choice. But it’s not the choice I made because I wanted instant gratification and didn’t get it.

#6 Prospects don’t know what they want. Often, our prospects are simply exploring options and ideas when we first talk with them. They don’t know what they want until they understand what’s out there, what the risks/rewards are, how long things will take to implement, how much it costs, etc. What comes across as wishy-washy to us, is really just our prospect weighing all the information in their minds, trying to make sense of it.

#5 Trust. A big one. It’s why cold-calling rarely works is such hard work. That’s why awards, referrals, testimonials all help. It’s also why an established company might get the business even if an upstart has a better offering.

#4 Logic vs emotion. Yes, B2B sales involves lots of logic. Complex sales require detailed information and a strong business case. However, emotion does play a role. The emotion or “feeling” part of the decision for a buyer is all the reasons outlined in this blog; risk aversion, the need for instant gratification (and conversely the need to avoid painful evaluations, and drawn-out decision), and the next 3 on the list.

#3 Lack of impetus. If I’m not in trouble or in enough trouble with the way things are, I am not apt to look for a way out.

#2 No desire to stand-out. Conversely, a desire NOT to stand-out

And the number one reason prospects don’t always make the optimal choice …

#1 Things are “good-enough” the way they are. This is the easiest choice. It’s the path of least resistance and the path most chosen.

I could argue that none of these top 10 reasons have anything to do with your product or the solution. Instead, they have to do with change. Are your salespeople trained to help prospects embrace change or at the very least, to overcome reluctance to change? What questions should the salesperson ask to uncover which of these apply to his or her prospect? Might be a good discussion for the next team meeting.

In November 2014, ITSMA took a poll to gain insight into the top priorities of B2B marketers over the next two years. The poll, as seen below, showed that Brand and Positioning was the number one focus at the time with Lead Generation as the second overall priority. When looking ahead to 2016, marketers forecasted a change in these priorities with Lead Generation moving from the second most important to fifth and Understanding Buyers as the top priority as indicated by 85% of respondents.

When looking at the poll more closely, Understanding the Buyers is not even rated as a top priority in 2014 so the real question is, how will B2B marketers be effective at generating leads if Understanding the Buyer does not become a priority for at least another year?

The foundation of any successful lead generation program is understanding the buyer. This is not simply the development of a persona that so many organizations have that highlights “Jim the IT Director” who likes cars, has 2.5 kids and makes an annual salary of $135,000 a year. While this information may be good for a consumer-oriented purchase, it does not get B2B organizations any closer to understanding the trigger events that initiated the purchase process, the multiple stakeholders that are involved with the purchase, the buyers path to purchase or their content consumption patterns.

Without this granular understanding it is impossible to build and align content (the fuel behind any effective lead generation program) that Engages, Nurtures and Converts their buyers along their purchase path, which is the approach today’s sophisticated buyers demand and prefer. If this prioritization holds, B2B marketers again will be turning in lackluster results in terms of driving revenue and maximizing customers lifetime value while at the same time, falling further behind their buyers.

This complete misalignment in priorities also highlights two other gaps that must be addressed if B2B marketing is going to succeed in today’s buyer driven world.

• An investment in skills development
• Focus on a documented, cohesive, buyer-centric strategy

In response to the question “Please rate the skill set of your marketing personnel in terms of executing Demand Generation strategy?” only 7.5% of respondents rated themselves as highly skilled. This lack of skill may explain why marketers view lead generation and understanding the buyer as mutually exclusive, they may simply not know any better. They perhaps believe true lead generation is simply the practice of capturing names via random tactics and sending to sales as leads. Marketers need to be enabled to do their jobs effectively and investments should be made to elevate the skill level, increase the knowledge and enable marketers to run programs that contribute to revenue.

According to the most recent Content Benchmark Study by Content Marketing Institute, only 35% of B2B organizations have a documented strategy. Translation, most organizations are practicing random acts of content and will not be able to tie this back in any meaningful way to business impact. As mentioned previously, any content strategy that is designed to fuel lead generation must start with the buyer in mind. Separating the two will only lead to a poor buying experience.

As we are one full month into the New Year, B2B marketers need to re-think their priorities and make sure they align because as of now, they do not make any sense.

Author: Carlos Hidalgo @cahidlago CEO/ Principal of ANNUITAS

Today's post is by Joanne Black, America’s top referral sales expert. Visit NoMoreColdCalling for more articles, tips, and free resources. You can also find Joanne on Twitter: @ReferralSales. If you depend on marketing to score your leads, you can forget about hitting your numbers. Prospecting is not your marketing department’s job. It’s your job – and it’s your most important job. You’re not entitled to sit back and wait for great leads to fill your sales pipeline, which has become common practice in most sales organizations. Many salespeople complain that marketing isn’t providing enough leads and definitely not qualified leads....

“You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.” – Dale Carnegie

I’m about one chapter away from completely finishing How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie and I would just like to say…Dale Carnegie is the man! Ok, that sounds cheesy, he really understood people and how to teach others to understand what humans really want. I’m not saying his principles are ground breaking, new teachings, but they make a lot of sense today when

I also recently read an article on Hubspot, Salespeople, Do Not Send Me This Email, explaining two examples of bad emails from salespeople. The unfortunate commonality with both of these emails that these salespeople were only talking about themselves and the company they represented. What do you think the recipients of these emails thought?

They didn’t care…

How do you write emails or effectively reach out to prospects, leads, and/or potential buyers to influence their decision?

How Dale Carnegie Breaks It Down:

In the beginning of How to Win Friends and Influence People, a chapter specifically dedicated to “Fundamental Techniques in Handling People,” Carnegie exclaims, “…The only way on each to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.”

It makes sense at first glance, but I’m sure you’re beginning to wonder how do you even start to get other people to do what you want them to do?

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.” – Henry Ford

It’s not just about the other person or you, but a merge of the two. Dale Carnegie’s example is in letter form, but for the sake of this piece and the digital age, it fits very well in terms of emailing someone.

The letter that merges the concept of Henry Ford’s quote is as follows:

Mr. Edward Vermylen
℅ A. Zerega’s Sons, Inc.
28 Front St.
Brooklyn, N.Y. 11201

Dear Mr. Vermylen,

Your company has been one of our good customers for fourteen years. Naturally, we are very grateful for your patronage and are eager to give you the speedy, efficient service you deserve. However, we regret to say that it isn’t possible for us to do that when your trucks bring us a large shipment in the late in the afternoon, as they did on November 10. Why? Because many other customers make late afternoon deliveries also. Naturally, that causes congestion. That means your trucks are held up unavoidably at the pier and sometimes even your freight is delayed.

That’s bad, but it can be avoided. If you make your deliveries at the pier in the morning when possible, your trucks will be able to keep moving, your freight will get immediate attention, and our workers will get home early at night to enjoy a dinner of the delicious macaroni and noodles that you manufacture.

Regardless of when your shipments arrive, we shall always cheerfully do all in our power to serve you promptly.

You are busy. Please don’t trouble to answer this note.

Yours truly,

J———B———, Supt.

Obviously, some of the specific pieces of information in this letter come across as a little dated; however, the overall concept is extremely relevant in emailing your prospects to influence decisions of those individuals and a fruitful outcome for you.

So, how can we break down those concepts for the digital age?

Elements Of Emails That Influence A Buyer’s Decision

1. Research

In the example letter above, the first sentence shows that some research was done to see that the company he was researching has been a “Good customer for fourteen years.” Maybe some records were looked at, but this is the best place to start for your email.

The usage of social media is at it’s highest with 74 percent of online adults using social networking sites, a perfect channel to start in researching the person who you are about to email. Granted, this may sound like social media “stalking,” but it’s the easiest outlet to get caught up on what this person is doing. You can see if they got a new job on LinkedIn, see what topics they are talking about on LinkedIn, and/or take a look at the pages they have liked on Facebook.

One service, that LinkedIn acquired last year, Newsle, can give you notifications on if someone was mentioned in the press or wrote any recent articles. This is a great sales tool to keep updated on the earned media of your own network.

Doing your research before your email can give you an arsenal of information to establish connection with the other person to let them know that you are in tune with what they are interested in or any achievements they may have gained.

2. Authenticity

Gaining this information from the research above gives you relevancy to the conversation, but the missing piece that you cannot forget about is the authentic component. Ultimately, we know what we want out of the email, but remembering our Dale Carnegie teachings it tells us that the other party couldn’t care less. Although, your prime concern may be your own priority, your well wishes that frame your argument could come across as inauthentic.

People can detect when someone is being inauthentic even at the earliest stages in their lives. In an experiment with 19 month old infants, they detected inauthentic emotion and did not just take “emotional communications at face value…[And] are sensitive to features of emotional contexts beyond what is expressly communicated by the adult.”

Authenticity is essentially one of the keys to if someone trusts you and is willing to listen to what you are saying.

There is a natural give and take with the letter above, without any fake compliments to fluff the letter. The first paragraph lays out the problem and then the following paragraphs outlines a genuine solution that benefits both of the parties.

3. Empathy

Although the letter above does give both sides of the situation, there is an extra layer of empathy and compassion. It’s clear that the delays probably made the sender frustrated, but as Carnegie states frequently in his book, talking about your own problems will get you no where. The sender tells the recipient of the congestion the delays can cause and then appeals to the recipient on how if the deliveries were made earlier his own workers could get home at a reasonable time to enjoy the macaroni his workers are delivering.

At the beginning Carnegie lays on the empathy, “Because many other customers make late afternoon deliveries also. Naturally, that causes congestion. That means your trucks are held up unavoidably at the pier and sometimes even your freight is delayed.” He understands the problems that the recipient faces and addresses those. Our brains feel pain and empathy in the same places, so there is this pre-psychological empathetic connection when you take the time to address the other person’s problems.

Take the time to put yourself in the other person’s shoes to see the problems they are facing and ultimately the benefits that they could reap (with your help or insight). A little empathy and compassion can go a long way, especially in influencing a potential buyer.

4. Make It Actionable

These emails of influence shouldn’t be just fluff, there should be a clear goal at the end. What do you want your recipient to do? How would you measure the success of the email? At the end of Carnegie’s email he clearly states an action for the recipient; “You are busy. Please don’t trouble to answer this note.”

Make your email actionable with something that the recipient can move forward with. Don’t dance around it, but be clear with that action. Do you need them to sign something, change a plan, or just schedule a time with you? Ask those things in the email. You can still have the framework that Dale Carnegie sets in his example letter with your requested actions as well.

There are many ways to email someone and I’m sure some salespeople have honed their own processes that might not include these things. However, people are seeking connections and want a salesperson that is their trusted advisor. Dale Carnegie’s principles are a great example to use in order to help establish that relationship that buyers are seeking. With these Carnegie email attributes, you can then formalize your own effective process, optimize different aspects, and measure the results.

Today’s potential buyers don’t become customers overnight—they require marketing over time as they self-educate and build trust with a company. Lead nurturing helps marketers communicate consistently with buyers cross-channel and throughout the sales cycle—addressing the gap in time between when a lead first interacts with you and when she is ready to purchase.

Why Is Lead Nurturing Important?

Lead Nurturing has become an integral part of a successful marketing strategy—specifically when building relationships with potential buyers on multiple channels, even if they are not currently looking to purchase a product or service. With lead nurturing, you spend time establishing a relationship with your buyer and building trust. As a result, when you communicate with your buyer, you are welcomed instead of intrusive. Without effective lead nurturing, communicating with your buyers can feel like an awkward first date, full of mistrust and hesitation.

Lead Nurturing—Evolved

Because of the proliferation of channels and devices, marketers must think beyond email when they create their lead nurturing strategy. Now, marketer’s must think about how to engage potential buyers where they are, which is often in many places, and over time.

The history of lead nurturing has evolved from drip marketing, a communication sent at a specific cadence regardless of user action, into a more sophisticated email strategy using marketing automation tools like Marketo. This lead nurturing has been the norm and the marketing standard since around 2008.

Today, lead nurturing has continued to advance. Now we think about using multiple channels to nurture buyers before they become leads and through their entire sales journey. Marketers look beyond email and incorporate the many channels their buyers use into their lead nurturing strategy—from in-store to mobile to social.

The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing Covers everything you need to know to get started using lead nurturing to drive revenue growth, including how to:

• Create a lead nurture strategy
• Nurture leads across channels
• Segment a lead database
• Choose appropriate content for each lead nurture track and audience
• Get the most value from lead nurturing with testing and optimization
• Measure and explain lead nurturing’s return on investment

Don’t miss the rest—Download the Guide Now!

Are you writing your content to fit your prospects’ reading styles?

Surprised that readers have communication styles? Sure they do! Whether you’re listening to a message or reading it, you evaluate it and interpret it using similar criteria. There’s a lot of well-written content that has less impact, simply because it’s not written appropriately for the intended audience. Delivering your message in a way that fits your audience helps you gain credibility and influence, and helps produce the results you’re after.

If you want your content to have the most impact, you should be writing for the communication style of your target persona. One great way to do this is by using the DISC assessment.

DISCovering the DISC Assessment (Yes, We Went There)

DISC is a communication assessment designed specifically to describe how people behave in professional contexts. DISC is made up of four communications types:

• Dominance
• Influence
• Steadiness
• Conscientiousness

We won’t go into all the ins and outs of the DISC assessment and the four communication styles, but you can get a great explanation of DISC here.

It won’t make sense for every persona to have their own DISC type, but for many it will. For example, if you have a Quality Control Specialist persona, they’re likely to emphasize quality and accuracy and value expertise and competency—the “C” communication type. In contrast, a sales rep persona probably places an emphasis on influencing or persuading others—typical of an “I” person.

How to Write for Different DISC Profiles

Writing for “D” Types

Keep it brief and to the point. “D” types aren’t interested the details, so give them the big picture – cast a vision. Be goal-oriented and understand their priorities. You’ll need to show thought leadership and demonstrate that you have solutions – write in terms of results, not methods.

Writing for “I” Types

“I” types are oriented toward relationships, so use a relaxed and sociable tone in your writing. Don’t pretend to be their best friend, but show that you understand them and their pain points. Make your company feel “human” and show that you value your relationships with customers and leads. Don’t be afraid to use humor when appropriate. Stories and examples have high impact. “I” types won’t need piles of stats and figures, but they will want easy access to information when they’re ready for it.

Writing for “S” Types

“S” types are low-key and value calmness and stability. A relaxed and easygoing voice is the best choice for this reader.  Be logical and systematic in your writing and don’t come on too strong – you’ll need to earn their trust over time so don’t try to close the sale too early. Expect them to take time to make paradigm shifts. Because they value cooperation, be sure to demonstrate that you value them.

Writing for “C” Types

“C” types are analyzers. You’ll need to be precise and focused in your writing. Be prepared to answer many questions. Your voice should be tactful and reserved, and you should show that you can meet high standards. Present logical, systematic content with plenty of data to back up your assertions.

Adapting Your Writing Is Just the First Step

Now that you understand how to adapt your writing to your personas, start thinking about how you might optimize other aspects of your content.

• Do your visuals “speak” effectively to your persona’s DISC type?
• Would your “I” persona rather watch a video or read a whitepaper?
• What’s the best way to share the content?
• What will the persona want to do next?

Before you know it, your content will be so well optimized, your prospects will think you knew them before they ever heard of you!

When it comes to leads, it seems like there’s never enough. It’s a chronic problem for businesses. Advertising costs are only growing and it takes a lot of time to warm-up cold leads. New prospects aren’t exactly chomping at the bit to buy either. But what if they were?

What if there was a way to get an unlimited supply of leads?

Fresh leads whenever you wanted, from sources you could tap whenever you needed a new customer? Turns out there are plenty of sources and they’re willing to do it, free of charge.

I call these complementary sources.

Complementary sources give you all the leads you can handle. These are businesses, organizations or people that serve the same customers you do, but in a different way.

Let’s say you’re looking to buy a house. That transaction is usually filled with people working towards the same goal in different, yet complementary ways.

• Your Realtor contacts the seller and negotiates terms
• The mortgage broker secures financing
• Appraisers estimate the value of your home
• And the title company makes sure the seller actually owns the home you’re buying

If you’re a Realtor, the appraiser, broker and title company are all complementary sources. They have their own supply leads.

Every business is surrounded by complementary sources

Start by creating a list of all of the complementary sources around your business. Once you’ve identified the various types of sources, setup an informal interview.

This interview’s about research, you’re looking for places to add value.

Ask the right way and their leads become your leads. Sounds crazy right? Why would complementary sources give you the leads they’ve paid good money for?

They can’t close the leads they have.

Complementary sources spend a lot of time and money on marketing. But they tend to be terrible at closing the majority of the leads they have for one reason or another.

They’re not giving their leads the attention they deserve

Maybe they’re terrible at lead nurturing or following-up. Or, they cherry pick the ones they prefer, ignoring the rest.

They’re wasting leads and they’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

That’s your in. Show them how they’re losing money and you have their attention. Give them a plan to get their money back – at no cost to them – and they’re dialed in.

It’s time they turned their leads over to a pro (you)

If you’ve done your homework you should have an idea of what you’re dealing with going in. What’s your angle?

• Are you going to resurrect all of their dead leads and get them to buy?
• Can you increase average order values or boost customer upsells?
• Will you get customers to sign up for a subscription service each month?

Whatever your offer, it needs to resonate with your complementary source. If you’re unsure about what they want, just ask.

Then layout the finer details of your plan

You’re asking for sensitive and proprietary info. They’re less likely to give you access if they’re unsure about how you’ll use it. Show them how you’ll approach their list, what your offer will be and the goals you have in mind.

The offer you make to their list needs to depend on you in some way. If you’re offering a product or service to their list they need to go through you to get it.

Set everything up once you have the go ahead. You want to make this as easy for them as possible. Set metrics and performance benchmarks ahead of time so everyone’s clear about what success looks like.

You’re ready to contact the people on their list

This is where upfront research really makes a difference. If you know your complementary source well you know about their customer’s biggest problems. Build that into your offer when you contact them and you’ve got their attention.

At this point any sales you make are a bonus.

You’re looking to disqualify any people who don’t belong on their list. It’s an important step because it tells you a lot about your source and the quality of their marketing.

The people that belong on their list belong in yours

Put them into a follow-up system. Start with a pitch and alternate between helpful content, tools or resources and a sales pitch. The list you’ve built with your source should focus on one thing.

Nurture these new relationships.

Provide meaningful content and support to the people on this list. Sell these people on you and your source when it’s appropriate.

This is great and all but it won’t work for my business

It’s a common objection: “I’ve got a SaaS business!” or “My product or service is completely new and original.”

But it’s completely false.

Apple’s iPad was a new product, but they depended on ad agencies, retailers and parts manufacturers to sell it. Every business has others they depend on. And every business is surrounded by products and services that complement their own.

What if my source cuts me out after I’ve done the work?

It’s always a possibility that your source will try to cut you out after they’ve seen your plan. That’s why it’s important to create a plan that positions you as the essential element. Do that and you’ll decrease the likelihood that your source turns on you.

Complementary sources are the key to unlimited leads

They serve your customers in different ways but they’re the perfect lead source. Show them how you can add value to their business and you’ll have all the (free) leads you can handle.

Need step-by-step instructions to make complementary sources work for your business? Download our guide (no opt-in required).

Marketing automation, when executed correctly, allows both big and small companies to market to and nurture prospects with personalized and useful content via a multitude of channels. Using marketing automation platforms and strategies, prospects are converted into customers and existing relationships with customers are solidified.

On a personal quest to turn my home into a crossover habitat between The Jetsons and Fort Knox, a series of epic fails led me to some of the biggest marketing automation fails I have encountered as a consumer. This story begins with a passionate search for a security company with top-quality monitoring capabilities, reliable technology, and home automation options. Here are four marketing automation “don’ts” and how you can stay far away from them.

1. DON’T:

Confuse your audience with poorly defined communication channels. 

The abundance of communication channels available to marketers in this day and age is almost ubiquitous, and all of us in the marketing game are using them to our advantage. The growing acceptance of receiving coupons, alerts and reminders via text message has helped increase sales significantly for B2C and B2B companies alike.

Minutes upon receipt and a good number of leads are ready to purchase. It would be a mistake not to use these channels of course, but with that being said, it’s our job as marketers to create a clear definition of ethical boundaries and legal parameters and stay within them.

Take for instance one of the security companies I have encountered in my quest. Company X (I won’t beat a dead horse) reached out to me via text massage. Exhilarated as I was with this correspondence, I found this disturbing and intrusive because my permission for such correspondence was never sought by the company.

I was never given the choice to opt in, and I was never asked if I allow them to reach me via this communication channel on my personal phone number. Let’s say I was being charged for incoming text messages, I would’ve racked up quite the bill after 16 messages with no way to opt out.

Marketing Automation Takeaway:

Communication between you and your audience should always be a welcomed gesture. Don’t alienate or anger your audience by forcing the correspondence to happen, and reaching out when you are unwanted. Always ask prospects to opt in to advanced and personal forms of communication like text messaging. Not only is it the ethical thing to do, but you’ll also be able to steer clear of any legal issues and reinforce a positive image around your brand to new prospects and current customers alike.

2. DON’T

Initiate communication on a channel you cannot use for the entire correspondence. 

Communication is a two way street and those who don’t understand this should immediately stop all marketing efforts. Think back on all the times you have asked a question to a sales rep over the phone only to have a script regurgitated back at you. Experiences like these are not only frustrating, but they hinder what good ol’ HubSpot dubbed as “delightion” of new and old customers alike.

In this case, I responded to Company X via text message only to have the even more frustrating experience of not acquiring the information I needed simply because the system is automated and would not recognize the phrases I replied with. In all fairness, I did not answer the EXACT question they asked, but did give them something even better, my needs.

This here made it clear to me that the marketing automation process they implemented is neither for my convenience as a potential customer, nor for a great user experience, but simply for their own convenience. Instead of being pleased with the marketing automation in place, I found myself with one prominent thought in my head — THESE LAZY JERKS.

Not if they had only implemented a well-devised marketing automation process — one that accounts for incoming and outgoing correspondences between their system and their customers with an ability to truly listen to the other party, they would have had a clear picture of my needs and be one step closer to closing the sale. Not having the capability to listen to responses via channels used for customer engagement sure is a failure, but it is even more so if they do but lack the ability and the process in house to follow up.

Marketing Automation Takeaway:

Align your sales with your marketing. If you ask questions or want responses via the channels you engage your audience on, be sure to have the capabilities and process in place to receive them and lead them to the next steps. Being connected to prospects and customers is the business of any marketing professional. Email alerts, third party monitoring tools and the use of sophisticated software platforms like HubSpot makes this task easy.

3. DON’T

Smother your audience with irrelevant and unwanted content.

Everyone is proud of the content they create, even those who create lackluster carbon copies and utter pieces of crap (harsh, I know but very true). During the process of nurturing leads, great marketers uncover a host of intimate details that help paint the picture of who we are doing business with. Marketing automation then kicks in and utilizes this information to serve tailored and personal content that will push leads further down the funnel and hopefully into the customer bucket.

As the email indicates above, my clearly stated needs from previous communication fell on deaf ears. During my research phase, I reviewed Company X’s videos and read reviews from previous and existing customers—a common practice in this era.I didn’t need further convincing, neither do I need to look at videos that have absolutely nothing to do with what I want.

What I needed was simply the specifics on what I had requested.

If they had, for instance, lead me to a video on the importance of having multiple cameras to monitor points of entry, I would have seen the value in the email marketing strategy. Unfortunately, I didn’t and the subject line of “Following Up on Your Request” is just a big slap in the face.

Marketing Automation Takeaway:

Sending content to prospects, especially if you are initiating the action is quite intrusive, so if this is a part of your workflow you must absolutely make sure what you’re sending aligns with their needs. If you don’t know their needs, take five steps back and review your process of collecting data. If you do not have an existing one, marketing automation may not be the best strategy for you to execute at the moment. Without a data collection process—using advanced content offerings or free quotes form submissions—you will have little to go on for your middle of the funnel activities and will end up alienating your audience.

4. DON’T

Send duplicate content or correspondences… Ever.

At this point in my search for the best company who could turn my home into something that would rival the Bat Cave, I was a hair away from completely losing hope in Company X. However, being a marketer myself, I gave them the benefit of the doubt since I am aware that flawless marketing automation is difficult to achieve even for the best of brands. For one, it requires a strong top-of-the-funnel base that produces a consistent flow of organic leads. Without this, you will be spending too much time and energy working the small pool of leads and miss the entire point.

The previous point included an email that I had received from a security consultant. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the last time I received this email… I received the same damn email over and over again from this consultant and a few others who went by Anthony, Ann, Bridget, Cecilla, Lisa, Josh, Jennifer, Clare, and Grace. I received 14 emails that ALL SAID THE SAME THING!

These emails were generated after calls I clearly stated I didn’t want and received anytime between 9:45 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Who doesn’t love an unnecessary call during the work day? After a while it became a bit of a joke around my household. Least to say they lost all their credibility in a prospect’s eye and in turn lost that sale and all potential future sales. They also got a bit of negative press from me as I relayed this horrific experience with my friends, coworkers, and family members — all of which I’m sure will find their way of relaying the story they heard at some point in time to some soul in search of the same service.

Marketing Automation Takeaway:

This again, comes down to poor planning and laziness. It doesn’t matter if you have to spend 100 hours or 1,000 hours carefully reviewing your workflows programmed to automatically send out correspondences. ALWAYS ensure you’re not sending out duplicates on any correspondences and especially on follow-ups.

No one wants to be hounded and certainly no one wants to be hounded with the same messages from every name you can come up with thanks to the alphabet. Simply changing the signature on a workflow message does not accomplish anything other than ensuring the loss of a customer that would have been.  Laziness should never be a part of your strategy.

Secure That Sale

As you have probably guessed, Company X lost my business. It wasn’t an easy decision as their reputation, services, and equipment are all up to snuff. The real issue was with how they didn’t listen to my needs and poorly handled nurturing me to become their customer. Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50 percent more sales-ready leads at 33 percent less cost — one of the many great benefits to executing a well-thought out marketing automation strategy.

Before you begin marketing automation, you have to take a deep look at your resources and create a realistic setting for initiating the marketing automation program. Can you handle the software expenses to help your efforts? Are there enough organic leads coming in that make marketing automation a viable option? Can you commit to actively listening on all channels you plan to utilize for engagement? Falling short on these areas will make you no better than Company X and will put you on the same boat. You might find yourself the subject of an inbound marketing article inspired by your epic fails and written to take a piss on your marketing efforts.

Just because a site visitor didn’t make a purchase or submit a form on their initial visit to your site doesn’t mean that they should be considered lost forever. Taking the appropriate steps to learn more about these individuals not only helps you form powerful ways to engage them again in the future, but it gives you an understanding of their demographic qualities, buying behaviors and more. These data points can help you create more focused, valuable and relevant content for your audience. Remember, these site visitors have already demonstrated some interest in your content by visiting your site in the first place so it is reasonable to think they would be interested in similar content going forward. For this reason, remarketing is an essential tool for forming your overall content marketing campaign

Do all roads lead to content?

Content marketing revolves around the process of creating or sharing specific media or publishing content in an effort to attract and retain customers. If you’re reading this blog, you already know that the ways to reach your target audience are endless: social media, blog posts, email marketing campaigns, targeted PPC campaigns, or any of the other familiar tactics that businesses around the world are using to reach new customers, and keep regulars coming back for more.

Having so many options for engaging your audience can be overwhelming. Having so many options can also cause messaging to become muddy over time if less relevant avenues are taken for creating and distributing content.

So where does remarketing come in?

Remarketing is an informed process of targeting your site visitors with specific messaging and content based on actions they took or did not take on your site. It enables you to identify people who have already shown a distinct interest in your brand and market to them for weeks or even months after they’ve left your website. By carefully collecting information about the people who visited your site in the past and the pages they visited, you can create content-driven and data-driven remarketing campaigns to attract them back again the next time they are online.

These individuals have likely come to your site because they are in the information gathering phase of the sales funnel or because they are ready to buy. Remarketing is a tool that allows you to nurture that site visitor and guide them through the steps you want them to take that ultimately leads to their conversion as a new customer.

You’ll need to first install a remarketing code and apply it to all pages on your site. Once you’ve acquired the necessary visitor information, the next step for setting up an effective remarketing campaign is understanding your audience. We wrote a post on how to set up a remarketing campaign, so head there to find out specifics. Here is an example of how a targeted remarketing campaign can build and retain your customer base:

Target Audience: Non-converting visitors who did not visit the “Request A Quote” page on your website. (Pending the quote request form is the first step of the conversion.)

Goal: Increase “Request A Quote” page engagement.

Target Audience: Non-converting visitors who did visit the “Request A Quote” page, but did not submit their information to be contacted by a representative.

Goal: Focus on “Request A Quote” form completion.

Target Audience: Converting visitors who were contacted by a sales representative but who did not purchase a service or product through your site.

Goal: Create an informed campaign to sell your services to customers who opted out in the past.

Target Audience: Converting visitors who were contacted by a sales representative and purchased a service or product through your site.

Goal: Drive “Feedback Request Form” completion to learn more about their experience and how to offer them more relevant products in the future.

How can remarketing inform your content marketing campaign?

Remarketing is a valuable tool for understanding content relevance and how to relate to your target audience. Plus, it allows you to build focused, content-rich campaigns that speak to the needs and interests of new and returning customers. After all, you’re not going to spend extra time building an elaborate social media campaign promoting your new snowmobile inventory in an attempt to reach the customers whom you already know reside in warmer climates and regularly visit your website to purchase bicycle gear. The same reason applies to the fact that you wouldn’t target a returning customer with a promo code or offer that is only valid for first-time converts only. Taking a few extra steps to create and share content that is helpful to your key visitors can produce really awesome results.

Save time and money by building content marketing campaigns that your target audience will relate to. Remarketing cuts the fat and goes straight to your customers’ needs. Knowing that a specific type of customer is interested in a certain product or service based on hard data can provide powerful insights to your campaign and your content. Something that seems as simple as delivering links that open directly to relevant content that exists on your site can produce a dramatic increase in conversions. You’re no longer relying on the customer to navigate your website where they may become lost or sidetracked in the process; you’re leading them to where you know they’ll get the most value based on past behavior.

Remarketing is a tool that both promotes the streamlining of content and informs the best methods of delivery to cultivate and retain a base of new and returning customers. By combining the insight and persistence of remarketing with carefully targeted content, you can expect your campaigns to pack an effective punch.

I’ve written a lot about inbound marketing on this blog. There are posts about what inbound marketing is, how to build an inbound marketing strategy, and tips on creating great content at the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. If you’ve read any of these – or if you are familiar with inbound marketing – then you know that it all starts with getting found online.

Today’s buyers don’t behave like they used to. I always use the example of buying a car. Instead of spending your weekend going from dealership to dealership getting the hard sell, just about everyone who buys a car starts online and waits until they know the exact make, model and trim package they want (and the price they are willing to pay for it!) before they visit a dealer. This change has come about because the balance of power in the sales relationship has shifted from the seller to the buyer and buyers are now more well educated than ever. We can go online and compare products or services, read reviews, and get recommendations from friends and colleagues. In short, buyers don’t want to be sold to – they want to BUY.

Companies that recognize this shift and respond accordingly are going to thrive in the new economy. Those that continue to rely upon old and outdated, sales-driven approaches will struggle. It’s that simple.

Where to begin?

To win business in our buyer-driven world, you need to get found online and that means being visible in search engine results. Why? A recent study by Fleishman-Hillard found that 89 percent of consumers turn to Google, Bing or another search engine to find information on products, services or businesses prior to making purchases. The best way to position yourself as the provider of choice is to get in front of buyers in the early stages of their decision making process when they are researching and self-educating.

To do that, you’re going to have to rank – and rank high – in search engine results. It’s not enough to be in the top 10. Research by online ad network Chitika reveals that the top 3 listings in Google search results get a 61.5% of traffic and the number one result gets a whopping 33%!

How do you get your website into these top positions? The key is to consistently produce lots of keyword-rich content. This is the whole theory behind inbound marketing. Produce great content that answers your buyers’ questions and solves their problems, make sure it is keyword optimized, publish it on your website, and you’ll get found by people looking to buy what you sell.

That’s the theory. Putting that theory into practice requires a solid keyword research strategy that will help you to identify what words and phrases your buyers  are actually using to find you online.

Getting Started with Keyword Research

Keyword research is, very simply, the process that marketers use to find the words and phrases that people are using to search for things online. This information is then used to optimize online content (from website copy to blogs, etc.) so that it gets found by search engines.

It stands to reason that before you can do research on the words and phrases your buyers are using to search online, you need to understand who your buyers are. The best way to do this is to create buyer personas – detailed profiles of your ideal customer that include information about their goals, likes and dislikes, challenges, priorities, etc. Armed with this information, you can get use the following tools and techniques to determine the words and phrases that they use to search for information online.

Short v. Long Tail Keywords

Before you dive into your keyword research, make sure you understand the difference between long and short tail keywords. This is an important concept when it comes to search engine optimization. Short tail keywords are the short words or keyphrases that you typically think of when you identify keywords. For example, if you are doing keyword research for an insurance agency, you might list words such as insurance, homeowners insurance, workers compensation, car insurance, etc. amongst your priority keywords. While these would indeed be relevant to your business, they are very broad and also very hard to rank for. Think about it. If you’re trying to get in the top three results on Google for “car insurance”, you’ll be competing with the 800 pound gorillas of the industry. Companies like Geico, Progressive, Esurance and State Farm have deeper pockets and teams of people dedicated solely to producing online content and improving the company’s search rankings.

The other problem with this approach is that it doesn’t necessarily yield the best leads. If you are a car insurance company serving Washington, DC and you rank in the top three for “car insurance” on Google, you’re going to get clicks from people all over the U.S. (and potentially the world) who are looking for car insurance. This is fine if you’re targeting such a broad audience, but if what you really want are car insurance buyers in Washington, DC, you’re better off targeting the keyphrase “Washington DC car insurance company” or the like.

But let’s take it one step further. I would argue that most people these days have changed the way they search – something I like to call the “Siri effect.” Whereas we used to search for “Washington DC car insurance company”, we now talk to search engines like they are people (think, “Siri, what is the best car insurance company in Washington, DC?” or “Siri, which car insurance company in Washington, DC has the best prices?”). This often means that our searches come in the form of a question or a full sentence.

This is what long tail keywords are all about. If I type “how can I save on car insurance for my teen driver” into Google and you happen to have a page on your website or a blog with that exact title, odds are that you are going to be the top result in my search. And if you’re the top result, odds are that I’m going to click on it and go to your website and voila, you have gotten found online!

Keyword Research Tools and Techniques

The most effective way to undertake keyword research is to start by identifying your short tail keywords and then build on those to develop a thorough list of long tail keywords. There are a number of tools you can use to help you do this.

1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool

I always begin my keyword research with Google Adwords. Google used to have a public keyword tool that anyone could use to identify the words and phrases people are using to get to a particular website or web page, but in recent years that tool was removed and replaced by the Adwords Keyword Planner. To use the Planner, you must have a Google Adwords account. If you do, simply log in and click Tools > Keyword Planner on the menu. Then choose “Search for new keyword and ad group ideas.” Here, you will be given the choice to enter a product or service keyword (car insurance), a landing page (ex. The car insurance page on your website), or a product category (insurance) and specify things like geographic targeting (do you want to see what everyone in the world is searching on this topic, or just the US?), timeframe (the last twelve months or the last 30 days?) and negative keywords (terms you DON’T want information on). Plug all this in and Google will tell you what people are typing into its search engine, how many people are searching for that phrase, how competitive it is to rank for it, etc.

If I were doing keyword research for my own company, I would start by entering in my own URL, but would then research my competitors to see the keywords people are using to find them online. It’s always interesting to see if there are gaps in my keywords and to identify areas that I could improve my ranking.

In addition to searching by URL, I would also search certain targeted keywords or phrases to see if they reveal additional search terms that should be targeted. For example, you could search professional liability insurance to find out what related terms people use. Here’s what a Google Keyword Planner search might look like for my company…

I like to export the results of my Google Keyword Planner research to an Excel spreadsheet (Google makes it really easy to do this) and then sort the results by how competitive the terms are and how much search traffic there is. The terms with high search volumes and low competitiveness scores are the low hanging fruit of the search engine optimization world.

2. Google Trends

In addition to Google Keyword Planner, be sure to check out Google Trends. This is one of my favorite tools and allows you to see how often a particular search term is used compared to other similar terms. I like to use Google Keyword Planner when I’m not sure whether buyers use the same terms that my clients use when they refer to their services. Quintain is a good example of this. We refer to the service we deliver as “inbound marketing” but you’ll also hear people call it “content marketing.” There are some subtle differences between the two but it’s interesting to run these terms through Google Trends to see how often each is searched. Turns out content marketing is by far a more popular term. Knowing this, I have a decision to make – stick with “inbound marketing” and appeal to a very targeted but niche audience, or use “content marketing” to get in front of more people? We generally stick with inbound marketing because we believe the leads we get are better with that term, but that might not be what everyone would do in this case.

The bottom line? Information is power, and Google Trends provides incredibly useful information!

3. Competitive Keyword Analysis

If you’re really curious what your competitors are doing to rank so well in Google, there is a simple way to find out. Go to their website, right click on the main content area of the page and click “view source”.

Enter a command find function (command + f) and then enter “keywords” and use the arrow or Next tab to advance through search results on that page. You’ll find the meta title, description and keywords that they’ve added to attract the attention of search engines. Pay particularly close attention to the meta title and description. The title holds the most sway in terms of how search engines rate the page, while the description is designed to get searchers to click on the result.

You can do this type of competitive keyword analysis for your competitors’ homepages or the interior pages of their website and there is no limit to the number of searches you can perform. Compare the results you find with the keyword analysis from Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends to see if you’ve missed anything or need to reprioritize the keywords you’re targeting.

4. Turn On Your Listening Ears

You heard me right! One of the best keyword research tools is actually sitting right on your head. Use your ears and listen to the questions your buyers are asking because odds are, they are the same questions that they’re entering into search engines. Write those questions down and keep a running list. Each one of those questions contains valuable long tail keywords. Build your content around them, and you will get found.

Don’t try to tackle this alone. It’s best to pull in as many customer-facing employees as you can so that, as a group, you can brainstorm the questions that are frequently asked about your product or service. I’ve done this exercise a number of times and typically come away with 50+ topics or questions.

What’s Next?

With so many tools at your disposal, it would be easy to get so wrapped up in keyword research that you forget the ultimate goal – to produce great content and get found online. I don’t see keyword research as a one-time thing. Get started, identify your top keywords, and then focus on creating content that answers your buyers’ questions and incorporates those keywords in a way that is natural, not forced. That is how you will get found.

Once you’ve made progress with your inbound marketing strategy and you start to see results, go back and revisit your keyword research to see if it needs to be adjusted. This is where a tool like HubSpot comes in handy. Use HubSpot or an equivalent marketing software tool to track how you’re ranking for your target keywords and where there are opportunities for improvement. You can also see if you happen to be ranking for keywords that you WEREN’T tracking but should be.

Do you have some other tools you like to use for keyword research? I would love it if you’d take a moment and share them with me in the comments!

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways for Asia Pacific businesses to reach customers and prospects directly. It’s a proactive, outbound tactic as opposed to the more passive, inbound methods of social and search marketing. When you send an email to an inbox, the recipient definitely will see it (if you’ve done the work to optimize deliverability). What they do after that depends on how good you are at encouraging engagement. A successful email marketing campaign requires the precise combination of several key ingredients:

• Deliverability: Maintain a good sender reputation and a clean list to ensure your email will get where it’s going.
• Responsiveness: Make sure your email can be viewed in different browsers and on various platforms such as tablets, desktop computers, and phones.
• Targeting: Select and segment the list to choose the right demographics for your message.
• Personalisation: Customise the email with the intended recipient’s name, job title, or other relevant data.
• Timing: Use A/B testing to find the best time to send campaigns and trigger emails.
• Relevance: Use calls to action that drive to content that’s appropriate and engaging.
• Optimisation: Analyse the results, fine tune your approach, and measure return on investment.

With those factors in mind, let’s take a look at seven ways to improve the engagement of every email you send.

1. Start With the Subject Line

Subject lines matter – a lot. In fact, 33% of email recipients open email based on subject line alone. To be successful, start by thinking about the subject lines that made you open an email in your own inbox. Best practices include asking a question, being specific, creating a sense of urgency, and keeping subject lines short, and using lower case. Use of personalisation in subject lines can increase the open rate by 22.2%. Need more guidelines? Here are 12 tips for effective subject lines.

Testing subject lines is an extremely important step. For example, you can find out whether a question (“What’s on sale this week?”) or a specific offer (“Save 50% this week only”) resonates better with a particular segment. Using A/B testing, in which you measure the performance of email A against email B, you can experiment with any aspect of an email that might have an impact on conversion, but subject lines are the most common subjects of email tests.. In case of a very large list, say hundreds of thousands of people, the two subject lines can be tested on a smaller percentage of the list, picking the one with the higher open rate and sending it to the remainder of the list.

2. Include Social Sharing Options

Emails that include social sharing buttons have a 158% higher clickthrough rate. Even if your readers are not interested in the offers you’ve included, they might forward the message to a friend or colleague. It is important to make that step as easy as possible. so be sure to include buttons that let people like and follow your brand on the major social networks. You can also publish email campaigns to social networks to extend their reach.

3. Segment Lists and Target Messages

To prevent annoying email recipients with irrelevant content, and to increase the likelihood that the reader will click, use list segmentation. Create groups of like-minded people so you can tailor offers to their specific qualifications. Marketers who segment their lists enjoy more transactions, more sales leads, and greater revenue. Once the list is segmented and you know who you are sending emails to, the next level is to consider what content they are looking for and use it for the offer. If the offer speaks to the recipient’s needs, it’s a no-brainer that the email will receive more clicks to take advantage of that offer.

4. Remove Distractions: Focus on the Call to Action

It’s important to consider the objective of any email sent. What one thing do we want the reader to do? If the goal is to get more Facebook fans, the copy of the email needs to be written around the objective, and that call to action should be obvious and easy to follow. A call out box, such as an outlined or coloured box with a link and a simple call to action, can increase clickthrough rates – as can high-contrast buttons and eye-catching images.

5. Find the Best Frequency and Timing

Discover when a person is most likely to open their email by tracking previous opens, segmenting those opens, and applying geographical location data. This is a tactic that requires some common sense experimentation,and metrics. The best frequency and timing depends on the target audience. If you are targeting business people, you may want to send emails during regular working hours. If emails are sent too early in the morning, they can get lost in the shuffle of a full inbox. If emails are sent too late in the afternoon, the recipient may see it as one more thing to review before quitting time and put off reading it until the morning. Maybe your audience only has time to check their emails either during lunch or after work. Try experimenting with time frames and run an A/B test.

The ideal frequency of emails sent depends on the content and what the subscribers prefer, but if you’re unsure, some experimentation is required. Most businesses will want to start with a monthly newsletter and then possibly increase frequency from there. If you have a lot of content, making your newsletter too long, consider increasing the frequency and splitting up the content.

Many businesses rely on sales and promotional emails to stay in the black. In that case, weekly or even daily promotional emails are appropriate. Of course, frequent emails only work if that’s what the subscribers expected to receive when they signed up in the first place. Monitor the unsubscribe rates closely as well as the open rates.

6. Use Different Types of Emails to Increase Engagement

One size does not fit all when it comes to email. Here are just a few ways to mix up the types of messages you send.

• Use a special welcome email to create a good first impression on the email subscriber. Offering a gift or coupon to every new subscriber increases the engagement of the subscriber with the brand. According to Forrester Research, confirmation emails receive the highest open and read rates. So the next time a customer purchases a product, don’t send just a confirmation mail – add some promotions for complementary products. Share corporate membership plans, promote newsletters, address FAQs, and provide information on customer care and product return policies. Be aware, however, that various countries have different regulations around types of email. Commercial messages (such as making an offer) may have rules and restrictions that differ from those that are considered transactional. (Subscription confirmations, order status messages, and shipment updates are examples of transactional communications.) Be sure you comply with the rules in the countries you send to.
• Try trigger-based emails to make a big difference in the email marketing results. Triggered messages are sent out automatically, based on important or timely events that are related to the subscriber’s actions. Trigger based messages can make subscribers feel valued – whether in the form of a welcome email, a reminder to repurchase a needed product, a message to let the subscriber know you miss their business, or even a celebratory birthday email.

Using different types of emails with prospects increases the probability of that the recipient will interact with the email – and with your brand.

7. Analyse the Results

Once you’ve done everything you can to increase engagement with your email, it’s important to look at the outcomes. Email metrics can help determine the effectiveness of communications and fine tune them to improve their efficiency. The data you’ll want to collect starts with the basics:

• Total messages sent
• Total messages delivered
• Hard and soft bounces
• Open rate
• Clickthrough rate
• Unsubscribes

So, what are these metrics, and what do they tell us? The sent and delivered numbers, along with the numbers of hard and soft bounces, can tell you how healthy your list is and how well your email deliverability management is doing.

The open rate measures recipients’ initial interest in the email. How well have you convinced recipients to open the email? After that, the text, layout and images in the email can take over. The clickthrough rate tells both how interested recipients were in a particular topic, and how well we converted that initial interest into action.

To take this a step further, you’ll want to measure the response or conversion rate. Response rate is the number of desired responses or actions taken divided by the number of messages delivered. The response rate is arguably the best way to measure the effectiveness of an email campaign. After all, it doesn’t matter if readers open or click the email if they don’t ultimately do what you were hoping they would do.

The last critical item to track is the Unsubscribe rate, or the number of unsubscribes divided by the number of messages delivered. Use the Unsubscribe rate to measure how well your email campaign holds the subscribers’ interest over the long run. If subscribers do not like what is being said, don’t find it interesting or feel that we are sending them far too many emails, they’ll tell us by choosing to leave the email list.

Be diligent about tracking these metrics for each email, and you’ll start to develop an understanding of what response you can expect, and learn to quickly identify if something is going wrong. Are your emails working? Are they worth the effort? With the right email metrics, you can find out for sure. And with all the information gathered, you can fix a failing campaign, or boost a good campaign into a great one.

A final note: Email is rapidly making the transition from the traditional desktop environment to mobile devices. This makes it potentially a more time sensitive, personal communication channel. It also means you may need to consider making sure your email’s design looks good and that your text reads well on a mobile screen. Keep an eye on the metrics that show you how many of your emails are being opened and clicked on in mobile, and make changes to accommodate these readers if you need to.

Ready to move past the basics of email marketing and learn new techniques to optimize your email results? Our “Amazingly Effective Email Guide” eBook contains five tips your can use for more successful – and more profitable – email campaigns.

What if you could have an infinite resource of targeted leads? The biggest list of targeted leads on earth is yours and the best thing is it’s free.

We all know this mega database of leads called LinkedIn, but how do you turn it into a lead generation machine with workable leads that can turn into prospects and ultimately customers? That is exactly what we cover in this article that is derived from a previous podcast with LinkedIn expert Josh Turner (that you can listen to here).

How to build a successful LinkedIn lead generation campaign:

Step one

The first thing that you want to do is define your targets and create a group for them. Who are the people you want to sell to or who are the people that usually buy from you? Define the exact types of people and companies you would like to target and design a tailor made group.

This group is not created for you to promote to or talk about how awesome your company is. The group is designed to supply your targets with information that is interesting and helpful to them.

Your chance for promotion will present itself when you have gained their trust. The following excerpt from the podcast will explain this with an example:

Josh: Yeah, here is an example, we have a client and they run a software development company, they are out of Illinois one of their big targets is manufacturing. And so if the CEO of the client firm that I am working with comes to me and says, “What is the best way for us to utilize LinkedIn to get in front of these kinds of companies?” Think about it, the people they are targeting in these big manufacturing firms are typically going to be the CEOs, the CFOs, the senior decision makers, sometimes CTOs, and such.

If we create a campaign all about software development those people are going to tune that out, so what we did in their case is we created a LinkedIn group called Mid-West Manufacturing leaders. This campaign and this LinkedIn group and all of the content we are positioning in front of these prospects is very broad. And we put first and foremost the interest of the prospects.

Note that the interest of your prospects is your top priority; this is not about you or your product.

Step two

The second step of this process is to find the right content to get in front of your prospects. You don’t have to create all of this content yourself. Most of the content you should use is curated content.

You find good quality articles that would interest your prospects and you post it on the group as a discussion point. You or someone in your company need to monitor the best industry sites for great relevant content.

A great free tool to use to find popular content is BuzzSumo.com. They tell you what content is the most popular on different social platforms in a given period. Just type in the subject you are looking for and it will throw the articles out in order of total shares. You can customize the search with all kinds of parameters so you can really make it relevant.

Josh recommends that you post 10 articles from different posters (so that it doesn’t look like a monologue of one guy just talking to himself) in the first week before you start inviting people to the group. LinkedIn will give you the option to invite your contact list. Invite the appropriate contacts on your list and you are now live. It will be easier to get people to join because it is starting to look active.

According to Social Media Examiner, it is acceptable to promote your group in a casual and unspammy way in similar groups. You can read more about that here.

If you post enough good quality content the group will start growing without you having to do much direct promotion but in the beginning you need to consistently reach out to new prospects to join the group. Just be diligent and at a certain point the members list will start growing steadily on its own.

The amazing thing is that if you do this right you will have built a relationship and set yourself up as an authority. Now when you approach the client you will not be wearing your salesperson hat but come from a very strong position of being helpful.

Ongoing process of managing your lead generation machine

LinkedIn allows you to send out an email to your group members once a week that goes directly into their inbox. This is a great tool for when you want to arrange for a talk with your sales team, but you need to be patient and build a relationship with those prospects first. Therefore, a better email would be to promote some form of helpful content if they are new to your group.

If your group has grown to a certain point you need to start keeping track of what content and messages certain group members have seen (based on when they joined the group) to be able to form meaningful discussions about challenges or opportunities they might be experiencing. Josh advises that you keep this information accurate and updated in a basic CRM tracking system. You can view an example of such a simple tracking system here.

Mistakes and pitfalls to avoid

1. Josh says that the biggest mistake he sees people making with this technique is to go for the sale too quickly. Build a relationship through conversation first.

Josh: …gain some top of mind awareness, position yourself as one of the good guys before you try and set up a meeting or call; you are going to get a much better response rate out of that.

2. The second biggest mistake he sees people making is not having a strategy to follow. Map out your plan and decide you are going to spend a certain amount of time consistently on getting this to work.

For this particular strategy, you are going to need up to ten hours a week to see meaningful results so plan accordingly or get your virtual assistant to do it. Make sure you document results so that you have something to iterate and improve on.

Conclusion

If you are new to LinkedIn we have written a great article on what rookie mistakes you need to avoid and general best practices when interacting on LinkedIn that you can get to here.

A consistent stream of leads is the life blood of your business so start doing this and it might help you simplify your whole sales process. Happy prospecting!

Have questions or comments? Feel free to leave a comment below!

As Wallis Simpson, Dutchess of Windsor, famously said, “You can never be too rich or too thin. Or have too many social media marketing statistics.”

Well, she actually only said the first part (which is debatable), but certainly would have said the second part (which isn’t) had social media been around in the 1930s.

How effective is social media in comparison to other digital marketing channels? Do consumers actually listen to brands? Do brands actually listen to consumers? How does B2B social media marketing differ in effectiveness from B2C use? Which network drives half of all social traffic to B2B websites and blogs?

What type of posts generate the most engagement on Facebook? What do 91% of consumers check daily? What do more than half of marketers identify as their most critical areas of focus over the next 12 months?

Find the answers to those questions and many more here in 106 digital marketing facts (well, mostly) and statistics from two dozen sources.

21 Social Media Statistics

1. 54% of B2B marketers said they have generated leads from social media. (CMO)

2. Among the largest social media sites, YouTube drives the most highly engaged website traffic (with visitors overall spending on average nearly four minutes and visiting three pages on target sites), followed in order by Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter. Reddit and StumbleUpon drive the least engaged visitors. (VentureBeat)

3. Is the value of social media marketing for b2c brand overrated? 68% of U.S. consumers say they “mostly” or “always” ignore brand posts on every social network. And 83% of consumers say they have had a “bad experience with social media marketing.” (Experience: The Blog)

4. Brand ads on social networks were among the least trusted form of advertising, significantly lower than trust in ads viewed in traditional media. (Experience: The Blog)

5. Among “prestige” consumer brands, over the past four years, less than 0.25% of new customers were acquired through Facebook and less than .01% from Twitter; this compares to almost 10% for paid search and 7% for email marketing. (Experience: The Blog)

6. And yet – 80% of brands advertised on social media sites in 2014. (DashBurst)

7. But – social media can be effective for selling things to marketers. Marketing professionals are 50% more likely than consumers in general to like a brand on Facebook, 400% more likely to follow brands on Twitter, 100% more likely to make a purchase as a result of seeing something on Facebook, and 150% more likely to have completed a purchase as a result of a tweet. (Experience: The Blog)

8. Only 20% of CMOs use social networks to engage and collaborate with customers. (MarketingLand)

9. But 24% of brand say they do “social listening.” (DashBurst)

10. Just 18% of consumers trust posts by brands or companies on social sites like Facebook and Twitter. (MediaPost)

11. While 78% of companies now have a dedicated social media team, only 26% integrate social media fully into their business strategies. (DashBurst)

12. Yet 93% of shoppers’ buying decisions are influenced by social media- because 90% trust peer recommendations. But only 14% trust advertisements. (#Socialnomics 2014)

13. 82% of hyper growth SMBs say social media is effective for generating new leads. (Business 2 Community)

14. 58% of marketers indicate that their social media efforts have generated leads. (Believable.) Social media produces almost double the marketing leads of trade shows, telemarketing, direct mail, or PPC. (Not as believable.) (Business 2 Community)

15. You’ve likely seen the statistic that if Facebook were a country, it would be the third-most populous on earth. What you may not know is that WhatsApp would be #5 (followed by the U.S.), Google+ #7, LinkedIn #9, and Twitter the 10th largest country. (#Socialnomics 2014)

16. For online merchants, the average order value influenced by social media last year was $143.46. (AddShoppers)

17. Though 60% of people say they get their news from TV and 29% from newspapers, social media comes in third as a news source at 28%. It’s followed by radio at 19% and other print media at 6%. (Digital Information World)

18. Though most customer service requests (40%) still come through call centers, 18% now originate via email and 13% through “eService” (web, social and chat). Customer service requests through that eService channel are expected to grow 53% in the coming year. (Bluewolf)

19. 90% of enterprises say they use social media to respond to customer service inquiries–yet 58% of consumers who have tweeted about a bad experience never received a response from the offending company. (Bluewolf)

20. When they do respond, the average response time of brands on Twitter to user comments or complaints is nine hours. (Social Media Slant)

21. 75 of the top 100 brands have a presence on Google+. (Social Media Slant)

5 Digital Marketing Statistics

22. For the first time, marketers spent more to advertise on the Internet (a total of $42.8 billion) than they did for broadcast television in 2013. (MediaPost)

23. U.S. marketers spent $12.8 billion on online display (banner) advertising in 2013–30% of the total online advertising spend. Retailers are the biggest spenders on display ads, accounting for 21% of total spending. (MediaPost)

24. However–just 32% of consumers say they trust online advertising of any type. Consumers trusted the messages in text message ads the least at 12%. (MediaPost)

25. 81% of marketing professionals believe that digital marketing technologies will cause their role to change within the next three years, but just 14% know how to “reinvent” themselves. (FierceCMO)

26. 76% of marketers say they need to be more data-focused to succeed, and 74% agree that “capturing and applying data to inform and drive marketing activities is the new reality.” Yet only 39% report using customer data and behavior patterns to shape marketing strategy in the past year. (FierceCMO)

8 Content Marketing Statistics

27. Marketers identified content marketing and social media engagement (each at 36%) among their top three digital marketing priorities for 2014. 31% included conversion rate optimization. Just 9% placed video marketing, and 2% connected TV, in their top priorities. (B2B Marketing Insider)

28. Consumer marketing is about mobile, B2B is about content. Asked what their organization’s “single most exciting opportunity” was for 2014, 22% of consumer marketers cited mobile, while just 10% of B2B marketers concurred. However, 24% of B2B marketers identified content marketing as their most exciting opportunity, compared to just 11% of B2C counterparts. (B2B Marketing Insider)

29. B2B purchasing decisions in general are taking longer and involving more people on the buying team. 58% of buyers say they spend more time researching than in the past; 53% rely more on peer recommendations; and 65% said the winning vendor’s content had a significant impact. (Marketing Interactions)

30. 88% of business buyers say online content plays a major to moderate role in vendor selection, yet just 9% of respondents think of vendors as trusted sources of content (ouch!); the most influential types of content across both the awareness and evaluation phases of the buying journey are third-party validated research reports and studies. (MediaPost)

31. 68% of business buyers start their content sourcing at search engines and portals, 40% go to vendor websites (why, if only 9% trust them? Hmm…), and 25% are activated by an email from a trusted source or peer. (MediaPost)

32. The three most sought-after types of content by business buyers are comprehensive industry/category surveys and studies (52%); technical details about products and solutions (44%); and analyst reviews or recommendations (43%). (MediaPost)

33. Content plays a pivotal role in add-on buying decisions or supplemental purchases following an initial contract; 86% of B2B buyers frequently or sometimes use digital content to identify complementary or add-on products. (MediaPost)

34. B2B marketers spent an estimated $16.6 billion in 2014 on digital content publishing to acquire business leads, influence customer specifications, and educate and engage prospects. (MediaPost)

22 B2B Marketing Statistics

35. LinkedIn is the only platform the majority (62%) of B2B marketers consider to be effective; in second place is Twitter, with 50% of saying it is effective. (CMO)

36. Only 16 percent of B2B consumers prefer live webinars. (CMO)

37. The average B2B marketing budget is about 2% of revenue. (CMO)

38. Metrics matter. 88% of B2B CMOs say their C-suite peers turn to them for data and insight needed to strategize and plan, and 78% agree that marketing’s influence on corporate strategy is greater today than it was just two years ago. (CMO)

39. The highest paying marketing jobs are in B2B. (CMO)

40. 60% of all social media traffic to business to business websites come from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. (SteamFeed)

41. 34% of tech companies have reduced their traditional advertising budget to fund digital marketing activities. (Only 34%?) (SteamFeed)

42. Just 6% of b2b buyers say that a prospective vendor’s social media activity has “a lot” of impact on their purchase decisions. 30% say it is “important but not a deal breaker.” (Content Marketing Institute)

43. On the other hand, 55% of buyers will eliminate a vendor from consideration if contact information and a phone number are not easy to find on the vendor’s website. (Content Marketing Institute)

44. The vast majority of buyers prefer to contact vendors through email (81 percent) or phone (58 percent). Just 17% want to use live chat and 9% social media. (Content Marketing Institute)

45. After visiting the home page and products/services pages, the most important next stop for b2b buyer’s is a prospective vendor’s “About Us” page. (Content Marketing Institute)

46. U.S. B2B marketers are projected to spend more than $100 billion on social media advertising by 2017. (Gerardo Lara on Pinterest)

47. The top social networks and social media tactics used by B2B marketers are LinkedIn and Facebook (each used by 86% of marketers), followed by Twitter (81%), blogging (64%), annd YouTube (53%). At the other end of the spectrum, less than 10% use Foursquare, podcasting, or Quora. (Gerardo Lara on Pinterest)

48. More than 80% of B2B marketers say their top goal in social media is increased brand awareness. (Gerardo Lara on Pinterest)

49. 53% of B2B Fortune 500 companies use marketing automation. (Marketing Interactions)

50. 63% of industrial supplies buyers say they purchase online, making it the most popular purchasing channel. Paper catalogs are least important. (Internet Retailer)

51. 54% of B2B buyers say they spend half or more of the industrial supply budgets online, and 39% say they plan to increase the amount they spend online in the coming year. (Internet Retailer)

52. 67% of industrial buyers say it is “very” or “extremely” important for suppliers to offer the ability to purchase on their websites. Just 7% say this is “not important.” (Internet Retailer)

53. Emotion plays a surprisingly large role in B2B purchases. Even when buyers see the value to the business, only 14% perceive a real difference in supplier offerings. (Business 2 Community)

54. But 71% of B2B buyers who see a personal value will buy a product. (Business 2 Community)

55. And 68% of buyers who see a personal value will pay a higher price for business product or service–but just 8% of buyers who see no personal value will pay the higher price. (Business 2 Community)

56. More than two-thirds of tech B2B searches occur outside of North America. (Social Media Slant)

6 Twitter Statistics

57. “Twitter users who see tweets from B2B tech brands are more likely to visit the sites of these brands. A recent study found that Twitter users visit B2B tech brand sites at a higher rate (59%) compared to average Internet users (40%), illustrating the strong presence of a B2B audience on Twitter. (CMO)

58. There is 50% crossover of members on Instagram and Twitter. (SteamFeed)

59. Tweets with 1-2 hashtags get 21% higher average engagement than those with none; but tweets with more than 3 hashtags get 17% less engagement. (SteamFeed)

60. Grandparents are the fastest-growing demographic on Twitter. (#Socialnomics 2014)

61. Twitter has 255 million monthly active users. (Social Media Slant)

62. 53% of Twitter users recommend products in their tweets at some time. (Social Media Slant)

7 LinkedIn Statistics

63. 83% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for distributing content. (Gerardo Lara on Pinterest)

64. For B2B websites and blogs, 90% of social traffic is driven by the big three networks–with half of it coming from LinkedIn. (Business 2 Community)

65. 83% of business-to-business marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing. (Business 2 Community)

66. 93% of B2B marketers find LinkedIn the most effective social network for B2B lead generation, and 77% say they have acquired a customer through LinkedIn. (Business 2 Community)

67. Each second, two new members join LinkedIn – the equivalent of the entire enrollment of the Ivy League joining every day. (#Socialnomics 2014)

68. There are, on average, eight new LinkedIn groups created each week, and 200 group conversations per minute. (Social Media Slant)

69. LinkedIn (74%) and Tumblr (54%) are the only social networks that U.S. users access predominantly via desktop. (Social Media Slant)

5 Facebook Statistics

70. Facebook posts with less than 250 characters get 60% more engagement. (SteamFeed)

71. Nearly half (45%) of B2B marketers say their company has gained at least one new customer through LinkedIn. (Gerardo Lara on Pinterest)

72. 52% of digital news consumers say they get at least some of their news from Facebook and Twitter. (Digital Information World)

73. Facebook has 802 million daily active users–609 million on mobile devices. (Social Media Slant)

74. Posting to Facebook on Fridays is likely to result in better engagement: 17% of weekly comments, 16% of weekly likes and shares, and 25% of videos played occur on that day. Updates posted on Sundays generate the fewest comments. (Social Media Slant)

2 YouTube Statistics

75. YouTube reaches more U.S. adults 18-24 years old than any cable network. (SteamFeed)

76. U.S. marketers spent $2.8 billion on online video advertising in 2013. (MediaPost)

6 Pinterest Statistics

77. Pinterest outperforms Twitter and LinkedIn in the time spent on each network. (SteamFeed)

78. Almost half of all Pinterest activity is on tablets. (SteamFeed)

79. For online retailers, Pinterest (24.3%) and Facebook (24.2%) drive the highest share of social revenue. (AddShoppers)

80. Pinterest now hosts roughly 30 billion pins on 750 million boards. (Social Media Slant)

81. 100,000 of Pinterest’s members are retailers. (Social Media Slant)

82. 92% of all pins are posted by women, and as of April 2014, there were 15 times more pins by women than by men. (Social Media Slant)

5 SEO and SEM Statistics

83. One-third of all organic search clicks on Google are on the first result. (SteamFeed)

84. 43% of all online advertising dollars are spent on search ads. U.S. marketers spent $18.4 billion on paid search ads in 2013. (MediaPost)

85. 72% of PR agencies are now offering SEO services. (MarketingProfs)

86. Each day, 20% of the terms typed into Google have never been searched before. (#Socialnomics 2014)

87. By 2018, one of every $10 spent on digital marketing services will be spent on SEO. (MediaPost)

7 Email Marketing Statistics

88. By industry, the highest average email click-through rates are in media/publishing (20%), software/SaaS (19%), and technology equipment/hardware (14%). The lowest are in real estate (8%) along with education/healthcare and nonprofits (both at 7%). (MarketingSherpa)

89. As of 2013, there were 3.6 billion email accounts (roughly one for every two people on earth). (HubSpot)

90. 91% of consumers check their email daily. (HubSpot)

91. 74% of consumers prefer to receive commercial communications via email. (HubSpot)

92. Suppressing anyone in your list who hasn’t engaged with your emails in over a year increases your deliverability rate by 3-5% immediately. (HubSpot)

93. For ecommerce merchants, the average value of Twitter share is 85 cents and the average value of a Facebook “like” is $1.41. But the average value of an email share is $12.10. (AddShoppers)

94. Also for ecommerce merchants, email subscribers convert at more than twice the rate of those reached through Google+ or Facebook shares. (AddShoppers)

12 Mobile Marketing Statistics

95. Half of all clicks on mobile banner ads are accidental. (SteamFeed)

96. CMOs say their top two areas for digital technology investments over the next 3-5 years are mobile applications and advanced (predictive) analytics, each at 94%. (MarketingLand)

97. U.S. marketers spent $7.1 billion on mobile ads in 2013–more than double the amount spent in 2012. (MediaPost)

98. 61% of marketers specify social media as the most critical area of focus over the next 12 months, followed closely by mobile at 51%. (FierceCMO)

99. 48% of emails are opened on mobile devices. But only 11% of emails are optimized for mobile. And 69% of mobile users delete emails that aren’t optimized for mobile. (HubSpot)

100. 25% of emails are opened on iPhones. (HubSpot)

101. As of January 2014, 58% of American adults owned smartphones and 42% owned tablets. (Pew Research Center)

102. By the end of 2015, 81% of all U.S. cell phone users will have a smartphone. (Social Media Slant)

103. 63% of adult cell owners use their phones to go online; 34% of cell internet users go online mostly using their phones. (Pew Research Center)

104. 81% of cell phone owners use their phones for text messaging; 74% use their phone to get directions or other information based on their current location; and 52% use it to send or receive email. (Pew Research Center)

105. Many mobile marketers still don’t get it though. Nearly 70% of cell phone owners say they receive unwanted sales/marketing calls, spam or text messages on their phones. 25% say they receive these unwanted calls and texts at least weekly. (Pew Research Center)

106. Mobile sharing grew 2.6 times faster than desktop sharing through the first part of 2014, and now accounts for the majority of social actions. (Social Media Slant)

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com in July 1995 with 10 employees and few sales.

Within two months, Bezos and his team had customers in 45 countries and all 50 states, and sales of $20,000 a week. In May 1997, Amazon went public with a $500 million valuation. 

Today, Amazon has a market cap of $172 billion and sells nearly anything a customer can think of at low prices and fast shipping speeds, in addition to hosting a cloud computing platform worth over $3 billion, and continues to grow.

Bezos is an example of an "exponential entrepreneur," according to serial tech entrepreneur and XPRIZE CEO Peter Diamandis and Flow Genome Project founder Steven Kotler, authors of new book "Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World." They attribute his success to both long-term thinking and a customer-centric attitude.

Diamandis writes that he had a chance to speak with Bezos at the TED 2014 Conference. He asked him what advice he would give to aspiring exponential entrepreneurs, those looking to build a business that can grow 10-fold annually.

Bezos told Diamandis:

It's so hard to catch something that everybody already knows is hot. Instead, position yourself and wait for the wave to come to you. So then you ask, Position myself where? Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you're missionary about.

I tell people that when we acquire companies, I'm always trying to figure out: Is this person who leads this company a missionary or a mercenary? The missionary is building the product and building the service because they love the customer, because they love the product, because they love the service. The mercenary is building the product or service so that they can flip the company and make money.

One of the great paradoxes is that the missionaries end up making more money than the mercenaries anyway. And so pick something that you are passionate about, that's my number one piece of advice.

On that point, Diamandis tells Business Insider, "There are people who are lucky, and who hit it out of the park on their first shot, and that's great. But unless you're being driven by your passion and purpose, you'll give up before you succeed. And so fundamentally passion and purpose trumps everything."

SEE ALSO: The classic allegory of 'stone soup' provides a lesson every entrepreneur should learn

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There are many ways that CEOs can take time out to strategically work on reviewing, improving and growing their business.

• You can look outward to other companies in your industry, other industries, emerging trends and new technology – all as input to your thinking about your own business

• You can look inward at specific areas of your company and think about what could be improved or done differently

• You can also just let your mind wander as you do non-business related activities, like bike riding or walking or playing golf, and see where that takes you

Another strategy for taking time out to work on your business is to use one day at a time as a focus day on one specific aspect of your business. Spend the whole day thinking about it, mapping it out and thinking about how you would improve it. Delegate further actions to your team.

For example, I recently worked through this exercise with a client. We looked at his company’s core marketing and selling activities to acquire new customers.

If your business is online your marketing process will be very different from a company that relies on word of mouth to attract new clients. That will be different again from a company that has a direct sales team, or alternatively a network of distributors.

Here’s 7 steps for your one-day business improvement exercise:

Step 1: Get something to map it out onto

Get a really large sheet of paper or use a whiteboard (if you have access to one on your ‘day out’) so you can freely map out all the components. A mind map is a good tool to do this.

Step 2: Do a brain dump of all the steps

They don’t have to be in order, just do a brain dump of everything that happens in the pursuit of acquiring new customers or clients.

(If you’re not sure of what these are, have your team provide this information to you, in preparation for your ‘day out’. They could do steps 2 and 3 for you.)

Step 3: Put them into a sequence

If you have an online business, the first step could be to post an invitation to a webinar on Facebook.

If you have a professional services firm the first step may be to do the same as above! It may also be to email a new contact with a link to a webinar or piece of information of value, or with an invitation to one of your events.

Step 4: Assess the outcomes these steps generate

You will know how successful or not your processes are. If you don’t know, then get the relevant information from your team. Find out what really works and what doesn’t, and also where they may encounter problems or glitches in their marketing.

For example, for every 20 direct invitations you send to your event, how many accept? 10%? 50% 1%?

For every webinar you run, how many leads do you generate?

Step 5: Pull apart each step and ask ‘what if?’

For example, is there a better way to reach new prospects? Is there a way to reach better prospects? What if we changed the sequence? What if we change the frequency? What if we added another step in?

What’s also critical to this process is to look at the follow through.

• Is there any?
• What is the follow through process?
• Who is responsible for it?
• Is it being done consistently?
• Could it be done better?

Step 6: Highlight specific parts in your process that need further work

You don’t have to do it. Delegate that to your team or even the marketing company you work with.

Set a timeframe for the improved process to be implemented, tested and measured.

Step 7: Set improvement targets

Now you can set some new targets to improve the outcomes in the marketing activities you do to generate new business.

Assessing improvements on a quarterly basis is a good timeframe as it’s long enough to get some traction and short enough to make further changes to your processes if required.

I think that working through this on your own, before you workshop it with your team, gives you an objective perspective.

This approach can be applied to any core part of your business, whether it be service delivery, product development, new client acquisition, or customer service.

Pick one area and give it a try!

This Valentine’s Day, lovers around the world will be busy trying to win hearts: 141 million cards will be exchanged around the world, more than 110 million roses will be delivered, and 36 million heart-shaped boxes of chocolate will be sold.

But relationships are hard—including in marketing. Just when you think you’ve finally figured your partner (or buyer) out, something shifts. She won’t pick up the phone or return your emails. Communicating with him is suddenly difficult. The two of you grow apart until, finally, the relationship ends.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Especially not for you, the modern marketer, and the buyers you hold dear.

The best way to build meaningful—and lasting—relationships with your buyer is by delivering relevant, targeted content. Here are 10 great ways to win your buyer’s heart during this season of love.

1. Know Yourself

If you don’t understand who you are, what you’re offering, and what makes that offering stand out from the pack, you won’t be able to develop a lasting relationship with your buyer. Take the time to identify your strengths and weaknesses. Get started by building a content board made up of stakeholders from across your organization. Ask this group questions like:

• Where does our company excel?
• What are our main points of expertise?
• What are our goals as an organization

The answers to these questions will help you identify the themes that will guide your content marketing strategy.

2. Know Your Buyer

Once you’ve gotten in touch with the real “you,” it’s time to find people with needs compatible with your brand’s expertise.

Identify the key characteristics and concerns of your target buyers and compare them to the strengths of your organization. You’ll soon discover common interests from which meaningful conversations (and content) can develop.

Building buyer personas is a great way to distill this information.

3. Build Your Game Plan

Once you understand your strengths, your buyer needs, and the themes you want to tackle with content, you’re ready to build your game plan.

Often, marketers feel overwhelmed by the amount of content they need to create to fuel their marketing campaigns. But creating enough content doesn’t have to be a struggle.

The content pillar approach allows you to develop one piece of meaty content, like an eBook or whitepaper, that tackles a particular theme. Then, you can break it down into many derivative assets that serve all of your marketing channels, personas, and buying stages.

4. Get Internal Buy-In

No matter how great the game plan, if you don’t have executive buy-in, it will fall flat.

By bringing members of the company—beyond marketing—into the content ideation and decision-making process, key stakeholders can see firsthand the value buyer-centric content brings to their roles and the organization as a whole.

5. Communicate Across Your Organization

Regular communication about marketing efforts throughout your organization is a must. Without it, you risk providing an inconsistent, irrelevant, or inaccurate content experience for your buyers—which leads to mistrust, not love.

Make sure teams from sales to product understand your big initiatives for every quarter, and can find the content you develop for these initiatives. You can’t foster healthy buyer relationships if you’re experiencing turmoil internally.

6. Reach Your Buyers Where They Are

It doesn’t matter how relevant the message might be if the right people don’t hear it.

Be strategic about your distribution strategy. Make sure you’re serving buyers at all stages of the funnel—from awareness through social channels and your blog to the middle and bottom of the funnel through your sales and customer support teams.

7. Leverage Your Influencers

A great way to improve your chances with love is to get some third-party support. The same holds true with your buyer relationships. If people your buyers follow and respect sing your praises, they’re much more likely to look your way.

Leverage your influencer network. Reach out with content that’s relevant to both your buyer and your influencer’s audience. Engage with them regularly on social media, via email, and on the phone to nurture the relationship. Always be sure to frame your request in a way that provides value for your influencers, not just your product.

8. Track What’s Working

You’ll never be able to improve if you don’t know what’s working—and what’s not. Make sure you’re tracking not only vanity metrics like unique visitors and social engagement, but also how your content is driving revenue and conversions in the later stages of your buyer’s journey.

9. Optimize Your Experience

Building lasting relationships isn’t rocket science. You expand on what works; you cut out what doesn’t. Sometimes that even means cutting the cord with buyers who aren’t the right fit for your products and services. Use your analytics to get a holistic picture of your marketing efforts and optimize accordingly: update your buyer personas, refine processes, revamp your messaging.

10. Foster Commitment

There’s no “set it and forget it” solution for maintaining buyer relationships. It’s imperative to check in with your buyers frequently to understand if, and how, their motivations, needs, and questions have shifted. Monitor activity and listen periodically to ensure your messaging and content stays relevant and meaningful throughout their path to purchase.