You’ve been on social media building your brand, and are looking for ways to promote your products on various social platforms strategically? It’s no surprise for consumers that brands are developing relations with them ultimately to sell their products.

Thus, if you want social media to have a positive impact, you need to employ a planned approach which is a right mix of – creativity and consistency. Here are five ideas that will help you promote your products on social media without being too ‘salesy’.

1. Through Contests

Holding a contest is an awesome way to promote your products without screaming “Look at me.” They can accelerate – participation, awareness, generate leads and sales and lastly drive product/service usage. For your contests to receive all those results, you must keep it fairly simple and have an amazing perk which they cannot deny.

Example – Maggi, very recently ran a contest on Twitter to promote their new product launch of Maggi Oats Noodles wherein users had to click a selfie while eating breakfast and post it to them with the #HealthyIsEnjoyable. Maggi no-where stated that users had to consume Maggi, only to please the brand and increase their chances of winning they snapped pictures of them consuming Maggi.

2. Through Social Proof

Social proof acts as an influence that can help promote your products to your audiences in a good light. Rather than blowing your own trumpet about your products and coming across as pompous, let the customer testimonials or user-generated content show off customer satisfaction and loyalty. This not only promotes your products, but also instils trust in them and lets them know that others have used products and it works for them.

Example – GoPro, their Facebook page is filled with user-generated content which acts as a social proof and promotes their product at the same time. In this image, one of their consumers has used their product and snapped a picture; it shows off the clarity and at the same time promoting how good the product is!

3. Deals & Promotions

Another great way to promote your products and your customers wouldn’t even mind it as they feel they are receiving a special treatment or getting a deal that can’t be found anywhere else. Provide different deals and offers to your consumers on various social networks, time and again so not only does it increase their excitement and sales, brings your product to the spotlight.

Example – Flipkart, before their #BigBillionDay sale created a lot of hype and excitement about their products they are housing. This image provides such an offer to their users that truly seems one of a kind, which they cannot deny “India’s Biggest Sale Ever.” Great strategy to not only create hype, but at the same time promoting their products and increasing purchase intent!

4. Visual Mediums

As content marketing matures, one common emerging theme is that visual content is the rising trend. With Facebook and Twitter’s new layout proves that rich media and photos are the best way to engage with your audiences. With emphasis given to videos, introduction of new Vine & Hyperlapse by Instagram great way to communicate with your consumers creatively and weaving in your products in those stories.

Example – I very recently did a post on how brands are leveraging Hyperlapse by Instagram in their content marketing plans to promote their products, do their brands storytelling. Similarly you can tap into the potential of images/videos to promote your products through these creative mediums so it looks appealing and gets your message across.

5. Behind the Scenes

Behind the scenes, images or videos can really get your audiences excited as it showcases how the products they are using are being processed and makes them a part of the brands storytelling and in-turn deepening the connect between the brand and consumer.

Example – Nordstorm, fashion retailer showed their viewers of how they snap pictures for their catalog. From where they ultimately look at products and make their buying decisions. This promotes your product and makes your users feel like they have a pass to backstage of the fashion shoot.

Social Media can be an effective marketing tool for your brand, if used correctly or it will only rob you off your time and efforts put in. Thus don’t be afraid to experiment when it comes to promoting your product/service, have fun and learn from your experiments. But the bottom line is, you shouldn’t come across as pushy and a broadcaster cause that will annoy your consumers and you don’t want to do that!

What tactics do you make use of on social media to promote your products, without coming across too pushy? Do share your insights with us in the comments section below.

There is definitely a fire hose of marketing challenges coming at every marketer and business owner.

Whether big or small, businesses direct their marketing to selected niche markets. Even the biggest and empire corporations carefully pinpoint what market they would cater best to maximize campaign effectiveness. The idea simply is “You don’t need to appeal to everyone.”

Niches are all over the place. Instead of targeting the whole wide world, businesses consider narrowing focus to a specific segment of the marketplace. It sounds terribly simple. For decades, niche marketing has given businesses a leg up in the competition; some have gotten it wrong that they failed to appeal to their desired niche market. According to Forbes, targeting vast audiences is also one of the major reasons why businesses fail.

The following tactics can help you be clear about what niche marketing is and how to target them effectively.

 

1. Would you jump?

When it comes to building a name in the industry, would you jump to the big pond or would you jump to a smaller one instead?

Some businesses are hesitant to employ niche marketing. Some are afraid to have a small share in the market. True enough, it can be tempting for marketers and businesses to target everyone, especially if you’re after reach and revenue. But any business who claims to be catering everyone cannot be appealing to a group of consumers in particular. You won’t be remembered. It is important for businesses and brands to determine first the segment of the market, which they truly cater too. Take for example an online carpet business. Do you think you would appeal to yuppies whose interests are gadgets and food?

Practice nichecraft and start determining a specific industry sector or niche audience. It is among the most effective ways to start the competition and dictate your bottom line.

 

2. Lead the Innovation

Most of the time, niche businesses are immune to steep competition but that doesn’t mean that you cannot and should not lead innovation in your industry. Mobile marketing, for one, is another huge leap in digital marketing apart from the ever changing and challenging search marketing. A noteworthy article, 14 Influential SEOs on Mobile Search Engine Optimization, highlights the major tactics to delve in mobile search optimization from great digital influencers. Mobile search is rapidly changing the market behavior and intent. With adaptive and innovative approach, even niche businesses can change the game, from being the challenger to industry leader. Always stay steps forward from your competition by leading innovation in your niche market, be it a product extension, a new way to reach and talk to your client or a game changer idea. Lead and own it.

 

3. Keep Delivering Quality Products and Service

Brands are the sum of experiences and satisfaction it provides to its customers. Especially when you’re targeting a niche market, it is very much crucial to deliver the best product and experience possible.

Have you heard about a pizza parlor near your city that offers free delivery and free hug? That is one of the good tactics you can do. Not only will you hit your customers’ emotional layer but you also make your brand unique and “cool”.

 

4. Balancing Cost and Finance

Financial aspects are very important and consequential to any business. Production, marketing, distribution, maintenance, everything else runs because of finance. A lot of businesses have been skeptic of delving in niche marketing because they fear losing their market share, their business.

Generally, business growth means increased sales, increased operational costs and capital resources. It has become a common misconception that if you’re not accommodating a wide net with your marketing, you’re leaving the money on the table. It is actually the opposite. Often, it is more expensive and less profitable to sell your business to a wide and non-targeted audience. Though businesses tapping niche markets usually encounter consequence cost, they often face other opportunities in revenue streams. Thus, this should go hand in hand with “innovation”. Balancing cost and effective finance planning is imperative for niche marketing.

 

5. Calculate Risk and Adapt Agile Marketing

With the quickening pace in modern marketing, niche players should be able to calculate risks and be agile enough to fuel disruptions and gaps in the market they are after to.

Moreover, practicing traditional waterfall method will cost you time and resources before even getting a 98% complete project. For niche businesses, it should be taken into account the principle of continual learning, feedback loops and concept of incremental progress.  Businesses that cater to small segments must also be able to calculate risk even before implementation.  Is the risk worth trying? Be agile.

 

6. Be a Thought-Leader

In addition to knowing your market, leading innovation, delivering quality products and some internal practices, it is also vital to know how would you be able to lead and influence the niche market that not currently being tap by other company in your industry. How would you build your brand reputation that will enable you to influence buying decisions of your target niche?

One best ways to build thought-leadership is by becoming an ultimate source for their needs and interests. Make sure that you don’t bombard your niche with content that is about your business and products by large. Sure, it is important to market your business but never overlook the idea that customers are getting smarter and no one will fall for bait. Value what matters to them and from there, build the fortress of your credibility.

 

7. A Review: Are You Targeting the Right Niche?

A niche is a narrowly defined group of prospects and finding yours might be really fiddly. To check if you’re chasing the right niche, make sure to check these following criteria:

1.     They have similar unique unsatisfied needs.
2.     Your product or service can satisfy their needs.
3.     You can reach them.
4.     Is the niche large enough to generate ROI?

The market continues to mature and the competition becomes sheer, the demand to find, develop and target specific niche grows.

The more you master these tactics, the more you’ll get to differentiate your brand, achieve less competition and the more effective you’ll be able to target your desired niche.

OTTAWA – The Harper government passed up conducting its own internal analysis on the job-creation potential of its $550-million small-business job credit, relying instead on numbers produced by an interest group, the finance minister revealed Wednesday.

Joe Oliver told the parliamentary finance committee that Ottawa’s decision to introduce the measure was based on the research of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.

“The department does not analyze every measure that we introduce,” Oliver told the hearing as he responded to a question.

“If we don’t do it, we look to those who have expertise and we did in this case to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.”

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business estimated the credit would generate 25,000 person-years of employment over the next several years. A job that employs a worker for one year amounts to one “person-year.”

But Canada’s parliamentary budget office has argued the credit will create only 800 net new jobs in 2015-16, while a freeze in employment insurance premiums could cost the economy 10,000 jobs over the same period.

The budget watchdog’s study said that overall, the credit would create about 1,000 “person-years” of employment with a price tag of $555,000 for each person-year.

Beginning in 2015, the Conservative government’s measure will effectively lower EI premiums for small businesses with annual contributions of less than $15,000. Oliver estimates about 780,000 Canadian businesses fall into that category.

Critics of the job credit have said Ottawa should have gone further and made a direct cut to premiums. They believe it would provide an immediate benefit to all businesses and employees.

Ottawa has indicated a broader reduction to payroll taxes won’t happen until 2017. Opposition parties have accused the government of delaying the cut in order to bankroll announcements aimed at pleasing voters ahead of next year’s election.

At the committee hearing Wednesday, Oliver was also asked if he was aware of the methodology used by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business to produce its estimate.

He replied: “I am aware that they have spoken to their members and they do the regular type of analysis that you’d expect them to do.”

When queried whether he asked his department to look into the study released by the parliamentary budget office, Oliver replied that he receives many estimates from a variety of organizations.

“Sometimes one looks at them and decides on the face whether they seem to make sense,” he said of the many estimates his office receives, noting it was worth listening to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business because of its “expertise on the ground.”

“When the CFIB said it’s a big, big deal for small business, it’s good news for people looking for jobs,” he said.

“We’re influenced by that when they say that small businesses should be thrilled with this announcement, because time and time again they’ve told us that payroll taxes like EI are the biggest disincentive to hiring.”

Oliver said he’s confident the measure will lead to significant job creation.

New Democrat MP Guy Caron, a committee member, asked the minister why his department did not undertake its own independent assessment.

“This is a group that is working to get benefits for its members,” Caron said to Oliver, referring to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.

“The government is not supposed to just take that at face value.”

Later Wednesday, the head of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business said he didn’t see anything wrong the government’s decision to base their job credit on their study.

“Politicians listen regularly to my organization and dozens of other groups to address all sorts of things, either spending or tax-reduction plans,” Dan Kelly said in an interview.

“They don’t do an economic study of every tax or spending measure that is out there because there are thousands and thousands of those measures.”

The group started lobbying the government on the proposal last spring, Kelly said. He added the plan was developed by the federation’s chief economist and based on a model from the University of Toronto.

Kelly disputes the numbers in the parliamentary budget office’s report last month.

“Even the most left-wing economist generally admits that there would be some stimulative effect of half a billion dollars in reduced taxes,” he said.

Follow @AndyBlatchford on Twitter

The post Ottawa skipped internal study on $550M job credit, relied on interest group appeared first on Canadian Business.

Simplicity of brand message is connected to company performance

The chances are you have been to a business networking meeting and asked a newcomer “what do you do?” only to get some lengthy description of a wide range of services, leaving you none the wiser as to what their business is about. You have probably been to trade shows and exhibitions and been attracted to visit some stand, only to walk away wondering what the company really does.

Harvard Business Review reckons you should be able to sum up your business in six words or less. Can you do that?

Research conducted by Siegel+Gale, a brand growth company, shows that there is a clear link between simplicity of brand message and the financial performance of the company. They have tracked hundreds of brands over the past five years and researched opinions about them in over 12,000 people in 8 major nations, including the UK. The brands deemed “simple” by the consumers outperformed other brands and also massively increased their value compared with the FTSE100 or the DOW.

For some businesses the results prove that simplicity is key. Aldi, the low-cost German-based supermarket, comes out as the “number one” brand, for the second year in a row. Why? Because its message is simple and doesn’t vary – good quality at low prices with no frills. Aldi beat Google into second spot. But Google gets there because when you use it as a search engine it could not be simpler – type in what you want to find out and get the results.

Down at the bottom end of the ranking, however, comes LinkedIn at 84th out of 90. The reason is because we are confused as to what we are really supposed to use LinkedIn for. Indeed, it is complex – is it a place for recruitment, for publishing your updates, for having a personal profile or a company one, or is it a forum where you discuss things with people? Count yourself lucky – LinkedIn abolished several older features such as “Answers”, which added another layer of complexity to its system. You may well have a LinkedIn profile, but do you actually use it and gain money from it? Only a tiny, tiny proportion of people using it do. Most people “have a profile” and leave it at that. Why? Because it is so confusing.

And who is the most complicated brand in the list? That “award” falls to AXA the insurance company, for having an extremely complex legalistic approach that takes people ages to wade through. However, AXA is in good company; in terms of industry performance, the least simple industry is insurance. The clearest brands of all were mostly in retail – you know what you are getting when you visit most stores. Low down on the list of industries was social media – too many complex systems and overlapping ideas. It seems that social networks just keep adding features, because they can. That leaves us confused.

Ask yourself “what is Facebook?” Is it a place to chat with people, or a place to promote a business? Is it a place to share pictures, or (thanks to the latest update) a place to visit web pages? Perhaps it is also place to watch videos – or, there again, is it a place to run a poll or a survey? Do Facebook know? It can do all of these things and more, but with each new change it just leaves us confused.

So here is the challenge which emerges from the Siegel+Gale study: can your online business be communicated within a second or two – the time it takes to say six words? If it can, you have probably gained attention. If it cannot, you are wandering into the territory of confusion.

Consider popular websites like the BBC news site – it has a clear and simple message, “read this”. Google similarly has a simple message “search here”. So does Amazon – “buy this”. Does your business really gets its message across so simply people can get it in a second? Or is your website like that person you met a networking event, providing loads of rambling detail with no real clarity as to what it is you actually do?

Not long ago, marketers used a monoculture approach to lead generation. Regardless of their audience, they’d all do one thing. They’d buy access to a list, blast out one or more emails with a link to a white paper or webinar registration, and wait for the responses to roll in. If they targeted the campaign at all, they’d typically slant the problem statement and messaging slightly to appeal to a particular industry and/or role.

Today’s marketers are moving to a more variegated approach. They’re carefully defining their audience and value propositions, sometimes in unexpected ways, and are creating programs specifically targeted to these micromarkets. Some of these marketers are basing these efforts on buyer personas; 44 percent of companies are using buyer personas to personalize their marketing, according to a recent survey by ITSMA. Others are doing so based on in-depth knowledge, research, and testing.

The following are examples of how marketers have taken their in-depth knowledge of their audience and created highly targeted approaches for marketing to that specific audience.

Stalking the Elusive C-Level Executive

C-level execs are masters of evasion when sales and marketers come to call. They refuse to pick up the phone. They ignore emails. They avoid webinars. They skip trade shows. Yet for purveyors of large enterprise applications that cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, C-level execs have the final say. So ignoring them is not an option.

This was the challenge facing David Hazeltine, Director of Demand Generation for Fiserv, which produces enterprise software solutions for financial services organizations. Fiserv deals can easily run from hundreds of thousands to more than a million dollars annually and require multi-year subscriptions. These deals clearly require approval from the highest-level executives at financial services firms.

Hazeltine knows that these executives send underlings to do research for them. So he often focuses his demand-generation efforts on those underlings. Said Hazeltine, “Researchers below the VP level are more likely to open emails and register and attend webinars. We strive to get enough thought leadership and storytelling out there so that they’ll pass it along to their bosses and say, ‘I’ve been getting compelling information through Fiserv’s webinars and emails. You should take a look at them.’”

Once the company gets past the subordinate gauntlet, Fiserv reaches out to executives by initiating a conversation. In some cases, Hazeltine’s team might send the executive a compelling case study with numerous calls to action asking them talk to—not a sales person—but to a “(Market) Technology Expert” about the solution.

Maia Tihista, Vice President of Global Marketing for Flexera Software, which provides software licensing, compliance, and installation solutions, has different audiences for her different product lines. She has found that for products where she needs to talk to the CIO, “it pays to be surgical. When we engage with a major company, we know the 15 people we need to reach and do targeted direct mail. Also, we’ve found conferences where you pay to go to a ‘dating’ type event that guarantees one-to-one meetings with CIOs. These events are very effective for some of our products.”

When the Gatekeepers are Millennials

At the other end of the spectrum are millennials. While most millennials are hardly in a position to approve major deals, they’re important influencers for Blucarat, a company that takes customer-created content from social media sites and helps companies use this content to enhance their eCommerce efforts. And these millennials can be tricky to reach. Kieran Taylor, Chief Marketing Officer at Blucarat, explained that while the ultimate buyers are VPs of commerce, the gatekeepers in this market are social media managers with a medium age of 27—just a few years out of college. But like executives, they use email as a last resort and are impossible to reach on the phone.

To reach these buyers, Taylor creates specialized content geared toward a younger market and disseminates it through social media. Said Taylor, “We’re switching to a viral approach with social media. Facebook and Twitter targeting are quite effective in terms of generating traffic and click-throughs. We use these channels to provide short videos rather than white papers or long documents.”

Targeting by Level of Experience

When it comes to marketing mobile software solutions, the target market cuts across all types of companies—large and small—in every industry. As a market leader in enterprise application software with more than 250,000 global customers, SAP’s mobile solutions group took a novel approach to targeting these customers. Most personas look at a particular role in a particular industry. But Adam Stein, Vice President, Mobile Solution & Product Marketing for SAP, explained that, “After interviewing thousands of partners and customers about how they make the journey to mobile, we discovered that personas for mobile customers really have more to do with where the customers are in the mobile adoption process.”

One way that SAP Mobile is targeting customers is through its new interactive microsite, http://sapmobilejourney.com. Similar to navigating the three types of trails on a ski slope, the company realized that companies are in one of three phases of adoption that the microsite labels: Getting Started, Fast Forward, and New Horizons. Users click on one of these labels and the site guides them on a step-by-step interactive journey customized to where they’re at in their mobile deployment process. A visual roadmap contains captions that explain how to get started, the benefits of mobile, and what they should do next. At each step in the journey, users can also click on links to useful content such as how-to videos, case studies, and third-party white papers that address their likely questions at that stage in the mobile adoption cycle.

Talking to a Skeptical IT Audience

What do you do when you market to technical audience with an above average aversion to marketers?

“You have to lead with well-informed opinions and new research to educate audiences,” said Jennifer Burnham, Director, Marketing Communications and Content at Druva, a startup that provides endpoint data-protection and governance solutions. “You can’t get away with fluff.”

Burnham’s group commissioned fresh surveys and research from analysts, such as Gartner, IDC and Forrester. They then fashioned the results into thought-leadership content and reports chock full of new insights.

She also works closely with customers, getting them to describe in their own words their challenges, experiences, and the benefits of the solution. She then turns that into content as well. Explained Burnham, “Listening to our customers talk about their experiences, challenges, and successes keeps us rooted in the real world. We use this information to create content that’s in their language with no buzzwords. It helps us build rapport.”

When the competition gets tough, the tough use the latest marketing technology and get targeted. Whether they’re trying to reach C-level execs, millennials, mobile adopters, or skeptical technical audiences, the smartest marketers realize they need to talk directly with these specific audiences and abide by their preferences.

Do you have a fascinating story about content marketing, lead generation, demand generation, or social media? I’d love to share your story in an upcoming post.

As a consultant, you know your strengths better than anyone.

Your clients rely on you for your expertise. They have problems they need to solve or goals they want to meet, and they know you can help them get there.

There’s a good chance you already offer a range of services to help make your clients more successful.

If you’re a marketing consultant, you may specialize in one area — like email marketing — but also have expertise in other areas — like social media marketing, content marketing, website design, or SEO.

You may also have relationships with outside consultants who possess skills adjacent to what you’re offering, those consultants can help you expand your business and take some of the work off your hands.

Finding new and creative ways to bring these services together is guaranteed to make your clients more successful, and can redefine the value of your business.

I recently had the chance to sit down with Erin Schweppe, senior manager of marketing services here at Constant Contact, to talk about the different ways consultants can bring their services together.

Erin has made it her mission to help consultants learn to layer their services to increase their offerings.

What does it mean to layer your services? That’s where my interview begins:

Hi Erin! Can you please begin by explaining what exactly is “service layering”?

Service layering is quite literally the notion of building or “layering” services on top of one another as a client’s needs are identified.

This approach enables the most needed (or highest-priority) services to be delivered first and offers a step-by-step path to add services as the client’s needs evolve.

The notion of “layers”, as opposed to “bundles”, offers a less intimidating approach to outsourced services for the cost-conscious business owner, giving them a greater sense of control over how they prioritize and spend their marketing dollars. Oftentimes, these services are provided for recurring monthly fees, purchased as 6-or-12-month packages.

What can service layering do for my business?

In a word, Grow! Service layering allows you to build a long-term, highly valuable ongoing service relationship with each client.

In this way, you’re able to reduce your cost of acquisition by achieving more revenue from a single client and creating a predictable recurring monthly revenue stream rather than acquiring multiple, one-time projects from new customers each and every month.

For example, let’s say you’re a web developer and you charge an average of $500 for each new website you design and build. These builds are typically a one-time engagement and often very time intensive. If you have a $10,000/month revenue goal, you would need to not only find 20 new clients each month (240 new clients in one year), but also would likely be pushing the limits of your team’s capacity to deliver to reach that revenue goal.

With service layering, you could achieve the same goal of $10,000/month with only 20 of those customers by developing a set of recurring services that include any combination of ongoing web updates, email marketing, SEM/SEO, or social media marketing on an average recurring fee basis of $500/month.

If you’re outsourcing some of these services, you’re able to scale to more than 20 customers a month and realize an even greater revenue stream.

How do I begin to figure out what other services I can offer my clients?

Service layering is based on the notion that each of your clients have different needs at different times in their business lifecycles. By looking at what you do in the “big picture”, it’s easy to see the variety of related activities needed to ensure marketing success. From there, you can start to identify what gaps need to be addressed for your clients.

To begin, focus first on your core competency and then look at the logical adjacencies from there.

For example, if you’re a web designer, how will you drive traffic to your client’s new site? SEM/SEO? Business listings? Email marketing? Social media marketing?

Once visitors arrive at your client’s new site, what action do you want them to take? Download content? Register for an event? Sign up for a newsletter service?

All of these yield additional marketing needs for your client that you, the expert, can provide in the form of new services.

Once you’ve captured that list, reconcile it against your current client portfolio. Audit their current marketing activities and determine what common areas they need help with. Test those offers with those clients to identify what resonates.

What one tip would you suggest every consultant do when considering what services to offer?

Don’t be a mile wide and an inch deep.

As you begin to build out your services portfolio, develop a network of your fellow Solution Providers (who provide complementary services) to help you deliver on these services, allowing you to remain focused on what you do best.

Your client will develop a trusted relationship with you, but that doesn’t mean that you have to deliver everything for them. Have that trusted network behind the scenes to do that for you.

Going back to our example, if you’re a web designer and you hate writing copy, look for Solution Providers who are copywriters; then outsource that part of to them — your client still works with you, and maybe that copywriter will need a website built for one of their clients someday.

Once I choose a couple new services to offer, how long should I wait before determining if it’s a success or not?

Great question. You should focus on three areas of success — adoption of the service, profitability, and impact to your clients business. Expect at least a three-month runway before you start to see measurable impact on any of these.

Is it possible to offer too many services?

My advice would be to find the perfect balance between reducing the number of vendors that your clients have to work with and become their trusted source of marketing services, while offering services that logically layer with one another.

As noted above, stick with adjacencies to your core business. If you’re delivering a range of marketing services and your clients express a need for legal or financial services, offer referrals to trusted providers of those services.

Have you tried service layering for your business? What new services are you offering? Let us know in the comments below!

Content that brings in lots of traffic is great, but it’s content that results in sales/conversions that will really make a difference to your business. It is sadly entirely possible to be receiving thousands of hits on a daily basis but still find that your actual profits are in the doldrums.

Copywriting agencies deliver value to businesses by creating highly targeted content which will encourage visitors to become customers. Here for your consideration are some of the tricks that web copywriters use to turn prospects into sales. They:

•  Tell stories – People have been telling stories since we lived in caves, and they continue to be a compelling medium for communication. Every brand has a story, and your content should put a positive spin on it. Stories let the reader know that they’re not dealing with a faceless company without a soul, but a collection of individuals driven by a common purpose.

•  Create content that is easy to read and scan – Internet users tend not to read everything on the page. Instead, they scan the screen for things that are relevant to them or peak their interest. Experienced web copywriters understand this and make it easy for them to do so by breaking up content into small paragraphs with plenty of sub-headers and bullet points.

•  Target a specific audience – There are almost 3 billion internet users globally, but most of them aren’t your customers and never will be. Before they start writing, web copywriters get a handle on who their audience is and then tailor the content towards them specifically. Don’t aim wide and hit nothing; zero in on your core market and nail them with content that appeals to them.

• Speak to the customer directly – When you’re talking about your products or services online, you’re not just mouthing words into a digital void. You’re talking to actual people, and a good copywriter will address them as such. ‘We’re sure that you’ll find our product easy and intuitive to use’ sounds so much better than ‘This product is easy to use’.

•  Talk about benefits – Discussing benefits rather than features is the key to product copywriting that results in sales. The customer doesn’t want to know about every little detail of your product, they want to know about what it will do for them.

•  Use the active voice – Strong copywriting speaks in subjects and actions. Consider the following:
  • ‘Our product is used by thousands of people around the world’ (passive)
  • ‘Thousands of people use our product globally’ (active)The active voice, in which a subject takes an action, has long been favoured by product copywriters as it has a more immediate, direct feel. The active voice sounds more like the way that people actually speak and this captures their attention far better.

• Include a killer call to action – The final part of the content is as important as everything that has gone before it. Other competing products are only a few mouse clicks away, so you need to tell your visitors what steps they should take next in the simplest possible terms.

If you can apply all of these to your content then it stands a great chance of being not only read, but being acted upon.

The process of hiring employees can be considered as part art and part science. The challenge faced by hiring authorities is where to put the most emphasis: on a person’s resume, which documents (and may overstate) his or her past performance, or on a less tangible determinant, such as future potential.

It’s an unfortunate reality that many people who look good on paper end up not being successful in positions for which they’ve been hired. There are many reasons this can happen, but more important than figuring out why is determining whether these bad hires—which have both financial and emotional costs—can be prevented.

In a June 2014 HBR article about spotting talent, Claudio Fernandez-Araoz espouses that there must be a fundamental shift in the hiring process—moving from emphasis on past competencies to future potential. He defines the latter as having the ability to adapt to ever-changing business environments and grow into challenging new roles.

This is compelling concept, and while it doesn’t negate the value of past performance, it does support the idea that technical expertise and competence alone are no longer sufficient to ensure new hires’ success. Equally important is whether “new blood” is a good fit for the organization, and this necessitates the use of an interview style that can reveal prospective employees’ ability to fit into a company’s culture and vision.

Here are three key steps to take in preparing to hire a high potential employee:

• Articulate your vision for the role. This entails being specific about what will be expected of this employee. For instance, rather than asking candidates how they would attract new sales prospects, identify the characteristics of your ideal client and then ask them to provide examples of how they would target meetings and close deals with this sector.
• Define your company culture. Ask questions that will illuminate candidates’ values, including what motivates them and whether they are competitive yet comfortable in situations that require collaboration. Never underestimate the importance of “fit,” i.e., the ability to successfully connect with existing team members, as a way to discern if successful onboarding will occur.
• Identify behavioral expectations. Candidates must be able to demonstrate behaviors that will ensure their success, such as work ethic. For example, if you seek someone who doesn’t need much structure and can initiate productive behavior, ask for examples when they’ve been able to self-start, overcome obstacles, and execute to achieve a goal. Also ask about how they resolved an ethical dilemma (and if they say that’s never happened, it’s likely they’re not comfortable being forthright and transparent).

When you engage in the hiring process based on candidates’ high potential, your success will be based on how well you did your homework before the interview; asking the right questions is the key to finding employees who are both technically proficient and a good fit for the organization.

By Tibor Shanto - tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

We have all the expression above, but it really rings home in sales, especially for successful sales people. If you look at sales as being an educational process, that is you learning from the prospect, even while you are helping them learn how you can help them reach their objective, let’s focus on the latter, you helping the buyer learn about the potential value you can/may bring.

Broadly speaking people fall into one of three styles of learning

• Visual Learners – Learn through observing, visualization; good visual recall of what they saw or read
• Auditory Learners – Strong in Verbal-Linguistic Intelligence, listen and identify patterns, effective use of language
• Tactile Learners – Learns through touching and physical interaction, activity, via demonstrations

The challenge is that as a sales person you can’t call in advance and as your buyer’s disposition, or start meetings by asking, not to mention that there may be multiple people in the process or a given meeting. I also believe that demos are only appropriate at certain point in the sale, and giving them something to read especially early could be counterproductive in so many ways. As a result sellers tend to lean on the visual and verbal, which can be effective, especially with a little planning and focus on how they execute.

The ability to paint a picture with words a number of benefits is selling. One is the ability to engage buyers on a deeper level, at a level where they make decisions. We have all heard the saying “people buy on emotion, then they rationalize it.” While not incorrect, it is also not complete. As I understand it, (or not), there a third element, the specific trigger that sets things into motion. With three layers in the brain (The Reptilian, Emotion and Thinking) each responding to outside triggers differently, it is probably more accurate to say that people buy in response or reaction to trigger – Reptilian; filtered by the Emotion, is this good or bad, pain or pleasure; the rationalized by the Thinking brain. Which is why despite all the data and objective facts available, people still make mistakes in buying.

As a sales people we have the opportunity to trigger responses and emotions that can cause a buyer to look at things differently and buy from us, versus. Unlike what some pundits will tell you, the goal of a sales person is not to stand around and wait for a random event to trigger something in the buyer, but to create the trigger to initiate the desired event(s).

Which is where the ability to paint a verbal story comes in. Think of a time in your life when stories, vivid stories were a key part of your daily routine. That’s right, when you were a child. The people who sharing the stories were people close to you who you trusted, parents, grandparents, kindergarten, teachers, etc.

“The Limbic (Emotional brain) system creates chemical messages that connect information to memory, the retention of which is significantly increased when that information is presented in an emotionally charged context.” Since having the buyer retain your message is a key challenge, there is a pay-off right there. But further, “This is why you are most likely to remember events that created a strong emotional response within you, and why other people will mostly remember the things you said or did to them that made them feel a certain way”

Most of us felt safe secure and happy when we were read stories when we were kids, that’s why leave movies or play with a good story feeling good and rewarded.

Learning to paint a quality verbal picture aligned with the buyer’s objectives, will not only enhance engagement, help the buyer retain more of what you are telling them, and feel good about buying from you. Trigger the right reaction in the reptilian and emotional brain, and you can move your sales forward in a measurable and repeatable way.

One caution, that no matter how good you verbal painting is, it won’t overcome a crappy product, or if they are not aligned to buyer objective. The goal is not to become a spin master but to tell your story in a way meaningful to the buyer.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto 

Creating and promoting an infographic, it’s a tried-and-tested technique that’s planned for all sorts of reasons.

But successfully getting visual content out there, online, can be more complicated than it seems.

One of the main reasons why is control. It’s tempting to try and make sure that everyone’s going to like what’s being made but in the process the creation becomes clean and inoffensive, or salesy.

Controversy is often shunned as part of this risk-adversity. But, sometimes, the risks are exaggerated: a bit of controversy can be a good thing – and a catalyst for better results, especially with a bit of conviction to back it up.

Here’s a case study of a riskier infographic-style piece that recently did well for the Snowskool team that I work with.

Here’s the design:

Here are the highlights so far:

Coverage: Article in the Daily Telegraph (one of the UK’s biggest newspapers) - Including 600 shares and a link within the article (snippet below).

Shares: +650 Facebook Likes & Shares

Traffic: +2,000 Unique Page Views.

Design costs: Roughly £200

Here are some key things we learned:

1. Be accurate

If you are going to be controversial then at least back the bolsh with witty and astute observations.

In my experience it’s usually the client (or someone else in the know) that holds the best of these bits ‘n’ bobs and not the teams that try to pull it all together without detailed knowledge.

So most of the fundamentals came from Snowskool in this case and we got the final product in shape as a team.

The accuracy of the observations won't be obvious to every viewer but if you've spent some time on the slopes then the persona might hit the spot - because Piers is based on encounters with a character that exists, as you can see from the comments below.

Key point: The people that know the topic intimately should have at least as much input into the idea than those who are supporting it – especially in controversial cases where it’s important to hit mark, or the funny bone.

2.  Find the fine line

One of the main difficulties in creating content like this is finding that fine line between risqué, funny and offensive. Controversy works, especially when viewers can comment, almost anonymously, and say something they wouldn’t normally be able to say. But crossing the line can be dangerous.

Finding the fine line requires a bit of debate before going live. We knocked a few heads together, our own and those of our friends, to make sure we weren’t going too far.

And getting national exposure like we did in the Telegraph was only possible because we stayed just on the right side of the divide.

Key point: Don't rush things out or be counterproducively crass - have a bit of testing and debate beforehand. 

3. Controversy can be attractive

I’m a bit of a cynic towards the process of ‘influencer engagement’ but it was the very technique that you see in PowerPoint presentations and training sessions that got the coverage in the Telegraph.

How? An audacious Twitter message got noticed, the strength of the content made an impression and we were asked if would be ok to cover the piece. Simple as that; sometimes it works.

Key point: Be bold when trying to promote content – intrepid attempts can work, but they work even better if your material makes an impression.

4. Use a sensible budget 

This infographic - admittedly not a true infographic - has a very basic design behind it but the simple structure supports the ideas well and helped the whole thing to come together for less than 200 Great British Pounds.

Based on that budget, this piece worked well but the results of creative content can be unpredictable - especially in controversial cases - so it’s a good idea to be on the safe side by keeping the expenses to a minimum.

£1k is a good guideline maximum bet to get a reasonable return on investment.

Key point: Don’t overcomplicate a design or process - it can be expensive. A £10k graphic that generates a non-reaction or meagre scraps of shares is far harder to justify than one that cost a pittance to put together.

5. Set suitable targets

What’s the goal of this graphic? It’s certainly not to try and convince viewers to have a laugh, pause for a moment of reflection, and then book a ski improver course in Japan.

Our goal was more realistic: to support brand awareness and search visibility with shares and coverage. That might sound loose but it’s honest and practical.

The controversial angle supported this goal in some ways, as part of the overall design and strategy - it helped the graphic to get noticed, shared and covered, where a blander piece would've been overlooked.

Key point: Controversial content can be shareable - suited to goals of increasing awareness and supporting search visibility.

If those goals aren’t yours – then at least have a goal that’s tied to the stage of the user-journey that the content fits into.

Other general points

• Paid support: Boost bigger content pieces with some paid support. We used pay-per-engagement sponsorship within Facebook in this case, because the model is affordable and fitted our goals but also because organic reach is getting harder to achieve.

• Design templates: Recycle designs instead of creating new templates from scratch. We’ll use this design again for the second stereotype in the series to keep costs even lower the second time round.

• Communities: Don’t underestimate the value of time spent in online conversation. It isn't just the infographic, it is the conversation leading up to and after its presentation that makes it work too.

That’s it then. Any other ideas of experiences, good or bad, with creating and promoting content that’s a bit controversial?

Exactly one year ago, we were just coming off a great Content Marketing World – and I was steeling myself for a family-filled Thanksgiving. As I was talking with Joe Pulizzi during our weekly phone chat – which we regularly ended by gossiping, ranting, and raving about what was happening in the industry – he asked me a seemingly innocuous question: “Should we do a podcast?”

“I think that’s a great idea,” I said – having absolutely no idea what I was signing up for. (Note: This is how I’ve adroitly managed my career thus far: Say “yes” to anything that sounds remotely interesting and figure out how to do it later.)

And, here we are, one year later and our jump into podcasting is just such an interesting metaphor for where I see the industry today. Things are changing so quickly, it’s sometimes really difficult to have perspective on it all. Everything about this thing we call “this old marketing,” both literally and figuratively, is riding tall.

A year of change

For those of you who have seen me speak this year – you’ll testify to my passion (sometimes verging on obsession) for remaking every marketing department (with content at its core) as the strategic, innovative function that creates differentiating value in the business. I really believe that content marketing can be that change agent in the business.

It’s evolving. A year ago – we talked about the business case. We could see that paid, owned, and earned media strategies were converging – but owned media was such a black box. Marketers asked, “How do I prove to my boss that this content marketing experiment is worth doing?” We searched for templates, case studies, examples, and best practices of how to begin a project. We looked for methods to optimize organic search, engage on social channels, and transform our habit of speaking in “features and benefits” into delivering value through original content.

In our first episode of “This Old Marketing,” we covered Google Plus-comment integration into other channels and how LinkedIn was launching Showcase pages. I ranted about the need to prove ROI as a prerequisite to starting a content marketing program, and Joe raved about Minecraft and its content marketing.

A year later – Google+ is … well… complicated (at best). LinkedIn has, arguably, ramped up its publisher aspirations to such a point that it’s competing with business publications like The Wall Street Journal – and I rarely have the ROI-as-prerequisite conversation anymore.

Evolution is, indeed, upon us. Our challenge as marketers is no longer about when we’ll do this content marketing thing. The question a year later is: How in the heck do we scale this thing?

What’s next?

I am not sure. “This Old Marketing” is as much an exploration for us as it is for you. Like I said, quoting Joseph Campbell, we just continue to say “a hearty yes to the adventure.”

What I do know is that marketing departments are mostly lost in a chaotic and anachronistic struggle to evolve from classic models. For the last 15 years, businesses have been constructing layer upon layer of small marketing – maintaining product, place, price, and promotion for every digital content channel that comes along and happily spending ever smaller amounts of money for ever smaller results and never solving the big, disruptive challenges that face the business as a whole.

Sixty years ago, Peter Drucker said that the “purpose of a business is to create a customer. The business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation.” In its time, it was true. During the 1960s, the idea of a “brand manager” was the cutting-edge equivalent of what we look at today as a “chief content officer.” The brand manager was an extraordinarily innovative professional who was considered to be (as marketing textbooks claimed) the “backbone of true marketing.” A mere 30 years later, the idea of the brand manager would be called “ill suited for today’s environment.” And, with that change, the overall role of marketing as the strategic function began to diminish as well. The textbooks would proclaim that marketing “cannot dominate, but rather must share power with other functions to ensure competitive advantage.”

Over the last 15 years, consumer behavior has changed fundamentally. The way customers become aware, browse, investigate, purchase, use, complain, and/or become loyal to the way a brand delivers its product or service has evolved. However, the business processes to inspire this customer journey have not. Marketing departments serve mostly a subservient, on-demand function, producing ever-more sales sheets, PDFs, brochures, and ad copy for an ever-hungry business that views marketing as the department that “makes things pretty.”

But content marketing is truly starting to change this. Over the last year, we’ve started to hear a stronger chorus of a hearty yes to the adventure. From the research we’ve conducted, advisory clients we’ve served, classes we’ve taught, and CMI’s own Executive Forum, we’ve seen real marketers make real strategic advances, solving big problems, and making content the natural evolution of the marketing department.

I’ve personally watched marketing teams transform from serving only to describe the value already created in the product or service into the departments that create differentiated experiential value separate and distinct from that product or service.

Now, can we take content marketing from a project to content marketing as a process? Can we do it in the next year? I don’t know. But, as for me, I’m ready to help create another 52 weeks of what we call “This Old Marketing.” As Drucker also said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

Adventure is calling … why not say a hearty yes?

You can listen to any of the CMI “This Old Marketing” podcasts or subscribe to the weekly series through iTunes or Stitcher.

Image courtesy of Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post This Old Marketing – The Evolution Continues appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

The consumer voice has never been stronger.

The internet has created a massive increase in the volume of customer feedback data. 

Social media, product reviews, customer ratings, online surveys, net promoter score… all these communication channels mean that companies are increasingly having to make their businesses customer-centric.

Managing customer experience is key in driving loyalty, retention and high CLV, however it’s the most progressive businesses that have taken the insights from feedback and used it to acquire new customers and drive change within functions of the business outside of customer services.

This is according to our new report Voice of the Customer: Listen, Measure, Act, produced in partnership with Trustpilot.

The report is based on interviews with senior executives working for a range of brands. It explores a range of questions including: ‘What does VoC currently mean to businesses?’ ‘How are brands implementing VoC?’ ‘Which key tactics are businesses employing to gather VoC data?’ and ‘What are the best practice approaches for building VoC?

Here are some key takeaways from the report, which point towards three main areas where businesses embarking upon a VoC programme need to take the next few steps: listen, measure and act.

Listen

Tools that provide the ability to listen to the customer are absolutely vital, otherwise you won’t have anything to measure and therefore act upon. VoC data however can be difficult to collect and it’s often unstructured and unpredictable.

How do you collect this data? You can directly ask your customers for feedback via an online survey. This shows them that you value their opinions. This data can then be shared across the business, to help improve products improvements and optimise the customer experience. 

Don’t forget that customers will often talk about your business across multiple channels without directly addressing you, which is why it’s vital to monitor your brand on Twitter and other social channels.

Measure

According to our interviews, measurement is one of the most lacking areas. Measuring the impact of VoC programmes is integral to establishing a link between VoC and ROI.

As multichannel communication becomes more prevalent and customers increasingly interact with businesses through online and offline channels, building a single customer view (SCV) can be much more difficult.

It’s important that this huge amount of data from all these various channels is pulled into one place, and that the data is used in a meaningful way. By building a fuller, personalised picture of the customer and their journey, a business will have a more insightful guide to improving future sales and make improvements to future customer interactions. 

Act

As soon as trends are identified, escalate them internally, decide how best to respond and act timely. It’s critical that customers are responded to quickly so they feel they are being listened to and taken seriously.

Responses must also be ‘human’. When dealing with so much data and analytics it’s easy to forget that real, honest relationship building is the goal of any VoC programme.

The personal touch can be incredibly valuable when building customer loyalty.

Improving the customer experience will also lead to many business rewards. We asked our respondents “what do you see as the business benefits of an integrated customer experience?”

For lots more in-depth insight, download Voice of the Customer: Listen, Measure, Act. 

Rudy. Rocky Balboa. Braveheart. Lassie. Everyone loves a hero.

Through the evolution of storytelling, one thing has always remained – we, as the audience, love a good hero. The story of a seemingly unlikely character overcoming the odds and accomplishing something amazing and becoming a celebrated hero is one that resonates with many – we want the “good” guy to win.

In a narrative, the hero archetype is the character who faces a challenge and is able to overcome the challenge. The challenge could be finding success in the face of adversity, showing the world that the underdog always has a chance, or showing a connection to a human that is so deep that it causes miraculous things to happen. No matter the situation, the hero is loved.

When it comes to business and storytelling in marketing, a great heroic story can work. A story featuring heroism can grab attention and unleash that emotional connection we often try to create through the hero’s journey.

But, finding a hero in your business story isn’t always the easiest challenge to overcome. To do it, you have to be creative and think outside the box and below the surface of what appears to be the story. You also might have to push your brand into the backseat.

For instance, take the story of the 23-year-old Chicago Bulls basketball player who was featured in a YouTube documentary, The Return, which chronicled the terrible leg injury he endured while competing in a game. The six two-to-three minute webisodes showed his journey from the injury to being badly injured and his ongoing quest to hit the court as a competitor once again. During the clips, Rose shares his feelings and is candid with his viewers about what’s happening inside and out.

And his viewers become intrigued. They want Rose to get back on the court. They want him to become a “hero.” Oh, and a popular footwear company sponsored the show – and the brand was seamlessly integrated into the clips, but was not at the forefront of the content.

Brands can find these stories and when it comes to telling the marketing stories it needs to be about finding the hero and highlighting the heroism.

When it comes to telling the story of heroic story, follow these three steps:

1. Move us and give us strength. Humanize the stories so the audience can relate and feel that the story resonates.

2. Recognize the value of authenticity. Tell a true story – not a made up story just to create a hero. True stories have much more power.

3. Embrace the chance to be different. Learn to connect on a personal level, not a brand level.

As a marketer, it’s your job to find the hero, get creative, and tell the story in a way that the audience can understand, connect, and become emotionally involved.

For more on heroes and using heroism to tell a story in marketing, check out the inquiry, How To Create Better Marketing Stories: Find the Heroism.

There’s been a lot of buzz lately around the idea of ‘the buyer’s journey,’ or a prospect’s experience from click to close. And it makes sense: in a world where alternatives to your product are just a quick Google search away, ensuring that a prospect’s experience is positive from the moment they engage has never been more important. Modern marketers must have a thorough knowledge not only of who their buyer is, but how they progress from awareness to purchase, their specific needs at each step along the way, and how you, as a marketer, can cater to these needs.

So what does the buyer’s journey actually look like, as a prospect moves from awareness to consideration to decision? Let’s take a look at what’s happening in this first awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, and how you can help gradually move your prospect through it and on to the next stage.

Help Identify Need

Buyer’s situation: At this very early stage, your buyer is most likely completely unaware of your brand and product, and may even be unaware that they have a pain point. Although a prospect may be a good fit for your product, at this stage of the buyer’s journey your sales pitch is going to sound like noise — and likely be sent straight to the trash bin.

How you can help: Your prospect needs to see that you understand their situation and their pain points before they’ll believe that you can offer a solution to make their lives easier and increase their success. One of the best ways to do this is to create high-level, non product-specific content that relates to what they’re already doing. For example, if you’re offering a solution that can help a company advance their email marketing efforts, reach out with an article on best practices for successful subject lines. You’ll put your brand on the map, and begin to establish trust as a helpful source of information. Gradually, introduce content that highlights a particular pain point they may be experiencing (ex: “4 Simple Ways to Increase Your Deliverability Score”), helping your prospect to realize that there are ways to improve upon their current processes.

Facilitate Research

Buyer’s situation: Once your buyers begin to realize that they have a particular pain point, the research begins. For 72% of buyers, they’ll turn to Google. The first stage of research begins with general search terms as buyers explore the options at their disposal. Customer reviews, social proof, and testimonials will carry a lot of weight at this stage.

How you can help: Simple: have these resources ready and easily accessible. Make sure your website is easily navigable, and have case studies and testimonials from successful customers prominently displayed. Consider using a marketing automation tool to begin tracking content downloads and collecting prospect information. While you’re not ready to start your sales pitch, it’s never too soon to start gathering insight into your prospect’s preferences. Also, take measures to ensure that your website is optimized for SEO; nothing adds credibility to your solution like ranking highly in a Google search for their pain point.

Deliver Relevant Content

Buyer’s situation: As your buyers delve further into their research, they’ll begin to understand which criteria do and do not meet their needs, allowing them to prioritize their questions during product demos. At this point, buyers can begin to eliminate vendors who don’t provide the functionality or service that they’re looking for, narrowing their focus to just a few competing companies.

How you can help: Educational (read: non sales-pitch) content like white papers, analyst reports, and industry reports are going to be critical at this stage. It’s okay to take a slightly more proactive approach towards helping your prospects educate themselves on your industry, so build out a few simple lead nurturing campaigns to gradually deliver this content to prospects who have provided their information via a form completion. Just remember to lay off the heavy sales pitch; you’re still in the awareness stage, and this stage is all about building trust with your prospects and establishing your company as a credible source of information.

Want more tips and stats? Ready to progress to the next stage of the buyer’s journey? Check out the interactive infographic by clicking the banner below!

Because we customize all our People First Productivity Solutions sales training workshops, we routinely survey participants prior to training. This gives participants a voice in shaping the focus and content of their training. By asking a series of questions, we learn a great deal about the sales culture, practices and strengths of a team. We […]

Everyone surely knows of the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, written over 175 years ago by British author and poet Robert Southey,back in 1837. By the way, a man named Joseph Cundall transformed the original antagonist from an ugly old woman to the pretty little girl we have come to know as Goldilocks in 1849.

As the story unfolds, our willful heroine Goldilocks sets out for a walk deep in the forest. She eventually comes upon the bears’ home, and having assured herself that no one is there, she walks right in and begins to look around. Being quite hungry, she tries three different bowls of porridge laid out on the table. The first bowl is too hot, the second bowl too cold, and the third bowl is “just right.” Then, she sits in a chair. But it is too big. She sits in a second chair and it is too small. The third chair, once again, she finds to be“just right.” After these endeavors, she journeys upstairs for a nap. She lies down in the first bed, and it is much too hard. The second, of course, is much too soft. The third bed is, as we all now know, “just right” and the audacious young girl falls asleep. When the bears finally return home, Goldilocks awakens and runs away.

Okay, that last part doesn’t help my point. The point I want to make here, and the reason this has anything to do with sales leads is this: Goldilocks wasn’t looking for as many bowls, chairs, and beds as she could get her hands on. She just needed one of each – the right one. Unfortunately, she had to sift through several ‘unqualified’ options before finding the one that provided a suitable return on her investment of time and energy. It’s here where we can segue into the topic of sales leads.

Having too many leads is like a bowl of porridge that’s too hot –

The bowl contains what you want, but in both cases, you’ll lose valuable time before you can reap the reward.

Having too many leads—especially if they are of poor quality—will force reps to spend less time talking to qualified prospects.

Perhaps of equal importance, is the fact that reps can only make so many phone calls in a given day. You should do the calculations. How many hours will reps spend qualifying new leads? Will it be 8 hours? Will it be more like 4 hours? Whatever it is, determine the maximum number of leads that can be contacted each day/week/month. If more leads are generated than whatever that number is determined to be, there will not be enough time to contact each lead.

So two things happen as a result:

1. Someone has to decide who gets contacted and who doesn’t. If they get it wrong, salespeople will chase prospects that will never buy from them or they will miss opportunities for closing business with real prospects—or both.
2. Lots of time and money went for nothing. Marketing spent large sums of money and effort getting tons of leads that will never be contacted, and then sales spends even more time and effort sifting through those leads in an attempt to prioritize. Having too many leads is not a good thing (thus the word “too”)

Having leads of poor quality is like a chair that’s too small –

No matter how hard you to try to get comfortable, finding a good position in an uncomfortable chair is impossible. So too, is the prospect of chasing too many poor quality leads.

You can and should classify lead quality into specific categories (just like Goldilocks), which will dictate the priority and any active framework for further efforts by sales reps.

Dubious Leads – A name and contact information exists, but there is little or no history of interaction, nor is anything known about the suitability of your company’s solutions for that specific contact.

Unworthy Leads - A name and contact information exists, and there may have been some substantial lead activity, but based on their buyer profile, your company’s solution is not likely to be a match

Unqualified Suitability – They have demonstrated an interest in your product or service but have not been qualified for suitability.

Unqualified Interest – The lead’s profile corresponds to that of a typical buyer, though there has been no indication of any lead activity to demonstrate interest.

Qualified for Suitability and Interest – of course, these are the highest quality leads

Having too few high-quality leads or too many low-quality leads is like sleeping in a bed that’s too soft or too hard –

You’ll roll around for hours trying to capture just a few minutes of precious sleep and awaken feeling exhausted.

After spending extensive amounts of time and effort, trying to substantiate and differentiate between the dubious, the unworthy, and the unqualified, and sifting through all the ‘data’ trying to qualify and quantify the levels of interest and suitability, there is no wonder why reps are blamed for not hitting their lead follow-up goals consistently. Conversely, the blame is often placed on marketing for not producing enough leads of value.

And this is what fuels the ongoing “marketing vs. sales” debate. A perfect time to focus back on what I will now officially call the “Goldilocks principle of Sales leads.”

Lead quality and quantity exist in a state opposition, and share an inverse relationship. Having a high volume of leads invariably equates to a sacrifice in overall quality.

Yes, marketing’s activities will often generate unworthy or unqualified leads and sales will often fail to follow-up on leads. The push-pull of contention between these two ‘factions’ must settle into a state of compromise. Unfortunately, we do not happen to live in a fairy tale, nor do we—as salespeople—have the luxury that Goldilocks certainly had. Finding that ‘just right’ state of performance, and productivity should not mean having to test each bowl of porridge, each chair, and every mattress just to achieve our goals.

When it comes to sales leads, the goal should be to generate the quantity and quality that Goldilocks would find to be “just right.”

I don’t like to dwell on mistakes. But having an awareness of our mistakes is one of the best ways to improve our future behavior. In the rapid-fire industry of social media marketing, mistakes are some of the greatest tools for improvement that you have. While there’s nothing like learning from your own mistakes, it is really nice when you don’t have to go down the DIY route. That’s where this infographic might help.

5 Social Media Marketing Mistakes

The full infographic (below) covers nine social media marketing mistakes. Below are five of the biggest mistakes I’ve noticed in brands.

1. Focusing on quantity of followers over quality. Not all followers are equal. Which would you rather have: 10 Facebook fans that don’t engage with any of your posts, or one fan that likes or shares one post per week? I’d rather have the one quality fan. Focus on engaging these fans – not empty numbers.
2. Adding to the noise. We all feel that pressure to crank out content. But do four uninspired Facebook posts a week really do your brand any good? No. Create content that will make an impact and engage your followers. If you don’t have the time or creativity, consider outsourcing your social media or using an editorial calendar to organize and execute concepts in advance.
3. Spreading yourself too thin. You don’t have to be on Twitter. You don’t have to be on Facebook. What you have to do is not over-commit yourself. Only create an online presence in the places where you can truly be present. Otherwise, you’ll come off looking like you don’t have much of a social media marketing plan at all.
4. Lacking a personality. Every company has a personality; but a lot of them are afraid to show it. Should you let your brand fly its true colors on social media? Well, it depends. The answer is different for each company. Read more about this issue – what I call “transparency.”
5. Not converting your followers. Followers are great. But, remember, the whole reason social media marketing “works” is because it eventually leads to sales. A lot of companies, especially younger ones, lose track of this goal. “Fans” and advocates give you feel-good vibes; but if they aren’t producing sales, you need to change things up. Selling on social media is a fine art. You have to learn to balance content that people simply “like” with content that asks them to take a step into your sales funnel. This is perhaps one of the bigger challenges many of our clients have faced before coming to BuzzPlant.

What’s one social media marketing mistake you learned from?

Feel like sharing? I’d love to know what social media marketing mistakes have tripped you up. If not, check out the infographic for some more tips and statistics.

Click here for part 2 of this list, to find out who ranked #16-34.

This year’s Power List—the second annual compilation by Maclean’s writers and editors of this unapologetically subjective ranking—highlights the clout of a truly diverse selection of 50 influential Canadians. Our list ranges from household names to: who’s that? Pinnacle corporate predators rub shoulders here with non-profit paragons. To help you understand how we picked them, you’ll see, beside each name, three icons. We’ll be unveiling more and more of our list every day until Canada’s 15 most powerful people are revealed on Friday.

In the meantime: Are you annoyed by our choices? Angered by our omissions? We invite you to write in our comments and offer your own powerful case for a different list.

This symbol indicates our weighting of the individual’s institutional standing. No surprise that the newly named head of Canada’s biggest bank ranks the maximum five. On the other hand, while we detect serious power in the creative clout of a certain movie director, he doesn’t head a studio or produce his own films, so we award him only a single blue pillar icon.

This tells you how much timing mattered in our choice of a given individual, based on the way things look to us in late 2014. Power expresses itself, after all, through the tasks of the moment. You won’t have to read very far into our list to see that we recognize the pressing priority of the Ebola challenge: Five clocks to a doctor near the centre of the crisis. The same principle works in reverse: Names from sports that made our 2013 list because we were looking ahead to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia have fallen off entirely.

The power that flows from great ideas is perhaps the most appealing kind. So we enjoy awarding multiple light bulbs to, as you’ll see, a university resident with new notions about linking academia to the community, or a young doc with new ways of thinking about the health of old folks.

Maclean’s 2014 Power List, Part 1

• 50. Christine Jennings
• 49. Yannick Nezet-Seguin
• 48. Jeremy Charles
• 47. Samir Sinha
• 46. Shawn Atleo
• 45. Arthur Fogel
• 44. Peter Singer
• 43. Elyse Allan
• 42. John Ruffolo
• 41. Jean-Pierre Blais
• 40. Drake
• 39. Arvind Gupta
• 38. George Stroumboulopoulus
• 37. Michael Cooke
• 36. Ann Cavoukian
• 35. Stephen Scherer

#50: Christine Jennings
Mystery export

A former town planner, Christina Jennings started the Toronto-based production company Shaftesbury in 1987, which creates and distributes original programming. But her biggest success has come recently with Murdoch Mysteries, a detective series set in Toronto at the turn of the 20th century. Originally aired on City TV and now on the CBC, it broadcast its 100th episode this year, and has been aggressively sold to international markets: “It’s amazing to create a Canadian show that’s a hit in prime time; that’s a hit in France, dubbed; that’s a hit in England,” Jennings says. It helps that the show fills a broadcasting niche as the kind of non-serialized crime drama most U.S. networks don’t make anymore: “You can miss a few episodes and it doesn’t matter,” Jennings explains. “You can have season 2 back-to-back with season 8 and it doesn’t make a difference.” — Jaime J. Weinman

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#49. Yannick Nezet-Seguin
And then he lifts the baton

The tiny, perfect, Montreal-born music director of his hometown’s Orchestre Métropolitain turns 40 in the spring. He still looks younger than that—until he lifts a baton and orchestras thunder in response. In his third season as music director of the mighty Philadelphia Orchestra, he’s turning around its financial fortunes and revitalizing its artistic mission. He records whatever he wants—and that’s a lot—for Deutsche Grammophon, Europe’s greatest record label. He showed political clout back home when he complained about the new Quebec government’s plans to close small-town music conservatories; Philippe Couillard abandoned the plan within days. What’s next? The legendary Berlin Philharmonic will name a new music director in May. “Yannick,” as he’s known, is on everyone’s lips as a top candidate. — Paul Wells

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#48. Jeremy Charles
Foodie for thought

It is his penchant for collecting local Newfoundland ingredients and turning them into a fine dining experience that has transformed Jeremy Charles into one of Canada’s most celebrated chefs. A meal from the 37-year-old head chef at Raymonds restaurant in St. John’s might feature anything from moose ravioli to cod sounds (the fish’s bladder) to Acadian sturgeon caviar. Haute cuisine doesn’t have a low price tag. The seven-course tasting menu costs $125, before factoring in any wine.

Charles left the East Coast at 19 and spent the next decade mastering his skills at culinary schools in Chicago and Montreal. Not long after his return home, Charles opened Raymonds in 2011, which enRoute magazine ranked at No.1 for “best new restaurant” in the country; several consider it simply one of Canada’s best restaurants of any vintage Charles has created a devoted following of foodies and fellow chefs alike, who are all lured to taste what Newfoundland and Labrador has to offer. — Aaron Hutchins
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#47. Samir Sinha
Elder doctor

At the ripe age of 37, Dr. Samir Sinha is emerging as Canada’s most compelling voice for the elderly. In 2012, as the lead author of Ontario’s seniors strategy report, Sinha called for improving health care for older Canadians—and keeping them as physically active as possible—at a time when our ballooning aging population makes this a critical social issue. In 25 years, one-quarter of Canadians will be older than 65. And older adults currently account for 60 per cent of hospital bed days, while making up only 15 per cent of the population. “We have a health care system that was designed to meet the needs of younger Canadians, and now it needs to rapidly adapt to meeting the population it’s serving most,” Sinha says.

As director of geriatrics at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital since 2010—upon his return from Oxford University where, as a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his master’s in medical history and a Ph.D. in sociology—Sinha has proven his approach works. His patients spend far less time in hospital than the provincial average and are more likely to live longer, independently at home. This includes Mr. W, now 104, who came under Sinha’s care in 2010 when he was admitted for pneumonia. Sinha ensured Mr. W stayed active and did physiotherapy. He returned home, where he’s been ever since. Many more Canadians may soon benefit from his approach: Sinha is working with the Canadian Medical Association on a national seniors strategy. — Rachel Browne

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#46. Shawn Atleo
Pragmatist, incrementalist, motorcyclist

In January, 2013, moments before entering a crucial meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Shawn Atleo, chief of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), received a text message from Theresa Spence: “Since you have decided to betray me,” wrote the hunger-striking Attawapiskat chief, “all I ask of you now is to help carry my cold, dead body off this island.” To Atleo, the missive landed like a body blow.

Last May, after months of ceaseless, rearguard action from his political rivals, Atleo resigned partway through his term, becoming the first-ever AFN chief to do so. He’d had enough of Ottawa, he declared. He headed home to B.C., then travelled to the U.S. solo, by motorcycle.

The AFN’s loss was B.C.’s gain. Last month, B.C. Premier Christy Clark tapped the 47-year-old father of two to head a crucial new round of talks between First Nations, industry and government, raising an intriguing question: Can a leader’s power actually rise after he’s been dumped from office?

The job, more promising and powerful than anything the fractious AFN is attempting, seems tailor-made for the enterprising B.C. chief. Atleo, who got his business start by launching a coffee shop in east Vancouver, has long spearheaded First Nations collaboration with industry. (B.C. First Nations are involved in mining and energy projects worth $300 billion.) As he once told the Toronto Board of Trade: “We’re looking for partners. We’re open for business.” He was unlike anything the AFN had ever seen.

Atleo, a hereditary chief of the Ahousaht on western Vancouver Island, was schooled in the pragmatic, incrementalist approach favoured by B.C. Native leaders, who tend to negotiate for their rights. The method puts them at odds with the Prairie leadership, who tend to fight for theirs. “It is our time as indigenous peoples,” says Atleo. “We must smash the status quo.” — Nancy Macdonald

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#45. Arthur Fogel
Live and in concert

As an organizer of music tours for everyone from the Rolling Stones to Lady Gaga, this former drummer has been a force in the music business since the 1980s. But when rock stars made most of their money from record sales, Arthur Fogel’s focus on live entertainment was, as he put it to the Independent newspaper, “at the bottom of the food chain.” Now recorded music has flatlined, and touring has become more important, turning the 60-year-old Fogel, head of global touring for Live Nation, into a celebrity. A documentary film featured Bono calling him “the most important person in live music,” and his hometown paper, the Ottawa Citizen, called 2014 his “year of living famously.” Of course, that attention also brings more negative rumours; when Lady Gaga’s 2014 tour was reported to have lost $30 million, Fogel responded that “just a complete fool would say something like that.” Fame comes at a price. — Jaime J. Weinman

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44. Peter Singer
Global health innovator

For the last 25 years, Peter Singer has dedicated his life to the impossible: solving the world’s health and social problems. His 56-page resumé proves this. He’s a medical doctor and professor, and holds numerous titles—from director of the Sandra Rotman Centre to foreign secretary to the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences—and even more accolades, including the Order of Canada and an appointment with the Royal Society of Canada. But it’s Singer’s role as CEO of Grand Challenges Canada where he’s had the most impact and turned Canada into a leader in development and global health.

Launched just over four years ago with funding from the federal government, Grand Challenges Canada finds and funds bold new ideas from innovators around the world to solve health problems in poor countries, from anemia to contaminated water. Under Singer, it has provided $158 million (and an additional $224 million leveraged from outside investors) to develop nearly 700 innovations in more than 80 low- to middle-income countries. But Singer is quick to deflect attention away from himself. “There’s a lot of credit to go around to everyone who makes all of this possible,” he says. “We have a fantastic team and it’s the innovators who are making the difference in peoples’ lives.”

At the Prime Minister’s global summit on maternal, newborn and child health last spring in Toronto, several innovations were debuted, including a project out of the University of British Columbia: a mobile phone app that measures blood oxygen levels to see if a pregnant woman is at risk for pre-eclampsia, one of the deadliest pregnancy complications in developing countries.

“We need innovations like these, because without them, we’ll just be stuck in the present, and that’s just unacceptable,” says Singer. Another Grand Challenges innovation in the works this year is a rapid diagnostic test for Ebola, being developed by an innovator from Uganda.

“It has been an incredible honour to do this on behalf of Canada,” Singer says. “It’s an initiative of which we can all be proud.” — Rachel Browne

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43. Elyse Allan
Energy emissary

Alberta’s oil sands are both an economic boon and public relations disaster for Canada—a key resource that unfortunately also leaves a relatively large carbon footprint. But rather than engage in endless debates about the merits of squeezing gooey bitumen from the ground, General Electric and GE Canada CEO Elyse Allan are doing what they can to square the circle. Earlier this year, GE launched a program to fund research aimed at reducing emissions of oil sands companies and improving their energy efficiency, with Allan saying that “collaboration is key to solving big challenges.” When she’s not trying to solve one of the country’s thorniest economic problems, all while running the Canadian arm of one of the world’s biggest companies, Allan devotes hours to sitting on government advisory boards, as well as those of the C.D. Howe Institute, Conference Board of Canada and Royal Ontario Museum. — Chris Sorensen

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42. John Ruffolo
Always up for a venture

If oil prices keep falling, Canada will quickly realize the danger of relying on resources for growth. It’s a good thing, then, we have John Ruffolo, head of OMERS Ventures, the $200-million venture capital arm of the Ontario municipal workers’ pension fund, planting the seeds for Canada’s next generation of tech giants. Ruffolo, 48, was no stranger to the start-up sector when he took on the venture fund in 2011. At the consulting firm Deloitte in Toronto he worked closely with early-stage investors to connect them with tech entrepreneurs. His talents and influence are needed more than ever. Tech firms account for just three per cent of the market capitalization of the Toronto Stock Exchange (compared to 25 per cent for energy and mining). So far Ruffolo has nurtured a crop of start-ups, including Hootsuite, Shopify and Vision Critical, that are on track to go public, bringing much needed diversity to Canada’s capital market and helping to revive the country’s entrepreneurial spirit. — Jason Kirby

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41. Jean-Pierre Blais
More than just cute kittens

As chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Jean-Pierre Blais is the most-watched federal regulator. The Conservative government wants consumers to see more price-cutting competition for cellphone services and more choice in how they pay for cable TV channels. Blais is supposed to make it happen. It’s routinely said the CRTC oversight spans a $100-billion business undergoing a revolution. But Blais sets himself up as a voice of caution. In the era of Netflix, Shomi and HBO online, he points out that about 60 per cent of Canadians don’t stream TV shows on their computers. “Canadians still watch on average 28 hours of traditional TV a week,” Blais said recently. “And the hours of viewing [spent on] online video services, including cute kittens on YouTube, is only 1.9 hours per week.” Still, when it comes to crafting new rules for service, and new safeguards for Canadian content, Blais is the man in the hot seat. — John Geddes

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#40. Drake
From crown prince to kingmaker

If we’re to judge Aubrey Drake Graham by the metric Canadians too often use to assess our homegrown talents—how famous are they in the U.S.?—there’s no denying the 28-year-old’s power, with his claim to the crown of the American-born rap game. He’s bankable in a fraught music industry, besting the Beatles in Billboard-charting singles in just five years. As the Toronto Raptors’ global ambassador, his brand has become infused with a franchise in well-timed ascendance. And he’s doing it in an essentially Canadian way—he owns the vulnerable image he’s curated, turning jokes about lint-rolling his pants at a basketball game and his average athletic prowess into marketing campaigns and self-deprecating Instagram posts. But perhaps the truest tell of his influence is that he’d rather be a hip-hop kingmaker than a mere crown prince: his label OVO Sound is cranking out acolytes in his hazy R&B-rap image, from PartyNextDoor to iLoveMakonnen. “How the game turn into the Drake show?” he rapped on the triumphal throwaway track Draft Day. How indeed. — Adrian Lee

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#39. Arvind Gupta
Thin on experience, rich in conviction

It’s not the fact that Arvind Gupta is a computer scientist that makes him such an unusual choice to oversee the University of British Columbia and its $1.4-billion budget. It is that UBC’s new hire has zero administrative experience in academia, a far cry from the usual path from professor to dean to vice-president to president.

What Gupta does have is a belief that exceptional research of all kinds has a place at UBC. This is blasphemy for those who believe university is a place to learn for learning’s sake, and that research should be “pure” and divorced from commercial interests. Gupta isn’t afraid of stirring the pot. He argues that collaborating with industry is UBC’s way forward—and makes his case for partnerships with the private sector rather bluntly, at least by the polite standards of power struggles in academia. Gupta is also an innovation expert who, as CEO of Mitacs, overhauled the non-profit research-funding organization to make it a place where Canada’s top graduate students are paired with industry to solve real business problems. He’s already announced he will add $100 million to UBC’s $565-million research budget. Now it’s up to Gupta to prove his hypothesis that this multi-million-dollar investment will distinguish UBC graduates and make their diplomas worth more than others. “What we’re doing now,” he says, “is not good enough.” — Nancy Macdonald

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38. George Stroumboulopoulos
A vegan’s power play

He’s gone from being Canada’s boyfriend to the nation’s emcee. As the face of Rogers’ new 12-year, $5.2-billion investment in the NHL, “Strombo”—his nickname—has been handed perhaps the most culturally significant perch in the country. Each weekend, the 42-year-old vegan now guides the collective consciousness as the host of Hockey Night in Canada—a 62-year Saturday tradition—and as the main studio anchor for Sunday’s Hometown Hockey. With a resumé that includes stints in alternative radio and as a Much Music VJ, a 10-year run as the host of his own CBC television talk show and a couple of unsuccessful attempts to break into the U.S. market, Stroumboulopoulos was not an obvious choice. But early in his tenure, he already seems at ease, infusing the broadcasts with his hipster tastes and a genuine passion for the game. “No one out there can out sports-fan me,” he told Maclean’s shortly after he was hired. How much pull does this skinny-jeans aficionado now enjoy? His feature guest on the season opening broadcast was none other than Stephen Harper. The prime minister, another dark-horse hockey dweeb, took him on a tour of his “jersey room” (actually a closet) at 24 Sussex and showed off his prized possession, a Leafs sweater autographed by all the surviving members of the 1967 Cup-winning team. Interesting TV, with some bonus high-powered trolling: Strombo, a noted Habs partisan, bleeds blue, blanc et rouge. — Jonathon Gatehouse

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#37. Michael Cooke
Man on a mission

In the five years since he was hired as editor of the Toronto Star, Michael Cooke has overhauled the once-plodding daily and turned it into a relentless powerhouse that sets the bar for investigative reporting in Canada. From dirty doctors to Rob Ford’s crack smoking to Jian Ghomeshi’s alleged sex assaults, Cooke’s mission to blow the lid off corruption and deception has the country taking note. His newspaper wins prestigious journalism awards—this year, the Micheners—but more important, it pushes the national agenda on issues of public policy and abuse of power. Born and raised in a small village in Lancashire, England, he took on the local fox hunt in his first gig as 17-year-old cub reporter, setting the tone for the rest of his career. After immigrating to Canada in 1974, he had stints at papers across the country before moving south of the border to the Chicago Sun-Times and New York Daily News. His investigative team is the envy of Canadian journalists, and word is he’s looking to expand its reach to Ottawa. Parliament Hill, you’ve been warned. — Rachel Browne

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#36. Ann Cavoukian
Privacy in 37 languages

Long before her high-profile 15-year tenure as Ontario’s information and privacy commissioner came to an end earlier this year, Ann Cavoukian had solidified her reputation as an international expert on Internet-era intrusions into our private lives. Her Privacy By Design framework, with its seven foundational principles, such as embedding privacy into the design of IT systems, was recognized in 2010 as the global privacy standard. It has since been translated into 37 languages.

A workaholic by nature, Cavoukian opted not to take a break after her three terms as Ontario privacy commissioner, but instead took on a new role at Ryerson University as executive director of the Institute for Privacy and Big Data. With the public’s ongoing concerns about online security and identity theft, Cavoukian’s next chapter will be to demonstrate that acquisition and analysis of mass data sets can coexist with personal privacy. After all, she’s already created the framework. — Aaron Hutchins

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35. Stephen Scherer
Science as hockey

For many, science is seen as a kind of higher, sacred sanctum of knowledge, far away from the profane world of power and politics. And yet, for Stephen Scherer—who co-founded and leads Canada’s first genome lab in Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and whose paradigm-shifting research has him touted as an inevitable Nobel prize laureate—the lab isn’t too different from the hockey rink.

“I have a son who’s quite into hockey, so I hang around with the hockey dads, and no one’s in science. And some of them are very successful people,” said Scherer, 50. “But whenever I talk to them I say, ‘There’s nothing as competitive as science.’ ”

Scherer was a talented hockey player in his day, playing forward for championship squads in high school, but Canada is better for his career shift. He was part of the research team that, in 2004, discovered copy-number variation in DNA, detonating the long-held belief that very little of our genetic makeup could differ. That game-changer has since helped Scherer find copy-number variations that could cause genetic diseases; just this year, he unlocked a potential “autism formula” that will help spur more reliable identification from an earlier age, when intervention is most effective. In September, he earned a spot among only four Canadians on this year’s Thomson Reuters citation laureates list, which has correctly predicted 35 Nobel winners in the last 12 years. “If I accomplish nothing else in my life, being on that list is unbelievable,” he says.

Of course, Scherer’s drive precludes that possibility, fuelled by a field where academic peers double as competitors for research-grant dollars. Despite the honours and his prolific output—he’s published more than 400 papers and been cited in more than 30,000—he still puts in 100-hour weeks, reminding himself of the value of his work every time he walks through the doors at the hospital. “You really can’t rest on your laurels. In a way, I kind of like that,” he says. “It’s sort of a sick thing to say, but it never ends in your life.”
And while turning 50 would consign most athletes to retirement, it’s clear Scherer isn’t ready for the emeritus status that comes with science’s highest honour. “Nobel prize-winners will all tell you that once you win, your life changes: you become a public figure, you give talks. So ideally for me, I’d actually win it 10 years out, because of my age.”

To get there? Well, it’s just like in hockey, he says with a laugh: “The key thing is to stay healthy.” — Adrian Lee

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The post The Maclean’s 2014 Power List, Part 1 appeared first on Macleans.ca.

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It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff is bullish about his company’s newest software, the Wave cloud service for visualizing data. But it’s good to keep in mind just how big of an opportunity lies ahead, at least from Benioff’s perspective.

On the company’s quarterly earnings call today, Benioff declined to tell analysts just how soon Wave will hit $1 billion in annual revenue. But he assured them that upside would be big.

“With Analytics Cloud, it’s far beyond that,” he said of the $1 billion figure.

Clearly, Benioff and other Salesforce employees envision Wave making Salesforce into a considerably bigger enterprise software provider, perhaps one day getting on par with Benioff’s old company, Oracle, even as Salesforce continues to push cloud software instead of selling service for companies to deploy in their own data centers.

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Indeed, the company today told analysts that it was expecting $6.5 billion in revenue for its 2016 fiscal year. And considering that Benioff is, as he put it, “extremely optimistic” about Wave’s capabilities from a money-making perspective, it’s fair to believe that soon enough Wave will become a major contributor to the company’s top-line revenues, right up there with Salesforce’s popular sales cloud for tracking leads.

The Wave product, Benioff said, is off to a strong start, with early customers like EMC, GE, and Verizon. And companies that weren’t previously Salesforce customers have also shown interest in Wave, said Salesforce’s president and vice chairman, Keith Block.

“We have never seen faster uptick and faster traction when it comes to a new product, and that gives us a level of incredible excitement,” Benioff said.

Even Salesforce executives, Benioff said, are getting in on the fun and using the software.

But while Wave is already available in app stores, providing “analytics for the rest of us,” Benioff said it’s not just an application. He sees it as a platform on top of which other applications can be built.

However things progress, Benioff views analytics as a big growth area for the company. It’s already a multibillion-dollar market, he said.

“We have the best analytics and business-intelligence product on the planet, and we are going to market in a huge way,” Benioff said.

BEIJING, China – Chinese censors have newly blocked access to several popular websites as they target content delivery networks that serve much of the Internet, according to a U.S. Internet service company.

The action comes as China hosts the World Internet Conference, which brings together many of the world’s top technology companies.

EdgeCast, an affiliate of Verizon, says censors have taken down several networks that provide local servers to help speed website performance. EdgeCast provides such a network, and its clients include software company Mozilla, publishing company The Atlantic and content management system Drupal.

The online activist group Greatfire.org said Wednesday that it was the target of the Chinese action, which blocked many other sites that use EdgeCast. The group enables Chinese Internet users to access websites otherwise blocked by Chinese censors. EdgeCast did not confirm Greatfire.org’s statement.

A Greatfire.org co-founder, who goes by the pseudonym Charlie Smith, said they had chosen to use several content delivery networks knowing that any move to take down their site would affect others.

“We knew that ahead of time,” he said. “It was our feeling that the authorities would not take that kind of action.”

China employs thousands of censors who block hundreds of websites and erase social media messages dealing with sensitive political topics. At the same time, it claims some of the world’s most popular online sites, including e-commerce giant Alibaba.

Alibaba founder Jack Ma told the Internet conference Wednesday that China’s online strength is bound to transform the Web. Outside the conference hall, several protesters were detained after holding up a banner demanding that China allow access to sites such as Google, Facebook and Twitter.

“I believe China’s Internet is not only profoundly influencing aspects of China’s economic development but is also participating in the development of the Internet across the world,” Ma told the conference.

The post China blocks more websites as World Internet Conference begins appeared first on Canadian Business.

Hey, Sierra Club, got some news for you! Grab a pen, David Suzuki Foundation, you’ll want to get this down too. Same goes for all those other groups that like to get excited about climate change—and angry at Ottawa.

It turns out the Harper government is a world leader when it comes to green taxes. Yes, according to the OECD, Canada has the toughest, most environmentally friendly tax regime among all wealthy countries when it comes to cars, carbon and commuting—far surpassing those green darlings in Sweden and the rest of Europe. Surely everyone can learn something from this.

In September, the OECD released a report on the taxation of employer-provided vehicles and their environmental impact. Taxing non-cash benefits such as a company car more lightly than the equivalent cash income skews compensation choices, as employees will always prefer a cheaper car to paying more income tax. Plus, subsidizing car travel inevitably leads to more driving, which creates “high environmental and other social costs,” the OECD warns. “These include increased contributions to climate change, local air pollution, congestion and road accidents.”

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According to the OECD, most countries substantially under-tax company cars. In Germany, the implicit subsidy is $3,500 per car per year. Swedish drivers get more than $2,000 from the taxman. Across the 27 wealthy countries studied by the OECD, the average credit is $2,300. And in Canada? It’s a mere $57.

Canada tops the OECD leader­board because our tax code treats company cars logically and neutrally—recognizing that the taxable advantage of a work vehicle comprises both the fixed benefit of having access to a car plus a variable benefit that depends on how much you use it.

As a result, company cars make up just 8% of all vehicles in Canada. Our tax system is “green” in that it’s indifferent between wage compensation and free cars. By comparison, nearly half of all cars on Swedish roads are employer provided. In France and Britain, it’s one-third.

The smaller point here is that environmental groups should be singing Ottawa’s praises for its refusal to subsidize car travel, as is the case across most of Europe. While we’re waiting for that (it could be a while), we might also consider the bigger message: Good things happen when taxes are neutral, efficient and apolitical.

Unfortunately, with an election due next year and the budget nearly balanced, the Harper government seems intent on ignoring the successful lessons of its own car tax in favour of unleashing a host of new boutique tax credits and other pointless complications. In an effort to win over the middle class and micro-voting blocs, Ottawa has created numerous special tax goodies covering everything from the recently enlarged children’s fitness credit to the obscure volunteer firefighters credit. All of this makes our tax system more opaque and prone to unusual outcomes.

Consider the Conservative government’s promise to introduce limited income splitting for the current tax year, a move clearly focused on winning votes from single-income families with children. As announced at the end of October, the scheme will see taxpayers rotate in and out of income splitting over the course of their lifetimes. Newly-weds would file separately, parents with young children would file jointly, and once those kids grew up, they’d file separately again until finally, upon retirement, they’d be back to filing jointly, thanks to pension splitting. It’s a mess of economic distortions and red tape.

Deliberately creating tax nooks and crannies in hopes of engineering political advantage violates the basic premise of proper tax policy, which is to raise the funds necessary for government operation in the least disruptive manner possible. Canada’s tax on company cars is a small regulation that delivers a big lesson: A coherent tax system that places neutrality and efficiency first can lead to desirable social and environmental outcomes far better than a tax code full of politically meddlesome, needlessly complex credits, gifts and bribes.

The post Amid a rising tide of tax credits, we need to simplify the tax code appeared first on Canadian Business.

Spurred on by the threat of further regulation, Canada’s major cellphone providers are starting to offer customers more realistic roaming options. But such efforts remain expensive, as evidenced by the continuing emergence of third-party alternatives.

The latest of these is Toronto-based KnowRoaming. I profiled founder Greg Gundelfinger and his innovative approach to the roaming problem a year ago. Now, his company has finally come to market with its promised product.

Unlike other third-party roaming options, most notably Vancouver-based Roam Mobility, KnowRoaming doesn’t require users to swap out their Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card upon arriving in another country.

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Instead, the service uses a cleverly designed, circuit-laden sticker that sits on top of your home provider’s SIM card. As long as your phone is unlocked, the sticker promises to switch over to foreign networks without you having to worry about opening up your phone.

Applying the sticker is kind of fun, actually. The product comes with a plastic applicator into which you stick your chip. A quick press and peel later and the gold KnowRoaming circuitry is affixed.

From there, you download the app, set up an account and load it up with some credit. So far, so easy.

Things get a little trickier once you land. The app automatically handles most of the switchover, but you do still have to press a few buttons to install a new wireless profile on your phone. It’s not difficult, but it can be intimidating if you’re not sure what you’re doing.

Everything went smoothly for me and I was up and running within a minute or so. I tested the sticker on a recent trip to San Jose, where KnowRoaming piggybacks on T-Mobile’s network.

The service worked well enough and I can’t say I had any complaints with it. I was able to check emails and my Twitter feed with no issues. On its own, KnowRoaming works and appears to be solid.

I did encounter a hiccup when I returned home, however. My SIM connected to the home network, but the phone I was using – an iPhone 6 Plus – didn’t want to work. I fiddled with some settings and managed to get everything right by deleting the profile I’d installed while in the U.S.

That’s a big strike as I can’t imagine the average user figuring that out.

The bigger problem with KnowRoaming is that it isn’t as good as some of the other options available in terms of pricing or speeds, at least for the United States.

I use Roam Mobility when in the U.S., which also rides on T-Mobile’s network. Roam, however, accesses LTE speeds while KnowRoaming uses only 3G.

Here’s a typical speed test I got with Roam Mobility:

And here’s what I got with KnowRoaming at the same time and in the same place:

KnowRoaming’s slower speeds, which are noticeable in actual use, might be tolerable if the service was cheaper, but it’s not. All-important data usage is actually considerably more expensive.

KnowRoaming charges 10 cents per megabyte or $7.99 per day for unlimited usage. In comparison, Roam charges only $4 for 400 MB per day, which is less data but more than enough.

The newer company’s main advantage thus lies in the convenience of not having to swap out your SIM card, which you do have to do with Roam. KnowRoaming also offers service in other a number of other countries, although I haven’t had a chance to test that yet.

The product itself is an impressive technical accomplishment and it could be a decent option for people who travel to many different countries, but if it’s just U.S. roaming you’re looking for, the pricing and speeds need improvement.

KnowRoaming supplied a sticker unit and service credit for the purposes of this review.

The post Review: KnowRoaming SIM card works for travellers, but speeds are slow appeared first on Canadian Business.

Wow! We are already at part four of the five part series that I’m doing on LinkedIn’s new “YOUniversity” dashboard. Do you currently work for a school or university? More specifically, do you work in the school’s career services, alumni relations, or development and fundraising offices? If so, this post is for YOU. So pull out your pen and paper and prepare to learn a little more about how you can use the “YOUniversity” dashboard to better connect your school or university to potential and current students, alumni, and more.

I’d like to first begin by showing you a video of how LinkedIn positions its platform as the go-to resource for Higher Education professionals.

The “YOUniversity” Dashboard for Schools

When you decide to view “YOUniversity” from the prospective of a school, LinkedIn breaks out the page into sections. They are:

The Higher Education Resource Center

The Higher Education Resource Center is an educator’s best friend. It is a separate site created by LinkedIn geared specifically toward students and professionals in Higher Education. The resource center offers valuable and insightful quick tip sheets and posters, presentations, videos, and other materials that help to better utilize LinkedIn. The resource center can help students and alumni identify and land their next opportunity and also help schools to have the most up to date data on their school, students, and alumni.

University Pages

The next area of value to educators are University Pages. With your school’s University Page, you now have an easy tool to connect and engage with prospective and current students, alumni, and even parents. I have described what components make up a University Page in part two of this series. LinkedIn also provides an easy to follow one-pager on University Pages that describes what University Pages are, how powerful of a tool they can be, and how to quickly get a University Page set up and designed to stand out.

The Alumni Tool

The Alumni Tool helps to make the job of anyone tasked with alumni relations easier. The alumni tool provides the most up to date data on employment and contact information for all of the alumni who are on LinkedIn – Globally. This information provides you with a deeper understanding of your alumni so that you can be more targeted in your correspondence with them for different campaigns, outreach initiatives, and events marketing.

The alumni tool is also a great resource for those in Career Services. It allows these professionals to have access to real time case studies and potential leads that they can share with students when helping young professionals to look for jobs and internships.

The schools section of the “YOUniversity” dashboard only scratches the surface of how higher education professionals can harness the power of LinkedIn within their school. I definitely recommend that all college and university staff members take time to further explore the higher education resource center and begin to weave LinkedIn into your overall work strategy.

Please be on the look out next week, as I close out this series by discussing how LinkedIn’s “YOUniversity” dashboard is geared toward employers. I hope that you are all finding these posts useful and that you are learning at least one new nugget of information each week. If you are an educator using LinkedIn, please feel free to share your experience with the platform, from a higher education professional prospective.

The countdown to all the key dates and selling opportunities over the holiday selling season starts here.

“Dear Santa,

I know you’re kind of busy right now.

And I know how you’re feeling, because things are getting pretty full-on here too!

The holidays are our busiest sales window opportunity. But we just don’t have the time or resource to keep up with all the holiday email marketing opportunities.

This year, is there any chance you could deliver my gift early, and send me a solution to this challenge?

Thank you.

P.S. Don’t worry about trying to wrap it!”

First off, forget Santa. He’s good, but he’s not that good.

The solution to this email marketing challenge – faced by all online marketers over the coming weeks – is right here, in this blog.

If you haven’t already, it’s time now to put together a tightly planned and executed holiday email marketing automation program.

You’re quickest win right now is to set up a holiday countdown automation program that covers off the key dates and opportunities. Then push it live, and let it run itself while you get on with all the other things you need to be doing.

Here’s our holiday countdown email automation program checklist:

• Email 1. Gift suggestions
• Email 2. Wish list sharing promotion (encourage customers to create and share their own gift wish list)
• Email 3. Delivery cut-off date calendar
• Email 4. Black Friday
• Email 5. Cyber Monday
• Email 6. Gift suggestions and price promotions
• Email 7. Last second class mail date before Christmas
• Email 8. Last first class mail date before Christmas
• Email 9. Last minute gift suggestions
• Email 10. Gift card promotion
• Email 11. Christmas Eve
• Email 12. Christmas Day
• Email 13. December 26th
• Email 14. New Years Eve
• Email 15. New Years Day (Happy New Year, and start of January Sales)

This gift guide email from Homegoods.com shows how a countdown can effectively include discount promotions to help drive engagement across an entire month.

Gift Guide categories make it easy for your customers to find what you want them to look for. Here’s a nice approach from The Terrain. The brand’s holiday gift guide email leads with staff picks and gifts by personality.

The shipping forecast…

It helps to use your email automation program to sow some seeds of urgency into your customers’ behavior.

Letting customers know final delivery dates in advance can prove an effective call to action in its own right, as demonstrated by this email example from vintage clothing store nastygal.com.

When you wish upon a…

Wish list promotions can be effective sales drivers over the holiday period.

Encourage your customers and subscribers to create a wish list then share it.

This wish list email from modcloth.com works equally well for the holidays as it does for Birthdays, spelling out all the advantages to the customer of creating and sharing their list.

Here’s a great example of a holiday wish list email promotion from J.Crew, themed around ‘how to get what you really want this Christmas’.

The tongue in cheek step-by-set guide provides an effective prompt to action, without feeling ‘salesy’.

Needsupply.com’s wish list email provides proof that a little incentivization can go a long way.

Banishing the last minute jitters

This email example from Netflix shows how services that are not delivery date sensitive can be effectively promoted over the holiday season as last minute gift solutions.

The popularity of click-and-collect means retailers with customer pickup options can extend their last minute online gift purchasing emails beyond their delivery cut off dates.

Lowes do a good job here of promoting last minute online gift orders and driving footfall to their stores.

Its’ all in the cards…

1. Gift cards

If your ecommerce solution includes gift card functionality, then the holiday shopping season above all is the time to promote gift cards to your customers.

Gift cards offer a flexible way for your customers to solve their gifting problems, and an opportunity for you to extend the reach of your brand to friends and family of your customers.

Lovenfreshflowers provide a simple but compelling message and call to action in their gift card email.

Online clothing store Roxy.com delivers a holiday gift card email that sells the benefits to consumers of gift-carding.

See our free guide to Email Marketing for the holiday season for more festive inspiration.

How many times have you received a cold email so terrible that you wanted to literally laugh out loud or even cry? In the business of cold email copywriting, I see them all the time; both from prospective clients and in my own Inbox. They either make me want to scream, or laugh so hard that I have to run to the bathroom.

I usually save the really bad cold emails I receive in my inbox and forward them to friends and colleagues with a few tips of what not to do. Other times, if I’m feeling nice, I respond to the cold emailer with a few pieces of advice.

With all of these terrible cold emails piling up in my Inbox, I’ve decided I’m going to go on a full crusade to fix this problem at its source. Join me for a RingLead webinar on 11/20 at 2pm ET for more email tips.

Cold Email Mistake #1: Losing Their Attention With a Weak Introduction Sentence

“I just wanted to briefly introduce you a  tech company that that you may not have heard of—COMPANY X.”

This is what I call “wimpy language.” It doesn’t catch my attention or excite me at all. No one wants to read through an apologetic or self-defeatist cold email, especially in the intro. Maybe I haven’t heard of your company, but that’s not what’s really important. Tell me why your product is fantastic and how it will help me solve my problems early in your cold email.

Cold Email Mistake #2: Confusing Prospects with a Rambly Value Proposition

“COMPANY X will announce a new version tomorrow.  The full release and infographic are below.”

You should be able to explain your product and it’s value prop in one sentence. NEVER ask the prospect to look “below,” especially in an email. Once you do that, you’ve lost them. Your prospects don’t have the time or attention span to scroll through an essay about your product. (They had an awkward and wordy newsletter below that I won’t include because it gives away the emailer.) Tell them what it is and how it will help me in as few words as possible.

Cold Email Mistake #3: Listing Boring Features Instead of Your Most Powerful Benefits

“With this new version, COMPANY X has created a feature that is unique in CRM technology. We call it 1-to-Many with Any. This clever engineering allows users to associate one FEATURE-FEATURE-FEATURE.”

Your prospects don’t want to hear all the ins and outs of your entire product. They want to know that you understand their pain points and have a solution for them. Product centric copy fails to target specific personas, decreasing the likelihood of a positive response.

Stop sending the same mass email to every persona on your list, and take some time to research the personas you plan on targeting. CEOs and VPs of Sales have different concerns, therefore, your emails should be tailored to reflect their unique needs.

Cold Email Mistake #4: Lazy About Checking for Grammar or Spelling Errors

One of the many downsides to outsourcing your outbound emails to Odesk or foreign workers is the potential for grammatical and spelling mistakes. Whether you’re a native English speaker or not, have someone with a strong command of the English language proofread your cold emails before you send them out. Having an extra pair of eyes makes a huge difference in catching grammatical errors. And when it comes to cold emails, how do you expect a C-level prospect to trust you with their business goals if you have grammar or spelling mistakes?

Cold Email Mistake #5: Treating a Cold Email like a Gimmicky Marketing Email

“This means that users have context for today’s complex relationships. This “People First” approach is geared to the way business has evolved, with people moving from company to company and job to job.“

Bold or enlarged text is a lazy alternative to powerfully persuasive email copywriting. Font gimmicks are dead giveaways that your cold email is a generic and mass-delivered. Writing cold emails is not the same thing as writing the marketing copy for your drip campaigns.

While customizing mass emails may seem daunting at first, a few personalized touches will give your copy a fighting chance for good open and response rates.

• Keep your email copy short and conversational.
• Don’t write long, drawn out paragraphs that explain every detail about your company and all your product’s features. Remember, the goal of your outbound campaign is only to get prospects on the phone, not to close the deal.
• Don’t use jargon that adds no value (such as “people first”), or includes bloated sentences that overcomplicate your copy and distract from your message. They aren’t helping you convert prospects into qualified leads.
• You will be more powerful and credible if you demonstrate that you’re “people first,” instead of just stating this passively.

My Cold Email Advice to Help You Write Better Cold Emails

PRO TIP #1: Write your mass cold email template as if you were writing an email to a single person. Pick someone from your list and do some research on them to get ideas of what benefits you want to mention, for example.

PRO TIP #2: Be straightforward about your product and how it will help make your prospect’s life easier.

PRO TIP #3: Do add customized inserts like, {!First_Name} and {!Company} to give your emails a more personalized feeling.

Gary Vaynerchuk, one of the biggest digital marketing big brains out there, likes to say that marketers ruin everything.

What he’s saying is that a few of us find something new that works and the rest of us flock to it, use it entirely too much, and completely degrade its impact.

But while Vaynerchuk paints broadly, his “ruin everything” line best applies right now to the world of email nurture campaigns, which can have a hugely beneficial impact on the sales and marketing funnel; but it seems like today, there’s nothing more disruptive and, frequently, more useless to a prospect. That’s because most of us are doing it wrong.

Here are the two biggest ways marketers ruin nurture campaigns and how to avoid them:

1. Campaigns that try to qualify too many leads

Because of the amount of effort required to get a nurture campaign up and running, marketers rightly place a lot of pressure on themselves to get a worthy return on their investments. Fair enough; but let’s level set on what that return should be.

Nurture campaigns are great at three things:

• Keep you in front of a prospect
• Learn more
• Build trust

What a nurture campaign isn’t great at, though, is scaling to do that for every single email address that ever enters a database.

Instead, smart marketers running good nurture campaigns are finding out whom in their databases display signs of being most like their best customers. They focus on building trust with those key contacts.

If you do that, too, your prospects will raise their hands, let you know they’re ready for a sales conversation, and give you an opportunity to solve their problems. That’s a far different behavior than using a campaign focused on upping lead scores to force that same person to put his or her hand in the air.

2. Emails that double as another form of broadcasting

Most nurtures are incredibly one-way: you assign someone to the campaign, they receive your emails, and you hope they click.

If all three things happen, that’s a win, right? Wrong.

When was the last time you were completely OK with someone not responding to an email you sent them?

Email isn’t designed to be a broadcast medium and your nurture process shouldn’t treat it that way.

Instead of just having a nurture push content, start pulling feedback from recipients. If someone reads a blog post or downloads an ebook, use triggered email to ask their thoughts. If that person responds, they’ve given you permission to start diving deeper into the larger issues that are motivating them to engage with you. Don’t miss that opportunity.

To borrow again from Vaynerchuck, this approach lets you effectively set up your ask. (Side note: If you haven’t read his book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook you should do so after finishing this post.)

Here’s the thing about Gary Vaynerchuk: he’s been right an awful lot of times in his career. Don’t let your nurture campaign be another excuse for him to say “I told you so.”