Rnordman

Google Webmaster Tools is a powerful resource for website owners, webmasters and SEOs alike. Once you’ve set up Google Webmaster Tools, you might be wondering what to do next. If you need basic tips, check out our Beginner’s Guide to Google Webmaster Tools. If you’ve dug around Google Webmaster Tools and are longing for more in-depth tips and advice, you’ve come to the right place! Let’s dive into five of the advanced Google Webmaster Tools features you should be using to improve your site’s SEO:

1. Adjust Your Sitelinks
When someone does a specific and branded search (in our case below, VerticalResponse), Google displays groups of related results, typically popular pages, underneath the main search result. These groupings are called sitelinks and are considered shortcuts to enable users to navigate a site quickly. In the example below, the sitelinks include: Log in, Pricing, Marketing Blog, Features, Non-Profit and About.

As we mentioned, Google will usually select your most popular pages as sitelinks, and while you cannot choose which pages Google decides to display, you can specify which ones you don’t want displayed. This is a rare opportunity, so take advantage of it by only displaying your best pages! To remove any unwanted results or pages from your sitelinks in Google Webmaster Tools, click on Sitelinks on the left hand side fond under the category Search Appearances. Then, type in the URL of the page you’d like “demoted” or removed and click Demote.

2. Monitor Your Most Linked Content
The Links to Your Site section of Google Webmaster Tools (found under the category Search Traffic) is an awesome way to find out what content people love on your site. Odds are, your homepage is the top linked content, but you might discover that a blog post you wrote 2 years ago is still compelling. This information provides you with the number unique domains that link to your content – The more unique domains that link to a piece of content, the better. If some of your most popular content is a bit older, we recommend taking another look at it and making sure everything is up-to-date. Check to make sure your images are still working, all the links are correct and even try adding a call to action into the post if you don’t have one already, to help drive sales or sign ups.

3. Fetch as Google
Your website might look fine and dandy on your iPhone, but to Google and their special Internet robot, GoogleBot, it can sometimes look very different. With the Fetch as Google tool (found under the Crawl category),you can see how any page on your website looks to the Googlebot. This is important because you can see which areas of a page aren’t rendering correctly for the Googlebot and fix them. If your pages look good to the Googlebot, they’re more likely to be shown in search results.

4. Use the Data Highlighter
SCHEMA Markup, another functionality found in Google Webmaster Tools, allows webmasters to markup HTML pages so that they’re recognized by major search providers. This structured data tool is very easy to use; locate it under Search Appearance and Data Highlighter. Watch the introduction video, click Start Highlighting, then plug in your page and start clicking away. Pick your most popular product page and start marking up the page – it’s as easy as clicking a product and choosing it. You can markup the product image, add a price, availability, reviews and more! When you’re all done marking up, just click “publish” and you’re good to go.

5. Search Your Keyword Ranking Data
Unless you’re manually checking, recording, and monitoring your keywords, you may not have any idea how your website’s keywords are ranking. You can pay for a tool like Moz, which will do the tracking for you, or you can check out the keyword ranking data section of Google Webmaster Tools. Find your keyword ranking data under Search Traffic, then Search Queries. On this page, you’ll see a 30-day rolling view of your traffic and keywords that bring visits to your site.

You can click each keyword for a deeper dive including the display page for that keyword, the position it was ranked in, as well as the number of clicks, and the click through rate for that keyword. This is some of the most valuable information that Google Webmaster Tools provides. If you know what pages are driving visits to your site, spend some time optimizing and testing to make them even more efficient, and optimize pages that aren’t performing well even better.

Now your Google Webmaster Tools skills are sharper than ever, so put them to good use! Know of any other useful functionality in Google Webmaster Tools? If so, share in the comments, and let us know if you have any other questions, too!

Too many salespeople fail to realize the potential that exists from their regular customers with regard to being able to generate new leads. Generating leads with existing customers is much easier than it may appear at first glance. We all know the merits of asking the customer with whom you just finished working for the […]

iBeacon technology has been in the talks since it’s introduction in WWDC, June 2013. This technology, that can be used to deliver path-breaking customer experiences and generate more revenue has been the most disruptive technology in recent times.

Even though beacons (the hardware devices that work on this technology) have created a substantial buzz, there seems to be a lot of ambiguity about how they really work and how they can be implemented. A lot of businesses that are interested in testing this technology, are struggling to figure out how to integrate beacons with their existing mobile strategy.

The first step in launching a beacon strategy is to have a beacon-enabled app. In this post, we discuss the pros and cons of having your own app vs a 3rd party app for your beacon program.

Your own app

If you are a well-known brand, with your app downloaded a sufficient number of app downloads already, you can easily build upon it by adding location-based elements to the app. Having a branded app that is used and valued by your customers will add momentum to kickstarting your own beacon strategy.

Pros:

Beacons help you deliver exceptional customer services and experiences, thus generating revenue. There are a multitude of features you can enable in your beacon-enabled app. Features like in-store navigation, contextual notifications, contactless payments, digital loyalty schemes etc., will help you grab attention and get noticed quickly.

Cons:

If you are a new/small company and do not have your own development team in place, app development can be quite taxing. Handling beacon deployment single-handedly can be quite daunting and expensive, especially if you have multiple branches across the globe.

3rd Party Apps

If you don’t already have an app in place, then this is probably the best way ahead. From PowaTag, a mobile commerce app with 240 leading retail brands on board to Vente-Privee, a leading mobile commerce app in the European market with 5000 partner stores across France, the market is abound with services that offer retailers an opportunity to send their customers relevant contextual messages in-store.

Pros:

The main advantage of using a 3rd party app is that you will be providing your service through an app that already exists on your customers’ smartphones. The app is more likely to have a wider reach than your own app (if any) would have. It’s easier to get the first messages going out and spreading word that you have jumped on the beacon bandwagon too.

Also, if you are only trialling beacons to know if they work for your business, it’s easier to test this via a 3rd party app rather than take the long (time-taking and expensive) route of developing your own app. For example, Chastwood Chase mall in Sydney, Australia recently trialled its iBeacon strategy via a 3rd party app to meet its trial project deadline of 20 days.

Cons:

Integrating with a 3rd party app comes with its own set of disadvantages. Not only will your brand’s message drown under those of others, but with too many brands pushing notifications through the same app, you are at a risk of annoying users. The danger is that as a brand you lose the ability to personalize, to learn from your customers,  collect rich customer insights data and to improve and strengthen your brand and sales.The only way to fight it, is to craft smarter messages that add value to your customers’ context.

While a dedicated app and beacon platform takes loyalty points, gender, age and other such specifics of the customer into account; the standard 3rd party app runs the risk of becoming more ‘spammy’ and less ‘engaging’.

To sum it up – If you already have a branded app that is used and valued by your customers, then you can easily build upon it by adding location-based elements to the app. If you do not have your own app, you can use a 3rd party app. To see the best results from beacons, however, having your own app is the best bet.

Devising your own beacon strategy involves a lot of steps – from procuring, to deploying and managing beacons, to integrating iBeacon technology into your app, and finally going live with beacons. It’s best to take small calculated steps in this direction, with clear goals in mind and you can truly amaze your customers using beacons!

Shanghai's stock exchange is booming again, but for how long? Bloomberg is taking a pretty dim view of the sudden upswing for mainland China's biggest financial centre.

The Shanghai stock exchange composite index was down for the year to date, until September. It's now surging upwards, with a 1% climb today, leaving it an astonishing 28.45% ahead of its January open. It's left the S&P 500 (up a mere 14.26%) in the dust. 

The index is now back to a three-year high. It's some way off a record levels, having peaked at over 6,000 before the global financial crisis hit a few years ago. Here's a chart to put that in perspective:

But the average value of shares traded is back above ¥200 billion ($32.58 billion, £20.63 billion) per day, according to Bloomberg, causing some fears for a correction. 

“It’s a good chance we’re at a market top right now,” David Cui, the China strategist at Bank of America, who’s ranked No. 1 by Institutional Investor magazine, said by phone yesterday. “Based on the experience since the global financial crisis, surging volumes each time marked a temporary top for the market.”

Jumps in trading may signal market peaks because they reflect too much investor “euphoria” toward stocks, according to Cui.

There are endless indications that China's economy is slowing even as Shanghai's equities boom picks up. Growth has fallen from the double-digit levels that were common before the financial crisis, but not everyone is pessimistic. From Bloomberg again: 

“There will still be more leeway to go for the market because the overall monetary policy has slightly changed to support growth,” said Kelvin Wong, a Hong Kong-based analyst at Bank Julius Baer & Co., which has about $296 billion under management. “At least for the near term, the market should continue to edge up.”

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Econsultancy held its regular Digital Cream Singapore earlier this month and it was packed with digital marketing specialists from South-East Asia.  

Around 100 delegates, mostly from brands and other buy-side firms, got together to discuss the future of digital marketing. 

I was fortunate enough to be the moderator of the table concerned with my main area of interest - SEO, PPC, and social advertising.  

We covered topics ranging from how SEO and PPC should be integrated to what new and cool stuff people were doing with paid media on social platforms.

The event was split into three different sessions, so I ended up hosting three different discussions during the day.

Though the topics varied widely on the theme, each of the tables had a 'lean in' moment where all 10 or so participants were actively engaged in the discussion - and offered both advice and voiced concerns about the key topic.

Now, we spoke under 'Chatham House rule' which stipulates that none of the comments can be attributed directly to the speaker - so there are no direct quotes here.  

I can say, however, that each of the discussions involved marketers from household-name brands. That is, these big ideas came from real experiences from organizations with large marketing budgets, not from agencies.

So, with the scenario set, let's move on to the Online Advertising big ideas from Digital Cream Singapore 2014.  I've organized the discussion topics into the initial important questions, the thoughts offered, and some conclusions from an hour's worth of discussion.

1) It's all about content

Questions

• How do I know what to advertise online?
• What should we offer?
• How do we get our message through to customers?
• How can we know if it is working?

Thoughts

• Beware of those who are "deep into digital", but don't have any other marketing acumen. They will miss that you have to create things you can't measure.
• Customer experience is the low-hanging fruit of digital marketing.
• Good customer experience starts with identifying decision-makers and mapping out their process when making the buying decision.  
• What are the pain points on the way? That is your content.
• You need to educate consumers first.
• Build up your brand offline so that SEO / PPC can reinforce it.
• And be sure to edit globally-produced content for the Asia market.

Conclusions

• You need high-quality, comprehensive content to back up any SEO / PPC / social advertising campaigns.
• So how do you know when you have enough? Can you map the customer journey from start to finish with content? And address pain points along the way? If not, then keep trying.
• Once you have the right content, THEN use SEO / PPC / online advertising to:
• Get it to the right people in organizations.
• Drive traffic to micro-sites (avoid 'leakage' clicks to other parts of the sites).
• Add analytics to measure effectiveness.
• Use site tools such as Alexa to compare with competitors.

2) When things get too complicated, use an agency

Questions

• What are SEO best-practices in the industry? Are there even any?
• How do we justify ROI of PPC?
• How can you use untrackable platforms like Instagram to enhance campaigns?

Thoughts

• First know what you're trying to accomplish. Are you building up usage? Or are you trying to make money?
• Then, calculate the value of each conversion. Know the lifetime value to your organization of each additional user/sale.
• From there you need to do your ROI - how much does it cost you to get each additional user.
• And you need an attribution model to ensure that the spend is tied directly to the sale.
• One company justified paying $200 for every click for a particular high-end product using this methodology.
• But knowing attribution and lifetime value (LTV) intimately is essential in order to pay such a sizeable sum for a customer.

Conclusions

• Most companies are far from having well-defined attribution and LTV models. So what can they do?
• Most felt that they should 'try it themselves first' - run their own SEO/PPC/online advertising.
• But the most experienced marketers agreed that you have to know you limits - and hire an agency when you hit them.
• Initial engagement of around $10k and 'see how that goes' before signing a larger contract.
• And try to pay on performance as much as possible.
• There are a lot of metrics, so be sure to choose one which makes sense for your business.
• Avoid easy-to-fudge numbers such as 'impressions.'

3) You have to be innovative to get outstanding results

Questions

• What is the correct balance between internal and external marketing efforts?
• What tools and technologies are people using now to drive better results?
• How can you compete with PPC keywords which everyone else wants as well?

Thoughts

• SEO and PPC were both outsourced. Some did both, others just did one.
• But now that Google is no longer attributing unpaid search terms, it may make sense to integrate the two.
• That way you can choose your SEO keywords from their PPC performance.
• That is, if the keywords are too expensive to buy then really try to get them with SEO.
• Some evidence that SEO can outperform PPC - people are intentionally NOT clicking on ads to get the most relevant content.
• Most agreed though, that it's very difficult to 'move the needle' with SEO and PPC - even when integrated.

Conclusions

• Digital marketers need to consider all innovations available in order to control costs in keyword bidding wars.
• Remarketing was considered to be a key technology to improve campaign performance.
• One organization used 'dynamic creative optimization' (DCO) with remarketing to make sure relevant content appeared to past visitors.
• All agreed that remarketing needs to be short in duration and turned off after a conversion - to avoid being annoying and creepy.
• Now some are using a demand side platform (DSP) with a data management platform (DMP) to target more effectively than PPC.
• All admitted that it was difficult (especially with Baidu) - and that finding a trusted parter was key.
• So, put aside 10-20% of your budget for innovations and pilot any new techniques before committing to it.

So...

It was very interesting to have 30 or so digital marketing specialists talk about their concerns and share, openly, what was going on at their organization regarding SEO, PPC, and social advertising.

From the discussions, I think the most important point was that we are all struggling to improve our search and advertising results. 

To do so, we agreed that you need to try different things. Sometimes outperformance is accomplished with content, other times help from an agency is essential, and almost always you need to be innovative to really make a difference.

Hopefully you've found this short overview of our discussions useful, but I'd be very interested to hear feedback - buy-side or agency - about the state of digital marketing at your company.

Please add a comment below! 

My guest blogger today is Chris Taylor, who founded Actionable Books on the belief that ideas are only valuable when applied. The Actionable Book website is host to incredible resources, like 500 summaries of the world’s best business books in bite-size format and  interviews with various thought leaders and authors. Chris is passionate about helping fellow entrepreneurs connect with ideas as well as their teams.

Book 1: Small Giants
by Bo Burlingham
There’s nothing wrong with growth, but growth for growth’s sake is a broken mindset. Small Giants is fabulous reminder that you can grow a successful business (that makes you happy) by making deliberate choices along the way.

Book 2: A Whole New Mind
by Daniel Pink
While not technically a book on entrepreneurship, A Whole New Mind was the book that introduced me to the world of possibilities in our professional pursuits. It’ll help you reframe how you spend your days & and how to leverage your own brand of genius.

Book 3: The Lean Startup
by Eric Reis
This book saved me over $25000 within 2 weeks of reading it. It provides a practical and easy to remember framework for testing ideas before you launch them, and the strong reminder that, “just because you CAN build something doesn’t mean you SHOULD.”

Book 4: Built to Sell
by John Warrillow
John’s easy to read business fable is packed with great insights on (and great arguments for) building value, even if you have no intention of ever selling your business.

Book 5: Traction
by Gino Wickman
Wickman’s V/TO canvas is practical, simple and flexible. I’ve been using it for years, and it’s a major reason for our growth since 2009.

 

About Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor is a writer, entrepreneur and speaker. He spends his daylight hours helping consultants and employees alike find meaning in their work and discover rich team relationships through his company, Actionablebooks.com.

When he’s not engrossed in work, Chris is an avid traveler, cyclist and snowboarder who loves nothing more than a well prepared meal paired with a decent bottle of wine and good friends.

Chris and his wife divide their time between rural Spain, an island in Panama and Toronto, Canada.

Connect With Chris

Twitter:  @actionablechris

LinkedIn:  ca.linkedin.com/in/chrisjrtaylor/

Blog: Actionable Books Blog

 

Visa has become the latest World Cup sponsor to publicly criticize football's governing body FIFA for its handling of the investigation into alleged corruption over the bidding process that will see Russia holding the 2018 tournament and the 2022 competition being held in Qatar.

Marketing Week reports that Visa  — which has a contract with FIFA to sponsor the World Cup until 2022, at an estimated value of £120 million over a four-year tournament-long period, according to sponsorship agency BrandRapport — is calling for more "forthright communications" from FIFA.

Visa released this statement on its corporate Tumblr page:

"We are troubled by the recent events surrounding FIFA.  In our discussions we have clearly stated that greater transparency and more open, forthright communications is not only paramount, but the only way in which public trust in FIFA, and all that it represents, will be restored. It is our expectation that FIFA will act accordingly and take swift action to resolve these issues in a manner that is meaningful and visible to all."

FIFA has an ever-growing crisis on its hands: it needs to hold on to the support of its sponsors as they account for 40% its commercial revenue, according to its latest financial filings. But that support is waning, at least as far as corporate communications are concerned. Visa's statement comes in the same week Coca-Cola said the handling of FIFA's botched investigation into the bidding process has been "disappointing." It adds to the growing negative tenor between sponsors and FIFA — other sponsors including Adidas, Hyundai, Sony and Budweiser have all previously released statements criticizing FIFA and the media storm it has created surrounding the World Cup bidding process — and brands are looking to distance themselves from the scandals.

A report in the Wall Street Journal this week suggested that Sony is close to terminating its contract with FIFA altogether, partly due to the controversy surrounding FIFA's investigation. The contract is up for renewal this year.

Earlier this month Emirates announced it was ending its sponsorship of the World Cup after an eight-year partnership with FIFA, "following an evaluation of FIFA's contract proposal which did not meet Emirates' expectations."

Most people took that to read that Emirates was uneasy about the corruption claims surrounding the bid process for the World Cup, particularly the 2022 tournament held in Qatar. However, the decision may also have been made because the brand is in a far more prominent place than it was back in 2006, and the brand awareness opportunity a World Cup can offer is no longer necessary. Emirates' contract also came to an end in 2014 anyway.

Sponsors have become increasingly perturbed with FIFA after the governing body released a summary of report on its investigation into the World Cup bidding process, cleaning the winning Qatar and Russia bids of any corruption. Shortly after its publication, the summary was disowned by FIFA's own ethics chief Michael Garcia, who said the report had been "misrepresented."

FIFA announced last week it was lodging a criminal complaint with the Swiss attorney general regarding "possible misconduct of individual persons in connection with the awarding of the hosting rights of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups." The Mail on Sunday reports that five officials with connections to FIFA are at the center of the investigation. But FIFA's ethics judge Hans-Joachim Eckert said there was not enough evidence to question the entire bidding process. 

Awarding the 2022 World Cup to Qatar has been controversial decision. Qatar said earlier this month it will not be able to keep its promise to hold the 2022 World Cup in the summer — completely disrupting European football seasons and potentially clashing with the Winter Olympics — its original $200 billion construction proposal has already seen 12 stadiums cut to eight, and the country's football body is continually fending off accusations of poor workers' conditions and a mounting death toll, which at the last report stood at around 900.

But despite the growing furore FIFA is facing at the moment, most sponsorship experts that Business Insider has spoken to don't think a widespread boycott is likely. The World Cup is an unrivaled marketing opportunity in terms of scale and, if a sponsor were to pull out, one of their rivals would be all-too-glad to step in. Statement's like Visa's appear to be an attempt at brand damage limitation.

SEE ALSO: World Cup Sponsors Are Coming Out And Criticizing FIFA's Disastrous Corruption Investigation

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It's that time of the year — shopping time!

And Black Friday kicks off a great time to go shopping. There will be deals galore. 

According to Mark Cuban, you definitely should take advantage of all the deals. 

A few years ago at Business Insider's IGNITION conference, Cuban gave his advice for investing to people of various incomes/savings. This is one of our favorite things Cuban has ever said, and we like to post it every year around this time as a reminder.

People with $25,000-$100,000 should first pay off any debt they have "because that's a guaranteed return," says Cuban.

If you have extra money, don't put it into public equities, says Cuban. He says you're better off using the "transactional value of cash."

What is that? That means, get the most bang for you buck at times like Black Friday, when everything is on sale.

A lot of people think that investing in stocks is the best way to grow money and avoid inflation. Cuban thinks the market is risky and can very easily vaporize your money.

As for inflation, he says you can fight inflation by using cash to get discounts. So, if you hold onto your cash through the year, then go shopping on Cyber Monday and get 30%-40% off of stuff, you're going to beat inflation. Or, if you go to a store and offer to pay cash if you can get a discount, you can avoid inflation. That's what he calls the "transactional value of cash."

This all changes is you're over $100,000 in savings. In that case, think about investing in public or private companies. Here's a clip with Cuban explaining it all.

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Cyber Monday sales will top $2 billion this year, according to IBISWorld, but Canadian company are likely to take home a tiny slice of the Thanksgiving e-commerce pie. Most of the country’s retailers aren’t doing enough to attract consumers’ online shopping.

“We’re not bad, we’re terrible!” says Retail Prophet founder Doug Stephens. “Amazon is selling four times what their competition combined in Canada does online. That in itself is enough motivation to get Canadian retailers to recognize that they’re asleep at the wheel and they need to get into this game.”

COMMENT: Dear Canadian businesses: time to get it together on Internet commerce »

Canada has become an unlikely hub for the development of e-commerce platforms, with market leader Shopify, big-brand focused Elastic Path and small storefront ShopLocket all coming out of this country’s tech sector. Unlikely, because e-commerce makes up only 3% of total retail economy spending in Canada.

Elastic Path CEO Harry Chemko says the paucity of online shopping options may be driving Canadians to build new platforms that facilitate it. “Part of me thinks that its because Canadian entrepreneurs get frustrated because our e-commerce experiences aren’t as good as they are south of the border,” he says.

MORE: Vancouver’s Elastic Path raises $3.5 million to invest in e-commerce’s wearable future »

Chemko points to a troubling phenomenon for Canadian retailers: some two-thirds of Canadian consumers who shop online make their purchases from U.S. websites. That’s a lot of money leaving the country because it has nowhere to go within it.

There are Canadian e-commerce success stories. Innovative entrepreneurs like ClearlyContacts founder Roger Hardy are re-entering the field with new ventures, new ideas like Vatché Pirjanian’s Pochetti are seeing significant pickup, and Frank and Oak remains one of the country’s most exciting brands. But those few examples aren’t enough to adequately service a population hungry for the convenience and value of online shopping.

MORE: ClearlyContacts.ca founder Roger Hardy places his next big bet on online shoe-shopping »

Here’s the scope of Canada’s e-commerce problem, in one infographic:

Source: Canadian Internet Registration Authority/comScore; Internet Association; Accenture; Google Canada

The post Why Canada has a serious e-commerce problem, in one infographic appeared first on Canadian Business.

We have been talking about B2P (Business to Person), P2P (Person to Person) and H2H (Human to Human) as the changing face of marketing. What’s common to all of these is the fact that marketing is done Brain to Brain. Interesting evolutionary spin on B2B marketing! It’s important to remember this as marketers. You are not marketing to search engines, digital channels and multiple devices. Behind any and all of these is the human brain. You have no choice but to anticipate how a human brain will think and react in order to motivate that targeted brain into positive action. I know this sounds a little bit geeky and futuristic, but in fact, it is going back to the very roots of traditional marketing that are grounded in buyer psychology.

The human brain is a fascinating world that “explorers”, scientists and psychologists have been researching for centuries. What’s different today is the plethora of external stimuli the brain is subjected to, and a huge chunk of that comes from digital media. From the colours in your company logo, to the size and colour of your “click here” button, to the graphics on your landing page, to the content on your blog, to the download link in your email newsletter—there is no limit to the permutations and combinations you can use to effectively influence buyer behaviour. The cherry on top, of course, is personalization. So not only do you need to be acutely aware of marketing to the human brain but you also need to ensure that you are marketing to a specific persona that is your target buyer.

The Content Marketing Institute has some useful insights on how to develop and adapt your content strategy and content marketing campaigns using consumer psychology.

The lines are definitely blurring between B2C and B2B with Brain to Brain being the marriage of the two disciplines. Peter Fader, Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of Business makes a great point, “All industries can learn from each other—if they were willing to accept the fact that the basic behavioral patterns are astonishingly similar across domains. Every company does some things well and other things poorly, but they spend way too much time convincing themselves why their industry (and company) is unique. Instead they should actively look for (and celebrate) the similarities rather than hyping up the (surprisingly small) differences.”

We need to look for, identify and prepare to take advantage of these similarities.

In our efforts to manage buyer expectations, we need to understand and Remember these Distinguishing Characteristics of Today’s Buyer in Order to Build Engagement.

Basic human emotions and instincts are, on average, similar in most people. If we are able to make those fundamental connections in our demand generation and brand marketing activities, the differences are easier to manage. That is the premise of successful brands defining certain core values that their brand promise delivers across the board, in all geographies, across all categories of buyers and for every product or service within their portfolio. Once buyers are able to recognize, respect and feel inspired to engage with those core values that resonate in their brains, they become open to receiving more focused, personalized messaging.

Personalization is not easy, mind you. Here’s a quick refresher on 6 Ways to Humanize Your Brand and Enhance Customer Experience.

Your organization can enhance demand generation by crafting unique campaigns that:

• Proactively seek buyer feedback
• Target specific personas
• Innovate customer communication methodology
• Leverage lead generation solutions that allow a holistic, real-time 360° view of your campaign effectiveness.

Let’s discuss below what other ways we can incorporate this concept of “Brain-to-Brain” in our B2B lead generation.

These are the Top Marketing & Strategy Books of all time.

My favorites, the ones that shaped my thinking and taught me the most. A few leadership and management books thrown in as an extra. These are the books I would recommend to someone who wants to become an awesome marketer, strategist or leader – students, product marketers and CEOs.

I would love to hear what books you think I should add to the list, please add your suggestions in the comments.

I love reading. In addition to Kindle, I have listened to probably a hundred books on Audible.com. I stopped listening to music on my commute, instead I have had the opportunity to learn a lot from dozens of authors. I really recommend it, try Audible here, you get two books free.

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Best Books on Marketing Basics

Positioning: the Battle for Your Mind – by Al Ries and Jack Trout

This is the book that made me realize marketing was my calling after reading it in middle school. Ries and Trout are the pioneers of positioning, a fundamental concept for strategy, branding and for almost every marketing activity. This is a timeless classic. It is easy to read and powerful. If you love this book, you will probably love marketing warfare from the same authors.

Kotler on Marketing – Philip Kotler

Philip Kotler is one of the most influenctial marketing academics, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management. This is an ‘essentials of marketing’ book that covers most of the basics. Highly recommended for novices and for anyone who wants to review the fundamental concepts of marketing.

 

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Best Strategy and Marketing Strategy Books

The Halo Effect - Phil Rozenweig
The author challenges traditional management gurus such as Collins and their “Good to Great” observations. What makes a new company great is strategy. Not culture, not leadership, not 5-point management principles. Just as important, the author talks about the 9 delusions of high performance in business, 9 business traps to be aware of. Every manager should read this. Read a summary of this great book here.

Crossing the Chasm – Geoffrey Moore
This is a classic. The fundamental concepts of these book are critical for anyone in a technology industry as it explains how products are adopted, and what are the behaviors of customers in different stages of the adoption curve. Understanding why and how early adopters, futurists, mainstream and laggard buyers buy is foundational. There are a few more books from the author that expand on this concept, all good reads.

Playing to Win – A.J. Lafley

A fantastic book by the former CEO if Procter & Gamble that clearly explains what is strategy and provides real-world examples of strategy from his time at P&G. There are plenty of stories of products launched, markets entered and strategies that produced results. Lafley bases on the definition of strategy of Where to Play and How to Win to provide a very practical view on strategy.

Understanding Michael Porter – Joan Magretta
Michael Porter is the top authority on strategy. But his books are dense and his concepts are complex. The five forces model is an important framework to understand industries for strategy planning but it is hard to grasp. Joan Magreatta does a wonderful job of summarizing and making Porter accessible. It’s a great read.

 

Trout on Strategy – Jack Trout
For Trout, there is no difference between marketing strategy and strategy. I don’t agree, but still, this is a wonderful ‘strategy for dummies’ book that covers more than the basics. This is an easy and a quick read, with more than a few powerful concepts. Trout has written other books that are fantastic: Differentiate or Die, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing and The Power of Simplicity are my favorites.

 

The Discipline of Market Leaders – Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema
This is a favorite because it very clearly covers three basic strategic options: you can lead with price, service or product – and what are the implications to your company culture and value chain to focus the company in one of those areas. A must read for every CEO.

 

The Pumpkin Plan – Mike Michalowicz

Strategy can be complex, but it does not have to be. This book is a perfect guide for small business owners, freelancers and consultants to understand the power of focus and specialization as the path to success. The most basic principle of strategy could be summarized around this: focus on a market segment or customer need to differentiate and win. This book is an easy read: clear and practical.

In Search of Stupidity – Rick Chapman

This is not a ‘strategy book’ per se. But it covers 20 years of technology strategy mistakes. It is a practical book that shows how strategy and execution shaped today’s technology landscape. It was published some 10 years ago, I hope to see a sequel.

 

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Best Books on Behavioral Economics and the Psychology of Influence

Predictably Irrational – Dan Ariely
Smart marketers know customers buy on emotions and then justify their decisions. In this book you will find fascinating examples of our irrational behavior, and critically important lessons that should guide every marketer. A great introduction to behavioral economics from a psychology professor. I have listened to the audio book more than a few times. Insightful and entertaining.

The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell

Why do some products suddenly reach a tipping point where they go from obscurity to market phenomenon? This is Malcom’s best book, where he explains the role of different types of consumers in how ideas are spread. A primer on influencer marketing that should be read by community managers to CEOs.

 

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion – Robert Cialdini

Cialdini is the authority on the science of influence. This is the foundational book you must read to gain insight into what, why, and how to influence buying decisions. Another cladssic psychology-meets-marketing book. Cialdini’s six principles of ethical persuasion: reciprocity, scarcity, liking, authority, social proof, and commitment.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us -Daniel Pink
Once you get hooked on behavioral economics after reading Ariely, Pink provides another set of practical insights into how consumers behave. Another must read, especially for digital marketers. There is a great video summary on YouTube .

 

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Best Leadership and Management Books

The one Thing You Need to Know – Marcus Buckingham
The author of the Strengths Finder philosophy, provides a useful view into what motivates employees and what managers need to know to be good leaders. This book is ful of practical insight and clearly one of my favorites. You can read a summary on this post that explores the differences between managers and leaders and what it takes to be great at each.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team – Patrick Lencioni

Lencioni’s books are always easy to read as they are written almost like fables. And yet, they capture key insights that are key for any manager. This book (all of Lencioni’s really) should be on every manager’s bookshelf.

 

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Best Communications and Writing Books

Made to Stick – Chip and Dan Heath
This is a classic. What messages stick? how to create ideas and messages that are remembered and effective? I have read this book a few times and it is always a great investment of my time. If you have not read it, stop what you are doing and buy it now to learn how the human scale principle, the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating curiosity gaps can help your ideas and your message .

 

 

Your Attention Please – Paul B. Brown and Alison Davis
Every marketer should write. This is my favorite book on writing clearly and effectively. It is full of examples. Sadly it is a little hard to find. I bought a copy for every member of my team at work.

 

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Good Books that Inspired me to Write a Summary Post

The Age of Context - Robert Scoble and Shel Israel
A view into the near future, the internet of things, and how our world will change with the latest technologies. In this post I explore the implications for marketers

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon - Brad Stone
The story of Amazon.com is fascinating. This post looks at seven insights from the book that made Jeff Bezos successful

The CMO Manifesto - John Ellett
A summary of the marketing manifesto that defines a modern marketer and provides the basic principles for a CMO to build a team and a marketing strategy

The Conversation Company - Steven Van Belleghem
This post is a summary of this book, which is the bible for a social media or community manager. Well written, practical and effective.

Do You Matter? how great design will make people love your company - Robert Brunner
This is a post about the importance of design and usability in the success of any company, based on this book, looking at Apple as the company that best exemplifies this philosophy

The post The Best Marketing & Strategy Books appeared first on The Adaptive Marketer.

You’ve probably heard the buzz on the web (link predictable revenue new PDF), in industry events, and virtually everywhere sales leaders congregate.

Sales development is in.

And rightly so.

Breaking the sales process into two distinct functions (openers and closers) is a more efficient way to generate revenue than using traditional sales strategies.

Sure, inbound leads are in amazing way to generate revenue, but most CEOs I know want to grow faster than that. So they decide to employ an outreach team, it may be called business development, sales development, BDR’s, SDR’s, etc…but the end goal is to generate more qualified appointments and demonstrations with targeted people at targeted companies.

With over 330 clients and 14,000+ users of our sales development software we’ve seen it be wildly successful.

We’ve also seen it fail miserably.

If you’d like to avoid the latter, have a look at the three biggest mistakes you can make when building a sales development team:

***Biting off more prospects than you can chew.

Sales development is a process. Think of your prospects as the raw materials and your efforts as throughput. You want to maximize volume without significantly sacrificing sincerity. Take a look at these two scenarios:

1. Generate a list of 10,000 names and drop then in your marketing automation grinder 5 emails over a 45 day period, pitching content and calling people when they click links or take an offer. In this scenario.

2. For each rep on the team, you generate 50 new names per day (targeted people at targeted company). You send a semi-customized email (though your mail server, not a transactional service) and follow up on that contact through phone, other emails, and social touches until you get a yes/no.

In scenario 1, you’re spamming. Your grinding a lightly curated list and not giving it any touch. Your prospects will know this. The emails will show up in third tabs and spam filters and by the time you get to the last email, many people won’t even work for those companies anymore. You’ll blow past helpful OOO responses with timeline requests and direct dials and your marketing automation system will likely screw up on sending multiple emails even after someone has responded.

In scenario two you’re massaging the list. You’re taking a small grouping of targeted people at targeted companies that are likely still at those companies and you’re reaching out with sincerity. You’re using your own mail server so you’re avoiding spam traps, you’re able to see out of office responders and reply accordingly. Most importantly you’re able to follow your own cadence that you’ve determined works the best for reaching out to your prospects so you can set the most appointments.

As the CEO sales loft this is the biggest mistake I see in sales development.

I think companies believe that they are different and that this spam scenario will work for them. I’ve rarely seen it pan out.

Social media is a bit of a black hole sometimes. You start with the best of intentions – connecting on LinkedIn with a new prospect, but somehow you always end up staring at a hilarious YouTube video that someone posted. As a result of our ADD ways, some companies have banned the sites, making it so that workstations can’t even access them. But we argue that social media is exactly where your employees should be spending their time. Sound a little strange? Or maybe you agree?

Either way, here are 4 reasons that MSP sales reps should spend more time on social media:

The perfect substitute to that ridiculous “follow up” e-mail.

Talk about awkward. There’s nothing worse than trying to unearth a cold prospect with the dreaded “follow up” e-mail. The most useless e-mail on the planet, sales reps are used to having to pull this one out of their toolbox to re-engage prospects. But social media is the perfect way to stealthily pop back into the lives of your prospects. Connecting with them on LinkedIn reminds them that you’re around, same with following them on Twitter. And because most MSPs are selling business to business, retweet and share their posts and you’re likely to see them return the favor, which is a masterful way for them to check out your content.

Pushing leads down the funnel.

I know a few executives at MSP companies that are huge fans of “leave behind” material. Being a hippie myself, I’m not such a big fan, because generally those collateral materials end up finding their way into the nearest trashcan as the receptionist inevitably cleans off her desk at the end of the day. Using social media, though, allows you to offer content to your leads and helps you educate them without having to use “leave behind” material. It’s environmentally friendly AND great for nurturing and educating leads.

It’s the ultimate networking event.

I hate networking. I’m really awful at it. In my first sales manager position I would take a stack of business cards and force myself to give them out, vowing that I wouldn’t leave until they were gone. Once the drink tickets are gone, things always get a little awkward. While you can’t discount the value and connections that these types of events have – you also know that time is money. The more people you can touch at once, the better your chances are of success. Ever seen a viral article or video on Facebook or Twitter? I rest my case.

You’re a TECHNOLOGY company.

I hate to break the news to you, but you can’t be old school forever. You are, after all, a technology company. You sit in front of customers and tell them every day that it’s time to evolve their technology or risk becoming obsolete. Even if social media WERE just a trend that will eventually fall to the wayside (it’s not), we’re pretty sure it’s your job to investigate it. Not being on social media is a little suspect. No one wants to be seen as outdated, particularly if you’re trying to pitch your prospects tools to manage and update their technology.

It’s your job to bring in sales and while marketing can help bring in the leads, they can’t help you close them. That part is up to you. Use the tools available to you to help you qualify prospects, push leads down the funnel and network like a master. Adopting technology shouldn’t be a new concept to you and social media is just that – a new technology tool to help you on your way to success. It’s time to spend a little more time on social media.

If you’re thinking about how to get started with inbound marketing, you may not know exactly where to begin. Endless online resources say that you should blog, research keywords, write whitepapers, buy marketing automation software, and more – but where should you begin?

Instead of randomly blogging about various industry topics and creating content without a purpose, you’ll need a focused marketing campaign. A campaign with coordinated parts and that speak to your ideal customer.

Follow these steps to get started off on the right foot with your inbound marketing campaign.

Create your buyer persona(s)

Before you start producing content, make sure you’re producing content your target customers are actually searching Google for. A great first step here is creating your buyer personas.

Buyer personas are fictitious representations of your ideal customers. Your buyer personas should be generalized summaries of ideal customers that you come into contact with. Is it a company CEO, an HR manager, or a procurement specialist? Your buyer persona will help you figure this out.

Additionally, buyer personas help you visualize what your ideal prospect deals with on a daily basis. Once you understand their pain points, you’ll be able to attract more of them by writing content that speaks to their needs.

You can create your buyer personas through interviews with current customers, or just from being a good observer and listener when you talk to new prospects in your target industry.

HubSpot has a customizable template that can help you get started mapping out your buyer personas.

Create your blog

Instead of randomly blogging about various industry topics and creating content without a purpose, you’ll need a focused marketing campaign.

If you plan on attracting the types of people that you defined in your customer personas, then you’ll need a blog. Simply optimizing your service or company pages for search engines doesn’t cut it anymore, because those pages don’t help the early stage buyer that’s searching Google for information.

Creating a blog can be a bit of a technical hurdle, but the biggest challenge will actually be figuring out what to write about. Planning out your blog is a great way to keep organized, create content on a regular schedule and to make sure it focuses on a topic that your potential customer is looking for.

To get you started, try writing down a list of very specific topics that come up in sales conversations or as popular topics in your customer’s industry. Take that list and form each idea into a blog post title, one per week.

For more information on writing your blog and optimizing it, you might want to check out these articles:

• 14 Reasons Why Your Business Should Start A Blog
• How to Get 3 Months Worth of Blog Topics From Your Next Trade Show

The key to your blog posts is that they are full of information that speaks to your potential customer’s pain points. You should be trying to solve their problems with innovative ideas and solutions, not pitching your product or service.

For example, if your ideal customer experiences corrosion in their boiler system, then you need to write about what causes corrosion in boilers, possible ways to reduce corrosion, etc.

Need some help planning your blog? The same blog planner template we use for clients is available for download for free, and includes instructions. Use this Excel template to define the purpose of your content, then list out all of the blog titles you want to produce. To take it a step further, add a column for post date to hold yourself accountable to produce this content on a regular schedule.

Get started writing and promoting

Once you have your blog topics and schedule mapped out, get started writing blog posts, publishing one per week. So that as many people see your blog as possible, you might want to send your email list a digest once or twice per month, and you’ll want to link your blog to your social media profiles so they show up there as each blog is published.

Start generating leads

Ultimately, you’ll need more than a blog to generate leads. You may already have white papers, product guides, industry guides or other information that relates to blog posts you write. Create landing pages with lead forms so people can download them in exchange for some contact information.

At the end of each blog post (or within the text of the articles), include a link to the landing page that contains the related information.

If this all seems like too much to handle, or if you’re unsure if you’re company blog is really going to get the kind of new business you’re looking for, you can sign up for an inbound marketing opportunity review here on our website and have an expert review your work.

With some structure and some focus, you’ll be able to attract new customers as they search Google. Once they are on your website, you’ll be able to demonstrate your expertise and get more business opportunities as a result.

This article is part of DBA, a new series on Mashable about running a business that features insights from leaders in entrepreneurship, venture capital and management.

Incubators were once a niche enterprise — in 1980, there were really only a dozen or so in the entire United States.

Now there are thousands— not just in Silicon Valley, but all over the world. Despite their rapid rise in popularity, incubating is still fairly risky business. By some estimates, the success rate is no better than the companies that they are nurturing — around 10%.

More about Venture Capital, Small Business, Startups, Dba, and Business

4 Reasons to Consider Revising Your Buyer Personas in 2015

Even if you’re new to the world of inbound marketing, you’re likely familiar with the term “buyer persona”; it’s that aggregate of information about your most ideal buyers that helps you produce content and engagement that appeals to them. When you have a buyer persona in place, your marketing efforts are much more nuanced, relevant and effective. Unfortunately, like most things, you buyer personas can become irrelevant to your marketing efforts as both your customers and your brand evolve over time.

As 2015 quickly approaches, we got to thinking about certain reasons you may want to revise your company buyer personas. Based on everything we know about marketing, social media and the changing landscape of branding efforts, making revisions to your buyer personas might be one of the smartest moves you can make in the coming year.

Here are a 4 reasons to consider revising your buyer personas in 2015.

1. Content Will Be More Important Than Ever

If you thought producing great content was important to your marketing efforts in years past, you’ll likely be surprised by content’s monumental status in 2015.

In 2015, customer education will be king, says Venchito Tampon, Content Marketer and Link Building Specialist with Digital Phillipines: “Educating the target audience will now become the top selling point of many brands from whatever industry they are in.”

Because the gap between the online world and the real world is swiftly narrowing, offering the most relevant content to your potential customers will be the difference between winning their attention and losing them to a competitor, perhaps one who can provide them with more relevant content and branding efforts. Don’t underestimate the fierceness of competition in the modern customer’s plane of vision; buyer personas will help you gain an angle by providing you with a more complete picture of your ideal buyer.

With content occupying such an important spot in your marketing efforts, it’s critical to have buyer personas in place that reflect the most recent, most accurate online data for the activities of your ideal customer. With this information on hand, you can create content that is most likely to appeal to them and get them more deeply involved with your brand.

2. The Importance of Personalization Will Continue to Increase

Like content, the importance of personalization in your branding efforts will skyrocket in the coming year, making it vital that your company adapts. Making your content more personalized and ensuring that the audience it reaches not only finds it relevant but will feel compelled to click on it are necessary tasks if you want to stay visible in your marketing efforts.

Personalization of email marketing campaigns, content and social media engagement efforts can pay great dividends for your company in terms of connecting with ideal customers; personalized emails can improve click-through rates by up to 14%.

Revising your buyer personas will ensure that you have the information you need to make your marketing efforts as personalized as possible, leading to better results for your content, your emails and your social engagement.

3. The Customer Has Changed

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the average online customer’s buying experience has changed dramatically in the past few years. Similarly, the buyer personas that you rely on to guide your content and online engagement efforts should also change.

The way that customers acquire information about products or services is very different than it used to be; customers are doing their own independent research on companies and brands long before they’re ready to make a purchase. Standing out to your ideal customers amid the vast sea of options at their fingertips means doing the research, compiling the data and knowing the specifics on what can motivate that ideal customer to make a purchase. Revising your buyer personas will help present this important information in a compact and succinct format.

4. Data Is More Important Than Ever

The importance of accurate buyer personas relate closely to the rise of data and quantifiable measurements of customer activity. As SEO, sales and marketing become more intertwined, it’s increasingly important to pay attention to what the reported data tells you about you customers, their buying habits, their reaction to your website and the influence of your branding efforts.

Using data in the efforts to revise your buyer personas can yield a variety of useful information, such as how long it takes your customers to research before eventually buying, which content drives the most interaction and gets the most shares, and how much time it takes a customer to begin showing legitimate loyalty to your brand.

As the usefulness of data increases, so will the ease of creating more accurate buyer personas.

There are plenty of other reasons to consider updating your buyer personas for 2015; what are some of yours?

Using Negative Keywords is a Positive Thing to Do

While it may sound counterproductive to marketers to use “negative” keywords for improving their ROI, actually the strategy can be quite helpful to your SEM and PPC campaign.

How Including Negative Keywords are Beneficial to a Campaign 

By using negative keywords, you are communicating to Google what variations of keywords you do not want to utilize in your PPC advertisements. For instance, if you are selling a crystal necklace, you may want to include the negative keywords of “cheap” or “free” in your negative keyword listing. Doing so will limit the number of people who are looking for cheap or free jewelry. By adding the words, you are filtering out any click-throughs from visitors who want inexpensive jewelry.

Find Out Which Keywords are Not Productive to Your Campaign

Using specific keyword types, such as phrase match, modify-broad or broad keywords, typically does not matter when you are bidding for keywords, whether or not they are negative. Instead, it is more important to find out which of your keyword phrases are producing the click-throughs you don’t want. Look at the interface for Ad Words to source the information.

Looking for Clues 

By referring to the “Dimensions” area in your Ad Words stats, you can find out which keywords have triggered unwanted click-throughs time and again. The main cause of unwanted clicks is usually a broad match keyword. Going through keyword phrase information on your Ad Words platform can give you the data needed to compile a negative keyword list.

How to Incorporate Negative Keywords in Your PPC Campaign

To include negative keywords to an SEO and PPC campaign, choose the campaign and then select the “keywords” tab. A hyperlink that says “negative keywords” is found towards the bottom of the page. By using this link, you can include the negative keywords that are adding to the unwanted clicks and impressions in your PPC campaign.

Why Using Negative Keywords is Important to Your Bottom Line

Negative keywords are helpful in filtering out click-throughs that will not be of any benefit to your PPC and marketing campaign. Therefore, using the keywords will reduce the amount you pay for PPC as well as increase your rates of conversion. Using negative keywords enables you to target the customers you want with more specificity. If you are going to conduct a PPC campaign, you will defeat the whole purpose of attracting niche visitors if you don’t make use of negative keywords as well.

One Final Note: Examples of Negative Keyword Lists 

Preventing “Bargain” Buyers from Visiting Your Site 

If you want to avoid “bargain” buyers from visiting your site, then using certain negative keywords can be a boon to your PPC efforts. Words such as cheap, bargain, discount, discounted, free, inexpensive, liquidation, overstock and closeout should be included on this kind of negative keyword list.

Preventing Price Comparisons

You may also want to prevent comparison shoppers from visiting your site. Negative keywords, such as pricing, price, prices, quote and quotes are all good words to add to this type of negative keyword list.

101 Business Solutions through Insight offers benefits of Affiliate Authors, Online Profile, Newsletters, Commenting, Key Differentiator, Advanced Search, Sharing Insights, Social Sharing &Activity. Register now as Affiliate Author to unlock your Insight score, publish insights ina Business context and build your competitive advantage. Best of all, it's FREE.

Your 30s are typically a time of settling down. You can't get away with many of the risks or bad habits that may have characterized your 20s.

We looked through the Quora threads "What is the biggest mistake you made in your 30s and what did you learn from it?" and "What do you regret not doing in your 30s?" in addition to author Mark Manson's "10 Life Lessons To Excel In Your 30s" and noticed recurring messages.

For instance, many 30-somethings focus so much on raising a family and building a career that they neglect important relationships and ignore opportunities they may never get again.

We've collected below the most common advice from those who have already experienced their 30s.

1. They spend time with people who add value to their lives.

Manson collected over 600 responses from readers who have lived through their 30s, and one of the most common pieces of advice was to stop spending time with those who don't treat you well and instead spend more time with loved ones.

"Don't just work. Make memories. The older you get, the harder it is to make meaningful relationships," writes Microsoft product designer Michael Dorian Bach on Quora.

The entrepreneur and blogger James Altucher writes on Quora that you also shouldn't forget that your parents grow older as you do. "When I was 34 I hung up the phone on my dad in an argument and never returned his calls. Six months later he had a stroke and died. A week before that he had emailed me to say hello but I didn't return the email. I'm sorry, Dad."

2. They pursue their loftier aspirations.

Twenty-somethings often begin their careers with big goals that they set aside to settle for a job they're not passionate about. Before they know it, a temporary job becomes a career.

An anonymous poster writes on Quora that the biggest mistake of his or her 30s was to become "addicted to a monthly salary," in the sense that he or she chose job security over career satisfaction.

While it's certainly more difficult to start a business or switch industries when you're 35 as opposed to 25, it's not impossible and may be the right choice.

Vera Wang, for example, didn't enter the fashion industry until she was 40 and now she's one of the world's premier designers.

3. They don't obsess about the future.

Manson recounts that one of the biggest lessons of his 20s was that there's not a magical moment where you start feeling like an adult who has it all figured out. He was happy to learn that his older readers said the same thing about their 30s.

"Unless you are already dead — mentally, emotionally, and socially — you cannot anticipate your life 5 years into the future. It will not develop as you expect. So just stop it. Stop assuming you can plan far ahead, stop obsessing about what is happening right now because it will change anyway, and get over the control issue about your life's direction," his reader going by Thomas writes.

It's healthy to have goals for you and your family, but don't stress out over specifics. Acknowledge that you still have plenty left to learn and that you're going to continue to grow as a person in unexpected ways.

4. They decide whether they want kids or not.

Kids certainly are not for everyone, but the majority of those who wrote to Manson or posted on Quora say they realized that putting off having children for an ideal situation is a bad idea. If you want to have kids, have them before it's too late.

"You don’t have the time. You don't have the money. You need to perfect your career first. They'll end your life as you know it. Oh shut up … Kids are great. They make you better in every way. They push you to your limits. They make you happy. You should not defer having kids," Manson's reader Kevin writes.

5. They take care of their health.

With a growing list of responsibilities, one of the first things that can go is making exercise and healthy eating habits a priority. But think of putting forth a little effort in both areas as a long-term investment.

"Be healthy. That is priority 1. Don't get into your 30s being slow and tired all the time. It sucks," Michael Dorian Bach writes on Quora.

Adam Dehner says on Quora that "at 41, I've got a list of physical complaints that might not have come about had I been healthier."

6. They establish a financial foundation for the future.

Hopefully you used your 20s to figure out a way to pay back the student loan debt statistics say you most likely had after graduating, and also started saving. But if you hit 30 and you've set nothing aside, it's not too late. By this point, though, you need to start saving for your retirement.

Altucher writes about the many times in his 30s that he bet practically all of his money on a business venture and then lost all of it. He is doing well now, but he looks back on his failures as the result of recklessness.

Determine what percentage of your paycheck you can easily live without and consider setting up an automatic investment in a 401k and/or other savings accounts.

7. They still enjoy themselves.

And finally, just because you're not in your 20s anymore doesn't mean you need to stop having fun. Bach writes on Quora that he spent most of his 30s chasing money, and it only made him unhappy and more cynical about life.

Quora user Jeff Miller adds that he learned the best times in his 30s were going on dates with his wife and playing with his kids. Among all participants, there was a recurring theme that none of the money you work hard to make matters if you're not enjoying life.

SEE ALSO: Jerry Seinfeld Explains How He's Remained Consistently Successful

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: What the Chinese saying 'The ugly wife is a treasure at home' actually means

As Thanksgiving in the United States is upon us once again, I’d like to take time to thank all those companies who strive to make their customers and prospects more intelligent through the use of great content.

But first … a personal story.

Most people don’t know this, but I grew up around a funeral home. My grandfather, Leo Groff, was an entrepreneur who ran the largest funeral home in Sandusky, Ohio (my hometown). While my friends were out playing basketball or pick-up baseball games, I was hanging around the funeral home watching my grandfather and my uncle work (this was not as bad as you are probably imagining). Actually, my grandfather was one of the main reasons I wanted to start my own business.

By the time I was in my teens, my grandfather was around the funeral home mostly to stay busy, while my uncle ran the business. While I did some odd jobs around the funeral home, my main job was to take my grandpa to lunch and listen to his stories.

One story in particular resonated with me. During the Depression, many of my grandfather’s customers didn’t have the money to pay for a funeral. Loved ones would come to my grandpa, telling him that they had no money, but still wanted a proper burial for their deceased. So, my grandfather would do the embalming and funeral services in exchange for rings, lockets, bracelets, and trinkets of all kinds.

A few years before my grandfather passed away, he showed me this old box, which had to be well over 50 years old. In the box were the rings, lockets, bracelets, and trinkets that paid for those funerals. When I saw this, I asked why he didn’t sell them for money or give them back. He said, and I’ll never forget this, “Back in those days, pride was all some people had. They had nothing but needed something. They were able to keep their pride by giving me these pieces of jewelry. So I couldn’t give them back. I also couldn’t sell them because each of these pieces is a reminder of a small thing that I could do that made a huge impact in someone’s life.”

Why did I tell you this? Because I learned two things from my grandfather:

1) Helping others is everything.

2) Amazing storytelling gets you most places in life.

That’s how I feel about the art and science of content marketing. Sure, we aren’t saving the world here as content marketers, but I believe we can do well for people and our companies at the same time by honing the practice.

During this special time of the year, thanks to those organizations that work so hard to create value outside of the products and services they offer.

And, thanks to all those organizations around the world that believe in, and practice, the following content marketing truths:

1. The content is more important than the offer.

2. A customer relationship doesn’t end with the payment.

3. Printed marketing doesn’t stop with the full-page advertisement.

4. “Being the content” is more important than “surrounding the content.”

5. Interruption isn’t valued, but usefulness is.

6. Internal marketing always takes precedence over external marketing.

7. Focusing on what the customer wants is more important than what you have to sell.

8. The competition can copy everything you have except your brand. The way you communicate is the differentiator (the only one).

9. Communicating directly with customers should be your first, and best, choice.

10. Marketers are already publishers (most just don’t understand this yet).

11. Today’s traditional publishers are scared of marketers.

12. Without content, community is improbable, if not impossible.

13. The marketing brochure should be stricken from all strategic marketing plans.

14. Lead generation is only one small part of the marketing picture.

15. Hiring an editor is not a want, but a must for most organizations.

16. No matter the medium or the provider, someone is always selling something (yes, even media companies).

17. Building your content ship on rented land is always a bad investment.

18. Ninety percent of all corporate websites talk about how great the company or product is and forget about the customer’s informational needs.

19. Ninety percent of all corporate websites are horrible.

20. In the next five to seven years, the majority of content in which consumers engage will be corporate media.

21. Buyers are in control; the traditional sales process has changed, and relevant content lets organizations into the buying process.

22. The Chief Content Officer is the CMO of the future.

23. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. This means that for content marketing to be effective, we need to change the culture first.

24. The most effective content marketers document their plan and refer to it often.

25. Customers want to be inspired. Be the inspiration!

Thank you to those companies that get the value of content marketing. Did I miss anything? If so, add it below.

Want to learn more about storytelling from Leo Groff’s grandson? Get Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, & Win More Customers by Marketing Less by Joe Pulizzi.

Image courtesy of Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 25 Content Marketing Truths appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

When you think about your buyers as a collective, often they become a bunch of nameless, faceless beings you must pursue, persuade, and close. You might also slip into auto-pilot and treat each one the same—run them through the same process you've been told to follow.

You know, however, each one is different and that people buy things, not companies. Not only that, but you know people buy from people they like and trust. The key is remembering that when you get busy and worried about making sales.

As we head into Thanksgiving weekend in the United States, I thought I'd share some advice from sales professionals to help you humanize your sales practices. These tips will help you improve relationships with clients, win more sales, and even help eliminate that perception of being a sleazy salesperson.

When it comes to evaluating lead generation tactics and channels, most B2B marketers are interested in three basic performance characteristics – the quality, quantity, and cost of leads produced. A recent report by Software Advice provides insights on marketers’ perceptions regarding the effectiveness and efficiency of several popular lead generation techniques.

The 2014 B2B Demand Generation Benchmark report is based on a survey of 200 B2B marketing professionals. The survey was designed to elicit input from marketers regarding what channels, offers, content types, and technologies they are using in their demand generation programs and which of those techniques and tools are most effective and efficient. Specifically, the survey asked for marketers’ perceptions regarding the productivity of 15 lead generation tactics:

• Trade shows & events
• Search engine advertising
• In-house email marketing
• Print, radio & TV advertising
• Referral/advocate marketing
• Third-party webinars
• Organic search
• Social media advertising
• Third-party lead originators
• Social media (non-ads)
• Telemarketing/cold-calling
• Third-party email marketing
• Retargeting advertising
• Direct mail
• Display advertising

I keep seeing that statistic – you know – the one that talks about how far through the buying process prospects are before they talk to salespeople. It’s flawed.

Here are a few reasons why:

• Prospects don’t care if they’re interacting with marketing or sales, they care about the quality of the conversation or interaction and that it’s giving them what they need.
• Salespeople are perfectly capable of using the tools available today to engage with prospects across all stages of the buying process. And they should be competent at all of those conversations.
• Marketers can facilitate interactions by sharing the strategic problem-to-solution story across the continuum of the buying process to support both buyers and salespeople in having more relevant conversations.

For some reason, we haven’t embraced these realities collaboratively.

Here’s the question that we need to answer:

What would happen if both marketers and salespeople were so damn relevant that there was no distinction between the disciplines?

In other words – if every interaction with a buyer is based on context and relevance, does it really matter if it’s initiated or extended by marketing or by sales?

Both functions are essentially focused on the same end goal – to drive revenues.

But, most of the time, we act like we’re on two different planets.

I know that marketers may be thinking, hey, wait a minute…marketing doesn’t close sales for complex products. That’s not our job!

Or, if you’re on the sales side, you could be thinking – there’s no way I’m creating marketing content and running campaigns. SO not my job!

Got it. But you’re in the weeds. You’re not looking at the coordination and collaboration that can end this artificial line in the sand that we’ve made up to divide the two sides of the B2B buying process.

It’s not about the work flows, it’s about the interactions.

Consider the Value of Creating a Continuum Experience

Marketing and Sales need to jointly take responsibilty for the buying process. There’s no wall in the middle – or even two thirds of the way through. We need to start looking at the buying process as a continuous experience that sometimes plays to the strengths of marketing and other times to those of the sales team.

Consistency of messaging and story across all channels and cross-functionally must become our foundation. When we’re all on the same page, it truly makes the label of marketing or sales irrelevant. Even better, it enables growth by building credibility. And that results in trust that earns more conversations.

When a buyer is working to solve a problem or meet an objective, he or she needs to gather enough information that they are confident about making a decision that will not adversely impact their careers. They need a level of certainty that the solution will do what it promises and that it’s necessary to go outside the company to get it. They need the ammunition to build the case, gain consensus from the others involved with consideration to each unique perspective and the ability to secure budget.

We, as marketers and salespeople, must help them do all of this. And it won’t happen when marketers push out content “How-to” articles that are too tactical for buyers to learn what they need to know or when sales calls after a white paper download to try to pitch a demo.

Find Your Story

Every company has a story that distills the distinct value they provide that sets them apart from competitors. Why aren’t more of us finding it and making it the foundational pivot point for increasing our relevance to and engagement with buyers and influencers?

Rather than marketing programs or sales processes, we should be focused on buyer initiatives first and make them the drivers for what we do.

When we can take this approach, then we’re prepared to interact competently with buyers regardless of where they are in the buying process. But, we’ll also be able to identify that place and help to address the unmet needs that help them decide to embrace change and trust you to help them. That’s because whether we’re marketers or salespeople, we’ll be able to see the big picture from the buyer’s perspective.

Creating new deal flow has become the toughest challenge in the mergers & acquisitions and corporate finance word. There is lots of money and a limited number of quality projects. This affects, Bankers, Financiers and Dealmakers. At 101 Business Insights you can leverage off our team of professionals, to ensure you are adequately prepared, set the right price, get the maximum exposure to pre-qualified potential buyers and address all the transitional issues ahead of time

Each year, as another Q4 comes to a halt, business people are forced to look back at what they did right and wrong over the past year, and start planning for the next.

It’s called professional reflection, and most of us do it while in a food coma after stuffing our faces with turkey, ham, and pie over the holidays.

This season, I urge you to consider some of the following content marketing predictions, based on a year’s worth of research. Hopefully they’ll help you sketch out your overarching 2015 content marketing strategy.

One thing’s for certain, it’s going to be another dynamic, adaptive year.

Kapost’s 2015 B2B Content Marketing Predictions

1) Whitepapers will be created more often, and used more frequently, throughout the funnel.

Executives are on an eager hunt to find the content asset that drives the most revenue and serves as many channels, products, and regional offices as possible. Our prediction? That will be the whitepaper. Study after study suggests that whitepapers are the type of content “decision-makers” consume. Interactive and playful content spurs engagement, but these data-heavy and analytical assets close deals.

B2B buyers like whitepapers because they’re credible resources to bring into a meeting with an exec (whereas it might feel unnerving to base a purchase decision on a funny infographic). And salespeople like whitepapers because they showcase product value propositions and competitive analyses in a data-based way.

And here’s a guide for creating a good whitepaper.

2) Big Data analytics will start to replace “gated assets.”

By 2015, Big Data will become more colloquial, possibly starting to reduce the need for gated content assets. Content will still be the driving force behind buyer engagement—but the process will change. After all, we know consumers hate entering their information into a form, and marketers are aiming to serve the buyer.

Big Data is our leading candidate for dethroning form submissions as the best way to get and leverage buyer information, once and for all.

3) LinkedIn will continue to dominate industry and marketing news. And will be the dominant social channel for content distribution.

In 2014, LinkedIn emerged as the #1 platform for professional content sharing. In 2015, this will not only still be true, but amplified. LinkedIn is making powerful strategic moves suggesting that it wants to be a noteworthy player in the marketing technology space: it bought Bizo, it launched “posts,” and it now has featured news.

Curious which basket you should drop you social budget? We’re thinking LinkedIn.

4) Facebook’s influence with respect to B2B marketing strategies will dissipate.

Since 2013, B2B marketing’s use of Facebook has diminished. The platform has become a general news aggregator, with no apparent niche. Photos are on Instagram, messaging moved to SnapChat, status updates are passé, and I’m not sure “likes” or “fans” were ever successfully monetized. Copyblogger even “killed its Facebook page because of that. Therefore, marketers are finding little need to leverage the platform for anything, except maybe targeted ads.

5) There will be significant rise in “VP of Content Marketing” roles.

As content marketing becomes more of a staple in marketing strategy, more titles will reflect the domain. Already, content marketing titles are on the uptick, with a more than a 5% increase in job titles over the past year. We predict this will increase into 2015, with upwards to 10% increase in job titles for senior level marketers. Specfically this will mean that people who once were “VP of Marketing” might become “VP of Content and Marketing”

6) There will be a decline in marketing technology options.

Remember Scott Brinker’s 2014 marketing technology supergraphic? That won’t get bigger in 2015. Consumers and marketing technologists are tired of struggling to manage a complicated marketing SaaS stack. Their fed up with “additional tools,” “new platforms,” or the “next best thing.”

In 2015, we predict a contraction of marketing technologies. Some will go out of business, others will merge. But regardless, there will be fewer platforms and more technology efficiency.

We hope it moves from this:

To this:

7) Wearable technology will affect marketing tactics.

By the end of 2015, wearable technology won’t be making headlines as the “newest trend,” but I’ll be damned if it’s not on your wrist (or other body part). Though hard to predict, there will undoubtedly be marketing ramifications as a result of the proliferation of wearable technology throughout the masses. Perhaps it will become a new content channel? Or perhaps it will be able to sense your chemical reactions to certain content messages? Who knows.

“What does marketing look like when the Internet surrounds us like the air that we breathe? Fascinating to think about,” says Mark Schaefer, Executive Director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, in Lee Odden’s post. We agree.

8) “Channel-based” marketing teams will finally start talking to each other, and work collaboratively.

Marketing teams are just starting to learn the value of cross-departmental visibility, and how it affects the unity and power of buyer conversations. In 2015, CMOs will make it a priority to establish processes to ensure that each marketing team member has access and visibility into what the other is doing.

Brian Solis, Principal Analyst at Altimeter Group, says it best in Lee Odden’s post: “I’d love to say that by 2015 we will truly see digital strategies that are integrated across social, mobile, advertising, marketing, comms, et al. But, we won’t. What we will see though is a more conscious effort to bring disparate groups to the table to learn how to collaborate across screens, channels, and moments of truth to deliver ONE experience to customers wherever they are in the lifecycle.”

9) Jesse Noyes will be nominated King of Content. Once and for all.

Oh wait. Well maybe not this last one. Unless someone really big names him that. Like Joe Pulizzi, Stephen King, or Michelle Obama. But hey, we can always hope.

*Editors Note: Recap post of the Deck presented at Sales Hacker Series in Boston on November 18th, 2014 by Steve McKenzie, VP of Sales at InsightSquared. All of the data presented here is illustrative. 

1. Lead Trajectory and MQL Growth

A lot of companies track leads, website visits or blog subscriptions, but the problem there is that it’s a lot easier to attract general traffic than it is to attract your target buyer.

• You may see a sharp increase in traffic, but if you don’t segment general visitors versus marketing qualified visitors you’ll have a misleading indicator of growth.
• Therefore, identify criteria to label something MQL and then track the growth of new MQLs month over month.

Are We Growing our MQL Number?

Here’s how we do it, the different colors in the charts represent different lead or campaign source for MQLs.

You want to watch for two things here:

• One is that you actually have exponential growth up and to the right.
• Two is that your mindful from where the lead growth comes from, this will help you double down on the right marketing spends later.

2. Lead to Opportunity Conversion Rate Over Time

Now that you’ve gotten marketing on track, you’ll need to pressure test whether or not your criteria for MQLs was correct. By tracking the percentage of MQLs that convert to sales opportunity month over month, you can early identify whether or not the leads you thought were marketing qualified are actually sales ready or not.

Where do Unqualified Leads Fall out of our Sales Funnel?

Take a look at this trending chart. Here we’re tracking the percentage of leads that get qualified as MQLs in blue, and MQLs that convert to qualified opportunities in yellow.

You’ll notice up until the end of Q4 in 2013, about 40% of our leads were classified as MQLs, by the end of Q2 that jumped to 80%. So either our marketing team got a lot better at attracting the right leads, or they loosened up their criteria on what qualified as an MQL.

The proof is in tracking the conversion from MQL to opportunity (that’s in yellow). What you’ll notice is that at the same time in Q4 last year and Q2 of this year, there was a drop from 80% to 20% lead-to-opp conversion rate. So this is how you keep your teams honest and don’t get a misleading indication of growth.

3. Call to Connect Ratio and Meeting to Deal Ratio

Now that you’ve got your marketing house in order and you’re able to maintain the integrity of their growth, it’s time to put in some metrics to ensure proper handling of those leads by your phone team. Too many companies rely strictly on dial counts or phone volume as the sole metrics for a phone prospecting team.

• It’s actually more important to be able to identify the actual ratios between the different steps in your sales process:
• Calls to connects
• Connects to meetings, ect.

This will allow you to develop a model that truly reflects the activity levels required to realize your growth goals.

Is My Sales Team Working the Phones Effectively?

You know it takes about 8 calls to get a connect:

• For every 10 connects you get, you can book a meeting
• And 70% of those meetings show up and turn into opportunities.
• You can now do the math and know that you need 80 calls to get one meeting
• So you’ll need about 115 dials to get an opportunity.
• Now if you take into account the amount of pipeline your phone team is supposed to generate and multiply that number of opportunities by 115 dials, you can easily back out the number of calls your team needs to make in a day.

Questions that you’d normally slave over in Excel can become incredibly easy with this style of reporting:

• How many dials a day does a rep have to make
• How much head count do I need
• What’s a realistic expectation for Demand Generation in my business

4. Pipeline Inflow/ Outflow

You should have a demand gen side that’s reliably performing and generating pipeline. Unfortunately, the concept of trending pipeline reports and all CRMs fall way short of expectations. They can give you a snapshot of your pipeline today, but they can’t realistically tell you if that’s better or worse than this point last month or last quarter. How can you measure growth if you can’t see historical trends?

Are We Winning More Than We Lose?

Here’s a solution to the inability to see trends:

• The blue bars represent pipeline being created in the given month
• We track it by value and by count separately
• It’s important for us to identify if we’re creating more opportunities than we used to while maintaining discipline that they’re not all turning into loses.

5. Analyze Your Bookings

That takes us to our final point:

• If you can generate growth on your marketing side
• Analyze the integrity of that growth by watching your conversion rates
• Model your phone activities to maximize the return on that lead growth
• Track to ensure positive pipeline growth, then you should see a growth in bookings. Otherwise there’s a sales execution problem.

Is Your Team Converting Opportunities into Deals?

So here’s my favorite slide and you can probably tell why. You’ve invested in marketing and gotten a return, you’ve modeled and invested in your phone prospecting team and gotten a return, now you can see the final payout by looking at a bookings trend that goes up and to the right.

 

View the SlideDeck from Steve and his Presentation at Sales Hacker Series in Boston here:

Questions? Comments? Tweet them at @SalesHackerConf or leave them in the comments below!

The post The 5 Metrics for Growing Your Sales Team Effectively appeared first on Sales Hacker.

After you generate some quality leads, you’ll want to move them closer and closer to a sale or a consultation. You’ll do this by sending a series of targeted email messages over a period of time.

Lead Nurturing – The Traditional Approach

A prospect downloads an ebook. You send a series of emails based on what they downloaded. The messages might include other related offers, blog posts and finally a consultation or sales offer. This approach works for many, but the problem is that you are assuming that their biggest challenge is related to the material they downloaded. And you know what they say about assuming…

Lead Nurturing – An Advanced But Simple Approach

We used to conduct our lead nurturing campaigns the traditional way, but decided to experiment with an advanced method that takes a little longer to set up, but in the long run will save you tremendous amounts of time AND be more useful to your leads – which means more sales for you!

The trick is to identify for certain the specific pain points experienced by your leads (which means you’ll need to ask on your forms: ie., “what is your biggest _______ challenge?” with multiple choice answers). Then create email campaigns to address each of the choices your make available.

Each campaign will provide a sequence of solution to the identified pain point, and encourage them to reconvert as a lead, providing progressively more information about themselves and helping them in their decision-making process until they’re ready to speak with you or purchase your product.

Persona-Based Strategy

Lead nurturing emails should be customized for your various personas. So let’s look at what a persona-based strategy entails:

1. Visitor comes to site
2. Visitor fills out form to convert on a premium offer eBook
3. On that form the lead fills out their pain point, position in their company, question about the industry, (what you need to know in order to nurture them effectively)
4. Lead is entered into a workflow based on what property you choose is most important
5. Lead receives emails based on who they are and what they want, leading them down the marketing funnel until they become a sales-ready lead

Setting Up The Campaigns

Nurturing campaigns can get complicated and tricky as you build them out, especially if you have multiple emails in a single campaign. You’ll need to lay out all the options for your lead. Different types of leads have different pain points, and the campaign emails should follow those pain points.

We often use a spreadsheet to make sure the sequence makes sense. Here’s an example of how a pharmacy might begin to layout a lead nurturing campaign for a consumer client who identified “diabetes” as their biggest challenge:

More content would be provided, more information gathered on each CTA completion until the person is ready to talk or purchase.

Give Leads Plenty of Opportunities to Convert.

During the lead nurturing campaign, you should give your lead numerous options to speak to someone about your business, request a free consultation, or whatever your bottom of the funnel offer happens to be. At this point, you can unenroll them in the lead nurturing campaign because hopefully they are your newest customer!

One of the added benefits of an approach like this is that you can spend more time carefully crafting each sequence and each method within each sequence because you’ll have fewer campaigns to create. You can and should keep an eye on their performance and adjust as needed. Do you think this approach could work for you?

How to identify and manage the most efficient methods of generating leads

The most successful small businesses know how to identify and manage the most efficient methods of generating leads. Generally speaking, there are two main categories of lead generation tactics: outbound lead generation (where you reach out to the prospective customers via phone solicitation, direct mail, paid advertising, and email marketing) and inbound lead generation (where the customer finds you via Search Engine Optimization, social media, and PPC).

Deciding on the right lead generation strategy

Different methods (or combination of methods) might provide the best opportunity for new business leads, depending on your circumstances. Deciding on the right lead generation strategy depends on what you’re selling and how your customers get information that leads to a sale.

Here are a few key concepts to keep in mind when deciding your lead generation strategy:

• Tip 1 – Not all customers are on social media, and not all social media channels are equally valuable.

Before you invest time and resources in social media marketing, you should determine whether or not your prospective customers are actually engaged in social media during their decision to make a purchase. Will your customer actually see your social media posts, and if they do, will it have an impact on their decision to buy from you?

Business to Consumer (B2C) companies are typically more successful on social media than are Business to Business (B2B) product sales, but there can be a place for social media in B2B lead generation as well – for example, many companies use Twitter to do research on prospective suppliers, and many high-level decision makers use LinkedIn for networking and to check references.

To be successful with social media lead generation, you need to know your customer in detail. Find out which target audience is really active on each social media channel (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and decide accordingly.

• Tip 2 – Customers might not be actively searching for your product.

When people need to buy food, they go to the grocery store. When people need to hire a consultant or buy business insurance or implement a complex new IT system, it’s not so simple – there’s not always a single ‘place’ to look for information about these high-value B2B sales.

Word of mouth and referrals are hugely important in the B2B sales world, and to help amplify the effect, you can do lead generation activities to build relationships with prospective customers via your blog, or by testing your market online with keyword searches.

Not finding hits or searches on your business or industry key terms? This may indicate your efforts would be more effective with outbound lead generation strategies. You might need to go directly to the customers and introduce yourself and explain the value that you offer.

• Tip 3 – Diversify your media portfolio: paid, earned, and owned.

There are lots of options for lead generation tactics, which can be broadly categorized as ‘paid media’,’earned media’ and ‘owned media.’ With ‘paid media,’ companies can buy mailing lists for direct mail or get paid exposure via an online Pay Per Click campaign.

• With ‘earned media,’ your company might hire a PR firm to get publicity for your new product launch, thus building your credibility and getting inquiries from new customers.
• ‘Owned media’ is a relatively new and fast-growing concept, where a company invests money and time in setting up a social media presence, website content, and directly building and engaging an audience.

When paying another company to put your content in front of their audience (‘paid media’) you tend to get faster lead generation results but with a shorter lifespan of value; customers might respond to your ad, but it might be a one-time opportunity – they might not remember you longer than your ad is running. But with ‘owned media,’ if you create enough engaging fresh, high quality content over time via your website and social media engagement, you ‘own’ your customer’s attention.

‘Paid media’ gets results right away, but ‘owned media’ can be a stronger long-term foundation if you’re willing to invest the time and effort along the way.

Choosing a good blend of lead generation methods – a ‘diversified portfolio’ of lead generation techniques – is usually the best strategy for success. No one type of effort or one single ad will act as a silver bullet to help your company achieve its sales goals. Buy some lists to get some fast acting lead generation, and add some effective outbound methods such as a website and some social media engagement to balance the short-term and the long-term sales goals.

Image/Copyright: Shutterstock

This is a guest contribution from Veronica Taylor.

Marketing automation without a human element is just a robot on autopilot. Before, during and after each automated campaign it is essential for real people to plan, edit and review. When campaigns aren’t working, they need to be tested and updated. Most people think of marketing automation as efficient yet impersonal. When used correctly, however, most automated marketing solutions now provide the possibility for highly targeted messages based on each customer’s personal interests, preferences and history. Here are a few tips for making your automated campaigns efficient and dynamic while also building stronger connections with your customers.

Have a Specific Goal

For each campaign you create, it is essential to know what you are trying to accomplish. Are you seeking more new signups? Trying to get leads to download your whitepaper? Simply raising awareness about your business or an upcoming event? If you have automated messages going out to customers but you don’t have a clear idea of what results you are trying to measure, you will not know if the campaign was successful. You won’t know which messages were effective and which ones need to be changed. If you are not measuring the response to your messages, you are not listening to your customers. The automated campaign will continue to run robotically, with no edits or improvements. Know what you are trying to achieve. If it’s not working, update it.

Survey and Track Customers

The best way to give marketing automation a personal touch is to use it to its full potential. Marketing automation now has the capability to track and store each individual customer’s preferences, history, important dates, interests, personal information and much more. With this wealth of data, it is possible to automatically create highly personally targeted campaigns for each customer. This way, the customer receives information that is directly relevant to them, making the experience much more personal. You can send out automated appointment date reminders, bill payment notifications, birthday messages, personalized promotions and so on. This type of personalized messaging builds stronger connections and reduces customer churn. When you want to update your customer information in order to provide even better targeted messages, survey customers to learn more and keep information up to date.

Know When to Write a Personal Message

Sometimes automation just isn’t appropriate. There are many instances in business where it is essential to take the time to manually write a message or a response to a customer. In these cases, a prompt message sent by a real person has a much greater impact than an automated message ever could. These are just a few examples: when a customer makes a very large purchase and you want to thank them with a special discount or free product/service, when a customer has been with you for years and you want to show your appreciation, when a customer takes the time to write to you with feedback, questions or comments, when you make a mistake with a customer’s bill, purchase or account, when a customer has a complaint, and when you have time to make personal comments on social media (automated social media management saves oodles of time, but you absolutely need real posts or tweets thrown in).

Review and Analyze

As mentioned before, if you don’t keep track of how customers are responding to your automated messages you are simply letting a robot control your marketing, which is going to show in your sales. Real people are essential to a marketing strategy because they try different things when they see something isn’t working as well as they had hoped. One of the greatest advantages humans have over machines is that they take chances and make mistakes rather than doing the same thing over and over again. The best way to increase revenue, boost customer life span and attract new customers is to listen to what your customers want. Automated marketing solutions provide you with all the data you will ever want. Keep a close eye on your reports, open rates, unsubscribes and other data. Review your campaign data after each campaign you send. Learn what customers respond to, learn what they don’t want and learn how to react positively when you need to make a change.

To summarize:

Your marketing is ultimately in your hands. Marketing automation makes it possible for businesses to save time and money, reduce the daily effort their staff has to put in and connect more effectively with their customers. Marketing automation is a powerful tool, but like any other tool it needs a skilled operator to make it work.

Veronica Taylor, Assistant Marketing Manager at SimplyCast, enjoys writing about small business marketing, improving communication strategies, social media trends and more.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger


Man Vs. Machine: Get Better Sales by Keeping Marketing Automation Human