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After years of insisting oil sucked from North Dakota’s Bakken shale wasn’t inherently dangerous, producers have been ordered to purge the light, sweet crude of highly flammable substances before loading it on railcars and shipping it through towns and cities across the continent.

State regulators said this week that the region’s crude will first need to be treated, using heat or pressure, to remove more volatile liquids and gases. The idea, according to North Dakota’s Mineral Resources Director Lynn Helms, wasn’t to make the oil inflammable, but merely more stable in preparation for transport.

It’s the latest regulatory response to a frightening series of fiery train crashes that stretches back to the summer of 2013. That’s when a runaway train laden with Bakken crude jumped the tracks in Lac-Mégantic, Que., and killed 47 people in a giant fireball. In the accident’s immediate aftermath, many experts struggled to understand how a train full of crude oil could ignite so quickly and violently. It had never happened before.

Subsequent studies have shown that Bakken crude, squeezed from shale rock under high pressure through a process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” can indeed have a high gas content and vapour pressure, as well as lower flash and boiling points. However, there remains disagreement about whether the levels are unusual for oil extracted from shale, and whether the classifications for shipping it should be changed.

Still, with more than one million barrels of oil being moved by rail from the region each day, regulators have decided to err on the side of caution and implement additional safety measures. For producers, that means buying new equipment that can boil off propane, butane and other volatile natural gases. Under the new rules, the Bakken crude will not be allowed to have a vapour pressure greater than 13.7 lb. per square inch, about the same as for standard automobile gasoline. Regulators estimate that about 80 per cent of Bakken oil already meets these requirements.

The industry isn’t pleased. It continues to argue that Bakken oil is no more dangerous than other forms of light, sweet crude, and is, therefore, being unfairly singled out. It has also warned that removing volatile liquids and gasses from Bakken crude would result in the creation of a highly concentrated, highly volatile product that would still have to be shipped by rail—not to mention additional greenhouse-gas emissions. It goes without saying that meeting the new rules will also cost producers money—at a time when oil prices are falling.

In the meantime, regulators on both sides of the border are taking steps to boost rail safety by focusing on lower speed limits, new brake requirements and plans to phase out older, puncture-prone oil tank cars. Earlier this year, Transport Minister Lisa Raitt said Canada would be “leading the continent” on the phase-out of older DOT-111 tank cars, which have been linked to fiery crashes going back 25 years. There are about 65,000 of the cars in service in North America, about a third of which can be found in Canada.

 

The post So it turns out Bakken oil is explosive after all appeared first on Macleans.ca.

SAN FRANCISCO – Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson spent most of this year pressuring the technology industry into facing up to the glaring scarcity of women, blacks and Latinos at companies renowned as great places to work.

Now comes Diversity 2.0 — finding ways to reverse a deep-rooted problem that isn’t going to be as easy to fix as writing new lines of code for a computer bug.

Some of the potential solutions will be explored Wednesday at a Silicon Valley summit organized by Jackson and his group, Rainbow Push.

Representatives from Google, Apple, Facebook and more than other 20 other tech companies will be on hand to elaborate on their plans to diversify their workforces. They’ll also hear from entrepreneurs, academics and non-profit groups that have been trying to overcome the cultural and educational challenges that turned computer programming into an occupation dominated by white and Asian men.

“It definitely feels like we are entering a new phase,” says Laura Weidman Powers, CEO of Code2040, a San Francisco non-profit that has been lining up technology internships for black and Latino college students for the past three summers. “When we first started, diversity just wasn’t on the list of these large companies that have power and potential to make change. Now, it really feels like it is. They may not know exactly what to do yet, but they are interested in taking steps in the right direction.”

Wednesday’s forum will mark the first time that many tech companies have publicly addressed their lack of diversity since acknowledging the problem earlier this year in contrite blog posts accompanying the ethnic and gender breakdowns of their workforces.

With a few notable exceptions like Intel Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., most major technology employers had long resisted requests to release the employment data that they regularly file with federal labour regulators. Google Inc. finally relented to Jackson’s demands in May, triggering a domino effect across the industry.

Jackson, 73, says he intends to hold the companies accountable for promises to make their workforces look more like the overall population. He met with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last week and had what he described as a “positive and productive dialogue” Monday with Apple CEO Tim Cook.

He has another closed-door meeting scheduled Thursday with Intel Corp. CEO Brian Krzanich (Intel is hosting Wednesday’s workshop at its Santa Clara, California, headquarters). Next month, Rainbow PUSH will release the first of what Jackson promises will be an annual scorecard rating the diversity progress of major tech companies.

“Many of these companies had an unfounded fear that we wanted to disrupt them,” Jackson says. “We came not to disrupt, but to build. Inclusion will lead to growth.”

Silicon Valley, a place that prides itself on progressive thinking and meritocratic policies, has a lot of ground to make up. For instance, only 2 per cent of the U.S. workers at Google and Facebook are black and the number of Hispanics is below 5 per cent at both companies. Cutting across the U.S. in all industries, 12 per cent of the workforce is black and 14 per cent is Hispanic. Meanwhile, less than one-third of the worldwide workforces at most major technology companies, including Google, Apple and Facebook, are comprised of women.

Diversifying the tech companies “is going to be a multi-decade process,” predicted Gary May, the engineering dean at Georgia Tech University, which has a long track record for training minority students in technical fields. “But this isn’t rocket science. It’s going to be about how serious we are going to be about trying to fix this. We are going to have to put some resources and time into it.”

Google already has underscored its commitment to bringing more women into the technology industry by pouring $50 million into a program called “Made With Code” during the next three years and partnering with nonprofits such as Girls Who Code, which has been running summer educational programs for girls since 2012.

President Barack Obama also is trying to prepare more teenage girls and minority boys for technology careers as part of educational programs unveiled this week. The initiative calls for major school districts encompassing New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Las Vegas, Houston and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to starting offering introductory computer science courses to all students in high school or middle school.

Liliana Monge, who runs a Los Angeles computer coding camp called Sabia.la for women and minorities, likens the technology industry’s reckoning with its diversity issue to what happens after a habitual drinker finally starts to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

“First you have to understand you have a problem,” Monge says. “Now, we are entering the second phase where (the companies) have to take the next steps to change.”

The post Lack of diversity prods technology companies to consider ways to re-engineer their workforces appeared first on Canadian Business.

What can retailers do to push back against the rising tide of online shopping and declining physical store visits? For Sport Chek, the answer is clear: fight fire with fire.

The sports gear and clothing chain is in the midst of transforming its presence across Canada with new mega-stores that make heavy use of gadgetry, telemetrics and sensors, all of which are designed to entice shoppers out of their homes and back into the malls.

MORE: Canadian Tire rolls out new focus on innovation »

To that end, the chain opened its second flagship store in the Metropolis at Metrotown mall in Burnaby, B.C. last week. It’s a giant space – 48,000 square feet, or nearly a football field full of skis, golf clubs and jerseys.

The store incorporates more than 190 screens, 60 tablets and 100 computers, with a five-foot-wide interactive “community hub” touch-screen at the entrance. Through an in-store community manager, customers can sign up to have their local events – say a ski or running club – advertised on the hub. They can also share photos of their events or competitions for display on monitors throughout the store.

“We want to move away from a transactional relationship toward a much more interactive relationship with the consumer,” says Eric Watt, flagship lead for Sport Chek. “Consumers today are much more informed. Online is their first point of reference. For us, flagships are a support to that.”

It’s getting increasingly tough for many bricks-and-mortar retailers to compete with e-commerce. Better prices online and the time savings in not having to go to a mall are resulting in what many analysts are calling a long-term, irreversible trend.

Online is expected to result in 11 per cent of all U.S. retail sales by 2018, up from 8 per cent in 2013, according to Forrester Research, with similar trends in Canada. In the United States, physical retailers got only half the holiday traffic in 2013 that they did just three years earlier, according to analytics firm ShopperTrak.

Many retailers are enacting defensive strategies as a result, such as in-store pickup of online orders or the reverse – “showrooming,” where customers can try products before buying them online.

INFOGRAPHIC: Why Canada has a serious e-commerce problem »

Sport Chek executives don’t believe their approach is defensive given the nature of the products they’re selling. Besides flashy screens and efforts at community building, the flagship mega-stores – such as the first, an 80,000-foot space in the West Edmonton Mall – are also geared toward product performance and customization.

The new Burnaby store, for example, has a treadmill with high-speed cameras that can measure a customer’s running gait and then recommend the proper shoe. Driving and putting simulators can also help suggest correct golf clubs and balls, while silicon foot molds can make custom ski-boot insoles.

“It’s about what are you creating that consumers can’t get online?” says Paul Reid, vice-president of operations for Sport Chek. “It’s about how you can differentiate yourself from those true-play retailers or e-comm retailers that are just going to sell you a product and get it to you quick.”

The approach seems to be working so far. Same-store sales have seen double-digit increases for five years, with most of that coming since the 2011 acquisition by Canadian Tire of Forzani Group, Sport Chek’s parent.

MORE: Canadian Tire’s new CEO Michael Medline on the digital shopping revolution »

Some of the improvement is the result of the shuttering of several of Forzani’s others sports-oriented retailers, such as Athlete’s World, which has consolidated sales into the Sport Chek brand. But executives – who decline to say how much of an investment the new stores are requiring – are convinced the move toward bigger and more technological outlets is also the right one.

Sport Chek is planning to grow to 300 stores from its current 190 over the next few years, with 17 slated for next year. Many of the new outlets will be of the giant flagship variety, with a focus on Ontario and British Columbia.

Next up is an attempt to reinvent online delivery. The chain’s virtual store in Toronto’s Maple Leaf Square – essentially an online ordering kiosk – is experimenting with faster delivery times. The idea is to supply customers who order products before 1 pm with same-day delivery.

“There’s no reason why the pizza industry has the market cornered on half-hour delivery. We have to figure that out,” Reid says.

“If you’re solely about product, you’re replaceable in the minds of consumers,” adds Matt Dellandrea, manager of product training.

The post To fight e-commerce onslaught, Sport Chek is bringing gadgets in-store appeared first on Canadian Business.

Your profit margin is a metric that should always be on your radar, and for good reason: it answers critical questions about your business, like whether or not you’re making money or if you’re pricing your products correctly.

It’s important to note though that your profit margin isn’t just something you should measure, it’s a metric that you should continuously improve. As author Doug Hall said, “If your profit margins aren’t rising, chances are your company isn’t thriving.”

To help you do just that, we’ve put together some pointers that can enable you to widen your margins. Check them out below and see if you can apply them in your business:

Lower your cost of goods

Take a closer look at the materials and procedures required to create or source your products, and then figure out how you can get them for less, without compromising the quality.

If you’re selling food, for example, see if you can purchase your ingredients at lower rates. Talk to your suppliers and ask if there’s anything you can do to reduce costs. Do you need to order larger quantities? Are there any middlemen or administrative expenses that you can cut from the process?

Figure these things out then take action accordingly. Let’s say you need to up your order quantities for a particular item to lower its price. In this case, you could look at your inventory data and determine if you can afford to order certain items in bulk. If not, would it be possible for you to consolidate orders for other items (or with other purchasers) to increase your buying power?

This is something that many large retailers have been doing for quite some time now. A few years ago, for example, Walmart sought out joint purchasers for raw materials, so they can consolidate purchases and get more buying clout.

Explore your options and run them by your suppliers to see if you can negotiate better deals. If they won’t budge, don’t be afraid to check out other vendors to find out if they can offer you more favorable terms. (And make sure your existing suppliers are aware of this—they could end up giving you better rates.)

Increase your prices

Raising your prices will enable you to make more money on each sale, thus widening your margins and improving your bottom line. Many retailers however, balk at the prospect of increasing their prices out of fear that they’ll lose customers.

We wish we could give you hard and fast rules when it comes to pricing, but the fact is, this decision depends on each company’s products, margins, and customers. The best thing to do is to look into your own business, run the numbers, and figure out your pricing sweet spot.

On top of considering basic pricing components like your costs and margins, look at external factors such as competitor pricing, the state of the economy, and the price sensitivity of your customers.

Speaking of which, take the time to consider what types of customers you want to attract. Do you want to sell to shoppers would take their business elsewhere just because they could get an item for less, or would you rather attract customers who don’t base their purchase decisions solely on price?

You’d be surprised to find that majority of consumers (though this may very from one industry to the next) may actually belong to the latter group. A study by Defaqto has found that “55% of consumers would pay more for a better customer experience.

Take all these things into consideration; do the math, and once you come up with a price increase, test it on a few select products then gauge customer reaction and sales from there. If the results are positive, roll out the increase across all your products.

You may also want to consider implementing creative or psychological tactics when coming up with your prices, in order to make them more appealing. You can, for instance, incorporate tiered pricing into your strategy.

Check out what shoe retailer Footzyfolds did. In order to combat cheaper knock-offs of its merchandise (they were selling them for $25, while Target had them for $10) the store decided to revamp its prices—but not in the way you might think.

Instead of lowering prices across the board, Footzyfolds introduced a high-end category for their products. With the new pricing format, they lowered the price of their everyday products to $20 a pair, but introduced a new “Lux” category for $30 a pair.

Owner Sarah Caplan told the New York Times that this move helped them increase revenues dramatically. “We actually have had the most interest in our higher-priced shoes,” she said to the publication, and reported that after launching the high-end line in the summer of 2010, they saw revenues increase by 100%.

Finally, remember that the way you communicate your new prices is just as important as the prices themselves, so put a lot of thought into how you’re going to relay the message to your customers. Give shoppers a heads up prior to the price hike; let them know why you’re doing it and how it’s going to benefit them (i.e. You’re bringing in more staff so you can provide a better service, or you’re launching an online store for their convenience.)

Also be sure to communicate your differentiating factors as well as the value that you bring to the table. Justify your higher prices by telling customers (or better yet by showing them) why your store is different or better than the competition. Do you have superior products? Can you provide unparalleled customer support? Do you offer a shopping experience that others can’t? Whatever it is, make sure your customers are aware of it.

Still worried that you’ll send shoppers packing? Don’t be. Recognize that letting go of a few customers may not necessarily be a bad thing. For one, the right price increase could improve your bottom line significantly enough to offset the amount of lost sales from shoppers who decide not to buy from you. Additionally, having fewer (but higher quality) customers helps lower operating expenses while increasing service quality at the same time.

Reduce operating expenses through automation

Automation can do wonders for your productivity as well as your bottom line. By putting repetitive activities on autopilot, you can reduce the time, manpower, and operating expenses required to run your business.

Go through all the tasks that you and your employees complete day-to-day, and see if you can automate any of them. Are there any cumbersome activities that are eating chunks of your time? Do you have to re-enter any data or perform certain steps more than once? Take note, and then look for solutions that can take care of them for you.

Take for instance, Crane Brothers, a contemporary menswear retailer. To save time and operating expenses, Murray Crane decided to automate the task of transferring sales data to his accounting software. Rather than manually plugging the numbers into the program, he integrated his point-of-sale system with his accounting software (Xero). He got the two tools talking to each other so that information is automatically transferred from one program to the next.

The result? Murray was able to free up time so he and his staff could devote more energy to helping customers. He also estimates that the automated system in his store saves him forty to eighty hours a week—or one to two full-time employees.

Data entry isn’t the only thing you can automate. These days, there’s (usually) an app for most of the boring administrative tasks in your store.

If you regularly make appointments with customers for example, consider using an app such as Timely, which streamlines bookings and sales, and even sends automatic appointment reminders to your customers. Do you spend a lot of time managing employee shifts? Check out Deputy, which lets you and your staff coordinate schedules from your mobile devices and sends shift changes and notifications for you.

Optimize vendor relationships

Earlier in this post, we talked about negotiating better contracts with your suppliers to reduce the costs of goods and widen your margins. If you want to take things a step further, consider building stronger relationships with your vendors. Ask if there’s anything you can do to make things easier or more cost-effective for them so they can fulfill your orders in a more efficient or cost-effective way.

That’s what photo digitization service ScanMyPhotos.com did. President and CEO Mitch Goldstone says that collaborating closely with their vendors enabled them to enhance their business processes. “We invite our vendors to think of us as a partner. The better we do, the better they do. The process is simple, just ask vendors to help improve your workflow.”

Goldstone shares that they even invited one of their vendors, the United States Postal Service, to visit their headquarters. “We asked them to study our entire shipping operation and the technology that drives our fulfillment services. Many, many elements we thought helped streamline the business, were all wrong and the USPS marketing team became our best partner to reinvent everything.”

See if you can do the same thing in your business. Strengthen your relationships with vendors and determine how you can work better together. Doing so could help you identify ways to reduce product costs and operating expenses. Or, at the very least, it could improve your workflow and productivity.

Personalize your offers

Another effective way to widen your margins is to offer tailored discounts. Remember that not all customers are wired the same way. Some people may need a 20% off incentive to convert, while others don’t really require a lot of convincing.

Instead of killing your profits with large, one-size-fits-all offers, identify how big of a discount is necessary to convert each customer.

Case in point: Online bicycle retailer BikeBerry.com. The e-tailer sought the help of big data company Retention Science to analyze customer behavior and gather intel on their customers’ past purchases, browsing history, and more. This allowed them to get to know their customers and figure out the most cost-effective way to convert each one.

They then created a series of email campaigns with five different discount offers tailored to each individual. Customers received one of the following offers in their inbox: Free Shipping (which is huge because shipping costs can run high for bikes and other accessories), 5% off, 10% off, 15% off, and $30 off new products.

The campaigns ran for two months and within that period, BikeBerry not only increased sales, but they were able to widen their profit margins by not offering discounts that are too big to customers who would convert at a lower threshold.

See if you can do something similar in your business. Instead of offering blanket discounts, go through the purchase histories of your customers, then personalize your offers based on their behavior and preferences. Doing so won’t just increase the chances of conversion (people are more likely to respond to an offer if it’s relevant to them), it’ll also help you maximize your margins.

You don’t always have to make drastic changes in your business to significantly improve your bottom line. As this post has shown, sometimes a simple tweak in your pricing or a phone call to your vendor can pave the way for wider margins.

Can you think of other tactics that can help retailers improve their profit margins? Let us know in the comments.

  So you say you’re a good salesperson because you’ve got pricing that is hot and you have the flexibility to make it hotter when necessary. What it comes down to is you’re selling on price. Here are 8 reasons why selling on price never works: 1. Your current price (which you think is so […]

Welcome back… and for those that are new — welcome! As I discussed last week, this series of posts aims to chart a course for us marketers as we move into this new era of marketing: the era of engagement marketing. We are on a crazy, wild ride as marketers, with dramatic changes in how we market and connect with people coming at us at an unprecedented pace.

In an effort to try and map out the future, Marketo and The Economist have teamed up to offer some insights and advice by talking with some of the best marketing minds out there. In addition to surveying thousands of marketers — the results of which, we’ll bring you in future posts — we had in-depth conversations with a varied field of marketing experts. From marketing luminary Seth Godin, to Bain Capital executive Aditya Joshi, to former P&G CMO Jim Stengel, we gathered rich insights about the future of marketing. What follows is a great dialogue we had with Seth Godin.

For those of you that don’t know Seth he is a renowned thought leader who writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything. He is the founder of squidoo.com, and his blog is one of the most popular in the world. He was hired by Yahoo! as Vice-President of Direct Marketing after selling them the start-up, Yoyodyne. In 2013, Mr. Godin was inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame, one of three chosen for this honor. His latest book, “The Icarus Deception”, argues that we have been brainwashed by industrial propaganda, pushing us to stand out, not to fit in.

There are a bunch of great points and stories in this discussion, so I encourage you to give it a read. There were a few key takeaways for me:

1. The shift to the era of engagement marketing and away from transactional and mass marketing is well underway.

Seth notes this fact when he says “For 100 years, marketing and advertising was the same thing…” and that “…we have seen marketing change from spending money to interrupt people with advertising”. Interestingly, he also says that “the problem is that a lot of marketers didn’t get that memo…” and that those marketers “…want it to go back to the way it was”. It’s clear that’s not going to happen and that marketers need to move towards a model of engagement that is centered on building personalized, lifelong relationships.

2. Marketers need to step up and drive the change toward an engagement model across the organization.

As I mentioned in my last post, this new era puts the marketer squarely in the driver’s seat within an organization — I called it a ‘marketing first’ world. I was struck when Seth pointed out that “marketing has completely transformed”, and that “the marketer now needs to be in charge of everything a company does… they need to be the first step”. Wow! And…here, here!

3. In order to be truly engaging, marketers need to create a continuous, authentic relationship.

Seth talks about how the explosion of channels has created a problematic land-grab effect for marketers who look to ‘own’ a channel. I agree with him when he says that this is a mistake and that you shouldn’t focus on “owning a channel”. True engagement comes from authentic, consistent participation across the channels your audience uses. Instead, use these channels — in Seth’s words — as a “new way to communicate… the truth about who you are”, and deliver “…an experience that people can’t help talking about”.

Enjoy the interview….

Economist Intelligence Unit: Marketing has changed so much in the past 
five years. What do you think will happen in the next five? What will the marketer’s mission look like in 2020?

Seth Godin: If we were talking about what is going to be the future of 
the dried plum, we would have a straightforward conversation. Everyone can agree on what a dried plum is. Not everyone agrees on what marketing is. So before I talk about where it’s going, we have to talk for at least a minute about where it’s been so we understand that we’re starting from the same place.

For 100 years, marketing and advertising was the same thing. The CMO didn’t decide on the product line or pricing or what the toxic waste policy should be. Instead, the measure of marketing has traditionally been, “How much money are you spending on advertising?”

Only in the last 20 years have we seen marketing change from spending money to interrupt people with advertising to market everything you make and everything you say. That involves making a promise to people about what they should expect when they do business with you.

The problem is that a lot of marketers didn’t get that memo. And a lot of marketers — mostly those who work for companies built on advertising mass products to mass audiences — want marketing to go back to what it was. And so when they see YouTube or Twitter come along, they think “This is just like a magazine except the ads are free. This is just like television except the ads are free”. And those people have been pretty generally disappointed with everything that’s happened recently because they’re still working as if marketing equals advertising.

Here’s the answer to your question: I think the next five years of marketing are going to be just like the last five years of marketing but more so. We’ll see the end of almost every newspaper. We’ll see the crumbling of the TV-industrial complex in which TV ads are always sold out. And we’re going to see even more reliance
by consumers on peer-to-peer connections and less on the message they hear directly from the marketer.

EIU: So what are the most effective marketers going to be doing five years from now? What do they need to
do now to make sure they don’t get passed by as marketing changes?

Seth Godin: The short answer is
 five words long: “Make things worth talking about”. The longer answer is that the marketer now needs to be in charge of everything the company does. And the ad agency isn’t the last step of the process anymore;
 it needs to be the first step.

You know the people who used to spend all their time spinning products when they’re released? They need
 to spend their time at the beginning. They need to be saying, “What should we make? How do we make it in such a way that the story of our product is true?” Look at Nike. Nike is not afraid to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the products they make, and not on the billboards that they rent.

EIU: So it sounds like there are two kinds of marketers. There are marketers who cling to pushing products with advertising and there are marketers who are embedded in what the company makes and are pushing it towards what the consumer wants.

Seth Godin: That’s exactly right. Most marketers have come from
an environment where everyone is selling exactly the same product. The way you won was with a clever tag line. That is the world of “Mad Men”. Modern marketers say, “Well, of course Apple people are waiting in line to hear Apple’s announcement because they’re actually doing something new. They’re not just spinning the old”.

It’s a huge shift. Changes like this haven’t happened elsewhere in the company. Accounting hasn’t changed. Product development hasn’t changed much. Sales isn’t so different, but marketing has been completely transformed.

EIU: I’m interested to hear what you think about the multiplication and fragmentation of channels. Ten years ago Facebook had under a million users. Now it has over a billion, Twitter has half a billion, even Pinterest is approaching 100 million. And all of them are generating big data, enabling predictive analytics, feeding into marketing automation with a lot of personalization. People call them channels, but broadcast media like billboards or TV ads were channels. These seem like much more. How are they going to be affecting marketers?

Seth Godin: Think about someone who goes to a new high school, think of all the channels there are at the new high school. There are the yearbook, the daily announcements, the school newspaper, people talking to each other at lunch. We can make a list of 1,000 ways the people at school are finding things out.

But the new kid at school isn’t a brand manager. The new kid at school isn’t saying, “How do I own this channel, and how do I own that channel?” The new kid at school is saying, “Who do I want to be? Because if I act like the person I want to be, the word will get out”.

And so you can’t really think of a channel as a choke point, where if you spend some money you can own that choke point. Instead, go in the opposite direction. All of these new ways of communicating mean that the more you act a certain way, the more likely it is that the truth will get out about who you are.

EIU: Isn’t the job of marketers to push out their self-definition through all of the channels?

Seth Godin: They can try, but it’s not working. Just call up the people at Procter & Gamble or the people in
the Republican or the Democratic Party and say, “How are you doing on pushing out the message you want everyone to be saying?” And what they brag about is, “Oh, look how great that Oreo thing was”. One Tweet got seen by everyone during the Super Bowl.

But one tweet about Oreos doesn’t sell a single extra Oreo. What marketers have to understand is that mass marketing was a brilliant and important way of supporting mass manufacturing. It was one of the key elements of the growth of the UK and US economies. For 100 years mass marketing sat right next to mass manufacturing. But now it’s over. It is just over. Mass manufacturing is over and mass marketing is over. And you can do all sorts of things to try to get it to come back, but it’s not going to come back.

EIU: So if the marketer isn’t pushing
out a message through those channels, what is marketing doing with them? You say that word will get out. What’s the marketer’s role in getting the word out?

Seth Godin: Their role is coming up with an experience, an environment, a service, a product, that people can’t help talking about, and then consistently delivering on that.

Say you start a real boutique hotel. Then you make sure the right people are staying there in the first few weeks. Word gets out among their circle of friends, who talk to the next circle
and the next, and the hotel is sold
out. Or you can start a fake boutique hotel, which Hyatt Hotel is trying to do. You skip all those steps and make it look like a boutique hotel. And
then you’re puzzled and surprised when there isn’t a line out the door.

The reason there isn’t a line out the door is that the people you were hoping to connect with can tell that it’s not a real boutique hotel.

EIU: What’s engagement marketing? How does it differ from other
ways of relating to customers?

Seth Godin: Here’s an experience that we’ve all had. You call a big company. You hear a recording that says, “Your call is very important to us, but due to unusually heavy call volume, we don’t have anyone to answer your call”, and they put you on hold for ten minutes. Then the person who answers the phone is measured on how fast they get you to hang up.

That’s the opposite of customer engagement. This company spent a lot of time and money to set up a phone queuing system. Then when you talk to them, they don’t care enough to talk back, or if they do talk back, they put someone in your face who has been programmed to be a cog in a machine.

If you’re serious about engaging the customer, you realize that the most valuable moments you have are when the customer is using your product, on the phone with you, actually engaged with you. If we over invest in that, or do what feels like over investing, we are far more likely to lead to the other sorts of interactions that we can’t buy, that we can’t control, but that we need desperately to happen.

EIU: Marketers have responsibility for every part of the company with which the customer comes into contact.
 Yet they don’t have the authority to determine what happens there. They’re influencers. In fact, in some companies that are dominated by engineering or operations, they struggle for influence.

Seth Godin: I don’t buy that. Your premise is wrong. If you start listing successful companies, almost all of them are run by people who do what I call marketing.

EIU: But all the parts of the company that engage with the customer or that have customer-facing responsibilities don’t report to the marketer. How 
do marketers orchestrate those customer touch points while they’re not in charge of all those people?

Seth Godin: Nobody’s in charge of everyone. Even the CEO. Influence is way more important than authority.

The first half of the answer is that you need to build influence. You gain influence as you give up more credit and take on more responsibility. The second half is that marketers need to make an effort to not sell out so cheap. What marketers usually do is accept the budget, accept the product and promise the world. That’s why they get fired so much. On average, the CMO gets fired every year and a half, because they make big promises and can’t keep them. They’re unable to keep them because they think advertising can save the day, and it can’t. What I propose they do instead is refuse to market products that they don’t believe in.

The CMO needs to refuse to have their team push work out the door for stuff that doesn’t keep the story consistent and worth telling. Toyota let a worker stop the whole assembly line because the quality of a spark plug was off. That’s what marketers need to do. They need to hit the button and say, “No, we’re not going do this anymore because the customer service people are letting us down when they answer the phone” or “We’re not going to do this anymore because I’ve seen the waste going into the river and I don’t want to be responsible for marketing that brand”.

Spinning for the wrong 
cause is beneath you.
 Once the CMO does this, everything upstream will improve. And to the marketer who says to me, “But
 I can’t do that cause they won’t listen,” I say, “Go work somewhere else. Because if you’ve got talent, doing good spin for a company that doesn’t get it is beneath you”.

EIU: How can you tell when a customer is engaged? What kinds of tangible metrics can show the impact of customer engagement?

Seth Godin: I don’t have a glib answer. Any mass metric is going to be false. I’ll give you an example: Six weeks ago I fired the New York Times. I said, “I don’t want to be on the New York Times Best Seller List anymore because it’s a false metric that’s usually gamed and doesn’t represent the post-mass-marketing world. Rather than ask for rating points or share of mind, I would ask questions like “Who would miss me if I was gone? With whom do I actually have permission to follow up? How many people call us on the phone asking when our new thing is going to be ready?” Those questions show depth of feeling and concern. If you want to be meaningful, you can’t be too general.

EIU: So you’ve got this asset called customer engagement. You’ve invested in it and built it up and
you can measure it in various ways. How would you talk to a CFO about that? When he asks for the ROI, do you think you could tell him?

Seth Godin: When I invented email marketing in 1990, I went to every big company you can think of and tried to sell them on what we had built. And they would say, “What’s the ROI?” Well, my first answer was “What’s the ROI on that TV ad you ran last night? You don’t know. And you’ve been running TV for years because it feels safe. And you like the fact that you can’t measure how well it works because then you don’t have to take the blame for it not working”.

If you’re a really good direct marketer, you make money for a while. But I think we’re moving into a post-direct marketing world where we can’t measure ROI. But we can measure whether you are gaining market share and profit because you’re making great stuff. When everything is driven by metrics you often end up in a race to the bottom, and the problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win. Instead, some people decide to race to the top — not just in pricing, but in terms of the usefulness of what they make and how much fun it is to talk about it. Those people are doing great.

I think that’s the challenge of the CMO. Put the spreadsheet away and do some serious work to make stories worth telling.

EIU: Do you think the group that’s racing to the top through customer engagement is growing compared with those who are racing to the bottom?

Seth Godin: CEOs care a lot about stock price, and what they’re seeing again and again is that Sears is cratering because Sears was focused 100% on spreadsheets, whereas a brand like Apple, which is a mass brand in the sense that they have big market share, is hiring people from the larger consumer goods industry. They understand that in a retail environment engagement matters more than giving people a coupon.

I hope you enjoyed the perspective Seth Godin shared in this interview. You can check out more on our page dedicated to the Next Era of Marketing site and follow my blog series each week. Do you have a question that you’d like to add to this interview? I’d love to hear what you think, please share it in the comments below.

Oil prices are still falling at a rapid rate. On Wednesday morning Brend crude plummeted below $65 per barrel, while WTI crude fell below $62 per barrel for the first time since 2009.

The falling price for both crude oils sent both benchmark oil indexes down more than 3%.

The WTI continued to fall following the US Energy Information Administration’s latest weekly status report. That document showed weekly crude stocks were up 1.45 million barrels again with expectations for stocks to drop by 2.2 million barrels.

The WTI, the US benchmark for oil pricing, was down over 4%, and briefly fell below $60 per barrel.

While the quick fall in daily prices per barrel is impressive, the yearly data is far more staggering in its sheer loss of value per barrel:

As prices have continued to plummet, that rapid change in price has caused a decline in US domestic production. Reuters predicts that the slowdown in U.S. production has led the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) to cut its forecasted growth by 100,000 barrels per day. The agency much of that production cut is being attributed to less demand for oil.

Also reducing its production numbers for 2015 is OPEC. The once powerful oil cartel plans to cut production to just 28.9 million barrels per day, it’s lowest number since 2002.

With U.S. oil producers finding an increasing amount of oil, and less demand for the product, oil prices have continued to fall at record rates and show no real sign of slowing at this time. WTI and Brent crude oil are down 35% from June highs.

The White House, Congress, and the CIA Inspector General's office are just a few of the entities that were kept in the dark about the CIA's detainee and enhanced interrogation program, according to a Senate report released on Nov. 9. But considering the extensive and potentially explosive international component of the program, which began in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks and was fully discontinued after President Barack Obama took office in 2009, it's notable the State Department also was pretty much kept in the dark.

The purpose of the CIA's detainee program was to transfer terror suspects to places where they could be interrogated in absolute secrecy and outside of American legal jurisdiction. This allowed CIA officers to employ the enhanced interrogations techniques that critics call torture and are not permitted by US law. 

As the report explains, "The CIA did not inform two secretaries of state of locations of CIA detention facilities, despite the significant foreign policy implications related to the hosting of clandestine CIA detention sites and the fact that the political leaders of host countries were generally informed of their existence."

CIA officials instructed US ambassadors not to even discuss the program with their colleagues at State. The report said in two countries, ambassadors weren't even "informed of plans to establish a CIA detention site ... where they were serving." In two other countries, the report found the CIA told government officals to keep the local US ambassador out of the loop.

The secretaries of State and Defense weren't briefed on the program until September of 2003, partly out of White House concerns Colin Powell, then the Secretary of State, would "blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what's been going on," the report states. 

The CIA was operating in a way that may have impeded the smooth functioning of American diplomacy, concealing highly sensitive information about American activities abroad from the US foreign policy apparatus. Elsewhere, the report hints at the costs of this policy, suggesting the CIA was running its own back-channel in an attempt to keep the detainee program up and running — with very mixed results.

SEE ALSO: The Senate just released the CIA torture report

Join the conversation about this story »

Here’s the thing: I know there are some folks out there still heralding the imminent demise of email marketing. I get it – email platforms like Gmail are making it easier for people to filter out or avoid the often deafening, virtual cacophony of promotional messaging. That said, I’m still inclined to disagree.

Though I am a marketer by trade, I am also a consumer who avidly looks forward to and reads through company email newsletters and updates. Why? Because, when well executed, an email newsletter is a great way for me to stay informed on what’s happening with my favorite brands when I’m strapped for time at work, on the go or marooned on my couch catching up on my Netflix queue. (Reruns of The West Wing give me life.)

But for every example of a great newsletter I can think of, there are scores of cringe-worthy missteps that spring to mind. Here are four common mistakes to keep an eye out for that will help you avoid the fate of me shaking my head at you over the dashed potential of what could have been a great email.

1. Your email subject line is too long
   Not only is there data to back up the fact that engagement goes down as the length of a subject line goes up, you also run the risk of email clients chopping off your well-crafted subject line, because it’s too long.

   Some email platforms are more forgiving than others, in terms of character limits, but a good rule of thumb is to keep your subject line to 50 characters or less. Seriously, when it comes to subject lines, it’s true what they say: Less is more.

2. The email itself is too long
   If you’re looking for the fastest way for me to hit the “DELETE” button on your email, send me an unending wall of text. Even if the content is relevant to my interests, like most of the modern population, I’m a scanner. Emails that are too long, have formatting issues or lack a clear progression of visual cues will not be read – it’s that simple.Make your content easy to digest by breaking up text into paragraphs, or better yet – bulleted lists. Then compliment your copy with bold images and clear headings for easy skimming.
3. Your content sucks
   Real talk: If you’re sending me garbage via email, I’m going to throw it into my online trashcan without a moment’s hesitation.Email marketing is an amazing, powerful communication  tool, but you have to have something of interest to say. So before you go rushing to put out an email newsletter, devise a clear strategy behind what you want to send and why you want to send it. If you still find yourself stumped, put yourself in the shoes of your intended recipients and consider what information would be of value to them.
4. You don’t have a clear call-to-action
   Finally, if you’re hoping for people to download a piece of content, buy something or interact with you in any way as a result of your newsletter, make it obvious with a prominent link or eye-catching button. You’ll do yourself a disservice by burying a beneficial offer in nuanced copy that’s too polite to be direct.

When it comes to email newsletters, there are a lot of ways things can go wrong. Just remember that really, it all comes down to actually having something of value to say and expressing your message in a manner that is clear, concise and easy on the eyes. Once you have those basics nailed down, you can be sure folks will look forward to seeing you in their inbox.

The Next Web Conference, which gathers industry leaders to discuss the latest business and technology trends, starts in New York on Wednesday. 

We asked some of the young entrepreneurs who are speaking at the event to offer their best advice for building and growing your career. Here's what they said. 

Alexandra Chong, 33, CEO and founder of Lulu

"My motto is never give up. Every startup and career has ups and downs, and you need to have passion, conviction, and confidence to keep going and stay motivated. You're going to hear a lot of no's. Don't let that stop you. Find a way to get to yes."

Hilary Mason, 35, founder of Fast Forward Labs and data scientist in residence at Accel Partners

"Don't take advice you see on the internet too seriously! But that aside, make things. It doesn't matter if it's writing, art, code, or furniture as long as you are someone who creates instead of someone who just critiques. Value experiences by how much you're learning, and if you're aren't learning, move on.

"Don't be afraid to push your company in the direction you think is right — you'll either be fired or promoted, and either outcome will end up just fine. If you find something obscure fascinating, learn as much about it as you can, because there's a good chance it won't be obscure for long."

Alan Tisch, 26, CEO of Spring

"Don't be afraid to fail. Risk comes before success."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

The much ballyhooed partnership between IBM and Apple to build enterprise apps for iPads and iPhones is officially open for business.

The companies launched their first slate of 10 apps on Wednesday and  announced some big customers: Citi, Air Canada, Sprint and Banorte.

The partnership, which goes by the name "MobileFirst," was announced in July. It was hailed as "groundbreaking" by Apple CEO Tim Cook at the time, and called a "landmark" by Apple CFO Luca Maestri when talking to analysts in October.

This is the list of the new apps: Each one is intended to run on iOS devices and be customized for individual companies (IBM would do that work), while the apps themselves will take advantage of IBM's cloud.

• Plan Flight (for travel and transportation companies) helps companies track and trim their fuel expenses by letting pilots view flight schedules, flight plans, and crew manifests in advance, report issues in-flight to ground crews, and make more informed decisions about discretionary fuel.
• Passenger+ (for travel and transportation companies) lets flight crews offer more services in-flight like special offers, re-booking, and baggage information.
• Advise & Grow (for banking and financial companies) lets bankers access client profiles and analyses to make more personalized recommendations for small businesses and complete secure transactions.
• Trusted Advice (for banking and financial companies) allows advisors to access and manage client portfolios on the road, modeling recommendations and do secure transactions.
• Retention (for insurance companies) helps agents manage customer contacts with analysis, alerts, and recommendations. It also lets them complete transactions using e-signatures.
• Case Advice (for government) supports caseworkers as they visit families and people. It also helps them identify at-risk situations using big data analysis.
• Incident Aware (for government) gives law enforcement officers real-time access to maps and video-feeds of incident locations on their iPhones. It also shows them information about victim status, escalation risk, and crime history ability to call for back-up, too.
• Sales Assist (for retail) lets salespeople see customer profiles on the retail floor so they can make recommendations. It also lets them check inventory, locate items in-store, and ship out-of-store items.
• Pick & Pack (for retail) helps retailers track items in the story and connects with inventory order systems.
• Expert Tech (for telecommunications companies) taps into FaceTime for all sorts of needs, whether it's employees asking an question to an expert or customers talking to a support tech.

IBM has shared a few photos of some of the above apps.

Both companies really need this partnership to work. Apple needs to shore up tanking iPad sales. Unless Apple does something to stop the tide, analysts are expecting Apple to post some abysmal numbers for its March quarter: about 9.8 million iPads, a 40% drop on a year-over-year basis.

This partnership will help Apple sell more iOS devices to its biggest untapped market: enterprises.

And IBM might be even more desperate for this partnership to work. Revenues for IBM are shrinking across the board. CEO Ginny Rometty is trying to lead the company through a massive turnaround, laying off workers, shedding underperforming business units and beefing up investments in growth areas like mobile and cloud. This partnership is one of Rometty's signature deals.

SEE ALSO: The 14 Best Tech Companies To Work For

Join the conversation about this story »

There's a lot to learn about money.

However, according to Robert Kiyosaki, author of best-selling personal finance book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad," some things are more important than others.

In his upcoming book, "Second Chance: For Your Money, Your Life, And Our World," Kiyosaki highlights three financial concepts in particular that serve as the basis for wealth. 

He writes:

If you understand the meaning of the words cash flow, asset, and liability, your chances for a richer life are greatly improved. The reason most people struggle financially is because they have lots of cash flowing out — and very little flowing in.

Here's a quick rundown:

Asset: Kiyosaki defines an asset as something that "has value, produces income or appreciates, and has a ready market. Assets put money in your pocket." For example, the three assets he focuses on are business, real estate, and paper (meaning stocks, bonds, and mutual funds).

Liability: A liability is something that absorbs money instead of producing it. The test Kiyosaki suggests to distinguish between assets and liabilities is to ask yourself, "If you stopped working, what brings money in and what pulls money out?"

Cash flow: Cash flow is simply the direction your money goes: into or out of an account, business or investment. "Cash flow determines whether something is an asset or a liability," Kiyosaki writes. 

Just like an "asset" is the opposite of a "liability," Kiyosaki points out that the opposite of "cash flow" is a "paycheck."

How could that be? While cash flows from your assets, he explains, paychecks are limited infusions of cash that punctuate the cycle rather than continue it. With a paycheck, there's only so much you can earn.

Kiyosaki writes that traditional education doesn't set up people to become wealthy, because schools focus on concepts like "paycheck," "saver," and "employee," while adults who become rich focus not on simply getting their hands on some cash, but perfecting their cash flow.

SEE ALSO: 9 Financial Concepts Every Functioning Adult Should Know

Join the conversation about this story »

Sometimes things just don’t make sense unless put into context.

For instance, every brand knows it should be monitoring owned content, but reading a successful use case from another company certainly makes it all the more compelling to employ the practices themselves.

Everybody needs a little bit of inspiration.

So we’ve gathered three real-life examples of social research projects conducted by brands to ignite those research fires.

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Key points to consider when undertaking research projects

There are several elements that need to be considered when conducting social research yourself.

• Why are you doing this research, and will it bring value or insight to your organization?
• How will it affect your current marketing practices?
• Who will be reading the results of this research, and what will it tell them?
• What does good look like in your industry?

Having a specific plan is essential for gathering insightful results rather than simply collating data. Understanding what questions you need answered and working towards this will eliminate irrelevant searches.

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Case Study 1: Locating Relevant Influencers

The Company:

A healthcare professional specialist

The Need:

They wanted to locate individuals for Twitter outreach

The Outcome:

Using social media monitoring, healthcare/science industry authors were found and segmented into three variables. These were their specialty, the number of posts they had written on a certain subject and how long they engaged with the topic.

Once this list was collated it was then refined and filtered by the healthcare organization to determine which Twitter authors were the most relevant to their outreach programme.

For example, how big was their following and what was their influence score?

Once connecting with their influencers the healthcare brand tracked their engagement.

Looking at the impact of their tweets would allow for better processes with future influencer outreach as well as which author garnered the most results for them.

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Case Study 2: Responding To Industry News

The Brand:

A beverage company

The Need:

They wanted to monitor and understand the changing consumer conversations around key issues in their industry.

The Outcome:

By tracking key themes that generate conversations, this soda company could quickly pinpoint spikes in conversations.

When monitoring the buzz on sweeteners they saw a dramatic increase in the conversation.

Understanding where the source of this discussion was emanating from allowed the brand to address the conversation on the right platforms.

It is clear that Twitter was the driving force for the sudden rise in mentions of sweeteners.

Assessing the impact of emerging conversations like this will inform brands how best to respond to a PR crisis.

Looking at the soda brand in relation to other key topics within the industry discussion allowed them to determine what the true sentiments of the audience were.

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Case Study 3: Evaluating And Evolving Content Strategy

The Brand:

A FMCG company

The Need:

They wanted to understand the impact of branded content on social media in comparison to competitors, and take this data and use it to inform changes to optimize content.

The Outcome:

When looking at the owned Twitter account of the brand their virality was less than their competitors. This means they received less RTs and shares in comparison to their competition.

It seems that their content, although popular, was not reaching the follower networks that they wanted to connect with.

Looking at how content was doing across different social channels demonstrated that certain topics performed better on select platforms. For example, seasonal content was better received on Twitter in comparison to Facebook.

From this insight the brand learned that in their sector it is not enough to simply write one piece of content and push it on all social channels. Instead, they learned that tailoring their content is needed for engagement.

If you’re like me, one of the first things you do in the morning is clear your email of irrelevant promotional offers cluttering an (assuredly otherwise pristine) inbox. That is, after all, why Google redesigned Gmail to include the “Promotions” tab – to make it easier to bulk-delete all of that junk you only occasionally open.

So if this is the case, why is email marketing still such a reliable (and effective) inbound tactic? Because consumers expect your email to be terrible. And when it’s not, they notice. In a world of bad pickup lines, the good ones stand out.

It’s not just about crafting a great subject line – successful email marketing is the kind that converts an open to a click. Like all great marketing today, it needs to convey value quickly. Plus, when you’re using email to re-engage app users, the tie-in needs to be obvious.

App marketing shouldn’t be limited to your app. More and more consumers are interacting with brands across a multitude of channels, and providing information about their experience at every turn. So, when using email marketing as an extension of your app, the call-to-action has to be relevant to their app usage, behavior or profile attributes. The experience should be cohesive and reflective of their experience.

In this post, we take a look at some of the templates you can use to enhance the app experience with email (without annoying users), including real examples of how brands are using them today.

1. The “Don’t Forget & Don’t Miss Out” Notification

Sometimes, it’s best to start out simple. Often, apps will use push messages to alert app users to items left in carts, places favorited, or restaurants viewed. This shouldn’t be viewed as a common tactic because it’s commonplace – it’s common because at the heart of it, what this tactic is trying to do is help the user complete whatever action it was he wanted to take (and don’t forget – apps were built to make completing a task easier). This notion should translate to your email efforts.

Which is why when I got this email from TripAdvisor after researching hotels in Portland, ME, I opened it.

Subject line: Still interested in these hotels?

 

Now here’s the catch: had there not been an element of timeliness to this conversion, this email might not have worked as well. But, given the timeframe I was searching in, TripAdvisor is right to remind me that the longer I wait to book, the more likely the prices are to increase.

What negates any potential for annoyance with this template is that it’s based on the users in-app actions – something they already did or expressed interest in. Sending out reminders personalized to the user, and that take into account the limited time available to reap the benefits, showcases your brand as one that wants to provide ease and accessibility at all times.

2. The “We Know What The Holidays Are Actually About” Offer

Regardless of your personal feelings about car service Uber, one thing is certain: they know their user base. In this case, they are tapping into a typical holiday occurrence in big cities (large parties) and sending out a special offer (free rides).

Subject line: ’Tis the season for holiday parties and FREE Uber rides!

 

This is a situation in which Uber users would have previously turned to cabs or public transportation to get them to and from holiday events. To capitalize on this, Uber is recognizing the user behavior, and the upcoming need, and running their promo accordingly: If you’re throwing a holiday party, why wouldn’t you want to offer free rides home for your guests? It’s safe, convenient and free! That’s the reaction this email campaign evokes, making it a success for Uber.

You can create a similar template by determining the right offer (and use case), opting for one clear CTA, and highlighting the “why” (why would a user want to participate in this promo?). Also, don’t be dissuaded by the barrage of holiday promotional offers – there’s a reason so many brands use them. If your app is positioned to solve a specific holiday-related issue and make the season easier, even better!

3. The “You Didn’t Even Know You Needed This” Alert

Nothing is better than being pleasantly surprised by new (or unknown) app functionality, especially when it exceeds your expectations as a user. The Slice app was able to do just that. Slice tracks all of your online orders and alerts you to when they are shipped, on route, delivered, or late. It’s an easy way to keep tabs on your various orders without having to revisit each individual tracking code.

Slice got me with an immediate click through when they sent out this recent email:

Subject line: Price Drop Alert: Pottery Barn purchase dropped to $23.50

Unbeknownst to me, this handy app also tracks sales and promotions on items you’ve recently purchased and alerts you to changes in price. They then encourage you to call or email the retailer with the information and ask for a refund on the difference.

Looking out for my wallet even when I don’t expect it? A definite marketing win.

This email is simple and straightforward – it’s clearly identified as a “Price Drop Alert” and provides suggestions about how to best go about getting some money back. Plus, now you know that this is an option on all future purchases you make that are tracked through the app. More than anything, this kind of interaction encourages app engagement, as it demonstrates additional value outside of basic features.

4. The “We Have Something Just For You” Promo

At Localytics, we’re big believers in personalized user experiences, and often, that individual touch goes a long way when it comes to email marketing. Using the recipient’s name in the subject line is a standout, and time and time again proves to have higher open rates. Pair that with a limited-time offer, and you’ve got the recipe for a tempting email.

Subject line: Booking a flight, Bryn? Reserve an airport Zipcar for just $50/weekday

Considering it costs upwards of $100 to typically rent a Zipcar for a day, this promo is essentially a 50% discount. But it’s not just an offer for offer sake – it meets a real need. Zipcar users need some way to get to the airport, and maybe you don’t want to wait around for a ride when you get back.

Also important? It’s funny. Zipcar is playing on the desire travelers have for space and easy travel after a flight, which can have its share of negatives. While you may be thinking “I don’t need to spend an extra $50 a day to leave a car at the airport,” you still see that photo and know “It would at least be better than taking the subway.”

5. The “Use This Editorial to Help You Choose”

App marketing doesn’t exist solely in promotions and reminders. Expanding into certain forms of content marketing and editorial direction can create a richer experience and add to your brand identity. Take a look at what Rent the Runway (RTR), a designer clothing rental service, recently sent to customers (Side note: I exclusively use the RTR app, not their website – so I know this email has come from my app profile registration and behavior).

Subject line: Your office party dress code, decoded

The RTR service is dependent on events; more specifically, knowing their customer has to attend an event and doesn’t want to buy a new outfit (but instead rent a designer one). They’re using email by harnessing the editorial nature of fashion and making it easy for users to shop picks for a popular holiday event.

Instead of offering a discount, showcasing new arrivals, or creating urgency, they’re simply trying to help you find the right look by highlighting the potential need (office party outfit) and giving their creative input. This experience trends more toward personal stylist territory than the retail realm, which adds a bit more credibility. Plus, it’s incredibly timely and relevant to the season.

Finding the Value

It can be easy to go overboard sending out emails when they’re a fast and easy way to re-gain attention, especially when it comes to elusive app users. The key? Opting for fewer emails with greater value. Use your app analytics to determine which features, content and screens are most popular, and use that information to inform your email campaigns. Personalize your messages to the best of your ability based on the data, and make the user feel like this is another cohesive part of the experience. When your emails speak to a need, they are better received!

Image courtesy of bplanet at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

There was a time, long, long ago in a dim and distant past when, if you were in sales, the company you worked for and the product you sold were more important than how you personally sold. You may remember the ‘No one gets fired for buying IBM’ adage. Buying from a market leader was often seen as the obvious (and safest) path for a buyer to take.

But the world has moved on. Established companies are being disrupted. Remember Kodak? Did we ever think we would see Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop challenged? What about the decline of Nokia and Blackberry?

In the past, buyers were informed by large companies with large marketing budgets and usually made their selection from a shortlist of the market leaders. That has changed.

We have all witnessed the democratization of information. As buyers become ever smarter (more knowledgeable really), they have more options available to them, and, contrary to some recent theories, the importance of the salesperson has increased. How you sell is much more important that what you sell – and the effectiveness of how you sell is determined solely by your credibility in front of the buyer.

If you, as the salesperson, can’t demonstrate credibility when meeting with your buyer, you will fail. It is as stark as that. It is the reason why senior executives (in the buying organization) take follow-up sales meeting in just 25% of cases.

Remember, the impact on a customer of a bad buying decision is usually greater than the impact on a sales person of a lost deal.

Here are 5 sales credibility killers you need to avoid:

Better than your own solutions, you need to know your customer. That requires a deep understanding of the challenges that face each of the key roles in the customer organization (in the area that you can impact). Only then can you offer a solution to meet those needs. Unless you can show that you understand the impact on the customer of the project they are contemplating then it is hard to position your product as a solution that will optimize the outcome.

It used to be the case that your job as a seller was to communicate the value of your product. Now, if you have a half-decent website, the buyer can educate themselves on your product (and can do the same with your competitors) so you better show up with something better that demonstrates how you can uniquely create, not just communicate, value. If you start the conversation with “Let me tell you about our products,” your credibility will be shot, right out of the gate. Instead, accelerate your credibility by bringing market insights to your customer.

Marketing works hard to produce product datasheets, presentations and solution overviews. If you lead your sales conversations with these materials you will likely be categorized as a non-value-adding vendor. But the better marketing departments also deliver “vendor agnostic” insight pieces that, when used correctly, change sales conversations with buyers by disrupting current thinking and bringing new perspectives that lead back to your solution. Start there and then use the product-focused materials when the customer asks for more information.

Gone are the days where sellers can just knock on the door of the corner office and close a deal. In a world of increasing complexity, today’s buyers are much more aware of the need to operationalize changes in their organizations. That typically requires the support and expertise of many players. Asking for the order, without addressing the needs of each of these individuals, and helping them to understand the internal relationships between those needs, will likely underline the fact that you don’t understand how their business works. Your job is to help them build consensus around their interdependent needs.

If there is one way to ensure you have a sub-zero credibility rating with your buyer, ask the dreaded question. Let’s imagine you have a meeting with a senior influencer in the buyer’s organization. She has taken time out of her busy day because she has a business problem she is trying to solve. She is hoping that you can provide some guidance. And then you make that fatal mistake. You open the conversation with “So, tell me about your business. What keeps you up at night?” There is no way back from here. You must know about her business, have a good sense of the problems she faces, and what keeps her awake at night. You should have ideas to share, experiences that you have gleaned from other similar companies, or expertise you from your colleagues or experts in your own company.

Credibility and its co-traveler trust are the most valuable currencies you have. They are hard to earn and must be spent wisely.

Have I missed any credibility landmines? Are their horror stories you’ve heard or witnessed? What other mis-steps should sales people avoid?

By now it’s clear that reaching millennials with content marketing is a must. Unfortunately, many brands still aren’t getting it right. When it comes to targeting millennials, brands tend to make two major mistakes:

1. They aren’t that young. Ok, not all of them are that young. Quite frankly, “millennial” can be a vague generational term when you consider it currently covers people aged 15 to 35.

But as Katie Elfering points out in her Q&A with Forbes, half of older millennials are married and about half also have children of their own. In other words, playing mainly to young crowds in your millennial marketing alienates a huge chunk of your demographic.

2. They can spot a phony attempt. Some brands think that any random social or viral play is enough to get millennial dollars. Take Budweiser’s attempt to win millennials over by ditching their classic Clydesdales in favor of a viral video campaign: in a climate where millennial dollars are going toward craft beers and away from the same old brands on every tap, that marketing money would be better spent on actually improving their beer or developing a craft beer of their own.

Don’t believe me? Just read the comments on the above-linked article (or almost any press release on the topic).

So who out there is doing it right? Here are a few brands that target millennials the right way.

Viral Content: Old Spice

Old Spice is hardly a new brand. Male millennials grew up knowing the name, mainly because their fathers and grandfathers used it. So how did Old Spice learn to target millennials in a way that resonates?

Though Old Spice had already started winning over millennial consumers with the introduction of the “Old Spice Man” campaign, its viral Mom Song really took it the extra mile. The video plays perfectly into the male millennial’s desire for independence by making fun of their overly-involved mothers. It’s clever, it’s catchy and most importantly, it will stick with them while they’re shopping.

Proof that the campaign struck a chord: try over a million YouTube views in just three days.

Cause Marketing: TOMS Shoes

To get millennial dollars, you have to do more than just sell them on a product. You also need a mission and an idea. Few brands have done this as well as the TOMS One for One Campaign. I am hard-pressed to find more than a few friends who don’t have a pair of TOMS in their closet, and it’s more than the “trendy” factor.

The concept behind the campaign is a simple one: for every pair of shoes purchased by a consumer, a pair is given to a child in need. As millenial marketing expert Jeff Fromm points out, this allows millennials to feel like they are part of a cause. Whereas previous generations had a stark separation between commerce and charity, millennials now choose to make a difference by putting their dollars behind brands that align with their own personal values.

Peer Marketing: Kia UK

Millennial consumers don’t want a sales pitch. In fact, 48 percent of millennials claim that word-of-mouth motivates their purchasing decisions more than TV ads. So in order to win millennials over to your brand, you have to market with them, rather than at them.

Kia UK fully embraces this idea. According to Edmunds.com, Kia has spent years focusing on budget-minded consumers. When you take into account the fact that 22 percent of millennials are under extreme financial stress, it’s no wonder millennial consumers gravitate toward the Kia price tag.

But Kia also pushes the sense of community that millennials crave by letting their current consumers make the pitch to potential buyers. Their site (with a design that screams “millennial”) encourages consumers to look at online reviews “so you can be sure you’ll know what people like you really think.”

With a word of mouth focus, coupled with an emphasis on budget-friendly models, it’s no wonder this brand resonates so well.

Millennials are a powerhouse demographic, to be sure. Luckily, we know all about how to help your brand reach them. For starters, make sure you know the hard truths about millennial marketing. Also, do your best to capture niche demographics like millennial females. Oh, and free snacks. Definitely free snacks.

[Note from Lee: TopRank has made many advancements in the content marketing space over the past 5-6 years and that leadership has resulted in growth – including the addition of 15 new people to our team in the past 7 months.  Among those new faces is content marketing smartie, James Anderson, our new agency Director of Content Marketing.  

James spent over 9 years as a journalist and editor before moving into the brand publisher space. And now he’s made the full move over to the marketing realm.  You’ll be seeing a lot of James here in the coming days and weeks as he helps me advance the TopRank content marketing machine even further – please make him feel welcome!]

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Like a lot of journalists, I have an ‘end of days’ story about why I got out of the business. Thankfully, I’m one of the fortunate ones who was able to get out on my own volition.

In the fall of 2010, I headed up the consolidation of two small-town newspapers, and I was able to see first-hand the changing landscape in the media world. If I hadn’t figured it out already, that moment solidified the need to make a change.

Content Marketing

About that time, I picked up Twitter chatter about this concept of Content Marketing. I learned that brands and agencies were willing to pay English majors like myself to do what they love — mainly, move words around in ways that inspire thought and action. So I dug deep into a couple years’ worth of  Master’s of Business Communications courses and hopped on board a Minneapolis news startup called BringMeTheNews.

For four years I helped brands tell stories through BringMeTheNews’ innovative platform. I dove into brand content and native advertising. I strived to tell sponsored stories that drove higher clicks and engagement than news stories — and when I did, I made sure to let the newsroom know!

Why TopRank?

Throughout the process of helping to grow a startup into a recognized marketing platform, I soaked up everything I could about content marketing. While I did, I met a lot of great people, including my new boss, Lee Odden.

We first met in person at the 2012 Content Marketing World in Ohio and joked about how we’d have to touch base back in Minneapolis. But we didn’t. A year would go by until I’d see Lee again in Cleveland.

Since that first meeting I’ve paid attention to what he and his smart team at TopRank were saying about content marketing, brand journalism and native advertising.

While I loved how BringMeTheNews allowed me to work with sponsored content, I knew there was still one more step I wanted to make. That step was from publisher to agency where the intersection of journalism, brand publishing and content marketing meet.

I had my eyes on TopRank Marketing and how the team was advancing the cause in the content marketing space through their own content as well as with clients like LinkedIn, MarketingProfs and Dell. When the opportunity arose to come aboard as Director of Content Marketing, I jumped.

At the agency level, talk of content is genuinely platform-agnostic. TopRank marketers are focused on attracting, engaging, and converting while truly understanding the relationship between buyers, information, consumption preferences and what will ultimately motivate action.

On day three I have already seen what I was missing in the journalism world. When publishers talk about content, the platform is the destination. At TopRank Marketing, the platform is a means with which to create awesome experiences for customers.

Image: Shutterstock

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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2014. | Content is not just a platform: Why I left journalism and joined TopRank Marketing | http://www.toprankblog.com

With the heightened awareness of and interest in insight selling, it has become popular for sellers to think of themselves as teachers. This is a positive step in the right direction toward genuinely helping buyers and creating value. However, there are some misunderstandings about how and what to teach that can backfire and leave sellers […]

If I could give every marketer a pop quiz, it’d only have one question:

What’s the most important element in a campaign – cleverness, appearance, or relevance?

Please tell me you got the right answer. It’s relevance, of course. Every marketer worth their salt has learned that message by now; all the pretty and witty creative in the world isn’t going to hook your audience unless the message actually matters to them. Yet somehow, teams keep making that classic mistake. They focus on what they want to say, rather than what their buyers want to hear.

Dissecting your buyers might not be the most glamorous part of marketing. You might prefer to be strategizing for a new social media campaign or dreaming up taglines. Here’s the thing, though: Creating content is pointless when you don’t know who’s going to read it. It’s like buying a gift for someone you’ve never met. The gift will probably reflect your interests rather than theirs and you’ll be insulted when it’s not appreciated.

So before you invest in writing, design, and production, make sure you know who you’re talking to – and where in the funnel you want them to hear it.

Not sure whose problems you’ll be solving? Try becoming a buyer detective.

Deepen Your Buyer Personas

If your personas consist of just an industry and job title, it’s time to get serious about data. You want to target buyers with meaningful content, which means you must understand their triggers and goals – you have to move beyond their role.

Let’s start calling buyers what they are, people, and with that understand that when they walk into an office they don’t shed their human skin. As marketers we need to get to the heart of what makes people, people – emotion. Look at interest and attribute data to glean precise customer insights.

What social media do your buyers prefer? What are their daily struggles and long-term aspirations? Does their content consumption point to a specific challenge?

Map the Buyer Journey

Don’t assume every buyer follows the same path. Persona A might have a certain obstacle that keeps her stuck at a certain stage of the funnel, while Persona B may have an urgent pain point that speeds him through much faster or urges him to take different steps. You should address this via responsive nurture tracks that shift leads to different segments based on their behavior – and be aware that what seems like a hot lead can be a dead end.

Stay Agile

Your buyer personas and content programs should be dynamic, not static. Always keep evaluating and adapting, and stay nimble so you can modify as needed. By monitoring campaign performance and incorporating new insights, you’ll identify new audiences and hone in on your buyers to a granular degree.

Tap Sales and Customer Service

Surveys are all well and good, but the best feedback can come from right inside your company.

Ask your sales team what challenges or concerns your business successfully solved for new customers. Ask customer service reps the complaints and questions they hear every day. Then, use that knowledge to update your personas and create content that addresses the most pressing objections, challenges and goals.

Engage

This might seem like a conundrum: How you can engage with customers before you find out who they are? Ah, but you can. The idea is to begin broadly, then narrow your focus.

Start by soliciting input and questions on your blog. Cultivate a thriving social community and see who your brand evangelists are. Involve customers in your product and service creation; they’ll feel valued and you’ll get priceless, real-time data to shape your strategies.

Remember, everyone wants to feel connected to their favorite brands – and the customers who respond to your initiatives will provide a treasure trove of audience insights.

Listen

Too many businesses are stuck in one-way marketing programs that are more like a monologue than a dialogue. But marketing is like dating; talking about yourself all night usually means you don’t get a second date. To keep your customers coming back, you have to be a good listener. Instead of ignoring online comments and reviews, pay attention to who’s leaving them. Monitor social conversations and find out what people are saying about you. You might be surprised by who’s interested and who’s not – and you’ll probably think of a few ways to convert indifference into curiosity.

Too many businesses pump out one-size-fits-most content and expect it to attract leads and drive sales as if by magic. But to really build a supercharged sales and marketing ecosystem, you must understand who you’re targeting. We live in an era rich with data – so keep drilling down into your buyer details and eventually you’ll strike gold.

UK marketers have become much more goal-focused over the last year. They also rate themselves as slightly more effective at content marketing when compared with the North American and Australian marketers we reported on earlier this year. Those are just a couple of the key findings we present in CMI’s third annual Trends report, produced in partnership with the UK Direct Marketing Association (DMA) and sponsored by Axonn Media. The report shows how UK for-profit marketers (both B2B and B2C) approach content marketing as compared to last year.

Goals have evolved

Not only has the percentage of UK marketers citing each of the goals shown on the following chart risen over the last year, but marketers’ priorities have also shifted. Engagement has moved up to replace brand awareness as the most often-cited goal at 91%. The number of marketers who cited lead nurturing has nearly tripled. Lead generation and sales have seen big increases as well.

Even though their effectiveness rating is higher than those we’ve seen in North America and Australia, UK marketers rated themselves less effective at content marketing versus last year (48% vs. this year’s 42%). Though the difference is small, it could explain the revived focus on goal-setting as more and more marketers are looking to drive efficiency by setting concrete objectives.

Click to tweet: UK marketers are more focused on #contentmarketing goals than in previous years, with 3x more citing lead nurturing. http://ctt.ec/6n89f+

Tracking ROI is a challenge; having a documented strategy helps

As is the case with their North American and Australian peers, UK marketers struggle to track the ROI of their content marketing programs. Only 28% say they are successful at this; however having a documented strategy helps: 46% of UK marketers who have a documented content marketing strategy say they are successful at tracking ROI.

RELATED: You can learn how to create a documented content marketing strategy with this 36-question guide.

Click to tweet:  28% of UK marketers say they’re successful at tracking ROI of #contentmarketing; having a documented strategy helps. http://ctt.ec/Ybca7+

Twitter ‘wins’ as the top-rated social media platform for content marketing

Eighty-nine percent of UK marketers use Twitter to distribute content; 75% say it is an effective platform for their content marketing efforts – the highest rating for a social media platform that we’ve ever seen. While Twitter also has high usage rates among for-profit marketers in North America (87%) and Australia (79%), UK marketers appear to be getting better results with it (only 54% of North American marketers and 53% of Australian marketers say it’s effective).

Click to tweet: Twitter “wins” as the most effective social media platform for UK marketers. #contentmarketing http://ctt.ec/q331H+

Many are focused on creating visual content and more engaging content

In an addition to our annual content marketing survey, marketers were asked what initiatives they’re working on now, and which ones they plan to begin working on within 12 months. UK marketers said they’re working on an average of 14 initiatives now, and plan to begin work on eight more over the next year. The highest-ranking initiative for now was creating visual content (70%), followed closely by creating more engaging content (69%). The highest rated for the next 12 months was developing a better mobile strategy (39%).

Click to tweet: 70% of UK marketers say creating visual content is a priority #contentmarketing http://ctt.ec/tHba1+

The most effective have lessons to share

In addition to gleaning the earlier insights, we also looked at how UK marketers who rated their organizations highly in terms of content marketing effectiveness set themselves apart. Here are some interesting stats about these “best-in-class” marketers:

Read the entire report to learn more, including:

• How many audiences do UK marketers target?
• What content marketing tactics, social media platforms, and paid methods of content promotion do they use?
• How do they measure success?
• What are their most pressing challenges?

What do you think of this year’s findings? Were you surprised with any of the changes we observed with UK marketers over the last year? What was your biggest takeaway?

See all of our annual research thus far and subscribe to our email to be notified of new research and understand the “whys” and the “what’s next” from the research.

Image courtesy of Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Content Marketing in the United Kingdom: Engagement and Leads Take Center Stage [Research] appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

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Sales people are in the business of convincing others. It may surprise you, but marketers are as well. HubSpot’s Ginny Soskey writes that it’s crucial to understand why “other people think and act the way you do.” In order to convert new leads, a marketer needs deep understanding of their company’s customers. You should also develop a strong knowledge of behavioral psychology principles.

Choosing to integrate behavioral psychology into your sales copy process could be the best content marketing decision you make this year. By understanding what your future customers need from your organization, you’ll make the shift from self-centered landing pages to content that people love. Here are three of the most universal and meaningful psychology laws to get you started:

1. People Seek Pleasure

If there were any single conversion psychology principles that applied to all types of buyer personas, this would be it. In fact, as Psychology Professor Paul Bloom writes, “most significant human pleasures are universal.” Our ancestors were interested in the pleasures of surviving winter and foraging enough food to be satisfied. Today, universal notions of pleasure will more likely encompass some of the “higher principles” of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

• Love and belonging
• Esteem, including achievement and earning respect
• Self-actualization

Write your landing pages, web pages, and other types of sales copy in a way that clearly demonstrates how you will create pleasure for your clients. Map your product to Maslow’s hierarchy, particularly the areas regarding esteem. The landing page example below from RightSignature does an exceptionally good job of clearly communicating several types of pleasure:

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Landing page visitors see that RightSignature offers convenience due to it’s “easy” and “fast” service that will “impress your customers”. The words about trust and social proof testimonials from highly-respected brands lend credence to RightSignature’s words. In less than 100 words, this sales copy effectively communicates that customers can enjoy the pleasure of earning respect, getting stuff done more quickly, and belonging to a class of businesses who trust RightSignature.

2. People Avoid Pain

No one wants to experience pain. Since the beginning of time, humans have done everything within their power to avoid suffering. While our odds of being attacked by a wild animal are much lower in the modern world, the fact remains that people want to experience pleasure, not suffering. As Psychotherapist Sheri Van Dijk highlights, “as humans, we do everything we can…to avoid pain – emotional or physical.”

Some forms of modern pain that your product could help your clients avoid can also be loosely mapped to Maslow’s hierarchy:

• Embarrassment, failure, or lack of progress at work
• Rejection by romantic interests or friends
• Difficulty achieving personal or professional goals
• Financial difficulties or concerns

The following landing page example from Natural Health Advisory is designed to build empathy with individuals suffering from clinical depression. The body sales copy communicates that depressed individuals can want to avoid feelings of isolation or being misunderstood. It’s an effective way of mapping their product (a free eBook) to overcoming the pain of depression.

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Keep in mind, there is a time and a place for sales copy that emphasizes the pleasure principle, as well as copy that demonstrates tools for pain avoidance. There are behavioral psychology studies that support both the negativity bias, as well positivity via the Pollyanna Phenomenon. I recommend you maintain a balance of both pain and pleasured-focused sales copy.

3. People Avoid Confusion

Max Wertheimer’s principle of gestalt, or pithiness, has been a major driving factor in behavioral psychology for over 100 years. Through his research, he demonstrated that people seek simplicity. Particularly, it’s natural to avoid anything that seems confusing or overly complicated, and to try to form patterns before understanding something as a whole. Three major components of mapping your sales copy experience to gestalt are:

• Always seeking simplicity and pithiness
• Providing closure to your readers
• Achieving symmetry, order, and logical flow

This landing page from Op Ed is exceptionally simple and powerful. The headline effectively summarizes everything the reader needs to know to “form a pattern.” The bullet points tell the rest of the story in a very clear way. You’ll notice symmetry and logical flow are also achieved through the use of art, which directs the reader’s eye towards the form:

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Does it work? Absolutely! Case studies from Unbounce report as high as a 128% increase in conversions when the pithiness principle is applied to existing landing pages.

If you run a company that’s been in business since before the Internet existed, or if few other companies in your industry are advertising online, marketing your business online might feel a little out of place.

After all, the entire lifecycle of the high-quality work you provide your customer begins, occurs, and ends completely offline. So why spend more time on your web presence when you’re getting business through your other sales efforts?

The answer is quite simple. You may not think that potential buyers of your products or services use the Internet to find you, but your prospective customers search for related information when they research purchase options.

Google helps potential customers pick your company

Your goal should be to intercept your customer early on as they gather that decision-making information and build a relationship before they make their choice.

As they pore through Google search results to gather as much information as possible, they’re seeking expert insight and opinions to help them develop a solution set and make their purchase decision. And when your company website is the source of that expert insight (or you are available to answer questions on their favorite social media platform), you’re able to establish your expertise and build a relationship before your customer reaches out in person.

Offline customers start online with research

Did you know that 94 percent of B2B buyers conduct some form of online research before they make a business purchase? That means that even if the service you provide for your customer has nothing to do with a computer, your customer still uses a computer to perform the early stage research that leads to a buying decision!

Your goal should be to intercept your customer early on as they gather that decision-making information and build a relationship before they make their choice. Becoming a part of this process is a vital step in building interest, trust, and relationship. That means creating high-quality blog posts, downloadable information, and social media interactions for your company that give prospective customers a number of opportunities to acquire information.

It’s not a matter of how to sell your services online. It’s a matter of how to generate leads online by appealing to your target customers and providing non-threatening opportunities for them to learn. If your company isn’t visible online — whether on LinkedIn, in search results, or with an effective website — then it’s much more difficult to be considered by your customers as they build their understanding of their purchase.

If you’re in business, you need a good online presence. What matters is where your customers want you to be. If you are an offline business wondering how to generate leads online, it might be time to think about giving online lead generation a try. Hundreds of potential customers are doing early stage research and looking for products and services like yours every month. Will your website show up when they search? Will they find something that benefits them when they browse your website?

Getting started can be easy

Though some companies choose to, you don’t have to go “all-in” with email, social media, blogging, content marketing, etc.

Here are some quick things you might consider if you haven’t updated your web presence in a while:

• Claim your local business page on Google
• Update your website with the latest product and service offerings (be sure to include answers to questions that you hear from potential customers)
• Get rid of all the technical jargon on your website that might confuse a potential customer
• Start a business page on LinkedIn, and post a helpful tip for potential customers once per week
• Consider getting some help

This is a guest contribution from Pratik Dholakiya.

There’s no doubt social media is important for businesses to engage with potential and existing customers. It’s marketing 101. Since it’s the de facto “I’ll let the world know what I think about this product or brand” medium, it’s also a unique channel where companies and businesses now face intense scrutiny.

Social media is best used for engagement. It’s a powerful tool that finally lets companies (of any size) get one-to-many with its customer base. Social media allows you to sell (without actually pushing).

At least 72% of people surveyed by HootSuite state that they are likely to buy from a company they first interacted on Twitter, for instance. There’s also a 30% in unsolicited recommendations.

With more than 500 million tweets a day and over 230 million active users, your customers are on Twitter, which is proving to be a great way to improve customer relationships. Facebook – with a user base over a billion and counting – continues to be the mainstay for B2C companies.

LinkedIn meanwhile is a great platform to establish your social presence, attract clients, employees, vendors, and even investors.

On social media conversation, share, and engagement is a direct result of your updates performing. If social media provides amplification for your content assets, the right metrics help you measure that amplification.

However, there are production costs associated with those updates. People, time, tools, resources are all under the anvil. So, how do you finalize your key performance indicators, measure the metrics that are important and determine if they’re the one that can deliver maximum ROI? Here are some of the top indicators every social media marketer should pin to the wall.

Business Assets

Today, content can be classified as a business asset. Assets are built to perform. Analytics help you understand how your assets perform over time in line with your business strategy. But just because something exists doesn’t mean it’s important. With so many metrics out there for a marketer to measure, life just got harder for content marketers.

For contemporary content marketers, metrics are best classified into classes, and then each asset must be measured against the overall performance of the asset class it comes under.

Cyfe is a single tool that helps you aggregate all of your asset classes in one place. You can pull in the numbers from the various sources, channels, campaigns (organic and paid), and maintain a single view for analytics. Chris Abraham of Socialmedia.biz termed it as One Dashboard to Rule Them All.

Cyfe integrates with social media networks, email marketing tools, and all other major sources for your traffic, revenue, or sales. Cyfe also plugs into campaign data from Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Yahoo Advertising, retargeting networks, and with Facebook paid campaigns.

It helps you mitigate these challenges that metrics carry:

• Metrics are numbers. But the actual transaction flow – from the time a prospect first knows about your business to the point of sale – isn’t straightforward.
• One single metric, by itself, doesn’t mean much.
• Metrics are best understood in clusters.

Time Vs Production

Time has a cost to it – a direct one at that. Although this metric is an internal assessment for your team to ponder on and get better at, it has a direct correlation to the rest of the metrics.

• If there’s an editorial calendar, planned per day, for the period of time, how are the deadlines being met?
• For every specific content asset, how long does it take to create and publish/
• How many different types of content are produced and published for a specific period of time?

Use Excel or any other tool/software you are comfortable with but measure these to get your internal processes in shape.

Retention

Social media retention is hard to get at, especially given that social updates have a miserable shelf life of about three hours on average, according to Pamela Vaughan of HubSpot.

According to her post,

• The mean half-life of a link on Twitter is 2.8 hours.
• The mean half-life of a link on Facebook is 3.2 hours.
• The mean half-life of a link via ‘direct’ sources such as email or instant messaging clients is 3.4 hours.
• The mean half-life of a link on YouTube is 7.4 hours.

Given these numbers, you’d have a vested interest in looking at the effectiveness of your social media assets beyond the initial contact. For your social updates, you’d need to look at:

• Tracking follower or fan growth over a period of time.
• The ability of each social update to garner interest in the form of likes, Tweets, and interactions with each update.

For Twitter, as an example, here’s a sample snapshot of Twitter growth for the last 28 days:

You also get to see demographic information, interests of your followers, and gender distribution as follows:

Engagement and Sharing

Social media is “social”. Unlike any other media, there’s the question of reach, engagement, and sharing that’s critical to this media. Traditional publishing depending on reach alone. Social brings in engagement and sharing too.

The more engagement, reach, and share your social updates can manage to stir up, the better it is for your business for multiple reasons. Tools like HootSuite and Buffer App already provide built in analytics for you to dig into. Each social network, meanwhile, also provides analytics on how your social web properties perform.

Facebook provides insights. LinkedIn has analytics. Twitter just rolled out activity dashboard to let you see how your Tweets perform including link clicks, engagement, retweets, replies, and instances of your Tweets being marked as favorites.

For each social network, the important engagement and sharing metrics will include (but not limited to):

• Number of impressions or reach per update.
• Activity level around engagement per update.
• Retweets, shares, likes, comments, and responses per update.

Lead Metrics

Vanity metrics don’t mean a thing. They really don’t. Except for massaging your ego, there’s nothing else vanity metrics do for you. Jay Baer of Convince and Convert writes:

“The end goal is action, not eyeballs.”

All the branding, engagement, and sharing later, it’s finally about leads. Kevan Lee of Buffer Blog wrote the ultimate guide on social metrics and gets right to the point with an emphasis on leads.

A conversion is that metric you should hang on to. Defined as the number of leads generated from the sum total of social updates, amplification, engagement, and reach.

If you use a tool like Snip.ly, you can also measure direct metrics like clicks originating through each update. This nifty tool also helps you measure conversions (originating from links within social updates) to specific destinations such as landing pages and website pages.

This is the point where all the talk about social media ROI begins to make sense. Taking it a bit further, these are the metrics social hawks at Moz are looking at. The folks at Moz talk about relative engagement rates. Their point is simple: the conversion rate on Facebook isn’t the same as engagement that comes from your Instagram or Pinterest account.

They recommend a tool like TrueSocialMetrics, which helps calculate the true economic value of your social marketing across specific platforms.

Over to You

With social media, the numbers aren’t hard to get. The only thing that matters is your analytical interpretation of those numbers and how they relate to your business goals.

In short,

• Ignore vanity metrics.
• Define your goals, classify your metrics, and measure what matters.
• Conversions are still the real metrics that matter.

How do you measure your social metrics? What are you on the lookout for? What kind of numbers are you busy crunching?

Pratik Dholakiya is the Co-Founder & VP of Marketing of E2M and MoveoApps. He’s passionate about fitness, entrepreneurship, start-ups and all things digital marketing. Hit him up on Twitter @DholakiyaPratik for a quick chat.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger


Get Social Media Right: Five Things you Just Can’t Miss

Everyone seems to have something to sell, but only a few know how to cultivate crazy checkouts. Slapping a product to your page doesn’t mean people will buy it. So what does?

How does a person make this happen for him/her? How does a person direct amazing traffic that will convert into paying customers? First you must have a checkout (with a product) that you can point to. Hint: try one of these ecommerce platforms.

How does Mcdonald’s attract customers?

It was once stated that the executive chef (from Mcdonald’s) had revealed the recipe to the secret sauce of the Big Mac and posted it online. But why would he do such a thing? Wouldn’t this destroy their brand and make everyone want to eat at home? After much research they found the results would be quite the opposite. They built this piece of content they knew would go viral and be shared among friends. Not only did the video go viral it received nearly 4 million views. So now the people who wasn’t eating the Big Macs, after this video with high conversion rates, are now probably eating Big Macs. All because a man took 2.5 minutes of his time to share something the public was wanting.

You too can apply this to your marketing strategy. But what does a secret recipe have to do with your business? Let me explain.

Ecommerce strategy for more checkouts

Like Mcdonalds we must do some research. What exactly are people wanting to know from us? What is a gift you can use to be brought in front of great men (your customer)? You must present a solution to your potential customer that will answer his hardest question. And it must be done in an entertaining way. Within 30 minutes you can do this, become the expert, convert people into customers, and create a resource for the upcoming customers. By talking about the newest or most effective product one at a time, it gives people an idea on how you can help them. So what does this look on paper?

1. You must perform a survey

By asking your customer what his/her biggest problem is, you will know what’s inside the potential’s head. You’ll know the problems they’re having, and therefore the solution. But unless you know the problem, how could you even say you have the solution? Surveys do this. So by coming up with the top 5-10 problems you think your customers having, you then can put together the survey. Then with a multiple choice survey, have them select the biggest problem they’re having. This is even worth paying for. But by having a customer base already, you may not have to.

Top survey platforms I recommend are:

• Google Surveys
• Survey Monkey
• Poll Daddy

2. Turn that problem into a presentation

Once you have found the hardest problem you must not only solve it, but present the solution. Present that solution and let it be connected to your product. I’ll give an example:

If you sell guitar lessons for instance, by providing a free course up-front, it not only shows your expertise but also a feel of what a class session would feel like.

If you are a marketer, you could lay down the greatest information and help the small business owner. In reality you are flexing the old expert muscles and building a relationship with those viewers. Since most don’t have time to market, why not just hire you?

Okay, so you get it? Solving the problem, in which connects to you, makes you the hero. You just did the hardest thing and that’s gain trust. The way they look at you will change within minutes of their problem being solved. You just went from zero to hero in no time.

So now the now content has been created and you know what you’re going to say. How should you present this to the world? Here’s your options:

1. Blog Post
2. eBook
3. Webinar
4. Online Course
5. Powerpoint
6. Audio Clip
7. Tutorial Video

One of these things could take an hour to do. Add that up and you have 6 hours of work. Keep reading and I’ll show how you can most of these with 1 single hour.

3. Attract your leads

You now got to attract that audience into viewing your content. Your amazing content will turn them into that lead you’re needing at checkout. So in reality the person bought your product way before checkout. You’ve got to make that happen in their mind before they pull the money out their wallet.

The way you make this happen is first find out where they hang out. If you’re selling guitar lessons, go to the instrument forums and build relationship power. And no, answering those questions isn’t a waste. You’re building what I call “click power”. I’m not here to debate Karma, but I do believe what goes around comes around. So spend your extra time giving to your community in a Facebook group page, forum, commenting on blogs in your niche, or growing your email list. Or you could simply spend money on ads (which is the quickest way) and direct that traffic. Emailing businesses about your new offer may help you also (def. for webinars).

Once you figure out your traffic source, direct them to an amazing squeeze page. After much tweaking this page will make most visitors convert into email subscribers. On that page you’re giving away a free eBook or instructions about new webinar (or both). For every email you get, count that as a lead, your content will determine the conversion rates. Higher the quality of content means higher the conversion rates.

Start with a webinar and transform it into other resources

Doing the survey determines the success or failure of this project. I recommend turning that survey into a webinar and then turn that into other resources all at once. Saving you time.

By starting with a webinar you can end up with:

• An eBook
• An Audio Clip
• A Video
• A Presentation
• A Blog Post

Here’s how you make that happen: First put together the presentation. Get the crowd to come, promote hard. Then you entertain them and answer all their questions. Make sure to record the whole thing. Finish the webinar with a bang and make sure the problem is solved (whatever that was). By doing this, you now have something to work with and transform into many resources.

What webinar platforms are best to use?

• GotoMeeting
• JoinWebinar
• Webex
• Google Hangouts
• Adobe Connect

Webinar In Action

By creating a webinar that last for 30 mins-1 hour, you will now have many resources. Most webinars have a powerpoint, and you’ll be talking along with it. Right? By recording this for later, you can turn that webinar into many resources that you could give or even sell one day.

Now you can take all of these and submit them online if you’re wanting extra traffic. During the webinar you’re making sales, and you could make even more sales by selling that information one day.

Who actually does this? Major brands like Moz, LeadPages, Lewis Howes, Social Triggers use this method to sell their products. And it works.

How Does All This Make My Checkout Successful?

By doing a survey, building the email list, and doing the webinar, you’re cultivating sales. How? You’re gaining trust, building relationships, and becoming the expert all at once. All of these in which are ingredients to a successful checkout. But if you really want to go the extra mile and make those leads even hotter, take that webinar and spin out resources that they take home. Do this by ripping audio off the webinar and offer that as an audio series. Another way is turning that powerpoint into an eBook. Other ways is simply saving the video, make it private, and give out that secret link. Take images from the powerpoint and make it a blogpost.

See what I’m doing here? You keep sending these emails offering something free in each email. Every piece of content is pointing back to your product and every email is simply a reminder to buy it.

Final Thoughts

So by focusing on what the struggles are (making sure it relates back to your product), you are giving that person a reason to read/watch/listen to anything you have to say. And if in fact they stay for the whole thing, that makes them a hot lead for your product. I understand that you may hundreds if not thousands of products, but by doing a product at a time, or many that have something in common with the topic you’re tackling, you will be able to make some great sales.

header image courtesy of Svetlana Tokarenko

Many of us tap into the millions of reviews and comments on social media to find influencers, resolve customer complaints, buzz monitoring and the like. But one use that is often overlooked is the hunt for prospects.

Using social lead generation or listening tools, you can find the exact kind of people that might be interested in purchasing your products. And not just masses of unqualified leads, but real leads with real needs.

Being able to demonstrate a gap in the market, or a bigger audience to reach out to, especially those that your managers weren’t aware of, could point out a massive growth opportunity for your business or help your agency secure that valuable pitch.

If you’re unconvinced by the potential power of social lead generation, then consider these 3 facts:

• Social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate compared to outbound marketing.
• Only 40% of marketers feel their current online marketing mix meets sales pipeline needs.
• 78.6% of sales people using social media to sell outperform those who aren’t using social media.

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1/ Clarifying the buying cycle

What makes social media so powerful for lead generation?

The ability to have direct conversations with your most valued audiences and aligning these interactions to the appropriate stages of prospects’ buying cycle.

To achieve this, marketers must listen to their stakeholders online to understand where they are in the buying cycle and how they want to progress through it.

Say you’re a company that makes high-end video production equipment for the entertainment industry, you will first need to find out the specifics of your target audience by using a social listening platform to answer the following questions:

1. Who is your target audience? Engineers and video editors at large Hollywood studios as well as executives at small, medium, and large video production agencies around the world.
2. Where are they in the social realm? Top sites are a Linkedin user group for video production tools, Twitter, and a video production community forum.
3. What keywords do they use to discuss products/services related to our products? “CGI,” “animations,” “cool camera shot,” “avid,” “high-end video”
4. What keywords do they use when discussing their challenges that your products solve? “video format conversion,” “slow composer,” “slow rendering”
5. What needs do they express? Flexibility to film once for different audiences (TV, web, mobile devices, etc.), speed, high-performance, quality, superiority
6. Other discoveries? Price is not an important factor, as these people are judged by making the best video possible.

Having this profile information in hand will help you add specificity to your social lead generation campaigns and tactics. We’ve set up queries in Brandwatch to obtain this information and find leads every day.

In this example, you could rule out a campaign with a discount offer. After all, your target audience has shown that it is willing to pay full price for the highest-quality and fastest tool possible.

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2/ Uncovering the golden nugget

Knowing this, your team will need to query social sites for one simple piece of prospect data: is your audience asking basic questions or advanced questions?

For the marketing team, the answer would help determine how they would develop new marketing materials and social conversations (e.g. content meant to educate early-stage prospects or hit them with the hard-sell vendor comparison content?).

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3/ Measurement to make social lead generation a success

Some marketers are successfully generating leads on social and don’t even know it. How is that possible?

Many of them measure social media leads the same way they measure leads from traditional marketing approaches.

But what if, for instance, your social media efforts drove twice as many registrants to your event? Most marketers would see this as a huge success, but it may not necessarily drive new prospects into the sales cycle.

To overcome this gap, you will need to define specific social media goals to measure success as they relate to leads (e.g. number of content downloads or registrants making a purchase within 6 months after attending the event).

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4/ Nurture your leads before passing them to sales

A sales cycle of four months or longer is common for most B2B companies. Prospects spend a lot of time doing independent research on social during that time. Marketers who engage with them on social are often tempted to pass them on to sales as fast as possible in order to show social lead generation success.

Don’t do it!

The majority of prospects prefer to engage a salesperson much later in the process. In fact, today’s B2B buyers complete at least 70% of their purchase before contacting a sales representative.

Use the knowledge you’ve picked up from social listening to elevate the most relevant prospects.

For example, you could obtain great lead-qualifying insights by cross-referencing them with their information on Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks. Connect with them, find what it is they need, track their responsiveness over time and then pass the most valuable ones to your sales teams at the appropriate state to ensure a higher close rate.

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5/ Closing the loop

As social media budgets continue to grow, along with management expectations management, marketers will need to concretely measure and benchmark their social lead generation efforts. Below are some measures that you should easily perform with your social listening tool

• volume of mentions of your brand
• improvement in brand sentiment ratings
• website traffic
• volume of visits from specific sites
• number of new fans and followers
• number of new social media sites that mention your brand

By combining this info with your traditional data, such as content downloads, submitted lead forms, etc. it should be much easier for you to prove the success of your social lead generation efforts.

By downloading this free guide you will learn how to reach a bigger audience, use your social listening tool in the sales process and drive your contacts into your sales cycle. After reading, you’ll be better equipped for the next generation of social media marketing.

Have you read our November post “10 Inbound Marketing Terms You Need to Know“? That’s where we listed 10 inbound marketing terms to help you understand your marketing department’s lingo. We’re back this month, with 7 more. While that makes 17 und marketing terms so far, by no means an exhaustive list, we just thought it would be more manageable in packets.

Let’s begin:

1. Content Vs Context

“Content” and “context” are intricately linked inbound marketing terms.

Content refers to all the information your company shares with readers, watchers, and listeners — blog posts, videos, podcasts, slideshows, social media updates, which is the basis for your inbound marketing efforts.

However, for your inbound marketing strategy to be truly successful, you need to release the right content at the right time and place using the right medium. This is where context comes in. Context ensures that content is relevant to your audience and their stage in the buying cycle.

2. HTML

HTML, which stands for Hypertext Markup Language, is a language used to build almost all webpages. Most HTML elements use a pair of tags in angle brackets, a start tag and an end tag such as and for making a word bold. Other HTML elements are unpaired, such as 3. JavaScript

JavaScript is the most popular of all programing languages. It allows website designers to add interactivity, animation, and automation to webpages, which can range from simple additional features to highly complex ideas that make a website act more like software than pages of content. Marketers can also use this language to track information including visitors, clicks, and audience movement around a site.

4. On-Page/Off-Page Optimization

SEO (search engine optimization) falls into two distinct categories: on-page and off-page.

On-page refers to the optimization of the actual content on a webpage. Marketers can improve this type of SEO by focusing on content,  meta tags, URLs, and image tags — by ensuring that all of these include the keyword for the page.

Off-page optimization covers the remaining SEO factors, including incoming links, social media, and linking domains, that determine how search engines index a page. Marketers are unable to influence off-page optimization to nearly such an great extent as on-page.

SEO is critical to inbound marketing.

5. Landing Page

Do you remember this term? We mentioned it in 10 Inbound Marketing Terms You Need to Know, but as it’s so important, it deserves a little extra detail.

Landing pages play a key role in turning visitors into leads. To arrive at a landing page, your audience click a hyperlink or button on another part of your website, often your homepage or at the end of a piece of content. Then, they have the chance to obtain an appealing offering in return for their contact information. Your marketing team uses these contact details to nurture leads, with the ultimate aim of converting them into customers.

6. Call-To-Action

The link or button that directs visitors to a landing page is a call-to-action (CTA). To be successful (i.e. make many conversions) you need to think carefully about language and the design of the button, if applicable. Most companies test minor tweaks until they arrive at optimal wording and design.

7. Inbound Marketing Offering Packets

When an interested web visitor provides a business with their contact information (ie. email address), they will receive an offering, which can be an e-book, whitepaper, webinar, free consultation, discount, free trail – something with will entice the visitor along the sales funnel to becoming a customer.

You are very likely to come across most of these terms and more. So, we’ve listed 17 in our two postings. What is your favourite inbound marketing term? Add your term and definition in the comments.

[Photo Credit: JohnSpencerEllis]

Let's say your marketing team is crushing it. All the metrics they use to measure success are green. At the same time, your sales time is not feeling the effects of their efforts and are spending more time prospecting when they should be closing. 

What's going on here?

In many organizations, a disconnect happens between marketing and sales: 

• The sales team says that leads coming in are unqualified. 
• Marketing says the sales team just can't close. 
• There's no system to tell warm from cold leads, high-value leads from low-value ones. 
• There's not even visibility into where the disconnect is occurring. 

Sound familiar?

The first step toward rectifying your marketing and sales alignment is implementing sales development into your existing process. 

What Is Sales Development?

Sales development is the process of warming up leads or prospects and readying them for the eventual buying decision.

A complete sales process includes the following steps: 

1. Prospecting
2. Connecting and qualifying
3. Researching
4. Presenting
5. Handling objections
6. Closing

Sales development falls within stages 1 and 2 of that process, practically on the line between the marketing and sales hand-off. 

Why Have a Sales Development Process?

Sales development is critical in inbound marketing because your marketing team is likely generating leads at all stages of the buyer's journey. In essence, many prospects may not be ready for sales outreach (yet!) at the time they become a lead. If the lead isn't ready, the sales rep will only be spinning their wheels on a call (or, worse, alienating them).

When sales development is used effectively, prospects are primed for decision-making when they’re handed over to sales closers, making the close of the deal easier to achieve.

“Simply stated, the function of sales is to sell directly to the end customer. The function of business development is to work through partners to sell to the end customer, in a scalable way,” says Andrew Dumont, who advises several early-stage startups. Of course, the better your sales development process, the more deals your sales team will close, and the more time they’ll have to focus on selling activities.

Creating a Sales Development Process

Sales development encompasses three stages: 

1. Identifying Marketing and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
2. Engaging those leads
3. Qualifying those leads into real sales opportunities

Sadly, this doesn't just happen on its own, especially if marketing and sales are not aligned.

Here are some steps you can take to begin implementing your process: 

1. Define the qualities of each lifecycle stage after a prospect becomes a lead. 

A website visitor downloading an ebook doesn't automatically mean they are a prospect. For this reason, lumping everyone into the umbrella term "lead" ends up creating disorganization. 

The marketing team's job is to nurture leads who aren't ready yet and identify the ones who are close to a purchasing decision. 

A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a lead that the marketing team flags as being ready for sales. Keep in mind that they could be right, or they could be wrong, which is why the next lifecycle stage is so important. 

A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), on the other hand, is an MQL that the sales team has now flagged as being a qualified prospect. It's then their goal to qualify and engage that SQL until they become a real sales opportunity. 

In order for your marketing team to generate MQLs for the sales team, they need to have a definition of what the sales team is looking for. This isn't meant to put the entire burden of qualifying leads on your marketers' shoulders but rather provide a loose framework to increase the number of MQLs that turn into SQLs and reduce the sales reps' load by eliminating bad fits.

Learn more about this with HubSpot's free lead management course.

2. Identify gaps in the pipeline.

Once you have definitions for each lifecycle stage—MQL, SQL, and Opportunity—you can now look for where the process is breaking down. Ask key individuals in each department questions about their efforts, such as: 

• Who are the best fit leads?
• What are the qualities that immediately disqualify a lead?
• What needs to happen before a sales rep reaches out in order for the conversation to be productive?
• Where are you wasting the most time in the prospecting and engaging stages?
• How can marketing better nurture and qualify leads who are not ready?

These questions may lead to interesting insights into where the gaps are between MQLs and SQLs and/or SQLs and Opportunities. 

3. Establish a process to close those gaps. 

• Is there a necessary step that's falling through the cracks? If so, who will be responsible for it moving forward?
• What marketing activities need to be added for better sales enablement?
• What collateral needs to be created so reps can have more meaningful conversations? 
• How can technology support the alignment between marketing and sales? Lead scoring? Automated lead nurturing?

4. Create a Service-Level Agreement (SLA) between marketing and sales. 

A service-level agreement (SLA) is a contract that establishes deliverables from one party to another. Once clarity has been achieved and gaps identified, you can formalize the relationship between departments with an SLA that documents what needs to happen before, during, and after the hand-off as well as what success looks like. 

The goal here is to get both departments to agree on definitions and roles so that they can take ownership of their duties while understanding how it all contributes to the big picture goals for the organization. 

5. Put the process in motion. 

With clearly defined roles and a shiny new SLA, marketing and sales will be better equipped to support each other, and sales will be better enabled to qualify and close leads. 

Continue monitoring the process, and don't be afraid to alter it as the team adjusts and you learn more about what works best. 

Below are some additional things to incorporate into your sales development process as you invest more into these efforts.

5 Essential Components of Every Sales Development Process

Sales development processes are most effective when they contain several strategic elements, carefully designed to advance prospects through the buying journey. Here’s a look at what your sales development process should include.

1. A CRM That Supports Your Workflows

Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms are only as useful as their ability to support your sales development representatives’ working methods, rather than create additional administrative requirements that don’t make efficient use of time.

Choosing the right CRM and sales software that supports your initiatives enables sales development reps to efficiently gather lead information and conduct prospecting activities. “From a sales perspective, sales development is a formalization of how the team reaches their customers with their products or services. It is all about ensuring that the method used to reach new prospects is cost-efficient and effective in terms of producing the right type of long-term customers,” says Mark Hunter of The Sales Hunter. 

2. A Robust Lead Qualification System

What qualifies a lead? At what point does a lead become a prospect, and a prospect becomes ready for the transition to your sales closing team? Sales development requires clear definitions and processes for qualifying leads for the greatest efficiency. Sending non-qualified leads to sales development wastes valuable time; likewise, sending prospects to sales closers who haven’t been adequately educated on the product or service can result in the loss of otherwise targeted prospects who would have converted with proper lead nurturing. 

These definitions, and the processes for qualifying leads and nurturing processes, represent the movement of a lead through the buying journey. Marketing, sales development, and sales closing teams all require a comprehensive understanding of these concepts.

“With the mindset of specialization in place, build specific processes for your reps to follow. It helps onboard reps quickly and effectively defines best practices for your team. The playbook you build will be a soup-to-nuts guide that includes your hiring strategy to the cadence you use to reach out to prospects,” suggests Greg Klingshirn in an article on Forbes. 

3. A Central Content Management Portal

Sales development representatives make use of a variety of collateral and content assets to educate prospects and qualify leads. Often, these assets exist in silos, forcing sales reps to waste valuable time searching for the right content assets for various prospects or to educate leads on a specific selling point. 

Often, because assets are challenging to locate, reps resort to using materials that are less effective but suit their general needs. When you manage a central database that includes approved sales collateral that’s clearly tagged and classified for various buyer personas and various stages along the buyer’s journey, you’re arming your sales development team with the resources they need to impact buying decisions. 

4. Sales Analytics

In addition to providing easy access to content assets to support sales development teams at every phase of the buying journey, sales analytics provide data to inform sales development representatives on the most effective sales materials aligned with buyer personas and the various stages in the buying journey. 

“Marketing can only optimize programs if they have the data they need to be successful. Sales reps are notoriously bad at maintaining good data and sales leadership cares about sales forecast data (with good reason). On the other hand, well-managed sales development teams are remarkably good at providing data. Sales development teams literally ‘live’ in the CRM application all day and are incentivized to get good data to marketing to make their lives easier,” says Craig Rosenberg in a post on the TOPO Blog. By arming reps with the right materials, for the right prospects, at the right time, your lead qualification process is streamlined and your reps can spend more time doing what they do best: selling.

5. A Means for Collaboration and Feedback

Sales development is truly the bridge between marketing and sales, and ongoing input from both sides of the equation is necessary for continuous improvement. The most effective sales development processes contain a built-in feedback mechanism. This enables marketing teams to inform sales development representatives of nuances and specific challenges related to sales leads while enabling sales teams to provide feedback on the readiness of prospects and the ease of converting prospects passed on by your sales development team.

Wrapping It Up

Whether or not you define it as such, all sales organizations utilize sales development processes in some form. The more carefully you construct your processes and the more thoroughly your marketing and sales teams are trained in each element of the process, the more qualified leads your teams will generate and the more sales they’ll close. It’s worth your time to develop a strategic, data-driven sales development plan to boost efficiency and achieve greater returns.

As the end of the year approaches, between holiday shopping, relatives visiting, and the weather going batty, you have a very important task: creating your small business marketing goals for the New Year.

This can seem like an intimidating task, but it’s an essential part of setting yourself up for success in 2015.

The good news is that you already have a ton of information from this year that you can tap into.

In this post, I will provide a simple strategy you can follow to assess your marketing results and set your goals for the year ahead.

Step 1: Recap what you’ve done

You probably tried a lot of different marketing activities in 2014. Jot down a list of the activities you were involved in.

For most small businesses, this list will include:

• Email Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Website/Blog (Content Marketing)
• Paid Advertising

Step 2: Identify the tools you need to track your results

Once you’ve gathered a list of marketing activities, you’ll need to make sure you have the tools you need to effectively measure your results.

Luckily, most marketing channels have built-in reporting tools you can use to track your activity.

Here’s a quick overview of the tools you’ll want to consider:

• Email marketing: Email marketing services like Constant Contact have built-in email reports that make it easy to track your results.

• Social media marketing: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest all have native analytics platforms you can use to access basic social media insights. With a tool like MarketMeSuite you can get even more detail about your different social media activities.

• Website/Blog: If you’re using a platform like WordPress to host your website or blog, you should have access to insights that tell you how many people are visiting your site. You can also use a tool like Google Analytics to get a more in-depth look at your website traffic.

• Paid advertising: Advertising options like Google Adwords and Facebook Ads provide insights into how your ads performed.

Step 3: Understand the metrics that matter

As you start to look into your reports, you’ll likely see some new terms and have questions about what these metrics really mean for your business.

Here’s a quick overview of some of the most important marketing terms and what they mean for you:

Email Marketing

• Open rate: Individual opens over the total number of emails delivered.
• Click-through rate: individual clicks over the number of emails delivered.
• Bounce: an email that cannot be delivered to the mailbox provider. A bounce is classified as either “hard” or “soft.” Hard bounces are the failed delivery of an email due to a permanent reason, such as a non-existent address. Soft bounces are the failed delivery of an email due to a temporary issue, such as a full inbox.
• Spam: If an individual on your email list reports your email as unwanted or unsolicited, it will be marked as spam.
• Opt-out: An opt-out occurs when one of your contacts no longer wants to receive your emails and unsubscribes from your list.

Social Media Marketing

• Impressions: A look at how many people saw your social post
• Engagement: The total number of likes, shares, and comments on a post
• Reach: A measurement of the size of audience you are communicating with

Website/Blog

• Inbound links: the number of sites linking back to your website or page. This influences your website’s search engine optimization.
• Leads: potential conversions. These are the people who need or are interested in your product or service.
• Bounce rate (website): the percentage of people who land on your website and immediately leave, without viewing any other pages.
• Time on site: a measure in minutes and seconds of how long a visitor stays on your site before exiting.
• Unique visit: a visit from a person to your site or page. This person is not counted more than one time.

Paid Advertising

• Audience growth rate: a comparison of your audience today to your audience yesterday, last week, last month, etc.
• Conversions: the number of people who achieved a desired result. This could be buying a product, signing up for a trial, filling out a form, or any other goal you had for a campaign.
• Funnel: the path that visitors take toward converting. A marketing funnel usually consists of Awareness at the top and descends down with Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty, then Advocacy.

Step 4: Assess and create new goals

As you start to look at your results, you’ll want to pay attention to both your marketing metrics and your business results.

On the marketing side of things, you’ll be able to gain valuable insights into:

• Audience Growth: Have you grown your email list? Are you adding new social media fans and followers? Are more people visiting your website/blog?
• Engagement: Are people opening your emails? Are fans engaging with your posts on Facebook? Are people reading and sharing your content?

But you’ll also want to look at how your different marketing activities are impacting your business. This could include:

• Foot traffic: Are your marketing activities bringing more people into your store/office? Which method is most effective?
• Leads: Which marketing activities are doing the best job at helping you reach potential customers?
• Sales/Calls/Appointments: Are your emails generating sales for your business? Are new customers discovering your business on social media?

Take the most successful tactics and create your high priority goals around these items first. They need to be challenging, yet reachable goals for your business to be set up for success.

Say you use email, social media, and content marketing. You started a blog this past year that has done fairly well. In 2015 the goal could be to increase unique blog traffic by 20 percent. This will involve some smaller objectives to be able to achieve it, such as writing more articles per month and including videos and images to enhance engagement.

Now look at those tactics that weren’t as successful.

Maybe your business put a lot of effort into being active on Twitter, but didn’t see a lot of engagement. Decide whether this is an avenue you want continue to improve. If it is, look at how you can trigger engagement by reaching out to customers, mentioning thought leaders in your field, or running a Twitter ad.

Maybe the issue was you couldn’t measure some of these metrics or gauge the success adequately. This alone could be a goal before you start the New Year. Find affordable ways to measure the missing metrics for the upcoming year.

Orient your efforts around the obvious winners and put some other things on the backburner or drop them entirely. You don’t need to be pursuing every marketing tactic, just the ones that work best for your business.

Step 5: Check in regularly

Come back to these goals every quarter so you can evaluate if you’ll be able to reach them or if they still need to be a high priority. A lot can change in your business over a few months and that can alter the direction your goals should be heading.

Long-term goals can also be forgotten if they aren’t revisited regularly.

Just sitting down and making goals is not enough — you should be checking in with your progress regularly to make the most of the initial plan you’ve put in place.

Yes, there is the possibility your goals might change, but if you don’t continue to evaluate your progress, you’ll have a harder time deciding how to change your initiatives properly.

So, to recap…

• Start by understanding what you’ve done and how you’re going to measure the effectiveness of these different activities.
• Make sure you have the tools you need to effectively measure your results.
• Once you understand what you need to measure, take some to assess your results and set actionable goals for the year ahead.
• And finally, make a point to check back in on your goals to see how your different marketing activities are performing throughout the year.

By sitting down to review and reflect on the previous year of your business you can make next year even more successful.

As a small business owner you have a lot on your plate and using your experience to organize next year’s business goals is a great way to put your business on a clear path in the upcoming year.

Have any questions for goal setting for the year ahead? Let us know in the comments.