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At the start of every year I like to set out the big themes I’ll be focusing on during the year, and I share those themes in the hope that you’ll find them useful in some way.

In 2015 my big overarching theme is Market Leadership. As I’m sure you can guess, future blog posts, emails and video will focus on some of the practical details on how to achieve market leadership in your market.

This first video of 2015 looks at the first of three big strategies I believe work the best to achieve market leadership for service and information based businesses: Thought Leadership.

You can catch the next two videos on Relationship Leadership here and on Marketing Leadership here.

 

Transcript

Hi, it’s Ian here.

At the start of every year I try to set out the big themes that I’m going to be focusing on during the year and share them with the idea that hopefully they’re useful for you.

And it’s been really gratifying to hear back over the years from people saying how it’s inspired them and they’ve focused on similar themes themselves.

Now often those themes will be very practical steps. So last year I talked about the 5 Ss of Simplicity, Speed, Systems, Scale and Sweat.

This year I’m going to focus more strategically – and I think that’s something every business needs to return to periodically as it grows.

In particular, if you’re in any type of service business or you sell online products it won’t have escaped your attention that industry after industry is becoming more competitive.

Now partially that’s because there are more competitors. But more importantly it’s because our clients now have much more visibility and access to suppliers than ever before.

It used to be that if you were a consultant or a lawyer, for example, then if you did a decent job you had a kind of little local monopoly- because it was just too much hard work for potential clients to search the market and find someone better.

Now these days of course they can just hop on the internet and find a whole host of alternative suppliers.

So as a result, business after business that used to have healthy margins and premium pricing is now finding itself commoditised and under intense price pressure.

It’s no longer enough in your marketing to generate leads and contacts with potential clients unless you can establish a market leadership position that protects you and cushions you from price competition.

Something that sets you apart from the raft of good suppliers and positions you – for the right clients – as the one they’ll be willing to pay more to work with.

Now there are many different ways you can establish market leadership but my experience is that right now there are three that are especially powerful and work really well for service and information based businesses.

The first market leadership strategy is Thought Leadership.

Now I actually thought long and hard about whether to call this strategy thought leadership or to try to come up with another name because I think the phrase thought leadership has been so misused in the last few years that it’s in danger of losing its meaning.

So when I say thought leadership I don’t mean churning out the same old articles that all your competitors have on their websites too.

You know the sort of 5 ways to win more clients, 7 traits of effective leaders, or endless “how to” blog posts that bring no new insights or ideas to the party.

What I mean is content that makes your potential clients go “wow”.

That gives them lightbulb moments: new insights and ideas, and changes the way they look at things.

So it’s ambitious content. Ideas you’ve actually had to work hard to come up with and you’ve really thought through.

Now clearly, thought leadership like that doesn’t come easy. Which is why it’s so valuable.

I’m not saying everything you write has to be earth shattering, nobel prize winning stuff. But I am saying it has to be markedly different and better to what your typical competitors are putting out.

it has to make your client step back and think “this person really knows what they’re talking about and I want to work with them”.

Now there are lots of different approaches you can take to thought leadership.

You can work on ideas and concepts than no one else has come up with before. So if you look at people like Seth Godin, Edward de Bono, Tom Peters these are people you would want to work with because of the quality of their new ideas.

Or it could be you take new ideas from a different field and show people how to apply them in yours. So in the world of online marketing Derek Halpern is famous for taking ideas from psychological research in universities and applying it to websites and online businesses.

Or you can give people new tools and practical frameworks for addressing their problems. I remember the first time I saw the way Michael Masterson applied the prospect awareness framework to writing sales copy and I was absolutely entranced and I bought the book that explained it in an instant.

Or you can create content that’s more in depth.

If you look at blog posts by Peep Laja at ConversionXL or Bryan Harris at Videofruit or Noah Kagan at OKDork then rather than half formed ideas or untested suggestions you get in-depth, multi-thousand word, rigorously researched and tested insights.

So lots of different ways of creating thought leadership. But each of them basically setting you apart from the noise that everyone else is making and establishing you as a leader in your market.

Now in tomorrows video I’m going to talk about the second market leadership strategy which is relationship leadership – so I’ll see you tomorrow.

The post Market Leadership Strategy #1: Thought Leadership appeared first on Get More Clients: Proven Strategies to Attract and Win Clients.

In 2014 the “Cloud” gained some valuable traction with mature product offerings as well as clarity in service expectation and pricing models emerging. We also saw the rise of the “Internet of Things”, but some degree of misunderstanding and media hype exists and will continue to exist well into 2015. Firstly, what is “The Internet of Things” (IOT) and secondly, how can the cloud benefit?

What’s old is new again?

For decades machines have contained micro controllers that enable them to perform their task(s), over the years more sophisticated machines evolved with proprietary software protocols and hardware to enable them to talk to each others or central control systems usually with hefty incensing and software costs. These early systems were often referred to as SCADA systems, “Supervisory, Control and Data Acquisition”, they have been in existence for at least 20+ years and most oil & gas plants, power generation, building automation and automated factory systems have them.

They are not new by any stretch of the imagination but what has happened in the last 10 years is the growing introduction of cheap Ethernet and Wifi interface modules that have been very economically priced to warrant adding them into these small control systems.

One area that has seen rapid adoption has been home automation and building control. Instead of wiring huge amounts of cable back to a central point,  de-centralised nodes linked via Ethernet or Wifi emerged, reducing installation and maintenance costs significantly. With the increase in control nodes there has been a corresponding increase in the data these nodes can provide. By using nonproprietary networking protocols (such as TCP/IP) and network hardware more device platforms can interface into them to utilise that data and open opportunities to provide control and monitoring.

For a typical building, there are 1000’s of temperature zones that can be monitored, air-flow into rooms, floor humidity, chilling stages, re-heating stages as well as occupancy detection, lighting control, lift control, water monitoring and regulation and a host of other control and monitoring points for ancillary services. If you even just consider a house, each room could have half a dozen monitoring points, multiply that by the number of rooms as well as the outside environment and the number of connected devices and the data they generate is substantial. Now multiply that by a suburb, city or country! We haven’t even started on cars, trucks, trains or our road and environmental infrastructure!

So where is IOT heading and where does “The Cloud” fit in?

Lets assume home automation is big in 2015, it might be if the purchases by Google are an indication. Over the last few years Google has been buying up the cream of the worlds Robotic companies and adding to the list of acquisitions is a (growing) number of home automation companies. My guess is that the future thinkers at Google can see a fully interconnected world where factories are automated, cars drive themselves and people basically work to solve the future problems, robots do the manual labour and systems interact to serve us. Sounds almost futuristic, but its only been 50 years since we travelled into space and the explosion of technology in the last 20 years has outpaced all previous periods in history. Owning the technology that delivers this could be very rewarding. But back to the Cloud, the key outcome of all this information is data generation and control, ideally centralised and ideally secured.

Opening all those devices to open slather access to the Internet for anybody to see is a receipt for disaster and in terms of security would see homes, commercial buildings and any other IOT system the subject of all kinds of security threats. Cloud based servers that provide secured central points of access limit the threat of attacks to IOT systems, Cloud Servers can provide central points of authentication, provide web interfaces for IOT devices that might need to talk different protocols like MQTT or REST and they can be the repository of data generated by IOT devices. We already entrust huge volumes of data to Cloud storage providers so this creates new and exciting opportunities to Cloud Vendors for value added services.

Some Technical Scenarios to consider

Lets get technical, lets assume you have spent $1000’s adding automation to your house, you can see the temperature in any room, the attic and outside, you can turn on the lights, the garden sprinklers and regulate the time the pool pump is running as well as monitor your overall power usage. You announce it on a Blog and suddenly 30,000 people go to your home automation page and flood your home Internet link, assuming you have a fixed IP address and a public facing web server! Obviously the traffic load will be an issue, so in reality you don’t want people to connect to your home, but while you are home you will need some level of Intranet access to do neat things like enable your security lighting, reduce cooling and air flow to un-occupied rooms and make sure the pool PH level is correct. Even on an intranet using Wifi, there are dangers.

Security for IOT systems is going to be a nightmare!

What protocol should these devices talk? While Internet Protocol (IP) is the defacto transport layer, high level protocols like MQTT are being promoted as the way forward and is sending your data to the Cloud a realistic idea and of any benefit?

Lets say a company offers you money for your power usage data, from this data a real time usage map could be produced that shows power consumption for a collection of streets, a suburb or an entire city. Not only is the data about power usage but its smart enough to report power usage for lighting, heating, cooling, cooking etc brokering this data and being paid for it might produce additional house hold income and create new economic models. Technically data needs to be delivered to those who wish to use it, Cloud Servers could be employed to store the data and broker it onwards to other interested parties, this could be done independently of the data source (your home or office building). If those devices also identify themselves then a whole new marketing segment opens up as well, this might be an unwelcome side effect for future consumers.

For data gathering use cases, pushing data to a Cloud Based server using a protocol like MQTT or a Publish/Subscribe protocol like RabbitMQ or some “yet to become popular” protocol needs to be identified early so the bugs can be ironed out. Personally I like the idea of generating data in JSON format and pushing that to a web service running on the Cloud Server, this data can then be brokered to third parties at a cost that reduces my server bill and subsidises my investment in technology.

Android is underappreciated as a commercial platform — as a revenue driver for the e-commerce, advertising, and software industries. 

Too many analysts remain attached to an outdated idea of Google's mobile operating system as fragmented, malware-ridden, and low-end. They believe Android users don’t spend money on mobile and lack lifetime value. This is no longer true.

In a new BI Intelligence report, we show how Android has translated its massive audience — an estimated 1.2 billion active users globally by the end of this year — into a solid platform for mobile-based businesses. 

Access The Full Report And Data By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>

Here are the report's main takeaways: 

• Mobile business models that neglect or ignore Android risk severely limiting their market potential. Android is roughly twice the size of iOS in terms of its user base and is comparable in size to the world’s two other major platforms: Facebook and Windows.
• Android is rising faster than competitors as a driver of mobile revenue, including ad revenue. In this year's second quarter, Android's share of mobile ad traffic passed the share controlled by Apple's iPhone and iPad devices. Android at 39% still lags iOS in ad revenue share, but it is gaining share twice as fast.
• Android is exploding as a mobile commerce driver. Android's share of mobile commerce orders is up 26% year-over-year. Android devices now account for just over one-fifth of all mobile e-commerce orders in the US. 
• The fragmentation problem is extremely overblown, from all perspectives: screen size, operating system version, and device proliferation. Globally, 80% of Android devices are running the two latest available versions of the platform. In the U.S, it's over 90%. Android Lollipop will roll out beginning this month.
• Google has also made strides in addressing the quality of apps in the Google Play app store, and that has translated to revenue growth. The percentage of spam apps is falling. Meanwhile, global  revenue on Google Play more than doubled year-over-year in the first quarter of 2014. That's faster growth than iOS, according to App Annie. Some analysts believe Google Play will overtake the Apple App Store in revenue within five years. 
• Android's Achilles Heel remains the feature-creep and bloatware perpetrated on the platform by partner carriers and manufacturers. But Google is exerting more and more control over Android and pushing partners to adopt its preferred version of Android, which has a full suite of Google apps, including  Search and Google Play. 
• Google has made progress in "recapturing" Android. In the second quarter of 2014, 65% of global smartphone shipments were running Google's preferred version of Android, rather than variants. That was a 3-percentage-point improvement over the previous quarter.  

The report is full of charts and data that can be easily downloaded and put to use. 

In full, the report: 

• Explains how Android has essentially solved the fragmentation problem 
• Delivers all the key stats in a dozen charts for Android-based e-commerce, advertising, and app sales
• Shows how Android is growing much faster across most key mobile business categories than rival platforms
• Lists all the milestones Android has achieved in 2014, including surpassing iOS in web traffic share
• Delves into why Android still has significant vulnerabilities, and how Google is addressing them

For full access to the report on Android As A Mobile Business Platform and all our downloadable charts and data on mobile computing strategy and trends sign up for a free trial subscription today.

 

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GUEST:

I’m entering 2015 needing more from my wearables. Yes, I can track steps, sleep, calories, and heart rate. But I’m still drowning in meaningless data and wondering how much value my devices really bring me.

Consider Jawbone Up 24 — one of my preferred devices — it tracks steps, sleep, and if you’re diligent enough (I am not), the food you eat. All of these functions essentially tell you what you’re doing, but they don’t tell you how or why to make adjustments. For instance, the companion app doesn’t suggest how to get a better night’s sleep, nor does the environment automatically adjust to help you recuperate from a workout.

In 2015, wearable devices will need to improve on this limited cataloging ability and actually show us how we can improve our lives in a meaningful way. They need to provide data that is contextual, actionable, and precise so that we can alter our behavior for the best.

Contextual Data

Contextual data would give you information that’s useful at a specific time of day. Not only would it help you sift through data noise more quickly, but it would also give you a better understanding of yourself over time.

Having access to a lot of data isn’t necessarily helpful if that data is presented in the wrong context. Take sleep trackers, for example. To get the most from sleep data, we need to get that information at times where we can make adjustments throughout the day and closer to bedtime. And we need some other data sources from our environment to help validate why and how we are getting a good or bad night’s sleep.

For example, imagine having a thermostat linked to a wearable device to note temperature changes in the room while we sleep. This data in addition to our sleep pattern monitor would help us quantitatively understand how temperature affects a good night’s sleep.

As our devices become more personal and linkable, the data we get will become more cohesive. If a device can contextualize the information, it can better understand how to improve on our surroundings and take the appropriate action. Eventually a mobile phone or wearable will be able to understand how to adjust an environment to our liking because of the contextual clues.

Actionable Data

Contextual data is not effective without the next piece of the puzzle, which is actionable data. Instead of seeing how many hours we slept and how much we tossed and turned, actionable data software could tell us what to do to make our sleep better. Advances in actionable data software would see adjustments in real time. For example, it could monitor the thermostat and adjust it as our sleep patterns change and the night progresses.

An early example of actionable data is Jawbone’s partnership with Big Ass Fans to create an experience where room fans can increase or decrease speed based on the temperature and humidity in your room.

In 2015, consumers will demand more collaborations like this, where technologies connect current siloed experiences and add true value and convenience to life. Companies will have to respond to consumer expectations or risk being left behind.

Whistle is a dog activity tracker that collects data to help vets better understand the activity level of dogs. The results can help pet owners, by recommending actions to improve pet health. Software like HealthKit gives developers the ability to create similar experiences — delivering data to our doctors who in turn can give us actionable recommendations to enhance our quality of life. However, for any of these functions to work precise instrumentation is necessary.

Precision and Accuracy

Wearables still aren’t as accurate as they should be. For many users, step counts vary in mysterious ways and heart rates fluctuate between “do I even have a pulse” and “I just walked three blocks, but it looks like I ran a marathon.” Manufacturers realize the inconsistencies and are working to improve on the existing hardware to increase precision.

Apple claims the upcoming Apple Watch will be able to track heart rate with the fidelity of most devices found in hospitals. Precision like that is vital if companies are to deliver on the promise that wearables will actually make our lives better.

As the connected home industry and the wearables market try to figure out how to integrate into all aspects of our lives, we will see more partnerships and open platforms for developers to enable devices to talk and work together. Laying this groundwork is part of the next age of computing where the context of data is king, and measuring value by the sheer volume of data becomes a thing of the past. While big data isn’t dead, it will take a back seat as companies provide more personalized experiences to their customers.

Elliott Chenger is an Android engineer and mobile developer at Mutual Mobile, an emerging tech agency that builds products for a more connected world.

Mergers and acquisitions in the technology sector have returned to pre-crash levels — and gone even higher — with average deal-size up a staggering 81% on 2013, according to data from the Jordan Edmiston Group (JEGI).

The news will likely stoke fears that the ongoing tech boom is at its peak. So get ready for another round in the ongoing debate over whether this is a bubble that's overdue to pop.

The total value of mergers and acquisitions in the media, information, marketing and technology sectors in 2014 was $128.3 billion. That surpasses pre-crash levels of $104.4 billion in 2007. In contrast, 2013 came out at just $66.7 billion, almost half of 2014's number. The 2014 number is skewed  by the massive Facebook-Whatsapp acquisition.

The average deal got more expensive, too: In 2013 the average deal size was $47.9 million; a year later, it's $86.7 million.

While deal value has almost doubled since 2013, the total number of deals increased by just 6% to 1,481 deals. The total number of deals is now 70% greater than it was in 2007, the pre-crash peak.

One significant contributor to that $128.3 billion figure is Facebook's acquisition of Whatsapp in October for almost $20 billion. But even subtracting that $19.7 billion, the total value of mergers and acquisitions in 2014 comes out at $108.6 billion — still higher than pre-crash levels.

Here's a look at deals by sector:

The B2B online media and technology sector saw particularly significant increases in deal value in 2014, totalling at $6.5 billion from 65 transactions as compared to $601 million for 57 deals in 2013. B2C online media and technology, meanwhile, rose "substantially" in 2014 to $15 billion—"despite a 20% decline in volume."

It's a detail that's likely to further stoke fears that the ongoing tech boom is a bubble that's overdue to pop. While tech deals have not yet surpassed their 2000 dot-com crash peak, they are getting there, according to PwC. The two booms are different, however, in the sense that this time around most tech deals involve companies with revenue and cashflow — in the 1999/2000 crash a huge number of tech companies had no revenue at all.

Salaries in the technology industry have never been higher, with some companies rumoured to be offering up to $4 million per engineer. Meanwhile, tech companies with little or no revenue streams like social network Ello and secret-sharing app Whisper are enjoying valuations in the millions or tens of millions of dollars. 

In September 2014, well-respected investor Marc Andreesson of Andreesson Horowitz warned that the current climate of high valuations "WILL NOT LAST." The investor warned against the high burn rates many companies maintain, saying that when the market turns ("and it will turn"), "many high burn rate [companies] will VAPORISE."

For now, though, JEGI's data suggests we haven't peaked just yet. "With strong Q4 activity and an active M&A pipeline, 2015 is well positioned to surpass 2014 levels," they tell us.

Here's a graphic of the biggest deals last year:

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LinkedIn’s publishing platform used to be reserved for select influencers; however, now anyone can publish articles there. But is the platform worth your time?

According to an Oktopost study, LinkedIn is the best social network for generating B2B leads. Over 80% of B2B social leads come from LinkedIn, compared with 12.73% on Twitter, and 6.73% on Facebook.

I recently decided to give LinkedIn Publisher a try to see if it would help me get more leads. After two months of building readership and tweaking my strategy, my post on How to Plan Your 2015 Content Calendar took off and appeared on LinkedIn Pulse. It has received about 3,900 views and more than 200 subscribers to my website, which is amazing considering I had only about 1,000 people in my LinkedIn network when I published the piece. These results show how well LinkedIn Publisher can get your content in front of a much wider audience.

While my post shows how I used this strategy to support my consultancy, the approach can be used for any content marketer who is trying to drive subscriptions to their personal brand or support their organization’s content marketing efforts.

Here are five tips that helped me achieve these results:

1. Obsess over LinkedIn Publisher titles

A few months ago, Paul Shapiro of Search Wilderness published the results of a survey in which he analyzed the 3,000 most successful LinkedIn Pulse posts. He found that titles with between 40 and 49 characters received the greatest number of views. I find that keeping your entire title visible below the post’s teaser image is essential even if the number of characters doesn’t neatly fit between 40 and 49. In the following image, you can see how posts with visible full titles earned more views than the post with the truncated title:

Note: After publication, I tweaked the middle post’s truncated title. While readership increased, it was nowhere near the two posts with the original shorter titles.

Since you only have a tiny space for an optimized title, cut the fluff. That means no meaningless adjectives or jargon. Plain language works the best. However, try to include a benefit or reason why people should read your post.

One great motivator is urgency. I published my high-converting post in November when my target readers were thinking about next year’s content. I used “2015” to convey a sense of urgency.

I also tend to write how-to or list posts, as they are popular with blog readers. Shapiro’s study confirmed that how-to titles perform the best on LinkedIn while titles containing questions perform poorly.

2. Provide in-depth, valuable content

I think the content stakes are higher on LinkedIn, as it’s a professionally oriented platform. Professionals use the site to network, update their profiles, and learn things that will help them excel in their careers. The last thing they want is bad content cluttering their streams. To engage this audience, publish content that is relevant to their needs and will make them look like superstars at work.

It’s hard to provide value in a short blog post. A few years ago, many people could get away with 300 words that just touched on a topic. However, the trend now is longer thought-leadership pieces – think feature articles. My high-converting post was around 900 words.

At the same time, don’t get hung up on word count. You don’t want to fill your article with fluff just to hit a word target. Use as many words as you need to tell a valuable story – no more and no less.

It’s also important not to repost old content from your blog. I did this once, but then learned that Google indexes all LinkedIn posts, which could create issues if duplicate content exists. If you want to reuse something from your blog, give it an overhaul – making it better and more relevant for today’s LinkedIn readers.

3. Create custom opt-in offers

I drove opt-ins through LinkedIn by creating a custom offer to accompany my post. Since the article was about planning your 2015 content calendar, I modified my own editorial calendar into a downloadable template for readers.

This offer worked well because it related directly to the LinkedIn post – readers were interested in planning their content calendar and many of them wanted the template.

4. Use LeadPages to drive opt-ins

I didn’t want to direct readers to a complicated landing page for the offer because some might be lost along the way. So I used a LeadPages tool called LeadBox. When readers clicked the link for the editorial calendar template, they saw this:

The form’s image is the same as the image featured in the post, creating visual consistency between the article and the offer.

After entering their information, they could instantly download the resource. The LeadBox had a 60% conversion rate and brought me 206 (and counting) new subscribers.

5. Insert next steps at the end of the post

My CMO, Jaime Almond, came up with a great way to boost engagement on my blog and LinkedIn. We include “3 Ways to Apply This Information Now” boxes at the end of all blog and LinkedIn Publisher posts.

In this case, readers could apply the information by downloading the editorial calendar template, sharing the post on LinkedIn, or joining the conversation in the comment section. I like Almond’s suggestion for “Share this article on LinkedIn” as a call-to-action. It taps into the motivation behind why people share content – to increase their own visibility so they can enhance their reputations and connect with business prospects.

One way to get more comments is to ask for them. This post received 18 comments and led to some interesting conversations and a follow-up piece on How to Create Your 2015 Content Promotional Calendar.

As you can see, LinkedIn Publisher can be an excellent tool for getting your content in front of a wider audience, starting conversations, and even attracting more subscribers. However, as more people jump on the publishing platform, competition for your audience’s attention will increase. That’s why it’s important to publish thoughtful content and refer to your analytics to see what resonates with your LinkedIn audience.

What do you think of LinkedIn Publisher? Let’s start a conversation in the comments.

Want to make 2015 the year to expand your content marketing skills? Sign up for the Content Marketing Institute Online Training and Certification program. Access over 35 courses, taught by experts from Google, Mashable, SAP, and more.

Cover image by Ian L, Publicdomainpictures.net, via pixabay

The post How to Get 200+ New Subscribers From 1 LinkedIn Article appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Last year, all I wanted for Christmas was to have the “80/20 rule” become standard. Clearly I was on the “Naughty List” as this did not come true. For those of you who are new to the “80/20 rule”, the idea is that 80% of your social posts should be designed to deliver value to the audience. This content should be curated from other sources and aligned with your brand’s mission, vision and values. The other 20% of your content can be about you and your brand. The idea is that if you spend 80% of your updates on content that is valuable to your audience; you will earn the right to talk about yourself. Problem is, we preach it. Heck everyone preaches it! But far too few brands and companies do it. Go ahead, go and audit your posts right now. I bet the best you did was 50%. I understand why. It is easier to talk about you and it is also easier to do that when leadership is reading because they want you to talk about their company. But, the reality is the more you talk about you, the more your updates become ignorable noise.

And the last thing I know we all want is to be noise in our customer’s social feed. So, since I did not get everyone to convert to this rule of thumb, I decided to put my money where my mouth is. Over the course of the last year, I’ve run a few social accounts. And what I’ve found in applying to 80/20 rule for myself was really shocking to me. Beyond earning the right to talk about myself, I’ve found that strong, consistent, valuable curation breeds better customers. I know, right? It did “earning the right to talk about me” one better, actually, it did me three better:

It bolstered the brand

The startup I am working on was a great test case in the 80/20 rule. With a startup there is zero brand, well none that anyone knows about anyway. Because we did so much curation (more like 90/10), we were able to develop a brand identity based solely on the information we were sharing. The brand became about helping people manage not only their career and job search, but also about managing work, life, time and relationships. We tweeted and posted a ton on making your day easier and workday brighter. We tweeted countless life, work, happiness and productivity hacks. And these got re-tweeted all the time. We were putting out great content for people who would use our tools and we were able to align our brand with a better way of doing things.

Curation paints you in a new light

To most people your company is a product or product line. People do not typically align your products with your vision, mission and values. And this is where smart curation can light up a brand. This is where you can start telling people what you stand for without being all preachy. The content you share from third parties will help your prospective customers see you in a new light. They may begin to associate your products with your mission, vision and values. But only if you share with them things that make that case. If you spend all your social real estate talking about you, then you will never expand the customer’s POV of your brand, you will continue to be a product.

Prospects and customers are more aligned, shortening the sales cycle

Through my work this year, I have found that curation makes it easier for prospects and customers to understand what you are about and helps them pull the trigger when they are ready. They understand not only what you sell (which is clearly listed on your profile and in up to 20% of your content), but they now know what you stand for. And if they are aligned with that and have become fans of your valuable, curated content, I have found they are more likely to convert. Is it a short-term, direct-response play? Hell, no. Social was never designed to be direct response, in my opinion. Social was designed to facilitate conversations. And when you facilitate conversations through curation, you are in a better position to cultivate a relationship that is beyond a social like. These become the people who are your word-of-mouth sales force.

In the last year, I have been very vocal in asking brands to dial down the sales and dial up the trusted resource. I can now say that the trusted resource has produced better results than the “Buy now!” bullhorn. Isn’t it worth a shot? Maybe this month, curate more and compare results. See what happens when you offer valuable, smart, curated content 80% of the time. Give it a shot; you probably have nothing to lose. Who’s with me?

   

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Five years ago, I published a post of 7 controversial usability predictions for 2010. So what were the results? Did my prognostications come true? Did I get them right?

So with 100 percent transparency, and a small amount of trepidation on my part, let us review how my predictions turned out.

For those of you who need may need a refresher on my 2010 controversial usability predictions, here they are with a brief update on how I did:

1. The cost of conducting usability testing will decrease by a factor of 10.

I think I nailed this one (means I got it correct for those of you not up on U.S. slang).

Costs for conducting usability testing are a fraction of what they were five to six years ago. Why? Primarily because more and more firms and consultants are using remote moderated and un-moderated usability testing in place of expensive in-person testing at remote locations.

Remote moderated and un-moderated usability testing tools enable research to be conducted for a fraction of what it costs to fly a team to a remote location, rent a facility or hotel room, schedule and conduct the tests, pay for food, travel and lodging for the team, fly them back, and wait for their results.  The savings easily beat the factor of 10 prediction I made.

Add to that that there are now a plethora of low cost remote moderated and unmoderated usability testing tools available, and the savings are even greater.

2. There will be a dramatic increase in the use of low cost web-based usability testing tools.

Again, nailed it!

Looking out at the tools available today, (you can see a recent list in my 14 usability testing tools article), it’s clear that web and mobile based solutions are plentiful, and seem to be added to daily.

3. True usability ROI will continue to elude usability practitioners

I think I mostly got this one right, and that this statement is still mostly true, as I have witnessed some firms who have become able to accurately predict their Return On Investment (ROI) for usability. But, sadly, I’ve seen plenty of other firms that are still clueless about usability and ROI.

It helps to have people like Jeff Sauro of Measuring Usability providing helpful information on how to measure and estimate ROI for usability. But I am going to go out on a limb here and state that there are still plenty of organizations and consultants who have no idea how improved usability adds to their bottom line.

4. Use of remote moderated usability testing will increase by a factor of 10

This one I think I missed. Firms that provide remote un-moderated usability testing like UserTesting, UsabilityTools, Loop11, and plenty more have experienced tremendous growth in utilization. But to a certain extent, that growth has I believe come at the expense of conducting usability testing sessions using remote moderated methods.

I have to admit that even for myself, it is sometimes easier, faster and quicker to conduct un-moderated remote usability testing versus moderated remote sessions. The allure of obtaining results in 10 minutes sometimes pulls decisions to use remote un-moderated, when in fact remote moderated would have been equal to or potentially better for a particular test.

Remote moderated will never go away, but because it takes more leg work to set up and administer it will probably never see utilization increase anywhere near remote unmoderated utilization.

5. The UK will become a major source of usability expertise

Nailed it! Have you seen the huge number of UX and Usability conferences in the UK? Here’s a list of the UK’s past 337 UX events from Lanyrd. Yes! 337 events!

There are also scores of UX, Design, and IA shops in the British Isles. The UK is no slouch when it comes to usability expertise. Our friends over the pond have embraced all things usability and UX and have used it to great extent. Is there room to do more? Of course, but considering the number of full time usability and UX shops that were there five years ago versus today, there has been tremendous growth in this area. So raise a hefty pint of ale, and three cheers in celebration of usability expertise in the UK!

6. The phrase User Experience Design will become overused and almost meaningless

I’ll give myself a partial correct on this one. True, UX is now a far more common term than usability and in some ways UX has killed Usability. And true, most business folks or non-techies may not know one from the other, but still, there has been some consolidation and standardization of the term user experience design that most in our circle understand and use. It’s far from meaningless, so although there are still multiple ways to define ‘UX,’ the common theme of the experience a user has with a product, website, application or whatever seems to be fairly well understood.

7. Without professional certification being required, more and more charlatans will be attracted to usability

I’ll give myself a partial correct on this one. A Certification course, test and certified practitioner list still eludes our ranks. I would have hoped the User Experience Professional’s Association could have made some progress on this in the past five years, but sadly that is not the case.

I have seen plenty of suspect ‘UX Audits’ and ‘Usability Reports’ floating around that seem to be very sub-standard in terms of actual UX and Usability expertise. Still, for the most part the players continue to be the players, and new consultants that pop-up for the most part seem to be interested in doing the right thing by their clients and providing real value. I may have been a bit negative in my attitude on this one. But still, until there is an official Certification and evaluation of practitioners, it really is a ‘buyer beware’ world for our prospective customers.

Conclusion: How I did On My 7 Controversial 2010 Usability Predictions

So overall I scored myself with:

• 3 Correct
• 3 Partially Correct
• 1 Incorrect

How would you score my predictions? Do you agree with my scoring? Be sure to leave your comments below!

Google is lobbying the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to open up unused sections of the radio spectrum, in a challenge to traditional mobile carriers that could open the door to far cheaper Internet for consumers, the WSJ is reporting. But there's a catch. 

Mobile carriers' networks are traditionally around the 600-700Mhz range, BGR reports — a wavelength that easily travels long distances and can pass through buildings. In contrast, Google is pushing for the FCC to open up the rarely-used 3.5GHz band, which has far less range, and would be unsuitable for running a national network.

That's not to say it's useless, however: The wavelength is capable of carrying significant amounts of data, making it viable as a possible alternative to Wi-Fi in urban areas. It could be used "to build speed wireless networks in parks, buildings or public areas relatively inexpensively," the Wall Street Journal suggests, "making it cheaper for consumers to access the Internet—and ultimately use more of Google's services like search, Gmail and YouTube."

Google isn't commenting on its ambitions for the wavelength, and it might not make any attempt to bid for access itself. But even if it doesn't, access to the the new airwaves will promote competition and cheaper Internet access for consumers, leading to an uptick in use of Google's Internet products.

The cost of existing available wavelengths is extortionate, making it extremely difficult for newcomers to get a foothold in the market—something Google hopes to combat by opening up more of the spectrum. In a filing with the FCC, company executives said they are "helping to make Internet bandwidth more abundant... The broadband ecosystem will be well-served by a policy environment that removes barriers to investment, discourages monetisation of scarcity, and empowers consumers."

For reference, the WSJ reports that the value of Verizon's airwaves "is more than $75 billion," and an ongoing auction for a portion of the spectrum bids are approaching $45 billion.

In recent years, Google has been moving increasingly beyond its purely online roots and into the network sphere. The search giant has been slowly rolling out its ultrafast broadband connection Google Fiber in various U.S. cities since its launch in 2011, challenging established Internet providers like Comcast and AT&T. 

Google is also experimenting with Project Loon—an attempt to bring Internet to developing countries, rural areas and disaster zones using high-altitude balloons. 

Join the conversation about this story »

Author: Yoav Vilner

All of this talk of New Years Resolutions, and what I’m going to do differently for 2015 has got me thinking about improvement. How can I work toward overcoming the biggest online marketing challenges?

There is good news about your 2014 challenges; they can turn into your 2015 successes. Every marketing team or business has their own shortcomings, there’s always room for optimizing and improvement. For the ‘new year, new you’ I’ve provided a list of tools to turn your challenges into your assets in 2015.

MOFU, TOFU, content curation, and KPIs; every marketer has their strengths and weaknesses. As marketers working in a constantly evolving field, we’re constantly finding innovative ways to conquer those weaknesses. Without further ado, here are the 5 biggest challenges marketers faced in 2014, followed by my choice of tools to overcome them:

1. Using Rich Media To Convert Random Readers

Although Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) was a hot topic in 2014, most companies have not fully embraced their CRO to the extent that they should have. This optimization has one of the highest paybacks of all marketing activities, so it’s important to use CRO to drive you forward as one of your largest assets.

In 2015 and well into the future, video content is expected to be the leader in increasing conversion rates. According to a study done by the Aberdeen Group, companies using video require 37 percent fewer visitors to achieve the same results, because conversion rates for users of video are higher (4.8 percent) than non-users of video (2.9 percent).

You can optimize your landing page by trying out different interactive videos to engage your users right off the bat. Out of the different tools in this landscape, I would pay attention to VideoStir—a tool used to create a real-life presenter for the website, starring you and not a random model you purchase from a virtual presenters bank. You can leverage that opportunity to show the users exactly where to focus and how to behave within the site.

 

 

 

 

With competition on the rise, many businesses and agencies need to continue putting Conversion Rate Optimization at the top of their priorities. Marketing departments are responsible for so many different tasks that often the conversion process gets lost in the mix of bulk user acquisition.

If you’re still stuck with a landing page that won’t convert, there are tools to create simple yet powerful landing pages.

2. Wasting Resources on Unutilized Platforms

Do you know where your audience is? Targeting your audience effectively is crucial to your entire marketing plan. According to AdAge, 40% of the average marketer’s budget is wasted. One of the biggest ways to cut down on marketing budget waste is to stop wasting resources on unutilized platforms.

Today with all of the analytical tools available and the shift toward engagement, marketing departments are under a lot of pressure to provide hard-hitting numbers. You need to prove that your ROI is high enough to continue investing in your current practices.

Luckily, in 2015 there are many tools available to track this ad spend, and find where our audience is hiding. If your business has a strong web presence, you probably know by now that if you work on generic goals or leads then Google Analytics is your one stop shop—providing a wealth of information on how your site is performing. Especially, where your traffic is coming from.

3. Gaining Control of the User Retention Process

Customer retention is definitely easier said than done. Some businesses are very successful in getting returning users by interacting with them in unique ways, while others find difficulty in getting their “one-off” users to scale.

What sets these businesses apart? The ability to tune into strategies that put the user before the product. A study from Forbes found that 49% of companies are unhappy with their current marketing technology’s ability to support their customer acquisition goals (I could only guess that the other 51% lied in the survey).

With the increased competition in 2015, it’s going to be even more important to improve your user retention strategies. This may require thinking outside the box a bit. For instance, let’s say you’re trying to market your mobile app—instead of thinking along the traditional lines of in-app mechanics, try thinking outside the box with outside-game mechanics.

TROPHiT sets a new wave of mobile retention tactics—offering users actionable value within the App. For example, ‘here’s a free pack of golden coins (would normally cost $2.99), tap here to claim in game X.’ Since the user is more engaged from the value, they are more likely to spend more time playing your game and come back more frequently.

4. Struggle to Provide Engaging Content

This struggle is real. 2014 was a year of realization for many businesses, and many 2015 marketing strategies will reflect that. What did everyone realize? Generating awareness and having ‘online presence’ is not enough to land you loyal customers.

Today content is at the heart of our marketing strategies. Many marketers face the struggle to win over our audiences with engaging content and provide them with real value. In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute, 54% of marketers are struggling to produce effective content.

It’s time conquer this beast. Providing engaging content is a matter of knowing your customers, delving into their perspective, and finding that value they’re looking for. Your prospective customers are out there looking for resources; you can get to be their number one resource.

While whitepapers and blog posts are great ways to provide your customers with the informational resources they need, they’re restricted as a one-sided method of communication. There’s no feedback and no interaction between your business and the consumer.

Creating engaging content doesn’t have to be challenging. I use two simple phases for this process:

A. Finding topics that are already trending right now so I can get inspired about what my audience is reading. For this purpose, I use BuzzSumo combined with my choice of keywords.

B. Creating even better content based on those trending articles, using tools to increase engaging content such as Infogram or

5. Keeping Up With Constantly Changing Trends

It seems as if every day people are coming up with new technologies that make it easier and more efficient to connect with potential and current customers. With marketing trends constantly transforming, it’s essential to stay up to date if you want to stay ahead of the competition.

How will you stay current in a constantly changing field? Being aware of the changing trends as or before they’re happening can keep you ahead of the curve.

Marketo’s predictions for 2015 can help you to keep up with these trends and keep you ahead of the competition. Other tools like DataSift can help keep your marketing squad be on their “A game”. DataSift is a platform that ‘sifts’ through all of the grains of sand that make up our social media conversations. They skim what’s going on every second on Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, etc. and filter the content to provide you with the most up to date talk on what’s going on in your industry.

This kind of technology is constantly evolving in order to keep up with the fast pace marketing movement. By giving you access to the most up-to-date conversations your customers and influencers in the industry are having, you can make more intelligent business decisions.

All of these marketing tools can be very powerful in implementing your new year marketing goals and strategies. I’m sure 2015 will bring its fair share of challenges. If you never face challenges you’ll be stuck in a rut and never move forward and grow. Thankfully, we have many great tools to help us overcome these challenges and become the leaders and innovators in our field.

What challenges did you face in 2014 and how have you incorporated facing them into your 2015 plans? Please share in the comments below.

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5 Ways to Turn 2014 Marketing Challenges Into 2015 Success was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Content Marketing: How the Marketing Team Should work with Sales  – Part I

Content marketing — it’s all the rage. A reported 93% of B2B marketing teams in North America are using a content marketing approach, according to B2B Content Marketing 2014 research. While that’s an impressive number, only 9% of survey respondents felt it was “very effective,” while 33% said “effective.” That tells me people are jumping on the bandwagon without clear strategies, tactics, or implementation.

So that we’re all on the same page, let’s start with defining what we mean by content marketing. Or, more appropriately, how Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, which publishes the annual B2B survey, defines it:

“Content marketing is the strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

This content can take any number of forms: blog posts, videos, white papers, printed or electronic books, infographics, case studies, emails, newsletters, articles, and so on.

Even though it plays a valuable and critical role in today’s marketing mix, content marketing is often misunderstood by those in sales. I would be rich if I had a nickel for every time a sales rep has said: “That’s just a download; what am I supposed to do with it?”

Given all the investment and focus being spent on content marketing, the only way to make an impact — to drive profitable customer action — is for marketing and sales to be in sync and supporting each other.

Here are a few tips to better align marketing and sales to optimize a content-based marketing approach.

Marketing should:

• Survey the sales team to get input on what support materials they would like to see from marketing and to glean insights from their daily experience with clients, prospects, the market, and even competitors in the field. Not only will you get more buy-in and alleviate a “throw-it-over-the-wall” approach, but the marketing team also will benefit from greater exposure to the overall business environment, enabling them to create more relevant content.
• Communicate the content strategy and publish an editorial calendar. Sharing your strategy is a critical step for successful alignment with sales. Give them a copy of the editorial calendar so they can plan related activities around the launch of specific content.
• Create relevant content. Make sure to feature content that is relevant to your company and products and services. Don’t make it hard for the sales team to relate the value of marketing content to their targets; even the best content can distract from the sale if it’s not relevant to what the company offers.
• Make sure sales can find the content. If the materials are just thrown into a folder on a network, no one will know where it is or what a specific piece is about. At Richardson, we use SAVO’s Sales Content Pro to house and manage all of our content. This is a great tool to tag and provide information about the content, which is linked to the appropriate stage in the selling process, which brings me to the next point…
• Have a strategy that creates content appropriate for each stage of the selling process. Content should be different for each stage of the sales process: qualification, discovery, proposal, presentation, and close. What’s relevant for prospecting is not the same when sales is presenting or expanding a relationship. Make sure marketing fully understands the buying and selling process to ensure the content will support the acquisition of new customers and growing value with existing ones.

Stay tuned for “Content marketing: Part II; How the sales team should work with marketing.” 

The post Content Marketing: How the Marketing Team Should work with Sales – Part I appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

2015 is here and I’m sure you’ve read your share of “how to make 2015 more successful.”

In fact, chances are you’re wondering if that’s all everyone’s writing about this time of year.

And, you’re right. It is.

My hope is that over the next 52 weeks that I’ll share some solid tips that will work to help you achieve success in networking no matter what year it is.

These tips will help you no matter how fast or how slow you want to pace yourself in learning and implementing successful networking practices.

Tip Number One

Look behind to get ahead 

Some will say to leave the past behind you.

I say that lessons learned from your past mistakes will provide shortcuts to your success.

What a waste it would be if we didn’t learn from our mistakes, harvest value from them and use that experiential knowledge to avoid future mistakes or capitalize on them.

Some of the most valuable lessons you can garner in answering these questions:

1. What did you fully implement that became a part of the core of your brand in 2014?
2. What did you let go of in 2014? (habit, events, opportunities, and people)
3. What foundational changes happened to you in 2014?
4. What did you uncover or discover about yourself last year?
5. What did you most appreciate last year?
6. What held you back last year?
7. What times/moments did you let fear ‘run the show’?
8. What surprised you about last year?
9. What were some of your shining moments from last year?
10. What were some of your greatest accomplishment and proudest moments from last year?
11. Who supported you last year and was your greatest advocate?
12. What did you learn about yourself last year?
13. When did you push the envelope of your comfort level?
14. When did you have to show extra kindness and patience last year?
15. What did you learn about you and your brand last year?

If you would like to share your “aha” moments or answers with me here, please comment below.

Ever look at the number on a price tag and wonder where that number came from?

According to Mark Ellwood, the author of "Bargain Fever: How to Shop in a Discounted World," a price consultant was probably paid a lot of money to help determine the number on that tag.

Ellwood says price consulting started in the 1980s when Hermann Simon, a former professor of economics in Germany, challenged the traditional method of "cost-plus pricing," which is pricing something according to the cost of acquiring it.

He writes:

Simon and his colleagues invented value-based pricing, essentially transaction utility in practice. Don't start with manufacturing costs, Simon said, but with the customer and what they value about a certain product.

Today, price-consulting savants break down exactly how much the demand for a good or service yo-yos in sync with its price tag (a concept known as price elasticity of demand), then help businesses adjust accordingly. The brinkmanship is akin to an everyday auction, pushing prices as high as the market will bear.

Here are a few methods of price consulting used to manipulate you into buying something you might not really need. Next time you're in a store, keep an eye out.

Anchor pricing

To explain "anchor pricing," Ellwood uses the example of Panera's $16.99 lobster sandwich, which the chain introduced to its menu in 2009. "An absurdly expensive treat became an anchor price, throwing everything else on the list into bargain relief."

According to Ellwood, that one item on a restaurant menu or in a store that is wildly overpriced has a purpose: to make everything else seem cheap in comparison.

Goldilocks pricing

This pricing strategy uses the power of three to push shoppers toward the one product a store is hoping to sell the most.

Ellwood presents an imaginary Best Buy offering three Samsung TVs each marked down 30%: a 32-inch for $499, a 40-inch for $699, and a 46-inch for $899. According to Ellwood, Best Buy is hoping to sell the 40-inch option because it will likely offer the healthiest margin.

"[Goldilocks pricing] identifies a target item and then bookends it with similar offerings that make it both a bargain (cheaper than a 46-inch TV) and better quality (that 32-inch is for skinflint Luddites)," he writes. "Offering just a pair of similar items, shoppers will be drawn to the cheaper one. Present a trio instead, though, and they will gravitate to the mid-priced option."

Prices ending in 7, 8, or .99

Here's something else that's not just a coincidence: prices that have common endings.

According to Ellwood, price consulting uses number theory to signal a certain kind of product. "Retailers know that prices ending in 9 indicate a value product (such as throwaway sunglasses), while a 0 ending shorthands premium and prestige (designer clothing), and 7 or 8 endings signal items priced to move and closeouts."

Ellwood cites one price consultant who "estimates that $9.99 price tag, can, on average, sell 10 to 20% more product than a $10 one."

The author says that "prices ending in 7 or 8 are most common in clearance racks or at retailers whose reputation rests entirely on good value, such as Costco or Walmart; they're intended to imply a constant spigot of bargains." 

SEE ALSO: 17 Tricks Stores Use To Make You Spend More Money

Join the conversation about this story »

According to dictionary.com, the standard definition of “to activate” means “to make active; cause to function or act.” Or in the realm of Physics (a realm marketers rarely get to consider), it means “to render more reactive; excite.”

As a marketer, I long for the day when all of my customers are active. I yearn for them to react to my offers. I dream of my customers being excited. But it doesn’t always happen naturally. A recent McKinsey & Company global survey found that the ability to create sustainable and engaging customer relationships is the top priority for CMOs. Yet, to actually do this goes well beyond marketing. It takes a lot of work—spanning from a company’s brand messaging to its product experience and beyond.

One sobering statistic that illuminates the shortfall in how companies engage their customers comes from a recent Janrain study on solving the engagement gap. 94% of consumers surveyed in the study said that after being mis-targeted by marketers, they deleted the offending messages, marked emails as spam, unsubscribed, visited the website less frequently, or worst of all, became less likely to buy.

So it’s no wonder that 93 percent of marketing respondents to StrongView’s 2014 Marketing Trends Survey say they plan to increase or maintain spending on activities focused on customer engagement.

But how can they increase engagement? Customer Activation!

To define Customer Activation, we mean motivating customers to move to the next stage of their lifecycle faster than they would on their own. That could mean someone becoming a first-time customer, a dormant customer re-engaging, a one-time customer becoming a repeat customer, or a customer becoming an advocate. The point is that every customer, no matter where they are in their lifecycle, can become a better customer. They can advocate more, purchase more, visit more, use more and so on. The challenge of the modern marketer is to activate every customer effectively.

To do so requires:

1. Knowing your customers deeply–their personas and their behaviors.
2. Figuring out the right mix of marketing touch-points to move them forward.
3. Driving each customer towards a measurable goal.

Marketers have a new set of tools to open doors into the world of Customer Activation. To start on the path toward Customer Activation, you need to understand where your company is today. Our new ebook, Customer Activation—Marketing with a Measurable Purpose will help you evaluate your current customer activation practices and determine how you can help your company tackle this challenge in the future.

This might sound a little crazy, but I think it’s true: Social selling is a lot like dating. Think about it. One of the most important decisions we ever make happens when we try to find someone to spend the rest of our lives with. Finding the right person for any relationship is important, and that includes business contacts as well as romantic commitments.

Dating can be a long and somewhat grueling process, but it’s necessary in order to find the right person. It sometimes includes dealing with deception, lies, and broken promises. I know I wasted lots of time and energy back in my dating days! Every time I thought I’d found the perfect fit, I realized I was wrong (until I met my wife, of course). We learn a lot through dating, because it allows us to gain experience through trial and error.

This search is similar to the process of finding the right business partner. As salespeople, we need to remember this. Our prospects spend a lot of time and energy researching, reading, testing, and trying to cut through the sales jargon to find the right solutions. Our customers are looking for long-term commitments with companies that have a vested interest in their future success. They can do without the fast talk, shiny suits, and insincere charm.

People don’t marry a partner they don’t trust (at least, I hope they don’t), and no prospect is going to purchase from a company they don’t trust (no matter how shiny the solution seems to be, or how charming the sales rep is). Long-term relationships thrive on transparency and sustenance, not talk and flash.

On Being Selective

Most of us have relied on a friend (or more recently, an online dating service) to set us up with dating candidates. It’s tempting to dive in and start dating anyone who looks remotely interesting. But that rarely works out (at least, it never worked out for me).

The same is true when it comes to prospecting new opportunities. Quit relying on your company to give you all your leads! Start building relationships on your own, and make sure you’re super-selective about who you spend your time with. The friend or manager who told you that it was about quantity over quality needs to get with the times. That is a dialing-for-dollars mentality and it doesn’t seem to be working anymore. Your buyers don’t want to feel like they’re just a number you reached randomly. They want to be treated as if they were the one and only. And in today’s competitive marketplace, they have every right to feel that way.

Online Dating vs. Online Buying

Think of it this way: Match.com pairs couples up only after they capture a whole lot of relevant information about them. This way, they try to make sure they aren’t wasting anyone’s time. If you’re in sales, this approach is critical. Are you making sure you do your research on the leads you’re given before you call and try to get them to buy? If not, you might get rejected faster than the pick-up artist on the street.

The thing is, there is enough information out there about your buyers to help you understand who is a good fit and who is not before you pick up that phone. Don’t waste their time or yours. Take the time to make sure that you’re going after the right match.

Using Social Media

Social media has evolved into a paradise for buyers and sellers. We now know who our buyers are, what they’re saying, and what’s important to them before we even start the relationship or the sale. Data and analytics from the social channels are even predicting the future of a buyer and seller relationship before it happens.
Every sale starts with a social relationship in some form or another. The great thing is that the social ways you can start a new relationship have evolved. You don’t have to begin with a potentially intrusive telephone call or an anonymous email blast. Now you can start with a tweet or retweet, a follow, a LinkedIn request, or a blog post comment. Social media provides many different ways to get the conversation started. And once that happens, you can start building a relationship a step at a time in order to build lasting loyalty. And who doesn’t love that?

Speaking of starting up social relationships, I’d love to connect with you, so join me on LinkedIn and Twitter.
How have you used social media to connect with prospects? Be sure to let me know in the comments.
Interested in learning how to develop a social media game plan? Check out Act-On’s free toolkit:

Each successful content marketing strategy is a social and connected content marketing strategy by definition. I’m not just talking about the areas where social media marketing and even social business overlap with content marketing. I’m even not just talking about the need to work with audiences of audiences in an era where everything is (getting) connected and integrated.

A little story. I started my career in the ICT channel, an industry with different types of intermediaries between the manufacturer and the end customer on the other. Depending on the type of end customer, different types of intermediaries were involved: broadline distributors, value added distributors, retailers, value added resellers, integrators, system houses, you name it. Usually there were at least 2-3 intermediaries and we never sold to the end customer (I worked both for distributors and manufacturers/vendors).

Despite never selling to end customers, we talked with them, asked questions, listened. We helped in the stores of retailers now and then to understand the final buyers and their buying decisions and journey. Based upon those lessons and experiences, we created content the different types of intermediaries could use to drive demand among their partners and the end customers so they would order more as they received more orders themselves. In other words: even without directly marketing to the end customer, we did it indirectly to help our partners and thus ourselves. Content and truly understanding were our “weapons”, for instance by creating how-to guides based on clear signals coming from “the channel’ and the end customers regarding what they needed to sell and buy. Or better: to succeed.

The Transformational Power Of Value

Since those days, the middlemen and intermediaries disappeared in many similar industries. Channel conflicts happened as Internet came along and more direct models disrupted the industry, even if today the ICT distribution channel model and that of some other similar industries is still very alive. In other industries it simply vanished.

The way we approached the market, using content to help partners create demand and do their marketing in the second and even third degree contains lessons for content marketers in these digital times. No one explained them better nor saw their transformational power better in a structured way and without ever talking about phenomena like content marketing, than business guru Ram Charan.

In 2007, Charan published “What the customer wants you to know” (you might also want to read his “What the CEO wants you to know”).  It offered a new way to look at selling, very much in tune with what we did. Sales is all about value chains and relationship selling alone doesn’t cut it anymore. It was key in Charan’s message: “what the customer wants you to know” means understanding what your customers but also the customers (of the customers etc.) of their customers want all the others to know, regardless of the number of components in the full chain. In other words: to sell you need to understand what everyone involved wants and needs. In practice this also means that even as a B2B marketer in a very complex market, you also need to understand the consumer, as a whole. So, even if you’re an ICT distributor you need to understand what the consumer wants, to give you an example. It also reminds me of another very good reason to understand the consumers as Content Marketing Conference Europe 2014 speaker Jay Baer mentioned in an interview (I quote): “consumers of all types are manifestly impacted by best [customer experience] practices, regardless of where and how they are unfurled”. Or: you need to look at the overall and connected customer experience expectations of all sorts of buyers, regardless of the context (B2B, channel, end customer, whatever).

The Audiences Of Audiences

Back to Ram Charan and the value chains. What do they have in common with content marketing, social, in fact, customer-centric and integrated marketing as a whole? Well, replace customers of customers etc. in Charan’s “Value Creation Selling” approach and you see that it’s pretty close to the ‘audiences of audiences’ model in a connected social media and content marketing view. Value chains connecting buyers, sellers, intermediaries, their social connections, business relationships, etc., with content as a means to create demand and business value through customer value across different layers.

Charan understood that the selling process was (and is) broken and that we were at the dawn of a very connected sales approach, even in markets that don’t show the traits or know the complex go-to-market models as in the ICT channel. And, after all, isn’t buying always a connected and social decision process too, even in an offline context? Isn’t each selling and marketing approach that works one in which all stakeholders are involved? And, so shouldn’t each content marketing strategy by definition be social and connected too, including the so often forgotten focus on sales and partner enablement? Isn’t content marketing success finally always connected?

Someday, every company will listen more closely to the customer, and every manager will realize that sales is everyone’s business, not just the sales department’s. (Ram Charan in “What the Customer Wants You to Know: How Everybody Needs to Think Differently About Sales”).

Understanding this is also understanding the importance of networks of customers and their influence spheres, and the audiences of audiences, as we know them in social media and content marketing. It’s about 1) knowing what they want you to know and 2) talking with them and, as Brian Solis says, through them.

Content Relevance Across And Beyond Value Chains

The best marketers apply this connected approach of customer-centricity, social layers, questions/needs across the ‘value creation selling’ chain and speaking to and through people as the driving force behind social media and social business.

The eternal question a content marketer should ask, “what do THEY want – and say”, is what social listening/monitoring is all about as well. Sure, it’s also about reputation monitoring, potential PR issues and all that but we focus far too much on this very limited dimension. What your audiences – and their audiences – say is the core element in the content you create from a social perspective. Listening is the basis, acting to drive action is the goal. And content is the glue. As I wrote before, the customer has a voice and you are an audience as well.

Content marketing only succeeds if you live by that question “what do they want me to know and provide them,” regardless of goals, channels, tactics, etc. That’s the essence, the basics. And, today, more than ever we have this great opportunity to listen but also speak through the mouths of our audiences and their audiences, etc.

When we get these basics right we can take our content marketing strategy much further, beyond the multiple layers of value and relevance across value chains into the huge opportunity of being remarkable and making the difference with our brands and what they stand for and evangelize through their content.

But, even if the latter never happens, working across value chains and audiences the best possible way, will already make you stand out in today’s content marketing practice.

Don’t get me wrong here, not all time is wasted on social media.

However, there are MANY gaping holes that we (yes, me included) have fallen into with social media that have caused us to waste colossal amounts of time.

I’ll share with you the ones I see trapping companies, brands, and clients the most.

Social networking is where a lot of people are spending (and yeah, sometimes wasting) their time these days.

In fact, Americans aged 18-64 who use social networks say they spend an average of 3.2 hours per day liking, commenting, and being lurkers.

But, as a user, I should be allowed to waste my time.

As a marketer and consultant? I should NOT.

As a business, YOU should not.

Here’s where your business might be spending time wasted on social media:

Too Many Social Media Platforms

We’ve talked about Shiny Object Syndrome before.

And yes, it’s wise to test out new platforms like Snapchat and Ello.

But if you’re on 20 platforms, sharing the same, tired content, or barely showing up at all, you’re likely wasting time.

How to NOT waste time here:

• Invest in the platforms where YOUR audience/customers are active
• Stick to only 3-5 platforms (or 1 — whatever you can commit to being AWESOME SAUCE on)
• Get rid of platforms where you don’t have a constant (read: DAILY) presence
• Let the data tell you what to do (as we did with our G+ biz page)

Measuring The Wrong Metrics For Success

There are soft metrics and solid metrics to analyze with social media.

Then there are vanity metrics; things like number of followers or fans, likes, etc.

If you don’t have a solid strategy for measuring what matters – CONVERSIONS – you’re wasting precious time.

I can’t tell you what your goal(s) should be, but it should involve some sort of return on investment (ROI).

That might be new blog readers, newsletter subscribers, course buyers, or webinar attendees — but unless your fans and followers are doing those things, you’re doing it wrong (and wasting time)!

How NOT to waste time here:

• Have a social media strategy
• Tie that social media strategy to business outcomes and/or goals
• Don’t let vanity metrics steal any of your focus

You Think Campaign, Instead Of Conversation

This one is really simple: If you don’t understand the value of engagement (or the social part of social media), you’re wasting GOBS of time.

Newsflash: If used correctly, conversations with your niche audience can actually SAVE you time on social media.

I can use some of my own good news for the New Year to make my point:

• I connected with Mark Schaefer of Business {grow} after hearing him speak in October of 2013.
• A year ago (January 2014) Mark and I were able to meet in person in NYC.
• A few months later (April 2014) Mark asked me to write a post on Emotional Marketing for his world-renowned {grow} blog.
• A few months after that I made his 70 Rising Social Media Stars list (June 2014).
• I closed a new client in November 2014 because of making that list.
• Mark and I met again in NYC in December 2014.
• Later that month, Mark asked me to become a blogger for his {grow} blog (my first post goes out later this month!).

And it all started with a conversation on social media.

There’s power in that. And money! And clout! And paid writing gigs!

Catch my drift?

How NOT to waste time here:

• Create and curate content that’s actionable, starts a conversation, or entices relationship building
• Instead of creating quote memes in Canva (where you highlight someone else’s wisdom and words), start asking your own questions, or sharing your own helpful quotes
• Ask SMART questions: Like ones that help you understand the pain points of your perspective buyers, or what social platforms they’re active on, or how they like to consume content (aka: market research)
• Run ads as a supplement to your conversations, rather than a way to collect fans who aren’t really interested in a relationship with you

Using The “Post And Pray” Method

The whole “post and pray” method many businesses use can actually hurt your brand. [More on that here]

While your social media content should meet your goals (see “measuring metrics” above), you should also ensure you’re nurturing the buyer through the sales funnel.

Not that it should be boring.

You have to entertain audiences, too.

But we feel sharing only meme and quotes made in Canva content is not smart, strategic, or savvy!

Others agree … see this conversation about it from Facebook:

How NOT to waste time here:

• Use a content calendar or publishing schedule
• Create content for all cycles of the customer lifecycle
• Make sure all posts have a desired goal/outcome (likes don’t count!)
• Use a call-to-action on posts to tell the reader what do do next [20 CTA examples and 20 MORE CTA examples]

Other Time You’ve Wasted On Social Media

There are plenty of ways to waste time with any activity, social included.

Of course I could go on and go, but instead I’ll leave you with a few more obvious time wasters:

• Not using a social media dashboard or CRM (we use and love Sprout Social!)
• OR, using too many tools to run your social media accounts
• Not trusting in automation (as long as you use it the RIGHT way!)

Have I forgotten any super obvious ways businesses and brands have wasted time on social media? Chime in and let me know in the comments section below!

See you in the social sphere!

Insight into Immediate, Every Day Challenges Yields Trend-SpottingReport that Companies Can Apply to Their Advantage in the New Year

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – (January 6, 2015) – Fusion Marketing Partners (FMP) today announced that they have released their annual sales and marketing trends report for 2015. The Colorado Springs-based B2B marketing agency, which serves organizations across the U.S. and the world, based their 2015 trends report on industry research as well as extensive interviews with B2B company leadership about their challenges, opportunities, successes and failures. The report can be accessed at www.FusionMarketingPartners.com/2015-trends.

By offering this look ahead to 2015, Fusion Marketing Partners hopes to give B2B leaders extra insight into how their industry is changing and how they can prepare for success. Among the trends noted in the year-end analysis:

• The increased emphasis on metrics to prove outcomes and effectiveness at every juncture of the B2B sales and marketing process/li>
• Increased competitiveness and sophistication of social media and pull marketing across markets and niches/li>
• The rise of the “buyer’s funnel” as a challenge to the traditionally seller-centric attraction-and-conversion process, as well as the continued drive for improvement in aligning B2B sales and marketing efforts

“Our goal in producing our year-end trends analysis was to share timely and actionable information about the things we know are keeping B2B marketing leaders up at night,” said FMP CEO Christopher Ryan. “We’re confident that leaders who pay attention to and take action in every one of these trend areas will increase their competitive advantage and improve marketing and sales performance in the coming year.”

About Fusion Marketing Partners

Fusion Marketing Partners (FMP) is an outsourced B2B marketing provider that specializes in helping B2B companies turn around their stalled or underperforming marketing and sales operations and build value in their business. FMP’s strategic expertise and vigorous execution of proven tactics has quickly driven measurable improvements in awareness, leads and revenue for B2B clients across the U.S. and internationally. The company was founded by principals with deep experience in B2B marketing, sales, business development, web marketing, and public relations — from successful startups to Silicon Valley giants. To find out more, visit http://www.fusionmarketingpartners.com.

# # #

For more information please contact:
Nate Warren
720.244.4734
nwarren@fusionmarketingpartners.com

Social Selling Strategies

Are you getting all the sales you want from social media?

Do you wish your followers showed more interest in your products or services?

Social selling is not an exact formula for sales, but instead an end result from strong interactions with your business or brand’s community. As word-of-mouth becomes the new norm online, it’s important to know how to reach your prospects and customers in a way that will get their attention and meet their needs. That’s the strategy that will create more sales.

The Problem and the Benefit

In the midst of powerful social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Instagram, and YouTube the consumer has the edge on promoting a company or not. Public response is very quick, which can directly impact your business sales – up or down. Just take a look at this recent example from Best Buy, which prompted a public apology on Twitter after referencing a popular murder podcast called, Serial. The negative public response was overwhelming:

It’s important to be relatable and non-controversial while maintaining open communication with your connections. Content should be at the top of your marketing strategy list along with a few other steps that will help your business or brand attract more leads and sales:

Create a sales page

Take advantage of services like LeadPages, or create your own landing page on your website where your social media fans and followers can learn more about what your company has to offer. Use these links in between other content that you share to avoid “selling” directly to your community.

Post a steady stream of quality content

Utilize your resources and target market research to feed your followers with information they will love. This can include articles that have previously been covered, or be updated information with a new twist. You can also repurpose your posts through infographics, presentations, and videos to create a variety in your mix. Visual content is especially popular on social media, and can generate a great deal of visibility like this example from a recent SlideShare presentation I published:

These types of images and videos are great to share on other popular networks like Pinterest, YouTube, and Google Plus, and short snippets can even be condensed to be featured on places like Vine and Instagram.

Actively participate in conversations

Be on alert for buzz around your tweets and posts on social media or join in on a conversation that could help your community. This can be done through social services like Hootsuite and Rignite, which make it easy to track your social feeds. Try to respond in a timely manner, especially when it comes to customer service issues.

Post helpful information and tips

Instead of making a sales pitch or asking your community to go to your website or join your network, draw them in with something of value instead. This can include contests, free reports, a coupon, asking their opinions, and so on. Not only will they appreciate the chance to win or participate, but will also be more inclined to share your content.

Social selling is not about the sale, but rather building trust with your fans and followers on social media who will in return reward your brand or business with word-of-mouth advertising online. People no longer respond to sales presentations until they know your company is one worth engaging with.

It’s good practice to use the available analytics on places like Twitter and Facebook to track your progress and learn where your conversions are coming from. Thankfully most social networks have this capability built-in for free, and provides great insight into how your content and conversations are performing. Just remember that social media is all about people, and the sales will follow!

Spending on smart energy and security systems alone will increase by 23 per cent this year from 2014.

Clients keep asking me if there is a benefit of having WordPress as their content management system or CMS. Ultimately it depends on the goals of the site and what functionality is needed to support those goals.

That said, for most businesses and organizations we encounter, WordPress is the best CMS. WordPress functionality can be extended to fit most of the website needs our clients have.

There is also a vast developer community out there building plugins for WordPress for just about anything you can imagine.

For digital marketing in 2015, organizations need to have a CMS that’s easy to use and does not hamper content and marketing objectives. WordPress, to that end, is great for digital marketing in the following ways:

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a proven digital marketing strategy. Organizations produce content useful to their audience; then, use their website and social channels to share and promote that content.

Content marketing also drives search engine visibility through the use of targeted keywords and phrases in the content. It also proves your website to be valuable to your target audience. This value helps to build backlinks – links back to the website – through social shares and other mentions.

WordPress is an ideal CMS for content marketing. It started as a blogging tool so content marketing is in its blood. It was built and has been refined over the years to make it one of the easiest utilities for creating and editing website content.

Website Portal

While not a full fledged Association Management System like iMIS, WordPress has a wide variety of plugins available (including an iMIS plugin) that can help you manage most membership needs.

With these plugins, you can manage your members, offer payment and scheduling options for events, sell merchandise and much more. This is beneficial to Associations as well as small to medium sized businesses who want to create a community of brand evangelists.

With these plugins and a solid digital marketing strategy, organizations can turn their website into a portal where their community of members, clients, etc. can gain access to information.

This is one element of a growing marketing discipline call Utility Marketing.

Community Building

With the functionality and strategies mentioned above, you have a powerful Youtility tool as Jay Baer puts it.

You’re website now becomes the hub of a community of clients, members, whoever your target audience might be.

From this hub you can build the marketing wagon wheel (see below) where social channels are the spokes.

The wheel is completed as your community starts sharing and discussing the content, events, merchandise that lives on your website – the wheel hub.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO is the process of optimizing your website and the links to it such that Google finds value based on certain keywords and phrases. With WordPress, you can greatly improve your SEO based on the following:

1. Using a plugin like Yoast, you can easily test the SEO strength of a page or customize the page title and META description.
2. WordPress eliminates any content bottlenecks means that content will be updated more often. This will improve rankings.
3. WordPress allows you to expand the pool of content editors in house. This is an extension of point 2. These editors, if invested in the success of the organization, are empowered to make changes on a regular basis which improves the SEO of the site.

Conversion

Conversion – turning visits into leads/sales – is easier with a CMS. You can track which content gets visits, shares, or comments and which do not. Then, tweak or eliminate the bad content and expand on the good content.

You can also track which calls to action work and which do not. With WordPress, you can try a variety of offers and calls to action. So, after identifying an offer/call to action isn’t working, you can replace it with something different that could produce better results.

Your website design/development firm can setup callouts and calls to action like buttons, styled boxes and more. And using a plugin like Advanced Custom Fields, the developer can set these up to be easily editable.

WordPress vs Other Content Management Systems

There are plenty of CMS options out there. I suggest that before making a decision, you do your research.

That said, as stated, the majority of our clients are a perfect fit for WordPress. While other content management systems have similar functionality to WordPress, there are some glaring differences…

• Cost – because WordPress is open source, there is no license. A proprietary system usually has a monthly or yearly fee. Also, the pool of available WordPress developers is vast. Competition means competitive pricing. Of course, price isn’t everything. A large group of available developers also means you won’t be left stranded if your developer goes AWOL.
• Portability – Because WordPress is built on a widely supported platform of PHP and MySQL, and it’s open source, it can be hosted just about anywhere. And because it’s not tied to any package or proprietary system, you’re not stuck in some agreement you can’t get out of.
• Flexibility – There are so many plugins for WordPress that you can find one for just about any sort of functionality you need. And any custom functionality not supported by a plugin can usually be developed by the many quality PHP developers out there.
• Longevity – With many CMS’s, an upgrade to the latest version is a major headache. With WordPress, it’s usually a day at most and sometimes just a flip of the switch. I would always recommend checking with your developer before doing an update.

Agile Marketing

I’ve given you a good bit to chew on here. In 2015, agility is going to be super important. Agile marketing means that your team is able to market on their time… not within the schedule of one staff member or your design/development firm.

The time between idea and implementation can sometimes be a matter of minutes with agile marketing. This makes the CMS your content superhero.

You can discuss content marketing initiatives and then implement them right away. If you lag at all, you could possibly lose out to your competition. Assume they all have a great CMS, because chances are a lot of them do.

What are your thoughts on WordPress?

A friend of mine wrote on Medium over the weekend about the New Year and the importance of finding clarity in life. The post was very personal, but it occurred to me that finding clarity is a very worthy goal for all of us as we roll into 2015.

At their core, all New Year’s resolutions are about clarity– the purpose of a resolution is to strip away the extraneous so that you can focus on a goal. If you can do that, you have a chance to be one of the eight percent of people who actually achieves his or her resolution.

So, rather than looking at your marketing and deciding that you need to continue to do everything you’re already doing and add in a new content platform and launch an Instagram strategy and create more CTAs in your marketing automation platform, you need to focus.

Focus.

You need a clear message.

That begins with organizational understanding of why you exist and what your value proposition is for the audience. It’s shocking how many organizations really don’t know why they exist. They’ve never contemplated what spot in the ecosystem they inhabit, why the audience should care about them, and what makes them different from their competitors. In other words, you need to Start With Why.

If your company still isn’t sure about its Why, then that’s what you should focus on. It will bring clarity to everything you do – every marketing tactic gets framed within this understanding. Every tough decision is influenced by the understanding of what you are and where you’re going. And it brings an energy to everything the organization does, because everyone – internally and externally – has clarity about the business.

For content marketing purposes, clarity leads you to solidifying your editorial promise – the promise you make to your audience. The editorial promise aligns with your brand promise. You need to be true to your brand, not go fishing for clicks, and create content that fits within that editorial promise.

Because once you’ve made that promise, you need to keep it. That’s how you build trust. And building trust is ultimately how you make the sale.

And that’s the whole point.

So, as you start fresh here in 2015, seek clarity.

And this just might be your best year ever.

Recently, a client asked me what I would do to produce better sales results right now. He wanted an easy answer. He wanted me to tell him how to go fast. If you’ve shared your Sunday morning with me for any time, you know that I believe that fast is slow and slow is fast. I wanted to give him the right answer in the short time we had together, so I told him to ask himself these five questions.

1. Are you spend more time nurturing and prospecting?

Most sales organizations and most salespeople can immediately improve their results by spending more time nurturing their dream clients and spending more time prospecting. You don’t close opportunities without first opening them. You improve your results when you nurture the relationships you need by providing them with value in front of asking for their time. You open new opportunities by prospecting, by gaining the crucial first appointment.

2. Are you are giving prospecting and opportunity acquisition the attention it deserves?

Discover what is or what should be compelling. Your dream client isn’t going to change without some compelling reason to do so. We find our prospects in one of two places: they are either dissatisfied with some gap in their performance or they don’t recognize they have a gap in their performance. You aren’t going to create an opportunity without an underlying reason for change. You either uncover that reason to change or you help your dream client come to understand that he has a reason to change. The more compelling the reason, the more certain the change.

3. Look at every so-called opportunity in your pipeline. Is there a burning reason for your dream client to change?

Talk about the necessary investment as early as possible. Grown ups know that acquiring something of a higher quality requires a greater investment. But sales organizations and salespeople mistakenly want to postpone that conversation as long as possible. If there is a compelling reason to change, there is a compelling reason to invest in that change. I work with clients with higher prices and who produce greater results than their competitors. The greater investment is necessary to produce those results. You might believe a higher price builds resistance to a deal, but if you are focused on the value you create (the outcomes), it reduces resistance.

4. When do you discuss the necessary investment for producing the results that your dream client needs?

Spend more time building consensus. If there is one thing that could derail an opportunity for you faster and more assuredly than anything else, that would be your mortal enemy, the status quo. The status quo has many defenders. Unless and until you work your way North and South through your dream client’s company building consensus, you aren’t likely to move the opportunity forward. To loosen the status quo’s grip on your dream client’s company, you have to spend time with the stakeholders. You have to help them understand the case for change, and you have to help mitigate the problems it creates for them.

5. Are you spending time with the right people?

Gain the commitments you need throughout the sales process. If you want to go fast, go slow. Follow your sales process. Create value during every interaction with your dream client and earn the right to take the next step together. You’ll slow yourself down if you don’t spend time helping your dream client. Go from commitment to commitment, creating value at every stage of the process.

Are you following your process, creating value, and leaving every meeting with the next necessary commitment? That’s five big pieces, none of them easy, all of them critical.

Gerhard Gschwandtner interviews Michael Webb on Selling Power TV: 

Quote for  General Managers:

“A process approach is a method of finding out what does the customer want, how do we figure out a way of keeping our own company from not giving it to them, and then making that a path that is easier to follow, both for the customer and for the salespeople. …”

“Once you have that idea, then the process is the salesperson’s best friend …”

Gerhard’s questions:

Why did you write the book?

“I had the opportunity to learn how process excellence worked in manufacturing, and I always wondered how come you couldn’t apply that wonderful business system to sales and marketing …”

Can you give us a case example?

“Threaded throughout the book is a client who sold water filtration. Their first bottleneck was in the keeping – customer service – side of the business. …”

Help me understand the relationship between strategy and process, and how do we get alignment?

Market research (and strategy) might tell you where the most fruitful parts of the market are, but process is going to give you the feedback and allow you to do the experiments that you can learn in order to optimize …

I see anything that is not connected directly to measurements of data and evidence – people’s actions – as pretty useless. Unfortunately strategy is often just associated with big ideas …”

A full transcript of this interview is available in the professional members area of SPIF. This was a great opportunity to explain Sales Process Excellence in a nut-shell. Let me know what you think!

And, visit https://www.sellingpower.com/Cloud to subscribe to Selling Power Magazine.

Order your copy of Sales Process Excellence today.

Michael

Bill Gates has taken to his blog to discuss the latest project from the philanthropic Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: a machine that transforms human waste into clean water and electricity.

According to Gates, at least 2 billion people worldwide don't have access to adequate sanitation, with human waste often polluting the water supply and remaining untreated.

The "Omniprocessor" aims to help with this problem. Its development is led by Seattle-based engineering firm Janicki Bioenergy.

The machine extracts water from sewage that's piped in or delivered to the facility. The dry sewage is then incinerated to generate steam, which powers the entire machine.

Gates publicly demonstrated his commitment to the new technology by drinking a glass of water on camera that entered the machine as feces just minutes before.

Here's how it works in more detail: 

First, the human waste is delivered to the Omniprocessor.

The sewage is then boiled and divided into water vapour and dry waste.

The dry sludge is burnt at extremely high temperature, driving a steam engine which powers a generator.

 The electricity produced by the generator is then delivered to the local community.

Meanwhile, the water boiled off the sewage is carefully filtered, producing clean drinking water.

Bill Gates says it's as "good as any he's had out a bottle," and would "happily drink it every day."

Watch the full video below:

The upshot is that the energy produced is more than enough to power the entire process, so it's easy for the owner of the Omniprocessor to turn a profit — making it an attractive investment for entrepreneurs in the developing world.

The only prototype is currently located just north of Seattle, but there's plans for a pilot project in Dakar, Senegal, later in 2015. From there, they hope to expand.

Gates thinks the Omniprocessor could also be a "great fit" in India working with local entrepreneurs to make the machine a reality. There's no indication of price (it could be "several years" until it's ready, Gates says), but at the same size as two double-decker buses, it's definitely not a consumer technology. Instead, it's hoped that local governments and entrepreneurs will be interested, reports Wired. 

Gates has previously written about his aspirations to "reinvent the toilet," and offered a $400,000 prize fund in 2012 to those able to tackle the issue of sanitation in an innovative way. Entrants varied from disinfecting ultraviolet-sand filters to "hydrothermal carbonization" that transforms feces into charcoal, with the first prize going to a California team that developed a solar-powered toilet which broke down human waste and generated hydrogen in the process.

"Diseases caused by poor sanitation kill some 700,000 children every year," Gates writes, "and they prevent many more from fully developing mentally and physically."

"Western toilets aren't the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn't feasible in many poor countries. So a few years ago our foundation put out a call for a new solution."

One solution was to reinvent the toilet, but the Omniprocessor approaches the problem differently, by attempting to revolutionise the sewage treatment plant instead.

"The history of philanthropy is littered with well-intentioned inventions that never deliver on their promise," Gates says, but he's "excited" about Janicki's project. "The processor wouldn't just keep human waste ut of the drinking water; it would turn waste into a commodity with real value in the marketplace. It's the ultimate example of that old expression: one man's trash is another man's treasure."

The billionaire Microsoft co-founder has pledged to give the majority of his vast fortune away to charity, and has become renowned for his humanitarian work in the developing world.

Join the conversation about this story »

There are plenty of mundane, everyday products that have little business being "smart," and at face value, the humble flashlight sounds like one of them. Ordinarily, the term "smart flashlight" would make me cringe as much as the next person, but hav...

There’s no shortage of articles heralding the benefits and potential payoffs of content marketing. The drumbeat has drowned out some of the realities of just how hard it is to create messaging that is compelling enough to connect with today’s discerning and time-starved buyers.

Over the past three years at Content4Demand, we’ve seen a shift in focus among our new clients that attests to this challenge. Where our first clients primarily wanted a resource center with a menu of content to fuel their growing number of demand gen campaigns, the majority of our new 2014 clients sought a better understanding of their buyers and their information needs.

This more sophisticated approach requires a more disciplined, holistic approach to content strategy — a reality also identified by the new B2B Content Marketing Report, sponsored by Spiceworks. Featuring input from more than 600 marketing professionals, the report found most are still struggling to create high-value content that connects.

Specifically, the report found the Top 5 challenges are:

• Lack of time/bandwidth to create content (51%)
• Producing enough content variety/volume (50%)
• Producing truly engaging content (42%)
• Measuring content effectiveness (38%)
• Developing consistent content strategy (34%)

We see some consistent themes among these top challenges. The reality is you can’t have a consistent strategy without first understanding what makes your target buyers tick. This must inform every part of your strategy. It will help you create more engaging content and ultimately make your effectiveness easier to gauge.

Another interesting finding from the B2B Content Marketing Report was the disparity in effectiveness between organizations that have a documented content strategy versus those that are still chasing the latest shiny object. The survey showed 36% of companies with a documented content strategy ranked their programs as very effective, versus only 11% without a clear strategy.

Marketers still need help creating content, and we’ve had great success filling that bandwidth gap. However, we are seeing longer-term success with partners where we help put building blocks in place that start with understanding the buyer.

Unfortunately, many organizations still haven’t realized how critical this buyer-centric approach is to their success. Another key finding from the survey showed 53% of companies are still segmenting their content by product/service category, while only 40% are segmenting by buyer persona, and only 32% are segmenting by stage in the buying cycle.

Regardless of how much additional budget companies put towards content, the issue of measuring effectiveness of those investments will continue to be a problem and a roadblock to success if marketers don’t start by building their strategies around the buyer.

The moment your target customer realizes his need for your product, he begins a three-stage buyer’s journey.

First, he’ll experience the awareness stage, in which he is aware that there is a problem that needs to be solved.

Then he enters the consideration stage, in which he considers all of his options to solve that particular problem.

And finally, he reaches the decision stage, in which he narrows down his options and decides on a final choice.

How you approach your buyer’s journey will have a direct impact on how effective your content marketing efforts are. This includes when, where, and how you reach out to your customer during each of these stages.

To help make your efforts more effective, here are three valuable insights from B2B marketing experts/analysts:

Lori Wizdo From Forrester Research

“Today’s buyers control their journey through the buying cycle much more than today’s vendors control the selling cycle. Although it varies greatly with product complexity and market maturity, today’s buyers might be anywhere from two-thirds to 90% of the way through their journey before they reach out to the vendor,” writes Lori Wizdo on the Forrester blog post “Buyer Behavior Helps B2B Marketers Guide The Buyer’s Journey.”

This is one of the main arguments for developing a comprehensive suite of content assets on your B2B website.

If your buyer delays speaking with a salesperson until they are ready for a price quote, then your website must speak for itself.

How to Apply This Advice At Your Company

Apply this insight to your website by working with your sales team to develop content. Make sure that key points in the sales process are addressed in whitepapers, guides and blog posts to help your customer’s buyer’s journey be as effective as possible.

Creating information on your website that’s genuinely helpful can also get your website found when people search for things other than your company name.

And since Forrester Research shows that your customer will find three pieces of content for every one piece of content from your company, the more you can produce, the better.

Atri Chatterjee From Marketing Profs

In his post “Guide the New Buyer’s Journey With Marketing Automation,” Atri Chatterjee from Marketing Profs writes that “a loyal customer has enormous value in both recurring revenue and advocacy (and even today it still costs six to seven times as much to acquire a new customer as to maintain an existing one). It’s wise to keep them engaged and informed with specialized programs—made easy with multichannel, integrated marketing automation.”

How to Apply This Advice At Your Company

This is a great example of why ongoing marketing efforts such as email newsletters and social media engagement are so valuable to your buyer’s journey.

It’s not just the first purchase that matters — it’s an ongoing, long-term relationship that will best serve your customers and your business.

To meet this need, you may choose to automate as much of your marketing efforts as possible. In particular, we recommend and use the HubSpot marketing platform.

McKinsey & Company Analysts From Forbes.com

“One chief marketing officer learned from customer interviews that 70% of the marketing budget and 40% of the sales efforts were not spent in places that actually influenced the customer’s purchase decision. They were either over-investing in some areas or under-investing in others with the result that they were leaving money on the table and missing out on deals they might otherwise have won,” writes Oskar Lingqvist, Candace Lun Plotkin, and Jennifer Stanley in a recent McKinsey & Company post on Forbes, “The B2B Customer Decision Journey: The Route To Increased Sales.” The team recommends that companies “focus on those points in the decision journey where they can be most successful in influencing those decision makers.”

How to Apply This Advice At Your Company

McKinsey & Company found that even though most B2B companies use customer-centric marketing strategies, few have truly embraced customer behavior as a serious study.

This mistake represents millions of marketing dollars and lost sales. It’s simply not enough to identify the decision maker; you need to make strategic choices about how, when, and where you target your marketing to have the greatest impact on your customer’s buyer’s journey.

The first step is knowing your customer. Do you have written buyer personas for the different types of customers you hope to sell to?

Is your targeted content performing as well as you’d expect? If not, consider applying the advice from these experts to further target your buyer’s journey.

The days of waiting for movies, music, and photos to transfer through USB drives may be over pretty soon. Startup Keyssa's new technology allows you to transfer large files in less than five seconds, with no plugging required.

Keyssa's "kiss connectivity" lets you send information back and forth by tapping one device against another, sort of like Near Field Communication. Keyssa's technology, however, is much faster. Essentially, the technology uses high-frequency radios to send information between devices.

The startup is backed by Tony Fadell, who led Apple's iPod team and then founded of smart home company Nest. 

We wrote about Keyssa's "kiss connectivity" back in November, but at this year's Consumer Electronics Showcase we got to experience it.

During a demo, Keyssa's Vice President of Product Mariel van Tatenhove transferred a 1.8GB file — about the size of a standard-definition movie — in just three seconds. 

Van Tatenhove simply rested a small hard drive with the Keyssa connector on a laptop, counted to three, and the file was transferred.

The connector's tiny size is just as impressive. Some hardware manufacturers are forced to add some extra thickness to smartphones, tablets, and laptops in order to fit a USB drive. But since Keyssa's technology a fraction of the size of a traditional USB connector, future mobile devices could be razor thin while still providing incredibly fast file transfers.

Keyssa says its first clients are smartphone, tablet, and computer companies, but wouldn't name names. And it might have other uses as well: Bloomberg Businessweek previously reported that the technology will eventually enable users to download music and movies almost instantly from kiosks at places like concert venues and airports.

SEE ALSO: Samsung Just Released A Tiny Flash Drive That Can Transfer Movies In 8 Seconds

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