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In which we take a look at the experience of using John Lewis from a customer point of view.

Meaning this won’t be a robust test of the ecommerce site’s search functionality, or the quality of its mega-navs, or the persuasiveness of its homepage. 

Instead this will involve searching for an item on Google, clicking on the most attractive result, testing the relevancy and helpfulness of its landing page and seeing how quick and easy it is to make a purchase. The customer journey in a nutshell. 

This is especially relevant as we enter the last few weeks before Christmas and time becomes increasingly precious for the online shopper with a long list and a fickle sense of brand loyalty.

After all it’s that time of year when you’re going to buy an iPad Air 2 from whichever retailer has it in stock (and has the most visible search results), rather than the one you’ve been using for the rest of the year.  

Search

As you can see from the following search results, John Lewis is taking no chances with one of the most popular tech products this Christmas. It has successfully delivered paid search results for ‘iPad’, ‘iPad Air’ and ‘iPad Air 2”.

It’s a wise strategy, as organic listings for John Lewis are quite far down the results page. With these paid results, John Lewis is easily beating rivals Amazon, Curry’s and even Apple itself.

While we're here, let’s see how it’s doing for ‘Monty the Penguin’…

Well played WWF, well played. The Google Shopping listings are also dominated by eBay.

Although on first sight this may seem like a poor show from John Lewis, if you actually visit the site itself you’ll notice that Monty the Penguin is out of stock. It would be a waste of time and money serving ads here for a product that’s unavailable and would only frustrate the shopper who clicked through hoping to buy the popular penguin.

Ad

In terms of the ad quality, John Lewis’s effort is much more detailed than its rivals…

Offering free delivery, a three-year guarantee and a rating system that proves the retailer can be trusted on multiple counts. The ad certainly trumps Apple’s rather flat effort.

The only real competition here for a searcher’s attention is the Curry’s ad. It offers a discount within the blue link and explicitly states what code to use during checkout.

John Lewis relies on its customer service messaging and prominence at the top of the listings to sway attention away from the Curry's ad.

Landing Page

If you’re using paid search, it’s vital that your landing page is completely relevant to your ad. It’s no good serving visitors with a generic homepage, if you’re advertising an iPad, you’d better be presenting them with exactly that.

Here is John Lewis’s landing page served after searching ‘iPad Air’ and clicking through on its paid ad. 

The major thing you’ll notice here is that it’s a product listings page for the first iteration of the iPad Air, not iPad Air 2. That’s fine as the original search term was ‘iPad Air’, however the ad that I clicked through specifically stated ‘iPad Air 2’. Confused yet? Yeah, sorry about that.

If I want to buy an iPad Air 2, I may not bother adding the ‘2’ when searching. I would assume that I’ll be served the newest product anyway. Then when I click on a link that says ‘iPad Air 2’ I'll be confused as to why I can’t see that specific item on the landing page.

There is also no mention of the newest iPad on the landing page. Not in the header, not in the product listings, not in the left hand navigation bar.

This is especially annoying as John Lewis has a specific ‘iPad Air 2’ landing page for searchers of that specific term.

All John Lewis really needs is a clearer link to alternative versions of the iPad on each landing page, and then the problem’s solved.

As for the layout of the page itself, the images are large and I like the fact that you can click on a colour option and the main image changes accordingly.

The text itself is too small though, with the technical specifications being difficult to distinguish as they are written in one straight line.

John Lewis also goes out of its way to highlight the three-year guarantee offer, however there is no mention of delivery options.

Particularly on the run-up to Christmas it’s vital to be clear about the speed of delivery, the cost for each option, whether it has a free returns policy and whether it offers click & collect. We know from its homepage that John Lewis does indeed offer all these things, but someone arriving on this landing page from search wouldn’t necessarily realise this.

Product page

The product itself looks great, there’s an excellent hover-zoom function and the price is clear…

There’s also a real-time stock checker, which is helpful and uses scarcity to add a bit of urgency to the purchase. Social proof is also utilised in the rating system, and customer reviews are enabled at the bottom of the page. 

This is also where a customer can finally see the range of John Lewis’s delivery options. My only criticism here is that on first glance, it’s not obvious that John Lewis offers faster premium delivery options.

If you click on the ‘UK delivery’ link (which isn’t an obvious link at all), you’re taken to the bottom of the page for further options.

The pricing information about ‘next day, named and Saturday’ delivery could easily be included in the information box at the top of the page.

Basket

This is a good example of a clear and simple basket design.

Nothing fussy, nothing distracting, it drives a customer straight to checkout securely whilst providing information on payment options, delivery options and states that I qualify for free delivery with minimal fuss.

Checkout

John Lewis asks for an email address straight away on a page that doubles as a sign-in and as a guest check-out.

Having a guest check-out is excellent for customer service, as it means speed and efficiency is the focus, rather than data capture. Then offering the option to create an account after the purchase is essentially offering the best of both worlds.

The next page is where you choose your delivery option. 

Allowing a customer to choose a delivery option before they are asked to enter their address means they won’t have to waste time entering address details if they’ve chosen a service that doesn’t require them (click and collect for example). For delivery to a home address, autofill has been enabled to speed up the process.

There are four more pages in the checkout process to navigate: a further ‘delivery options’ page, an ‘order summary’ where you can write a gift message, this is followed by a ‘payment page’ then eventually a ‘receipt’.

This whole process could be much more efficient, for a start there’s no need for the ‘order summary’ page in between delivery and payment. The order summary details remain throughout the process, it’s pointless reconfirming them. If John Lewis want to offer gift messaging, this could easily be integrated into the payment page.

Better still, provide a single-page checkout that changes and adapts the experience based on the options ticked by the customer. Making the checkout process six pages long is needlessly tedious and can hamper conversion.

According to David Moths post on single page checkouts, ProImpact found that a one-page checkouts improved conversion by 13.39% and Xanthos improved a client’s conversion rate by 67% after implementing the same.

In conclusion...

One of the massive keys to success in ecommerce is not to assume that the homepage is the place where every customer journey starts. Visitors can come in from a huge number of different side-doors and search results, so it’s important to highlight the most important customer service information on every possible landing page and make the process of purchasing an item as quick and easy as possible.

Positive customer experiences focused entirely on ease and speed will definitely encourage that same visitor to come back. 

For more ecommerce best practice guidance, check out Halfords: the customer journey from search to checkout.

It’s that refreshing time of year when everyone starts to talk about what they’re thankful for. I’m sure you’ve seen Facebook statuses of enthusiastic friends writing about a different thing they are thankful for each day during the month of November. As the season of thankfulness and giving progresses, I’m sure you count your job as one of your blessings. If you’re as lucky as me, you live and breathe inbound marketing and inspiring others is on the top of your to-do list every day. It’s no secret inbound marketing is on the rise because of its simple, useful, and successful tactics. Of course I’m thankful for it, and here are some reasons why you should be too.

Reason #1: It’s an organic approach.

If you haven’t realized this already, outbound marketing is a thing of the past. The consumers are now in control and they know exactly what they want. They want useful, educational information that is easy to digest. Inbound marketing has given you a way to provide this practical information for all of your consumers. Instead of bothering consumers, you are now able to relate to them on a human level. Thanks to inbound marketing you can research and measure exactly what your consumers are looking for. Inbound marketing empowers you to create solutions your consumers want, instead of forcing them to see ads or promotions they don’t want to engage with.

Reason #2: It’s honest marketing.

One of the best parts of inbound marketing is that it’s honest. In the past, marketers and sales people may have gotten a bad rap for attempting to force consumers to buy, or for pressuring them into making a move they weren’t sure about. As an inbound marketer, you want your consumer to be absolutely sure before they buy. You want them to be educated on your company, your products, and what your business stands for. Inbound marketing allows you to remove this element of secrecy that has traditionally surrounded many businesses. Inbound encourages you to be transparent and authentic. Giving consumers an honest look into the inner workings of your organization allows business to become personal. Your buyers love this personal element and they will reward you for this transparency by becoming your biggest advocate. Thanks inbound for making me more honest!

Reason #3: It makes you a leader.

In inbound marketing, content is king and producing useful relevant content will help you become a leader. How amazing is it that you can use your practical skills to help others? Thanks to inbound marketing you are able to put your skills and ideas into useful content like eBooks, whitepapers, or blogs and spread your knowledge around the world. Your consumers that are searching high and low for solutions to their problems will come across your information. They will be thankful to your organization for helping them answer their questions and the result will be a relationship built on trust and honesty. Not only will you become a leader in your field, but you will earn the preference of your consumers. Thanks inbound marketing, you’re great.

Reason #4: It helps communicate your company culture.

As if inbound marketing hasn’t done enough already, it also helps to communicate your company culture. As you know, company culture is the foundation on which businesses are built. A business’s mission used to be a few lines of copy on their website hidden under the “About Us” section. Now, companies are developing a culture, where share values and a constructive environment are not only lived within the organization, but they are communicated through their content and strategies. You have the power to construct and control an evolving message about your company through social media, blogs, your website, emails, and more. You aren’t just telling your consumers what your mission is, you’re showing them how you live your truth every day, thanks to inbound marketing.

Reason #5: Big and small businesses are on the same level.

In the past, big businesses have had an unfair advantage over small businesses in terms of marketing. They were able to spend more money on advertising, direct mail campaigns, and cold calling. On the other hand, using inbound marketing and content creation actually levels the playing field and allows organizations of any size to create unique, helpful content that their consumers will find useful and share. Even if budget sizes differ, small businesses are equipped with the exact same tools as big businesses to make purposeful and original content that will communicate with real people who want their products. Thanks to inbound marketing, the world is literally at your fingertips.

Reason #6: It’s fun!

I can’t forget to mention that above all else, inbound marketing is fun and rewarding. Making use of social media tools that has the capacity to reach literally the entire world is mind blowing. Writing a good piece of content and having people from China, Australia, or Italy share it and take something away from it? Amazing. The internet has given us the power to empower ourselves, our businesses, and our consumers, while inbound marketing provides a path that streamlines these opportunities and tools. It’s fun and makes you feel good!

Wow, I didn’t realize just how thankful I was for inbound marketing until I started this list. Inbound marketing provides us with a structure for a dynamic, evolving internet savvy world. As communication grows, so does inbound marketing. Thank you inbound marketing for helping real people connect with real businesses. As you count the things you are thankful for this holiday season, don’t forget about how inbound marketing has empowered you.

The Content4Demand team meets in person several times a year to assess trends in B2B content marketing and identify how we can improve our portfolio of services in response. The most recent discussion surfaced many trends, but these three are the ones having the biggest impact:

1. The need for a renewed focus on the buyer: The content marketing universe now has a plethora of apps, formats, platforms and planks, so there are lots of questions to ask and decisions to make. Is content curation more important than content amplification? Are white papers still relevant? At what stage in the buy cycle does video work best? Do I have to have highly detailed personas?

With the expanding choices and accompanying questions, we’ve identified a need to stay sharply focused on buyers, letting their needs and behaviors guide decision-making from strategic planning to content creation. If any content marketing effort does not start with the buyer, then it’s not going to be successful.

2. A growing demand for content-strategy consulting: When the invention of marketing automation software birthed the content marketing industry, pioneering IT companies were all at the same starting line. Now, a wider variety of organizations use content marketing, and more join the charge every day.

While content creation is still a huge part of what we do, more of our clients need help with content strategy, either because they are just beginning or they’ve built up content libraries and now need help assessing what content remains useful, what should be expired, what can be repurposed and how to fill content gaps. In response we’ve refined our processes for persona development and buyer assessments; content library audits; content mapping and gap analysis based on buyer knowledge; and ideation for filling gaps.

3. More noise in the vendor marketplace: Digital marketing and advertising agencies are all “doing content” now, but many of them aren’t offering complete content services or have just put a new name on an existing service.

This can be confusing for marketers, so we are emphasizing our sole focus on B2B content marketing and our inherent knowledge of demand and lead generation, and marketing automation technology. After all, our parent company launched Content4Demand based on requests from readers of our online publication Demand Gen Report, a leader in covering the marketing automation industry.

We expect these three trends to have a big impact on what we do in 2015 and how we do it. Our clients are changing, and we’re changing to better serve their needs.

The series on this thought provoking question “Is Sales Enablement Making Salespeople Stupid?” continues.

In case you missed the first two posts, click here for Part 1 which discussed auto-pilot versus strategic thinking and here for Part 2 where we discussed sales enablement role’s on value messaging. Today, let’s consider another key question that was raised a few weeks ago in Atlanta on a sales enablement panel at the Sales Force Productivity Conference.

How does the need for enablement tools change in transactional versus complex sales environments?  When, if ever, is guided selling or following a script critical?

Transactional sales environments may not have more than one key decision maker involved and the products or services are easy to understand. Typically these buyers can find all required information to make a purchasing decision online, and the transaction itself can be made online. B2B buyers are used to making those buying decisions on a regular basis. Often, salespeople are only involved very late along the customer’s journey, if at all. Instead, service roles become more and more important in those transactional environments to connect to the customers’ concepts.

Complex selling environments are primarily defined by two criteria. It’s the complexity of the customer challenge to be mastered. And it’s an increasing number of involved stakeholders from different functions and roles. These buyers often make purchasing  decisions in parallel to their day-to-day roles. Various dimensions, such as customer-specific situations, the stakeholders’ different concepts, the buying network’s decision dynamic and a provider’s complex portfolio of capabilities to design tailored solutions are connected to each other and have to be considered as a system.

Different requirements in both selling environments

Enablement content services have to address different needs in both environments. Based on the criteria above, the sales content for a transactional environment is focused on the actual buying phase and the service phase, tailored for the key buyer role. The awareness phase, which is essential in complex environments, is something buyers often process on their own, and online. Complex sales environments require modular and dynamic content and messaging approaches, not only to cover the entire customer’s journey, but also to address different buyer roles adequately. Therefore, enablement content designed for a transactional environment is easier to provide and can guide much more precisely than in a complex sales environment. And that’s why the competencies in transactional sales roles are different from those in complex sales roles. The level of critical and strategic thinking that is required from a salesperson to connect all the dots in a complex buying situation is very different from what a salesperson in a transactional sales role will ever need.

Scripting – who wants to be in a “scripted” conversation?

Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes – would you tolerate a scripted conversation for more than two minutes? There is a possibility to script typical conversations to help salespeople to be more effective. That can work in a more transactional environments, but only if related training services help people to play with these scripts and ultimately get away from the scripts. But very often the training part doesn’t take place, and conversations sound just “scripted.” Does that differentiate anybody in anything from competitors? No, not at all. So, come full circle with scripts or don’t work with scripts at all.

To be successful, guided selling requires strategic thinking – embedded in a sales methodology

Guided selling works backwards from typical patterns of customer challenges and problems, and is responsive to different buyer roles along the entire customer’s journey. That requires a modular and dynamic content approach which has to be organized in a collaborative way. Often, that doesn’t happen, and salespeople are overwhelmed by the variety of content that’s available. If so, they’re likely to just switch off the noise. In this case, content packages or interactive playbooks for different customer challenges can guide salespeople along the customer’s journey and help them to find the right entry point for different buyer roles and different situations in different industries.

But in all these complex selling and buying situations, critical and strategic thinking can never be replaced by content and messaging. Strategic thinking is the key to connecting the dots across a large stakeholder network, and to analyzing and synthesizing the specific customer context and each buyer’s concepts. Critical and strategic thinking requires a sales methodology that can deliver scalable results. A sales methodology explains the how and the why, and guides people through different steps to create or manage opportunities.

Related posts:

Is Sales Enablement Making Salespeople Stupid? Auto-Pilot Versus Strategic Thinking

Is Sales Enablement Making Salespeople Stupid? Sales Enablement’s Role In Value Messaging

Understanding different buying environments – where are your customers?

Objective selling is about understanding one simple concept: all prospects have objectives. Whether it’s to get rid of a pain, solve a problem, or meet a goal, objectives are guaranteed. Therefore, objective selling can apply across 100 percent of your target market.

At a high level, here is the 10-step process to objective selling.

1. Find the value

Value is part of every single sales conversation, however, it can be defined many ways. However, a value proposition can be defined by the salesperson and the prospect together. Work with an actionable definition of value. Offer prospects the help to overcome hurdles or remove barriers. Help them bridge gaps between where they are now and where they want to be. That is the objective, and they’re going to see value.

2. Determine the objectives

Instead of thinking in terms of the sales process, think about the buying process. This mentality brings in both the buyer and the seller, and it helps sellers align with the buyers.  It also allows salespeople to begin to focus, get to understand the prospect’s objectives, and then use those objectives to more effectively engage with the prospect.

3. Know the end result

Imagine your sole job is to drill the perfect quarter inch hole. Most of the time, salespeople would try to sell you a drill. However, I’m going to argue that the most effective way to actually engage with that client is to sell them the hole. After all, that’s the desired outcome. That’s how they’re measured. That’s how they measure their world.  The tools of getting there are really just a means of achieving the end, and if you want to successfully engage with them, focus on the end.

4. Understand why they buy

Why do people buy? There are five familiar elements.

• Risk avoidance
• Financial gain
• Boost productivity
• Shift time
• Self interest

By fitting your product or service into one of these elements, you can start to build a model that will help you focus on the objectives.

4. Focus on the impacts

Rather than starting with what you can do or what the needs are, focus on the impacts.

For example, if we can increase your production, you’ll be able to reduce the cost, increase your market share, buy your raw materials in a more cost effective way, which then drives your profits. You’re taking it to the next level by showing additional benefits.

5. Match objectives

Match specific objectives to impacts to connect the dots for the prospect. For example, a delivery truck’s objective is to deal with existing clients and provide them with their deliveries. The more service calls they get, the better they’ll do. But, at the same time, given the cost of fuel, they have to find ways to reduce costs. Objectives can have specific impacts. Delivering against the objectives enables you to hit some of their specific objectives and goals.

6. Know where to focus

Review your wins and your losses, as well as those who don’t make a decision. The more focus that you put on these three areas, the more you’ll be able to see why it is that you’re winning. The more you focus on this, the more you’ll target the right people, and by doing that, you’ll be able to get a good sense of what objectives you actually address for them.

7. Review your losses

Reviewing your losses will reveal any adjustments that need to be made in the way you’re selling.

8. Ask the right questions

By going back and reviewing your deals, you’ll be able to formulate the right questions, because with the right questions, you’re going to get the right answers.

• What are some of the biggest issues that the prospect is facing?
• How do you use risk?
• What would it take for somebody to engage you?
• What are some of the objectives that you would respond to and what are some of the things that you wouldn’t?

The goal is to be able to fill in these boxes so you can use them on demand. If you know the answers to some of the issues, then it’s a lot easier to ask questions.

9. Leave your product in the car

One of the challenges I set for salespeople is to go into their sales meetings, especially early in the cycle, and leave their product in the car. If you go in focusing and understanding objectives, then it’s a lot easier to achieve. Leave product out of the equation and you’ll have a better engagement and a shorter sales cycle.

10. Act on it

Once you’ve determined the objectives, it’s time to act. Extrapolate the value over the life of the asset. All of your good questions will result in good answers. From there, you’ll be able to go back to the prospect and present your well-suited solutions.

Get more sales tips with the free RingLead ebook.

On Friday nearly a dozen members of the TopRank Online Marketing team had the privilege of attending a packed house at 514 Studies downtown Minneapolis for Social Media Breakfast aka #SMBMSP72.

The topic? Social Media Marketing case studies. And gnomes. And bacon. And made-up words like “magicable”.

Featuring case studies about local and national brands including Land O’ Lakes, Thomson Reuters, Axonom and two Fortune 100 technology companies, presentations were given by Jaclyn Grossfield @jaclynanng, Casey Hall @CaseyHall_ and myself.

While the Minneapolis / St. Paul Social Media Breakfast events are always well attended, this one was particularly so because of the insatiable interest in practical social media marketing insights. That and maybe the introduction of the “Social Media Gnome” pictured above. Instead of “Elf on a Shelf” think of him as a “Gnome in Your Zone” watching to make sure you’re following best practices. [Cue laugh track]

To help satisfy the broader interest in social media case studies and tactics, here are 22 takeaways, insights and tips from the presentations captured by the team at TopRank:

Alexis Hall – TopRank Account Manager

Tip 1: Use social media to encourage your audience to participate in and contribute content in a meaningful way. If the content connects with their own experience in a meaningful way, your audience will be more likely to engage with and amplify that content.

Tip 2: Activate subject matter experts within your organization in order to create content which goes beyond product marketing and provides helpful content which will resonate with an expert audience. Provide subject matter experts with quick and easy training on how to create content which works for a blog or social media up front and then empower them to write about the topics which they know most about.

Nick Ehrenberg – TopRank Content Marketing Manager

Tip 3: There is a fine balance between promoting on-domain content and off-domain content. Without the balance, you risk missing potential revenue and/or engagement with the audience. Regardless of the content’s source, it must fulfill the primary goal: driving buyers through the purchasing cycle.

Tip 4: Product promotions belong on product pages — that’s what they are meant for. Your organization’s blog should be the venue for subject matter experts to dive deeper into audience concerns or trends. Make your blog a resource for all people in the target audience — not just your immediate customers.

And if I was able to grow a solid beard, I would totally join the Marketers With Beards Facebook Group. [From Lee: You can do it Nick!!!]

Joel Carlson – TopRank Social Media Lead

Tip 5: Using typography allowed an agency (Exponent) to override the Facebook restriction of 20% or less text for ad images used with Land O Lakes campaigns.

Tip 6: Create a company blog (hybrid site) that is a combination of internal and external content. It will increase interest in the site and make visitors more likely to return.

Tip 7: Products should not be the focus of a blog, but instead, it should provide information that help visitors gain success.

Tip 8: B2B audiences are well informed, so when it comes to blog content, provide expert and technical content for readers.

Evan Prokop – TopRank Digital Marketing Manager

Tip 9: You probably already have subject matter experts in your company who can be grown into public facing thought leaders – with a little guidance and motivation. As marketers, it’s our job to not only help them master content creation tactics such as blogging and social media, but to show them why it’s important.

Tip 10: Appeal to your audience’s emotions. Land O Lake’s Mothers Day Facebook giveaway campaign tapped into a topic most everyone has strong feelings about (and spends a lot of money on apparently), their mom.

Kate Heithoff –  TopRank SEO Copywriter

Tip 11: Social media is a great way to spread brand awareness and grab your audience’s attention. Using visual pieces with an enticing calls to action can have substantial results. Know your audience, and use appropriate language to receive engagement on social networks, whether that be likes, shares, comments or retweets. Emotion-evoking visual content and language can go a long way with the appropriate audience.

Tip 12: Whether creating visual or written content, know your audience and who you’re writing for. Provide them with information that is new and relevant. Do not only talk about your company, but rather talk about your audience and target their wants and needs. In your content, let them know that you value their time, and are not there only to press products or sales upon them.

Katie Konrath – TopRank Content Marketing Lead

Tip 13: There is no one “magic formula” for success in content marketing. Every audience has different content and social preferences. To succeed, you need to pay attention to what is working for other marketers, and then run tests to find out what works best for your audience.

Tip 14: To build relationships with influencers on social, you need to first learn about them. Who is their audience? What are their goals for engaging online? What is in it for them when they help you? If you are able to clearly communicate how helping you benefits the influencer, you will have better results when you reach out to them.

Douglas Fehlen –  TopRank Copywriter

Tip 15: When it comes to social media marketing, self-promotion and helpfulness is a unique balance for every organization.

Tip 16: Provide content that customers will find valuable, even if they never buy anything.

Tip 17: Look for opportunities to inject storytelling into messaging through social media engagement – even if you’re in an industry not necessarily known for emotion-touched content.

Andy Thomson –  TopRank SEO Copywriter

Tip 18: People want meaningful connections, so give the people what they want in an opportunistic way using real-time monitoring and popular platforms.

Tip 19: Efficient training and leveraging subject matter experts for great content can win buy-in from executive leadership, especially when internal resources are scarce.

Tip 20: Don’t be afraid to find loopholes in social network posting rules. For example, Land-o-Lakes achieved this using clever typography in their Mother’s Day photo ads on Facebook to get around the 20% text rule.

Thank you again to Mykl Roventine from the Minneapolis / Saint Paul Social Media Breakfast for the invitation to present at this event and a big thanks to the TopRank team members that worked on the client engagements shared in my presentation: Alexis Hall, Kate Heithoff, Ben Brausen, Emily Bacheller and Renee Whisnant.

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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2014. | 20 Magicable Takeaways From 5 Social Media Marketing Case Studies at @smbmsp | http://www.toprankblog.com

Killer content is only “killer” if you know your audience. Your content needs to relate to your buyers in meaningful and lasting ways. Join us Thursday, December 4th for this Digital Marketing Depot webcast with Bryan Eisenberg. He’ll discuss why it’s essential to develop the right...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Yes, me too. Nobody – well hardly anybody – is talking about “Sales 2.0″ anymore, and yet less than twelve months ago you couldn’t hear yourself speak above the incredibly loud din that rose to a deafening crescendo.

So what happened? Has it gone away? Have we moved on to “Sales 3.0″ and everyone forgot to tell me? Was it all a figment of my imagination?

It is now more than eight years since Nigel Edelshain first coined the term, on a balmy Sunday afternoon way back in 2006, and perhaps we all now accept that actually, it was just the next phase in a continuous cycle of change in the way we all sell.

But the silence we are witnessing now is almost as loud as the silence I experienced when I posed the question – frequently.

I didn’t just ask the question here on my blog: I asked during keynotes that I was delivering; I asked during training workshops that I was leading; I asked all my learned chums … and still no definitive answer or explanation.

However, let me be very clear here, the “sales space” has witnessed the birth of some superb new solutions; highly successful conferences; a plethora of books/articles/webinars etc. over the past eight years, and if that was Sales 2.0, then bravo.

But did it need to be called anything? Wasn’t it simply a natural evolvement? Is it still with us?

Maybe it was like “Web 2.0?”

I remember a few years back, a very good chum writing a recommendation on LinkedIn, praised me for “fully embracing Web 2.0 tools” I didn’t really understand the significance of her compliment, but again, I do hope someone will alert me when and if I fully embrace Web 3.0

And what about our customers – the buyers – do you think they noticed the arrival of Sales 2.0? Mine didn’t, and to this day my perception is that they remain blissfully unaware.

My conclusion is that it is our secret – us sellers – and probably best to keep it that way.

These are just a few of the questions that keep me awake at night – or not!

The primary attraction for businesses using social media has traditionally been the ability to organically grow their audience and raise brand awareness on the platforms. However with Facebook’s blunt announcement that organic reach is on the decline, it means if brands want to be visible on user newsfeeds, they would now have to pay to be seen. Businesses are faced with the reality that dominant social media platforms have become oversaturated with content from businesses of all sizes, with brands generating content faster than users can consume them.

With the increase in sponsored posts and paid ads on Twitter, brands are now also competing with news companies for visibility. This is not particularly surprising coming from Twitter, a company that wants to redefine itself as an alternative news platform, with their combination of personal communication and real- time newsfeed a remarkably useful tool for those working in the media and entertainment industry.

In response, Facebook and Twitter have both announced the arrival of new commerce tools, designed to give businesses a ‘call to action’ option that will help to drive sales through social media. Twitter has also moved to give businesses more flexibility when paying for advertising, and according to Forbe.com’s Jayson DeMers:

“These objective-based campaigns, which are still currently in beta, will offer more flexibility including tweet engagements, website clicks or conversions, app installs, new followers and leads. These campaigns will be particularly appealing to small business owners who want to pay for results, not just for brand visibility.”

It is early days yet, and businesses are sure to be testing this option out this holiday season, however it also represents a shift in how businesses may now view the role of social media in their marketing/PR strategies.There is a new focus on social marketing, with marketers using social media to drive “sales over status updates and commerce over engagement.”

The average holiday consumer is now more likely to go to social media for information that will influence their purchasing decision, and Facebook and Twitter’s new ‘buy’ buttons would help facilitate smooth online transactions. If Facebook and Twitter’s new commerce capabilities prove to be useful for marketers, this may help to counteract the growing difficulty of organic reach experienced by businesses this year.

Post-its. Whiteboards. Hand-written to-do lists.

Keeping projects organized, whether at home or in the office, used to require a whole lot of ink. In today's world of digital, however, staying on top of your work is more "swipe" and less "write." A constantly regenerating crop of apps and programs has emerged to help keep you organized.

Below is a list of eight project management hacks, both for the home and for the workplace; absolutely no BICs or Uniballs required.

Workplace

Image: Flickr, Cory M Grenier

• Podio: Whether you're a freelancer, small business owner or corporate manager, Podio lets you view all of your tasks in one place. The software, which runs on desktop, mobile and tablet, allows users to create workspaces where they can mark off completed tasks, assign projects, share files and even auto-generate comments.Additionally, Podio handles CRM, sales leads and recruiting — saving small businesses time and precious seed money. Wish Podio could do more? The software has a drag-and-drop development tool that even non-programmers can master.

• Asana: Asana is a technological godsend for those who dread rummaging through a cluttered inbox. The app eliminates excessive back-and-forth emails, allowing team members and managers to create project cards, update assignments on-the-fly and communicate inside the program — without sending superfluous emails and IMs for "status updates."Asana works especially well for companies with loose structures and minimal red tape; users are able to freely establish sub-projects within larger assignments, and post updates without altering the card or getting manager approval. Users can also structure Asana tasks by date, or make them dependent upon the completion of other assignments. Read more...

More about Task List, Task Management, Home Improvement, Tech, and Apps Software

SEO writing tips in 2014? With all that has happened in search in recent years, do we really even need them? The answer is yes. Despite all the speculation in the industry, SEO is not dead, and it can still help you rank in SERPs when creating content.

Don’t worry, no keyword spamming or black hat tactics. I’m talking about writing optimized content using Google-friendly best practices. After all, when you spend time and money on quality content, your prospects should be able to find it.

Want to get a leg up on your competitors? Need to generate more leads and sales for your business? Here is a collection of must-know tips to boost the visibility of your web pages.

SEO Writing Tips: 22 Ways To Rank Higher In SERPs

1. Plan ahead.

This saves you time and keeps you organized and focused. Find great keywords. Plan what you’re going to write about. Build a content calendar.

2. Use SEO-friendly software.

Blogging platforms like WordPress (especially when you add the right plugins) make it easy to write and search engine optimize.

3. Be consistent.

Google favors sites that continuously publish fresh content, so writing consistently can improve visibility. Three to four posts weekly should do the trick.

4. Elaborate.

Long, in-depth blog posts and articles tend to perform well in SERPs. Aim for 1,500 words or more when writing. You may just get a ranking boost.

5. Keep it interesting.

Engaging content keeps visitors on your webpages. One of the lesser-known SEO writing tips, Google looks at bounce rates and time on site when ranking pages.

6. Write compelling, keyword-rich titles.

The title is the first thing search engines look at. Users, too. Note that click-through rate (CTR) is a ranking factor.

7. Break text with subheads.

Subheaders (H1-H6 tags) organize your content and describe it to search engine bots. Be sure to use important keywords here.

8. Include enticing snippets.

The meta description, along with your page title, is what makes users click through from SERPs. Again, click-through rate affects rankings.

9. Lead with keywords.

The first few words of your titles are given more weight in search. Always use primary keywords as close to the beginning as possible.

10. Link to trusted sites.

Linking to relevant content on high-ranking sites in your industry improves user experience, which is why it is an SEO best practice.

11. Link within your own site.

Linking to internal pages distributes link juice and allows search engines (and users) to crawl your website more easily.

12. Vary anchor text.

Optimizing link text (outbound links) to match keywords exactly can attract penalties. To be safe, diversify your anchor text.

13. Attract inbound links.

Search engines see multiple quality backlinks as a sign that your content/site is useful. There are many ways to build inbound links.

14. Add optimized pics.

Images bring your text to life. If they are optimized (file size, keyword titles, alt text, and descriptions), they can boost SEO and traffic.

15. Use LSI keywords.

Latent Semantic Indexing is how Google understands searcher intentions. Use synonyms and related words to make your content more relevant.

16. Target long tails.

Long tail keywords are less competitive and easier to rank for. Visitors who find your content using these terms are also more likely to convert.

17. Answer questions.

People ask search engines questions all day long. Provide credible answers (using long tail keywords) and they may just refer them to you.

18. Check your density.

Keyword density may not be a Google ranking factor, but too many keywords can lead to over-optimization penalties. Keep it under one percent.

19. Make use of online tools.

One of the best SEO writing tips you’ll get. Online tools can help with everything from keyword research and productivity to grammar and writer’s block.

20. Have a swipe file.

Keeping a file that contains all your best ideas, keywords, templates, and information can save you a lot of time when writing.

21. Don’t forget to share.

Sharing gets you traffic and links, which tells Google your content is popular. Promote via social media, blogs, forums, and other relevant channels.

22.Let others handle the writing.

Don’t have the time to create and optimize content? Outsource to professional writers. Check out the authors at Writtent.

Have some SEO writing tips up your sleeve? How do you make your content work harder for your business? Let me know in the comments.

You are being inundated with the latest and greatest shiny object promising to deliver magical results. It’s the times we live in. Social, mobile, digital, traditional and so on. The options are limitless.

You get a feeling of hope. This is what you have been missing. It’s the silver bullet that’s making other entrepreneurs rich and now you are going to jump in so you don’t miss out.  They are telling you how you can get that kind of exposure and hundreds or thousands of new potential customers. You see how other businesses have completely turned things around, seemingly overnight, by taking advantage of one of these tools.

You read magazines and blogs telling you why being on social media is not an option, but a requirement for small businesses. And why this method or that media is totally dead.

So you get excited and fire up that new social media page or launch that PPC campaign. BUT the results don’t pan out. Even worse, your hope has been shattered.

It’s back to the drawing board. You think “there has to be something I can do. All of these new opportunities to get my message out, one of them has to work!”

The problem is not the medium you’ve chosen, it’s your lack of a clear plan and/or process.

Here’s a look at the blueprint we created several years ago to help provide our clients with some clarity on what a well oiled sales and marketing engine looks like. The concept here was to provide clarity to the idea of event vs process which tends to confuse many businesses.

Take a good look at what a fine tuned sales and marketing engine looks like. The way to view this is simple: ALL components are required for maximum performance (read: for you to receive the highest possible ROI). Every missing component will reduce overall performance and, just like a car engine, could potential create a complete breakdown. And this should be applied to any and all campaigns, whether a social media effort, print ad or PPC campaign.

When I meet with entrepreneurs and marketing departments and begin to evaluate their engine, more times than not they are launching campaigns are missing ALL but 3 components. See if this sounds familiar in your own business.

Side Note: when we diagnose the plan and process of a client, each component is graded as well. In other words, even if you have several components in place, they may be weak. For example, you may be generating leads by advertising, but your headlines are terrible, thus reducing the effectiveness of the component. BUT for the purpose of this post, we just want to make sure you have the components in place. I will go over how to evaluate each component in future posts.

You decide to advertise (this could be anything from print ads to pay per click campaigns). By default you get to check the “generate leads” box because, unlike many small businesses, you are actually trying to let people know you exist. This effort also enables you to check the “build trust” box. A bi-product of putting your name out there is you begin to build a little more trust than a competitor who no one knows exists. And you are probably willing and able to take a customer’s money for the work you do, so you get to check the “convert” box.

In other words, the majority of engines consist of shooting blind arrows. You put your name out there with an ad of some kind with the goal of converting a sale.  That’s it.

If your headline is poor or your overall message lacks clarity you’ll get failing grades for generating leads and building trust, but they are still a part of your engine. It’s like having a fine tuned sports car (your business or skill) and removing all of the components of the engine except the few that will actually enable you to turn it on and move a bit. Then to make matters worse, those few components are rusty and can’t even perform at their best – but you still expect to compete in the big race.

If your marketing and advertising is missing components, you are at risk of wasting your money completely.  Worse than that you will erode the hope you have as you work so hard to reach your dreams.

I also want you to think about this. Looking at the outline above, what component part would Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram fill.  What part would a print ad, texting, PPC adverising or tradeshow fill?

If you are of the thought process that these are anything more than lead generators or trust builders, then you’re wrong. You can spend tons of time and money on these, but without the supporting components you will be wasting your time and money.

If you are going to a tradeshow, about to spend money on PPC or you’re going to be spend time to consistently post on social media, then you should take the time to make sure you have the other components in place. How will you capture leads? Do you have a system in place to follow up with those leads consistently and nurture them along, building more trust? What happens when they give you their money? Do you OVER-deliver on the promise? Is there a Wow-Factor? Do you have a system in place to consistently nurture existing customers after they convert?

Marketing is a process, not an event.

Don’t fall into the trap of believing any event that pushing out your message will bring you success and a strong ROI. It won’t.

Make sure your engine has all the necessary components to achieve peak performance before you launch any campaign and I promise you you’ll not only save yourself time, money and frustration – you just might put your company into overdrive!

How does personalisation increase conversion rates?

In our experience, effective content personalization increases conversion rates, boosts lead generation and cuts cost per lead. It might be intuitive to believe a personalized message is more effective than a one-size-fits-all message, but intuition isn’t the driving force here – what does the data show?

We have now served millions of personal content recommendations, and the evidence now shows an increase of 20%-30% in conversion rates, across all on existing traffic and content. Behind these numbers, there are several cool scientific reasons why this works so effectively.

 

 

 

5 ways personalisation enables you to generate more return from your content strategy

Here are five reasons why personalisation is effective, the first from the perspective of the marketer and four from the point-of-view of the online visitor:

1.  Take the economically-efficient choice and go after the low hanging fruit

If you are in marketing today you probably noticed that you are faced with a wide array of opportunities where to invest the marketing budget. Indeed, you are already frequently working with more than a hundred software programs. And you are already paying so much to get the visitors to your website - you spend on content planning and production and SEO and then on media, and now, if you’re successful, you have an audience at your virtual door and you are confronted with three major problems:

• 1. The user has already made up her mind - according to CEB, 57% of the customer purchase decision is complete before a customer ever contacts the business.
• 2. 98% of visitors will remain anonymous, making it very difficult to decide where they fit in within your array of desired personas.
• 3. And then there’s this: combine the median business site load time of 3 seconds with the fact that the majority of visitors leaving after 15 seconds - and you have only 12 seconds to engage with these anonymous visitors who already know what they want.

By converting the visitors who are already at your website – the low hanging fruit – you can generate leads of the same quality at a cost of 3 to 6 US Dollars, according to BrightInfo’s data. From the economic standpoint of measuring alternatives, that is very efficient.

2. Cut through the paradox of choice

With so much content, a visible real-time offering counteracts this phenomenon, described so eloquently in this TED video. In short, in terms of customer satisfaction, it is true that some choice is better than no choice. But it is not true that infinite choice leads to greater satisfaction than limited choice. Having a large and diversified arsenal of content is usually a smart strategy, as it helps to cater to bigger crowds. But each visitor is at risk of getting lost by trying to compare different offers that compete for his limited attention span.

3. Reduce a related effect – Analysis paralysis

Analysis paralysis is an anti-pattern, a state of over-thinking a situation so that a decision is never eventually taken. This happens when a decision is considered as over-complicated, with too many detailed options, so that a choice is never made, rather than try something and change if a major problem arises.

Even worse, when people start to look for that optimal or perfect solution, they not only fear making any imperfect decision, but they start imagining that there is an ideal solution.

Once they don’t find it in those 15 to 30 seconds they spend on your website, their image of your product or service may remain negative for a very long time. In addition, anything that they do actually try out or buy will most likely be compared to that imagined solution – and reality often fails to meet imaginary expectations.

4. Cut the rate of horrible decisions: Extinct by instinct.

Ironically, extinct by instinct is the opposite effect of analysis paralysis, and is also true on your website: No single website can overcome the overall information overflow. Your website is part of a vast amount of information every qualified lead has to go through and process each day, and some of them will make their decision based on hasty judgement or a gut-reaction.

With more and more of the decision-making process happening BEFORE the visitor ever gets to your website, you want to make sure that his decision-making is as accurate as possible as soon as he shows up on your radar.

Content personalization can limit the amount of fatal decisions based on hasty judgement or a gut-reaction that result in unsatisfied customers. With so many competitors out there, having unsatisfied customers is not a thought you want to entertain.

5. Prevent users disorientation

Another closely related phenomenon, disorientation, can be tackled by shortening the funnels – the track a consumer takes through your website. This is especially important in websites that offer numerous products, services, and content, and experience high bounce rates.

Plenty of our clients place a lot of emphasis on page-views, often thinking the more the merrier. But, as we just as often reply, there is also some danger there – that is, to show the wrong pages.

You never ever want a visitor to think, 'wait, why am I even seeing this?' Instead, focus on leading visitors in the right path, by highlighting the way through their personal interests.

Image credit: Freepik

To see the 2014 Maclean’s Power List, naming the 50 most important Canadians, click here.

There are close to 800 lobbyists for hire to bend the ears of MPs, senators and other federal public office holders on behalf of their clients, an 85 per cent jump since the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying starting keeping tabs in 2005. To find out who’s been busiest in the last 12 months (ending Nov. 14), we asked Canadians for Responsible Advocacy, a lobbyist watchdog launched in April, to crunch the numbers. Below are the lobbyists who had the most contact with officials, and their top three clients.

1. Matthew Triemstra, National Public Relations
Total meetings*: 70
Clients: Pacific NorthWest LNG, Progress Energy Canada, SupremeX

2. Isabel Metcalfe, Public Affairs Counsel
Total meetings: 50
Clients: Canadian Energy Efficiency Alliance, Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, Canadian Actors’ Equity Association

3. Daniel Brock, Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP
Total meetings: 48
Clients: Munich Life Management Co., RGA Life Reinsurance Co. of Canada, Swiss Reinsurance Co.

4. Wendy Noble, Sussex Strategy Group
Total meetings: 41
Clients: Small Guys Tobacco Group, UPS Canada, Amalgamated Transit Union Canada

5. Nanci Woods, The Capital Hill Group
Total meetings: 38
Clients: Seabridge Gold, Conference for Advanced Life Underwriting, Genzyme Canada

6. Natalie Dash, Campbell Strategies
Total meetings: 35
Clients: Thalidomide Victims Association of Canada, Trustpoint Innovation Technologies, the National Benefit Authority Corp.

7. William Pristanski, Prospectus Associates
Total meetings: 33
Clients: Tata Consultancy Services Canada, Resolute Forest Products, Ericsson Canada

8. Robert Serpe, McLaughlin Advisory
Total meetings: 28
Clients: D+H Limited Partnership, Canadian Tire Corp., Genworth Financial

9. Marc Desmarais, Sussex Strategy Group
Total meetings: 27
Clients: Small Guys Tobacco Group, Amalgamated Transit Union Canada, Celestica

T- 10. Ron McLaughlin, Chapman/McLaughlin Advisory
Total meetings: 26
Clients: Genworth Financial, D+H Limited Partnership, Canadian Tire

T- 10. Elizabeth Roscoe, Hill+Knowlton Strategies
Total meetings: 26
Clients: Berkshire Hathaway Energy Company, TMX Group, BlackBerry

T- 10. Bruce Drysdale, Drysdale Forstner Hamilton Public Affairs
Total meetings: 26
Clients: Catalyst Capital Group, the Energy and Minerals Group, Baffinland Iron Mines Corporation

*Number of communications reports, filed with the federal lobbyist registry

The post Behind closed doors: The 12 most powerful lobbyists in Ottawa appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The gap between the amount of money college sports programs make and how much goes back to the athletes continues to grow. The chart below shows us how much college football players might be worth at the top programs if they were able to play in a free market system.

We calculated the Fair Market Value of college football players at the ten most profitable programs using data obtained by BusinessOfCollegeSports.com. Using the NFL's most recent collective bargaining agreement in which the players receive a minimum of 47% of all revenue, each program's revenue was split between the school and the athletes with the players' share split evenly among the 85 scholarship players.

Using this method we can estimate that the average college football player at the University of Texas is worth $605,000 per year (up from $578,000 a year ago) based on the program's $109.4 million in revenue with the University of Alabama coming in second at $409,000 per year.

That's a far cry from the $3.8 million Texas spent on student aid for football players in 2013, or about $44,700 per athlete.

Join the conversation about this story »

We all do things we aren't proud of with our money.

Whether that's selling stock in a company right before its value skyrockets, shrinking away from negotiating our salary, or simply dragging our heels on opening a retirement savings account, even the best of us are prone to mistakes.

Successful people are no exception.

We spoke with seven CEOs, executives, and multimillionaires to find out exactly which of their financial choices over the years made them cringe.

Read on to find out how these highly successful people answered the question, "What's your biggest financial regret?"

Jacquelyn Smith, Jenna Goudreau, and Richard Feloni contributed reporting to this story.

Letting other people talk you out of great investments.

Tony Robbins, multimillionaire life coach:

"I have a resort in Fiji, and there was a little company that bottled water. The bottle looked cool, and the water tasted really incredible — you could tell the difference. I hired a guy to give me research [on the business]. He was a so-called 'expert.' And I said, 'I think I can make an investment in this. I think I can get 30% of the company for half a million dollars.'

"He came back to me and said they don't have the resources or capacity to make it. And I accepted that. I look back on Fiji Water and anytime I grab one I say, 'Holy shit!' So use your experts as coaches and do your own homework and dig deep."

Buying stock in a bank that 'couldn't' go under.

Ken Lin, CEO and founder of Credit Karma, which recently reached a $1 billion valuation:

"In 2008, I bought shares of WaMu two days before they collapsed. At that time, I thought that it was panicked selling and that a bank like WaMu wouldn’t or couldn’t go under.

"Clearly, I was wrong. It did teach me a valuable lesson about how fast things can change in business."

Overthinking investing.

Jon Stein, founder and CEO of Betterment:

"I wasted so much time and money by overthinking investing. Whether it was opening a dozen brokerage accounts, getting too concentrated in individual securities (thanks Enron), and attempting to do overly complicated transactions — it was a waste.

"I should have just taken the index route in my younger years. I'd be in a better place for retirement now, and I would have been able to spend more time with friends and family.

"The money is one thing, but I'll especially never get back the hundreds of hours I poured into trying to beat the market."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

As marketing teams finalize plans for the year ahead, the logistics of making growth happen should be strongly influencing the targets you set.

Most of us would agree there are four ways to strategize for growth: increase the share you hold in the markets you are strong in; develop new products for those markets; extend your reach by finding new markets for your current brands; and develop new products that cater to new markets.

But while the strategies themselves are well-known, your capacity to expand is of course directly proportional to your capacities to generate demand and to fulfil. It’s tempting to pluck a number that’s x percentage points above organic growth. But as the old direct marketing adage goes – be careful what you ask for, because it might just come true. Here’s 7 factors I suggest you look at to navigate a responsible course between stretch and over-reach.

1. Access – will your distribution strategy allow you to grow volumes of either current or new lines to the extent you need to? If reach is finite and static, your ability to physically deliver into market will bottle-neck. What have you done to open up access – and is doing so in keeping with your brand’s position in the marketplace?

As my colleague Brad VanAuken points out here: “Distribution contributes to customer brand insistence in two ways. First, it increases brand accessibility so that brand preference is more likely to be converted to brand purchase. But, more importantly, it increases brand exposure, which increases brand awareness … The only situation in which extensive distribution may not be right for your brand is if it is positioned as an upscale or luxury brand.”

Will you be available, not available or too available as a brand for the targets you are setting?

2. Speed – can you deliver enough product fast enough to meet the demand? At one level, this is about pure fulfilment. At another, it’s about making sure that you have paced the introduction of new product and the upgrade of current offerings at just the right speed to avoid simply trying to shovel more and more of the same kind of product into market.

How have you timed your innovation/improvement programme to coincide with your expansion plans? Too slow – and your brand will lack dynamism. Too fast – and you risk overwhelming consumers with too many choices and cannibalizing your own releases.

3. Support – have you timed and resourced your communications to drive growth at the pace and intensity you require? I think this is one of the significant challenges today – getting enough cut-through for your brand to be heard at the same time as you continue to sustain and refresh the messages to keep consumers’ interest.

Too many brands think through to launch and then plan for maintenance comms. I think that’s changing – and increasingly brands need to be planning waterfalled comms that maintain messages but introduce new points of interest over the medium term. At the same time, you need to have a resource ‘buffer’ in reserve to address any lag. The trick here is to responsibly balance maintenance of your growth ranges, introduction of new developments and offers, the planned withdrawal of communications support for dying lines and the responsive comms needed to plug holes or fades.

Are you saying enough about the right things to the right people at the right times with the right weighting in the most interesting ways to generate the growth you want?

4. Interaction – how are you ensuring that your social feeds are more than just background? How are you striking the right balance between the short-term exchanges that Twitter and Facebook are so good for and the longer-term commitment of reinforcing relevance? What metrics have you put in place to ensure that your social conversation is fuelling interest across all your products and planned releases, without reducing your social channels to promotional mouth-pieces?

At the other extreme, is your brand just chatting for the sake of it? That question is made all the more pointed by speculation that organic reach on platforms such as Facebook is heading for zero. In which case, you may find yourself increasingly allocating resources to interactions that speak to no-one and add nothing to your ability to grow.

 5. Volume – obvious but easily overlooked. Once you’ve generated the demand, will you be able to keep up? The temptation is always to look to ship more to bigger markets but, to Brad’s point earlier, not everyone should be looking at scale as a driver for growth. Sometimes, a brand should be aiming to be precious rather than popular – particularly given the logistics, expense and delayed returns of getting into some of those markets and continuing to supply at the levels required.

Everyone talks about return on equity and return on capital. Perhaps marketers need to focus as much energy on the heavily-related topic of return on expansion. “What do we get for going there in greater quantities? And what do we gain if we don’t?”

How much is enough when it comes to your brand retaining optimum brand value? At what stocking level do you risk becoming too much of a good thing?

6. Understanding – there’s a fascinating irony in the fact that as markets get bigger, the demands of consumers to be treated specifically and personally grow louder. Those demands come with some potentially hefty investments. The key questions for brands with ambitious growth plans are: Can you grow your understanding of your market(s) as quickly if not more quickly than you can the consumer base itself? And then, having grown it, can you keep feeding that enlarged community with the levels of service and experience that they now expect?

In a great piece on the travel industry, the authors offered advice that is relevant to any number of brands keen to expand their footprint: Focus on customers, not channels; Win in the era of ‘big data’; Unlock the power of partnerships (“Succeeding here may be more about identifying companies with similar interests and synergistic capabilities than about throwing new money and new technology after problems rooted in structural issues of coordination.”); and Master the entire customer experience.

How will you stay delightfully one-on-one as you expand? What will you continue to know about your customers as individuals that your competitors don’t know?

7. Responsibility – What compromises will you need to make ethically to achieve the growth you’re targeting? Does it depend on you sourcing from lower-wage countries, for example, compromising environmental standards or adding ingredients to your products that are considered harmful or unhealthy? Does it come at the expense of diversity goals – or other responsibility targets? Interesting to see Puma putting safeguards in place across its supplier network to ensure that they pass muster. Not doing so risks your brand being labelled as one that pursues its commercial plans at too high a social cost.

What’s the potential cost of growth to your social reputation?

Brands remain addicted to growth. (In time, my view is that we will have to question that – because the environmental consequences debate will become increasingly mainstream.) But in the meantime, growth continues to be the metric that so many look to for proof that marketers are doing their job well and that businesses are strong. In the 12 months ahead, what level of growth are you going to commit to that enables your brand to grow at a realistic pace, retains the customers you have, introduces new advocates to your brand community and continues  to safeguard and enhance your brand’s immediate and long term reputation?

Sponsored By: Resonate. Reach audiences based on why they choose brands.

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop, the Brand Storytelling Workshop Series and Brand Strategy and Customer Co-Creation Workshops

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

 

While creating and publishing content may be easy, measuring content marketing is a hard and daunting task. Earlier this year, I asked 24 content marketing experts to name the one  most important metric to which they pay attention. The responses were across the board. Clearly, there’s no one way to measure content marketing.

Since there are so many metrics for content marketing, and even more tools used to measure them, I recently created a framework that covers eight types of possible metrics. Keep in mind that not all of these metrics apply to all types of content. The framework is broken down by channel, so you can get specific examples of each metric.

1. Consumption metrics look at the number of readers who consume your content, the channels they use, and the frequency of their consumption. Those who are in the consumption or sharing phase are likely earlier in your sales funnel or top of funnel (TOFU).

• Website or blog: Look at page views, unique visitors, and average time on your site using a tool like Google Analytics.

• Assets like downloadable eBooks or white papers: Check your download or form completions using Pardot, Marketo, Eloqua, Act-On, or other marketing automation platforms. Keep in mind that if your asset is indexed by search engines, users may be able to download the asset and bypass the submission form.

• Social media: Tools like bit.ly can help you measure click-through action.

• Email: MailChimp, Marketo, Eloqua, and Constant Contact measure areas such as open rates and clicks for your email campaigns.

• Feeds: Use FeedBurner or FeedBlitz to quantify your content’s clicks and views.

2. Retention metrics look at the effectiveness of holding your audience’s attention beyond the initial contact.

• Website or blog: Look at the percentage of returning visitors, the number of visits, the pages per visit, and the bounce rate using a tool like Google Analytics.

• Social media: Track your followers on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

• Email: MailChimp, Marketo, and Eloqua can measure the number who unsubscribe or opt out from your email content.

• Feeds: Use FeedBurner or FeedBlitz to quantify your subscriber base over time.

3. Sharing metrics examine what content is being shared, by whom, and where or how they are sharing it. They are not really applicable to feeds.

• Website, blog, asset, and social media: SharedCount can help quantify retweets, “likes,” and social media shares of your content.

4. Engagement metrics are key to understanding whether your content resonates with readers. What kind of action (if any) are they taking after reading your content? Are they frequently or consistently taking action?

• Website or blog: Google Analytics can help measure a user’s session duration and page depth (how deeply into your site the person has clicked).

• Social media: Tools like Disqus can help you measure comments and social chatter around your content.

• Feeds: Use FeedBurner or FeedBlitz to quantify your subscriber base over time.

5. Lead metrics (marketing’s part of the sales pipeline): As customers advance through your sales funnel, some will reach the lead metrics phase (middle of funnel). Here’s where you’ll want to see new leads generated and existing leads touched through your content. Tools like Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, Act-On, and similar marketing automation platforms can assist in this area.

6. Sales metrics apply to customers at the bottom of your sales funnel where you’ll want to look at the dollar amount and percent value of opportunities influenced or generated and those ultimately won. Use a CRM tool like Salesforce or Full Circle CRM for this.

7. Production metrics are an internal assessment of your content operations. How is your team (including members) performing against editorial calendar deadlines and goals? How long does it take your team to turn a content idea into a published piece of content? How many pieces of content do you regularly publish in a week or month? You’ll need to measure these areas on your own over time. I suggest using a simple Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to track this.

8. Cost metrics are among the most important since they help you calculate a return on investment or ROI for content marketing. What does it cost to produce and distribute each blog post, white paper, or email campaign? Remember to consider not only the cost in staff time or freelance budget but stock images, design fees, and any paid distribution channels.

Getting started with content marketing measurement

To begin measuring the efficacy of your content marketing, I would recommend the following:

• Start small. You don’t need to measure everything all at once. Rather than flying blind, start measuring something that’s easy for you and work from there.

• Focus on TOFU first. The top of the funnel is often the easiest place to get metrics. For example, sharing and consumption metrics don’t require marketing automation or a CRM tool.

• Go broad, then deep. It’s easier to get coverage over all your channels for a class of metrics such as retention or consumption, rather than going deep and trying to map a whole customer journey down to revenue.

• Count consistency. For your metrics to really pay off, much like your content production, it’s necessary to generate metrics for your content over a period of time, not just for a one-off of your newest content. By doing so, you can identify which older content is evergreen, and what may be underperforming and should be retired or reworked.

Measuring these areas will help you improve your content marketing and demonstrate its value to the rest of your organization. For more strategies to help you improve your ROI, download my extensive eBook on this topic, The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics.

Pawan Deshpande shared his expert insight at Content Marketing World. Check out all the fantastic CMW sessions that are available through our Video on Demand portal.

Cover image by Eukalyptus via pixabay

The post 8 Metrics to Conquer a Content Marketer’s Fear of Measurement appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

The overwhelming majority of people working on any given B2B marketing campaign have never seen, met, or spoken to a customer—and certainly not a prospect. They do their B2B prospecting from reports and results. They are separated, a gap to a chasm, from the often conflicted humanity of the people that make the decisions. This separates your B2B prospecting campaign from its potential.

Challenges of B2B Prospecting

We are not fishing on the shores of Lake Abundant—it’s harder than ever to differentiate ourselves and to find, nurture, and motivate prospect as the world become increasing atomized. The B2B prospect is the most elusive, with a long consideration journey that takes place, for the most part, prior to any direct engagement. So, who are those guys? What do they want? Perhaps we should ask them.

Many companies utilize personas – archetypes or synthesized summaries which are based on qualitative research with real people in this position about their characteristics, specific information behaviors, attitudes, motivations, and goals. Personas have generated great success in B2C (e.g., Best Buy’s customer centricity campaign generated double-digit improvement in sales per store), we think persona’s next greatest potential is in B2B prospecting.

Personas have one thing that data and research reports do not. Personality. And, as a very wise friend once said to me, the B2B sale is all about personalities. This can put the personality on the planning table and can serve as a point of reference, if not agreement, between marketing and sales.

Research on How Personas Can Help B2B Prospecting

We (b2p partners) recently conducted proprietary research among marketing professionals to begin to understand and benchmark how companies are using personas and where and how they have been effective. The full results are detailed elsewhere (I’d be happy to send them to you—scott.hornstein@b2ppartners.com), but as we examine the potential of personas in B2B prospecting, three points jump out:

• About one half (58%) of respondents said they are currently using personas.
• About a third (35%) report that personas are very or extremely effective.
• About one half (47%) discovered important new insights or corrected faulty assumptions.

The potential is there—just being able to avoid mistakes half of the time would justify the effort to me, but let’s look at the other side of the coin:

• About a third (32%) say personas are not respected or appreciated within the organization.
• A quarter (26%) say the personas have not yet revealed many new insights.
• Less than a fifth (17%) say that personas are not very or not at all effective.

There’s one verbatim that seems to sum up what’s underneath these stats:

“In the main, personas tend not to drive any new learning, but rather skin existing learning with a newer, somewhat obvious conclusion.”

The results are that 41% of the personas were created from existing data, which iis a self-fulfilling prophesy. Said differently, it’s hard to find new insights when you are relying on the same old information and biases. To be effective, we must engage the prospect in purposeful conversation designed to uncover the what, how and why of their goals, consideration and decision behavior.

As our B2B prospects get harder to influence, let’s understand them better through personas. Remember the third that said that personas are very or extremely effective? Here’s their input:

• “Personas are drivers of our segmentation strategy.”
• “Better copy and image selection. Leads to better targeting, media usage and prioritization of budget”
• “A contributor to product development”

Is this the silver bullet we’ve been waiting for, Godot? Sorry. While we’re waiting, it sure seems like an effective way to leverage success.

 

Inbound marketing is amazing, isn’t it? You do some blogging, create an offer, post it all over social media, and get lead conversions. But what happens after that? Now that you’ve gotten all these leads from your website – how do you turn them into sales? The number one complaint that we get from our customers who are investing in a more basic strategy is that the leads they have, though sales qualified, just don’t seem to be closing. This is the ultimate smarketing challenge and it’s a great example of why I tell people to invest more into their marketing. While this may look a little self-serving (a marketing company telling you to invest more money in marketing), hear me out.

Here are 3 reasons to double your inbound marketing budget.

1. Stop the fight between sales and marketing.
   Before there was Smarketing, there was Nark-eting. (You love that. I just made it up. Just now.) What’s that? That’s when the sales team and marketing staff all sit in a room with the executives and point fingers at each other, trying to place the blame (nark) on someone else. It’s hard to keep each department accountable when there’s no clear definition of what exactly a sales qualified lead is, or how they’ll be nurtured by either side. Investing more in your marketing process will help marketing qualify leads more easily before the sales team starts working them.
2. A shorter sales process.
   What happens when you have more marketing budget available? More marketing activities. This includes nurturing, which sends timed e-mails to your leads based on their interests. Once leads download more content, marketing has a much better idea of what they’re interested in, who passes that on to sales, giving them much more insight into that lead.

3. A sweeter pipeline.
   If your pipeline is looking a little top-heavy, you need to add in nurturing. Nurturing allows you push leads down the funnel. It gives marketing and sales leads at every level so that once the bottom of the funnel leads are closed, they have more leads to close and no one is stuck with a ton of top of the funnel leads that never get followed up on and fall through the cracks.

Rather than taking the knife to your marketing budget at every opportunity for what you or your sales team perceive as poor results, an increased budget will eliminate conflict, make it easier on your sales team by providing more qualified leads and give the company executives a beautiful, well rounded pipeline. Inbound marketing can yield fantastic results, but if you’re not investing enough into the process, you may not know exactly how awesome those results can be. Be sure to investigate your leads closely and determine whether or not it’s time to invest in some deeper nurturing options.

According to research, between 50 and 75 percent of the success of a B2B marketing campaign is down to the accuracy of the data available. Businesses also rely increasingly on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems – software that retains every lead, every sales opportunity and every contact record.
But software is only as useful as the data it contains, and good quality, up to date information is the key. Businesses invest thousands of pounds in obtaining leads that allow them to generate profit. But what happens a year later, when it’s time to sell something new?

This statistic from Target Margeting Mag, from a 2001 study, proves the scale of the problem: 70.8 percent of business people surveyed had at least one change to their contact record in 12 months. The breakdown of change was:

• Job or title change: 65.8 percent
• Phone number change: 42.9 percent
• Email address change: 37.3 percent
• Change of company name: 34.2 percent
• Move from one company to another: 29.6 percent
• Change of name: 3.8 percent

Bear in mind that this study was conducted 13 years ago. The rate of change is accelerating all the time. How long would it take for an entire database to become stale, useless and out of date? We can make some guesses based on more modern figures.

The Acceleration of Decay

HubSpot published an interesting study on marketing databases. By using simulation, it found that business databases naturally degrade by 22.5 percent per annum.

In other words, more than one in five contact records in a marketing database is lost to data decay in a single year. That’s a contact that your business invested in, and a contact that could have yielded your next big sale. NetProspex reported that data decay occurs at a rate of around 2 percent per month. Its president, Michael Bird, calls this problem a “huge potential nightmare” for B2B marketers.

Over time, this rate of decay is compounded. A healthy database with tens of thousands of contacts could be useless within half a decade. Businesses grow, change, shrink, go bust, merge and split into new businesses. People grow, change and move on.

Reasons For Decay

Why do our databases lose valuable contacts? The answers are surprisingly obvious:

• People move jobs, and they rarely take their email address with them. If you lose contact with one person, you effectively lose contact with their organisation as a whole
• Even if you have a personal email address for a valued contact, the contact probably won’t retain it for more than a couple of years
• External companies and organisations enforce changes

Dying Assets

A marketing list is a business asset. It is not immune to deterioration and devaluation. As long as there is natural churn, the database is becoming less useful. It is a ‘dying asset’.

There are three very clear consequences of data ‘death’:

• The business has to put more money into replacing the lost contacts with new leads. The longer the database is left to decay, the more investment is required to revive it
• If you delay for too long, the expense of revitalising and resurrecting the database increases. This takes us back to the 1-10-100 rule
• Data decays silently. Its effects may not be felt immediately. A business can use out of data contact information long after it has gone stale, running up unnecessary bills and creating unnecessary waste. GBGroup estimates that mailing a brochure to a database of 100,000 businesses results in £38,800 in waste (see their working here)

Reviving Data

Mary Firme at ReachForce says that businesses “simply can’t deliver” the expected results if data is allowed to decay. She suggests that it must be “addressed consistently”.

HubSpot cites improved marketing as a cost-effective way of replacing lost leads. Other solutions include:

• Telemarketing projects, where clients are called one by one to confirm their details. While effective, this is time consuming and potentially difficult to manage. What happens when a valuable contact cannot be reached?
• Buying lists. Plenty of companies sell ‘clean’ B2B marketing lists that can replace your own list. But when purchasing a list, you don’t always know if all of the contacts are qualified. And, even if it’s a great quality list, it will still decay from the moment you purchase it
• Exporting databases for cleaning. It’s a credible solution, but the act of exporting and importing may introduce even more problems
• Using data quality software to clean data in situ, using the expertise of your own staff to manually review progress along the way

Solving the Problem

The data decay challenge is universal. Even if your business has not yet been affected, its contact records, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and address books are all vulnerable to deterioration:

• In the UK, Companies House keeps a record of all active businesses. It says that one business closes every three minutes
• Our own figures suggest that 42 per cent of CRM failure is due to poor quality data
• Businesses sroupay 37 per cent of business value is down to the data the business holds, according to PWC Global Data

A small business with a few hundred clients could manually review its database once a year. It could visit every website, telephone every contact and cross match records with public databases. It would cost money and take time, but it’s possible.

For an enterprise with thousands of customer records – or tens of thousands, in some cases – ringing everyone to check their address is clearly not going to work.

Data is always going to decay, and the bigger a database gets, the harder it is to manually maintain. Wouldn’t it be better if you could prevent decay, or reverse its effects, with regular data cleansing?

Data quality initiatives are the only way of ensuring a high standard of data quality and a low rate of decay.

Do You Need to Perfect & Merge Duplicate Records?  Please join us for the second of our webinar series where we can help:

• Manage the data in your CRM (no data leaves the CRM environment)
• Merge duplicates to create a best surviving record
• Create a Single Customer View

Your company data is an asset, ensuring it is accurate and up to date is not a just a requirement, it is a necessity.

Every salesperson wishes there was a magic formula that converted leads into sales with a snap of your fingers. But instead of searching for that elusive, enchanted elixir, spend your time doing some self-assessment, honing your presentation skills, and listening to what potential clients have to say can create the real magic that generates leads and turns them into sales.

Below are 5 tactics that are almost as fool-proof as a rabbit in a hat.

1. Reuse and Recycle

Calling old leads rarely results in a sale. However, repurposing the data from unfulfilled leads has a special value – feedback.

There are ways to achieve “do-it-yourself” feedback. Many firms’ call systems announce, “Calls will be recorded for quality assurance purposes.” If your firm does this, and permits access to those records, they give you a great tool for assessing your lead skills.

In lieu of lawfully recorded sales calls, consider employing one of the many lead-tracking apps available. Alternatively, go low-tech and take copious notes during the conversation. The point is to understand how your call techniques do and do not succeed, and by recording what you did in successful calls versus unsuccessful ones provides a great deal of insight into areas in need of improvement.

If nothing else, think of this as recycling, or unfruitful leads repurposed into educational material that helps better prepare you for closing all the new leads coming your way.

2. Nothing Beats a Great Pitch “Recipe”

The sales pitch is the do or die moment for most sales leads. Reading a script developed for a nameless, faceless company rarely succeeds. It’s vital that you come up with an original approach that reflects who you are while also including important ingredients like:

• Clearly and authoritatively identify who you are and why you are calling.
• Use a strong and confident, but never overbearing manner during the call.
• At the same time, make the person feel they are in charge because you are responding to their inquiry or addressing their needs.

Attempting to make a quick closure of a lead is possible, but requires finesse and a fair amount of luck. Remember to be classy and never pushy.

However, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet complained, “…therein lies the rub.” You can never be certain of a client’s feelings. All the smooth talking in the world will not make a client sign on the dotted line if you have not prepared them for the close. Taking time to build trust, however, may pay off handsomely. In other words, it all goes back to the idea of having a conversation, starting a relationship, and building a rapport with the prospect.

3. Listen – You May Learn Something

Listening to what a prospect has to say is a truly novel approach for many sales professionals. Conversing with the prospect rather than only “pitching”: provide information while also listening to them to gain more data about them.

The conversation aspect is important. It is not all a pitch by this point. Any information the prospect provides gives you additional fodder to energize your sale. Even asking if they understand what you have said thus far counts. Beyond that, listen to what they say, use it to frame helpful information addressing their needs, and then present how your firm addresses those requirements. Prospective clients appreciate personalized responses to concerns.

4. Distinguish Yourself

Find a way to distinguish yourself from the competition. Especially when dealing with difficult or indecisive clients, sometimes a little drama and/or cage rattling may work like a charm.

Sometimes, a friendly, engaging, yet memorable greeting suffices to make prospects remember you. Is it a potentially huge account? A well-conceived, personalized gift or letter may do the trick.

For particularly recalcitrant prospective clients, Wendy Connick, writing in the National Association of Sales Professionals website suggests two approaches bound to gain their attention:

• Convince an existing client who has the respect of the prospect to attend the sales meeting with you. It is a bit like peer pressure, but if that existing client is successful, there may be good reasons for the prospect to emulate them.
• Walk out of the meeting. Do it politely, but firmly. It may be enough to shock difficult potential clients into action.

5. Use Technology Creatively

A huge percentage of leads (over 71%, according to Forbes.com, citing a Harvard Business School report) languish due to a lack of responsiveness. The secret to closing many leads is speed. This means constant access to the hardware used for immediately responding to inquiries, whatever the platform.

Nothing beats person-to-person contact, but such meetings are not always possible. Use all the available tools, from telephones to computers, and beyond. An article in B2BMarketing suggests using e-signature apps to close the deal, and cloud-based apps to store contracts. This permits reviewing contracts them with leads via phone and/or internet. Do the research and discover what best suits your needs, and then take the time to learn how to make it a success for you in converting leads to sales.

Building on my post last week, I was reminded of a conversation I had with a marketer who was meeting with her new boss to explain the need for a new lead nurturing strategy.

The problem was that her boss felt their current integrated marketing campaigns qualified as lead nurturing. We discussed the challenges of communicating what is and isn’t lead nurturing.

A lot of marketers say they are “nurturing” their prospects, when in reality, all they are doing is sending out nice brochures, landing page links or marketing copy focused on product releases or company announcements.

Starting to get my point?

Pretty, well-designed fluff is not going to “feed” your prospects. Creating a nice layout and clarifying your value statement isn’t going to contribute to the development of your client or your relationship with them.

Let me break it down even further by giving a few examples of what is and what isn’t lead nurturing.

 

Examples of what is NOT lead nurturing:

1. Sending out an e-newsletter on a monthly basis

2. Blasting your entire database with a new case study that’s unlikely to be relevant to many list members

3. Sending all early stage leads the same series of emails, regardless of their behaviors

4. Randomly calling leads every four weeks to see if they are ready to buy

5 Salespeople calling early stage leads every month just to “touch base”

6. Offering content that promotes your company’s products and services and does not take into account your prospects’ interests or needs at their stage of buying

 

Examples of what IS lead nurturing:

1. Sharing content that’s relevant and valuable, even if they never buy from you

2. Sending a targeted email that includes content based on:

• Recipient’s industry and/or role in the company
• Stage in buying process or interest
• Previous conversations or content engaged that’s likely to be relevant

3. Helping to answer a question or offering more information

4. Sending information that is relevant to the recipient’s problem

5. Making calls based on touch point data that adds value to the interaction – being a “plus” to their day

6. Giving them useful information that sticks with them and/or helps them grow as an individual or company

 

It’s all about building trusted relationships with people. That’s what we really need to do instead of expecting to drive conversion from a single event or email. You do this by consistently offering relevant content in the context of lead nurturing and delivering value.

 

Image Attribution: The Vacant-Green Camera

 

You might also like

Lead Nurturing: You can’t automate trust [More from the blogs]

Lead Nurturing: Pilot campaign increases conversion 32.6% with automated emails [MarketingSherpa case study]

Lead Nurturing: 3-part funnel campaign creates 70% increase in inbound calls to sales reps [MarketingSherpa case study]

Lead Nurturing: How intent data lifted a B2B email campaign’s CTR 248% and forwarding rate more than 400% [MarketingSherpa case study]

According to Forrester Research, many brands are wasting their time with Facebook and Twitter.

“It’s clear that Facebook and Twitter don’t offer the relationships that marketing leaders crave,” said Nate Elliott, a vice-president and principal analyst, concluded in a report, “Social Relationship Strategies That Work.”

“Yet most brands still use these sites as the centerpiece of their social efforts — thereby wasting significant financial, technological, and human resources on social networks that don’t deliver value.”

Instead, Elliot suggests brands enhance their Websites to make them more community-focused and interactive. This would give their Websites a digital presence that drives more engagement than Twitter or Facebook.

A few thoughts about Elliot’s thesis:

1. For some brands, Twitter and Facebook are services with high amounts of engagement, enthusiasm and participation. Good examples are Starbucks, Oreo and WestJet. It provides them with the justification and ROI for social media activity and resources.

2. The role and value of Websites shouldn’t be under-estimated because brands own this piece of digital real estate, whereas they “lease” space on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. It counters the notion that Websites are, for some reason, becoming dinosaurs.

The reality is every brand has different products, goals and ways to engage with consumers.

For some brands, social media is a no-brainer because it gives them ways to build relationships and get consumers involved with the brand and each other. This is particularly true for business-to-consumer brands.

For these brands, Twitter and Facebook offers plenty of value that complements their Websites. In an ideal digital world, there is virtuous circle between social media and Websites. Each party involved in the marketing and sales activity supports each other.

At the same time, there are brands that get little benefit from social media, including Facebook and Twitter – despite their size and presence. Their products, marketing and consumers are not natural fits for social media. It’s not the way these brands sell or their consumer buy. As a result, social media isn’t part of the mix – and that’s okay.

At the end of the day, a brand has to decide what works for them to support their strategic and tactical goals – be it sales, leads, customer service or brand awareness.

For some brands, social media is a no-brainer. For other, it’s a non-starter. It’s the way business works.

Regardless of whether a brand is all over social media or treats it as untouchable, the common denominator is the value of Websites – something the Forrester report accentuates.

A brand’s Website is their digital doorway where they welcome existing and potential customers, as well as other stakeholders such as analysts, media and partners.

As a result, a company’s Website needs to be engaging, information, insight and an effective tool to support the business. It’s where business happens.

If I had a choice between investing in social media  and a Website, the Website would win hands down.

But for most brands, it’s not an either/or proposition. They need a Website and they need some kind of social media presence. It’s just a matter of finding the right mix for each business.

More: MarketingLand and Business Insider provide coverage of the Forrester Report.

The post No Such Thing As Hard And Fast Rules for Social Media appeared first on Sysomos Blog.

If you’re not taking advantage of advocacy marketing (aka influencer marketing, referral marketing, and word-of-mouth marketing), you should give it serious consideration. Here are a few reasons:

• According to McKinsey & Company, word-of-mouth (WOM) is the primary factor behind 20%-50% of all purchasing decisions.
• A Zubrance white paper states that for every $1 a company invests in energizing its brand advocates, it receives $10 in positive WOM impressions and sales.
• MathMarketing did a study that showed marketers who use referral marketing have higher marketing-qualified lead (MQL) closure rates than those who use purchased lists.
• BzzAgent says brand advocates are:
  • 75% more likely to share a great experience about a product.
  • Prolific content creators; they write and share more than 2X as many online communications about brands than do non-advocates.
  • 70% more likely to be seen as a good source of information by people around them.

Advocacy marketing has bubbled up with vengeance this year, but the practice isn’t new – leveraging WOM amplification from influential people who like you (they really like you) is probably one of the oldest marketing techniques in the book. But since everything old is new again (I’m talking to you, pork pie hats), advocacy marketing is back in the spotlight, heralded by digital pundits as an essential technology-aided marketing strategy that can deliver big upside.

History and the above data points suggest they’re right. This post – part 1 of 2 – will attempt to tie a bow around the business case. (Part 2 will dive into the how-to’s and offer a few case studies.)

First things first …

What is Advocacy Marketing?

Advocacy marketing is a strategy for motivating your most important marketing assets – e.g, happy customers, employees, partners, and fans – to spread the word about your company, products, and services via their networks and communities.

It’s always been a powerful practice, and it’s more so now thanks to the digital age and, in particular, the rise of social media. With modes spanning recommendations, ratings, reviews, testimonials, answers to forum questions, comments, and shares, today’s advocacy marketing is more immediate and more scalable than ever in history.

There are three types:

Earned Advocacy. This is the most valuable type because the source is authentic – actual customers, industry thought leaders, and influencers. It’s also the most scalable because it’s self-perpetuating: as you fill the funnel with new leads and gain new customers, the advocacy process begins anew. Additionally, earned advocates are more likely than others to be content creators – people who generate content that references, touts, and/or links back to yours.

Like “earned media,” earned advocacy is not paid for … at least not directly (there’s a lot of hard work involved in providing great products, services, and storytelling that lays the groundwork), and it can’t be bought. It can be effective through the entire funnel.

Owned Advocacy. Owned advocates are “inside players” who are associated with your brand and have a stake in its success; e.g., employees, fellow travelers, suppliers, and business partners. Its value can be important in the middle and bottom of the funnel when prospective buyers are diving deeper and looking for more specific proof points and engagement levels on which to base their decisions.

 

Paid Advocacy. Like the term, these are advocates a company pays to endorse the brand. Celebrities and athletes fall into this camp, as do doctors, lawyers, and other influencers who are remunerated in exchange for their seal of approval. Although they’re far less likely to be viewed as authentic, paid advocates can help jumpstart awareness and interest for a product or service.

Why is It Valuable?

Economics.

Advocacy marketing is based on the data-supported premise (the bullets that introduce this post, for example) that buyers are heavily influenced by their peers and, in fact, have higher trust in the information supplied by people they know than in the information supplied by companies. And, the people actively listening are probably active buyers.

Here’s a graph that puts a fine point on it, sourced from Nielsen and presented at the 2014 i♥marketing conference:

Assuming your advocates spread positive WOM, advocacy marketing is a highly effective way to expand marketing reach and amplify what works without significantly increasing marketing costs. Key business benefits include increases in demand generation, traffic, qualified leads, revenue, and transaction size.

Not too shabby.

What Can Advocacy Marketing Be Used For?

There are many goals that can be met and/or supported by using advocate marketing. Here are four of them:

1. Revenue growth. Most advocacy marketing programs (earned, owned, or paid) are all about getting referrals – people who will visit you, engage with you, purchase from you, join forces with you. The larger your pool of advocates, the more opportunities you have to expand visibility, improve trust, and grow your revenue streams.

2. Demand generation. Advocates can be great champions for you at the top of the funnel by promoting you and your products, services, great experiences, content, events, offers, promotions, deals, coupons, etc. across their wide range of blogs and social networks.

3. Content marketing. Advocates tend to be prolific content creators (even paid advocates because they have a vested interest in your brand’s success). This means advocates are far more likely to proactively share your content. The more useful and relevant your stuff is to their networks, the better.

4. Product development. Developing a new product or service generally takes a lot of time, resources, and money, all of which can be reduced by tapping into your pool of advocates. Their quick feedback and insight into consumer needs and expectations can help you understand your ideal target customer and decrease the time-to-market.

Don’t be the 7 Percent

That’s the percentage of brands that offer only social customer incentives and rewards, even though 47% of us expect incentives and rewards when we connect with brands online (Lithium). True, advocacy marketing is more than social, but the data point illustrates a very real disconnect … and a very real opportunity to harness an underutilized strategy.

Advocacy marketing can give a welcome and measurable boost to the entire sales funnel. In Part 2 we’ll dive into how it’s done. Stay tuned …

“Share me” by pixelised, used under Creative Commons license. “Exit Bear Stearns, Enter Grumpy Cat” by SFview, used under Creative Commons license.

In today’s B2B marketing world, things are moving fast.

Tweets fly through streams …

Buyers mass-delete emails …

And your last blog post was yesterday’s news.

If you want customers to see your message, you can’t schedule a few tweets and hope for the best.

Since it’s the end of the year, you’re likely planning your 2015 editorial calendar. This is also the ideal time to plan your 2015 content promotional strategy. Here are three tips that will help you systematize your content promotion, so you can get your content in front of a wider audience.

1. Re-evaluate your promotional channels

Review your 2014 content analytics and determine what worked and what didn’t work. Here are some questions that you can ask:

• What are you doing now that you’d like to improve in 2015?
• Are you wasting money on expensive ads that your customers never click?
• Do your customers expect to interact with you on their mobile devices?
• Where do your customers hang out?
• Has your audience moved from one social network to another?
• What new channels will matter to your customers in 2015?

Once you have a list of channels that will drive the most engagement, add them to your promotional calendar. Whenever you plan a new piece of content, decide how you will promote it or repurpose it across these channels.

2. Give readers next steps

Every piece of content should lead readers to your next piece of content, drawing them deeper into your sales cycle. One way to track your next steps is to include a “call to action” column in your editorial calendar. Every time you add a piece of content to your editorial calendar, note its call to action.

For example, if you add a blog post to your editorial calendar, your content team will see that they should direct readers to register for a webinar after they read the post. Then, they can create the appropriate calls to action, banner ads, etc., to get people excited about your webinar.

3. Make a list of your promotional steps

When you’re busy, it’s easy to forget where and when to promote your content. That’s why it’s useful to create a list of “promotional steps” for your content assets. Here’s a promotion template for a blog post. It outlines 20 steps you can take to promote a blog post – from emailing it to your list to sharing it across your social networks.

You can create similar templates for your major content assets (white papers, webinars, case studies, etc.). When you follow these steps, you’ll get in the habit of consistently promoting your content.

Tools for Systematizing Your Promotions

Keeping up with your content promotions can become overwhelming. One tool that I recommend is Kapost. It includes a workflow that allows you to track your promotions. Here’s a screenshot:

I also like Oktopost for scheduling your social promotions. It allows you to tie all your social posts to specific campaigns and schedule them in a calendar. Here’s a screenshot of a week in my calendar. Each colour represents a different campaign:

Now is the time to plan your content promotions. Systematizing your promotions now will help you reach a wider audience, so you can attract more leads and turn them into customers in 2015.

Guest author Scott Gerber is founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council.

Partnering with another company can be great for both parties involved—or it can end in disaster. Collaboration can be tempting for a quick sales fix, but do your due diligence first.

To learn more, we polled eight members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) on the questions you should ask before saying yes to collaboration, and the red flags to look out for during early discussions. Their best answers are below.

Figure Out Why They Want to Collaborate

Sometimes the answer is as simple as "to increase sales." But sometimes it's because of an internal political struggle, a desire to compete with you, or even just to look like they are doing something.

Beware of people who seem to be too eager to work with you. That usually fizzles out at some point, either quickly or after they have wasted a lot of your time.

—Jessica Richman, UBiome

Work With Doers

Ideas are easy. Everyone has them.

If you're talking with a company and their focus is strictly on how big and successful the partnership will be, but there is no discussion about how the partnership will actually happen in reality, run and hide. These are talkers, not doers.

—Adam Stillman, SparkReel

Look at the Size of the Project

I like a challenge, but I also think it's prudent to first prove the need. If a company proposes a collaboration in which both parties would be required to invest 40 hours of work, be prepared to rebut with an idea that will only take five hours of work.

If that's successful, then you can build up to bigger projects. Otherwise, you'll risk having wasted time on something that ultimately offers little to no ROI. Businesses can fall victim to their own ambition, so beware of the delusional entrepreneur who dreams up new "winning ideas" every few minutes.

—Firas Kittaneh, Amerisleep

Don't Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

It’s important to make sure the collaboration is on brand for both companies. One party will always have slightly more to gain, but associating with another company whose market perception and/or consumers are noticeably below the level of your own is a big red flag.

Another thing to watch out for is the appearance of playing favorites. Too many collaborations with one brand can have consumers associate you together and you never want your perceived value to be tied too closely to that of someone else’s.

—Jess Levin, Carats & Cake

Make Sure You Are a Priority

When it comes to selecting potential partners, one of the most overlooked issues is prioritization. Make sure the company is vetting you as a partner as much as you are vetting them.

If this partnership is a top priority for the executive team, that is a good sign that they will commit the resources to make it work. Outside of this, you should also research the health, reputation and integrity of the company.

—John Berkowitz, Yodle

Check Out Their Core Values

It might sound cheesy, but if a potential partner doesn't have core values defined or smirks when you want to review yours, don't move forward. Would you want to date someone who doesn't have an idea of where he or she is going—or worse, thinks your direction is silly and misaligned?

One of the best new client meetings we ever had was when we said, "Now, we want to talk about our 10 core values," and the client said, "We have 10, too. And look, we have exactly four in common." Shared values are a solid sign of a good relationship to come.

—Beck Bamberger, BAM Communications

Ensure ROI on Your Time

Collaborations often sound fun, but they can be incredibly time consuming with little reward at the end. I once set up a special referral program with a company that promised they would send many leads our way, only to see zero sales. We wasted a lot of time on our end setting up that partnership.

Collaborations are fun and can be a huge win for your business, but make sure that you can be very confident that the math will work out before you dive in. Look for a partner that is willing to be open with their numbers about similar partnerships in the past.

—Laura Roeder, MeetEdgar.com 

Make Sure They Have Experience

Do they have the experience and can they deliver on what they say? Low rates of repeat purchase, negative feedback online or difficulty getting their customers to take your calls are red flags.

Also, if a potential partner isn’t a culture fit, it’ll never work. That disparity doesn’t make them bad, but might be a sign your ways of working aren’t compatible.

—Chris Cancialosi, Gotham Culture

Image courtesy of Shutterstock 

How many times have you labored away sending the same email over and over again? Instead of copying and pasting the same content with minor tweaks, there’s one simple tool that can save you hundreds if not thousands of laborious hours.

This one invaluable tool can be used from everything from business to personal relationship management, and you can even use it to hire your next accountant.

This life-changing tool is called mail merge.

Even though it’s not new, few people are utilizing it to its greatest potential. The next time you need to send out a mass message to friends, family, business acquaintances or prospects, don’t just Blind Copy and Carbon Copy emails to everyone or rely on your email software. These blast messages feel highly impersonal.

The solution to all your problems is as simple as uploading a CSV and writing a quick template to send a mail merge that is both efficient and hyper-personalizable.

Here are four ways that mail merge can change your life.

1. Mail Merge: The Automated Way To Get Dates Or Make New Friends

Personal experiences such as dating, inviting friends to dinner, or throwing a party can be executed with a mail merge. Your message can be as generic or personalized as you’d like depending on how many custom inserts you include. Oftentimes, I’ll even create a custom sentence in my mail merge CSV with a line like {!Personal_Note} that’s specific to each person I’m mailing. While that takes more time to create, it’s still a lot faster than sending emails one at a time (even with copy and paste).

And if you’re a serial dater trying to line up a bunch of dates, you can even include custom inserts like {!Location} and {!Time} to line up your calendar for the next month. You probably want to include a custom sentence or phrase in there if you want to actually get the dates.

2. Save Time With Searching For The Best Service Provider Or Products With Mass Email

Are you in the market for buying a new security system or looking for a lawyer? Do you find yourself asking service providers and businesses the same tedious questions over and over?

Shopping around for reliable and competent service providers can be a time consuming nightmare. Finding accounting and law services online is easy, but contacting each of them individually means a lot of time chasing down potential providers. By using custom inserts like {!Service_Name}, you can reach hundreds of providers via email, and quickly ask all the right questions you need to locate your best options.

3. Job Applications Is A Numbers Game: Why You Should Blast Out Personalized Applications And Interview Requests

Searching and applying for jobs can feel like a full-time job. Sending emails with every resume and a personal note is tedious and time consuming. You can simplify your application process by creating a basic introduction template that can be sent to multiple, potential employers at once.

And you can even try my favorite tactic that got me every job I’ve ever had: circumventing the job poster and directly cold emailing the CEO with an idea or question that demonstrates the value that you can offer the company.

Mail merge allows you to create and categorize your email lists based on position or type of company you are applying to. Each list can be personalized with custom inserts like {!Company} and {!Position}, saving you the headache of addressing each email individually. Using relevant custom inserts inside your subject line and template will increase open and response rates that get you more interviews to land your dream job.

4. Ramp Up Your Outbound Sales With Regular Mail Merges

Cold emails are still the most effective way to generate qualified leads for closing deals, especially for B2B companies. Mail merges are an easy way to scale your outbound email process. Having a bigger list of prospects to emai,l while also making sure you have a high open and response rate, will keep your pipeline full of qualified leads. Custom inserts like {!Competitor}, {!Industry}, and other personalized firmographic information will help you create effective and scalable outbound sales processes.

4 Steps To Execute Your First Mail Merge

1. Create a spreadsheet in excel of your contacts with “First Name,” “Last Name,” “Email,” and any other relevant fields you need from your custom inserts and save it as a CSV.
2. Write a personalized email template with custom inserts. You can create these inserts by using code like {!First}, {{First}}, and other methods based on what program or tools you are using to do the mail merge.
3. Send a test email to yourself in a CSV with your own information to check to make sure everything reads correctly.
4. Send out the mail merge! (You can do this with a premium account of Yesware, Google App’s free plugin/script, “Yet Another Mail Merge“, or Outreach.io if you’re doing more complicated campaigns where you would like to AB test heavily.)

Looking for mentors? Your customers are the ideal candidates.