We tend to look at willpower as this magical force inside of us that we either have or we don't. In a recent interview, Scott Adams—Dilbert creator and frequent advice giver —explains that willpower is actually a finite resource, and there's a way to get what you need done without draining it all.
Recently I was browsing 15 Mind-Blowing Stats About Online Shopping and noticed a surprising trend. While online retail orders grew by 11 percent for the first quarter of 2014, revenue from mobile devices increased by 35 percent for the same period.
More customers are shopping on smartphones and tablets than ever before, but not all mobile shopping is equal. For instance, shoppers spend more on product purchases from their tablets. For purchases over $500, sales on Android tablets were 12 percent higher than on Android phones, and 11 percent higher for iPads than iPhones.
Clearly, people shopping on tablets are doing something differently, behaving differently, than people shopping on smartphones. Many consumers own both types of device, so their behavior is driven not only by the device, but by the context in which they are using that device. For example, 80 percent of tablet users report that they use it most frequently at home. So, how should we as content marketers ensure that we are providing the right experience for the same consumer depending on the device they use?
Here are the top tips to increase conversion on mobile.
The smartphone is great for killing time between meetings, while you’re in a cab or bus, waiting for an airplane, or in the waiting room for a doctor’s visit. People are quickly scanning emails and social posts, reading the news, browsing for deals, viewing those two-minute YouTube links, and scanning codes in stores for immediate price checks. In the context of online shopping, people are typically comparing prices or looking at reviews or referrals from their networks, but are often not making purchases. For these types of shoppers it is important to create an experience tailored to the short attention span of people on the go. For instance, make the product images as large as possible, create in-line zoom and spin features, make it easy to use gestures such as “swipe” to move to the next product image, and keep that “save” or “add to cart” button on the screen so customers can save their favorite items for purchase later. Shoppers add to favorites more on smartphones than tablets, so make sure they can do it quickly and easily.
The online retailer eBags.com did just that in its eBags.com/obsession mobile app. The company researched the behavior of consumers on their smartphones and created an app specifically targeted to those findings. The app allows customers to quickly view a bag, then click “love it” or “leave it” and a new bag will appear. Their favorites are saved, and the app learns the shoppers’ preferences as well, and starts to show them bags similar to the ones they “love.” Soon shoppers are finding bags that they never even imagined they wanted, yet fall in love with immediately.
eBags also paid attention to fundamentals. The company used a dynamic media publishing solution for a “design once and deliver optimized to any platform” approach that improved load times by 70 percent. eBags has seen double-digit smartphone conversions when shoppers use this app, well above the industry average.
Now consider shopping behavior on a tablet or laptop. Your customer is more likely to be sitting at home on the couch. Traffic from tablets is steadily increasing, and engagement on tablets is similar to laptops and desktops. Marketers should strongly consider providing an experience tailored to tablets, one more similar to laptops than to smartphones. You have more of customers’ attention and a larger screen to show an interactive catalog, a video gallery, or a more detailed view of a product, as well as to provide more engaging experiences such as 360-degree spin and zoom to help them complete their purchase. The customers will likely be in a new phase of the purchasing cycle. They have saved an item on their smartphone and now they have retrieved it, want to learn more, and have more time to do it. This is a good time to offer them a longer video explaining the features of your product in more depth, such as those offered by Philips for its shaving products. These are perfect for tablet users looking for the extra information that will persuade them to buy.
Give your customer targeted content not just for the device, but also for the likely behavior on that device. Look at how tumi.com handles this for their products. The product page shows a video on desktops and tablets, where the shopper can view the content in better detail and has more time, but not on smartphones. They also enable swipe gestures on the mobile devices for selecting the images to view.
A new smartphone behavior is emerging: using the smartphone to scan barcodes, look up reviews, or compare prices while actively shopping in the store. What if you knew that a shopper on your website was actually in your store? What would you do differently? If the shopper scans an item, could you offer a video on how it works, or send a special offer to buy it now? Beacon technology combined with an app makes this type of scenario possible.
Consider how to bring the features shoppers expect from online shopping into the store. Show them targeted offers for related or recommended products that complete their purchase, but do it from inventory in that store, and base it on your visitors’ shopping history. Make it something they can convert right then and there. The beacon technology should tell you where they are in the store and what merchandise is in their immediate vicinity. Imagine a scenario where the app alerts salespeople in the store about what was scanned and what offers the shopper is seeing. They could go to the shopper, greet him or her by name, and offer assistance in finding the items. Or perhaps the shopper has completed the purchase and paid via the app. The salesperson could come out bearing their selections packaged and ready to go. Finally, the app may give you insight about what visitors do next online after they leave your site. Do they go to a competitor or somewhere related? With features such as these, your store could become the next store of the future.
Plenty of studies show that investors tend to overweight their own equity market compared to investing abroad, a behaviour that has particularly worked against a lot of Canadian investors given the underperformance of this country’s resource sectors and, more importantly, weakening currency.
Specifically, the U.S. dollar index, which tracks the value of the U.S. dollar relative to a basket of foreign currencies, has been on a tear this year, with global investors piling into U.S. stocks, bonds and other greenback-denominated assets.
As a result, the index is up nearly 12% from its May lows and has reached a four-year high. Interestingly, the worst performers within the index happen to be the yen, which has fallen to a seven-year low against the greenback, and the Canadian dollar, which is at a five-year low.
This has really benefited those Canadians who own U.S stocks this year. Adjusting the currency back to the Canadian dollar, we calculate that the S&P 500 is up a whopping 19% compared to the S&P/TSX’s 13% gain, the MSCI Emerging Markets Index’s 6% increase and the MSCI EAFE Index’s meagre 3% gain.
The good news is that the weaker currencies could provide the necessary stimulus to kick-start global economic growth, which appears to have recently stalled.
For example, weaker currencies are helping those with ties into the strong U.S. market, such as foreign banks with large U.S. operations, European and Japanese car makers who are now able to sell more competitively priced vehicles into the rocketing U.S. auto market, and Canadian oil companies because the U.S. dollar gain offsets weaker oil prices.
The strong greenback is not good news for everyone though, especially the U.S. tech sector, which has approximately 60% of its revenue coming from abroad, U.S. retailers and health-care companies that have large international operations, and U.S. automobile manufacturers, who now have to compete against lower-cost imports.
However, if history repeats itself, there could be a great opportunity for the contrarians. The U.S. dollar has reached similar levels three times since the 2008 financial crisis, but has failed to breach it each time, selling off 10% to 20% shortly thereafter.
Therefore, if one were to position around this, it would mean locking in some profit from U.S. equity positions and rebalancing into Canadian, European and Asian markets that are all benefiting from low currency values relative to the U.S. dollar.
More importantly, there could be some strong currency gains should the greenback correct as it has done in the past.
Investors should always maintain a well-diversified portfolio and the current situation in the currency markets may represent a chance to rebalance, especially for those too heavily weighted in U.S. stocks.
Martin Pelletier, CFA, is a portfolio manager at Calgary-based TriVest Wealth Counsel Ltd.
(Shutterstock)
Canada’s hydrocarbon energy sector and, in particular, the growing oil sands sector, has an Achilles’ heel: greenhouse-gas emissions. The energy sector is supposed to have a friend in the Stephen Harper government—the oil-soaked leader of our petrostate, if you ask his most strident opponents—but the government’s consistent failure to address the greenhouse-gas issue with anything other than inflammatory rhetoric, obfuscation or blatant falsehoods, let alone develop coherent policies, is the best ammunition for which opponents of the industry could ask. The more our government avoids the question, responds with unrelated barbs and attacks, or attempts to shield the public from the truth, the more the public will ask questions, the more the public will feel that there are things to be hidden, and the more symbolic oil sands will become. With friends like the Harper government, the oil and gas sector is likely to keep adding enemies.
Canada has committed to a greenhouse-gas emissions reduction to 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020, a target which we are, so far as I can tell, universally expected to miss. Barring economic collapse, we’re not expected to come anywhere close and, even with economic collapse, it’s unlikely we’ll get there. The math just doesn’t work. That’s not just my opinion, it’s based on a projection made by Environment Canada, and provided by the minister of the environment to the UN. The model used by Environment Canada is the same model used by Natural Resources Canada for some of their work, as well as by the National Energy Board. It’s been vetted against every other major economy-wide model of emissions and economic growth that make predictions for Canada. None of them, to my knowledge, provides materially different analysis.
Here’s what the Government of Canada concluded in its National Communication to the UN earlier this year about its target, based on analysis using Environment Canada’s model: “Canada . . . committed to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions to 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020. In light of strong economic growth, this could be challenging.” To illustrate the challenge, the minister of the environment included the following figure:
Emissions projections and Canada’s targets. Source: Environment Canada.
The figure clearly shows that not only are current measures expected to leave Canada short of meeting its target in 2020, our government expects to see emissions heading up in every year between now and then, barring the introduction of new policies. If Environment Canada’s analysis holds true and no new policies are introduced, we’ll find ourselves with emissions 122 Mt greater than the level to which we committed to reduce them in 2020.
How robust are these projections, you might ask? They are based on an economic model, so they are inherently a product of many assumptions, but, mostly, they’re going to be influenced by rates of economic growth and, given the importance of oil sands emissions, changes in oil prices and, again, to any new policies not yet announced. In its most recent quasi-annual Emissions Trends report, Environment Canada tested these emissions projections under a variety of scenarios, including slow economic growth and low oil prices. The lowest of the scenarios, shown in the figure below, still has Canada missing its target by more than the total emissions of the oil sands today, with emissions not declining much below today’s levels between now and 2020. That outcome is also associated with a significant drop in oil sands production, which the National Energy Board forecast would occur in a pricing environment not unlike today’s. If the government expects emissions to drop for those reasons, that would, no doubt, be interesting to those currently seeking approval for pipelines.
The math doesn’t stop with current projections. It extends to policies, as well. While they’ve received a lot of attention, the oft-discussed oil and gas policies will not likely allow us to reach our targets. There simply isn’t enough time, unless the government were to impose a policy that would significantly constrain growth in the sector and lead to substantial re-fits of existing capital. Let’s look at the numbers. Emissions from the oil sands are expected to grow as production grows, increasing from approximately 60 Mt today to an expected 101 Mt in 2020. That gives you a sense of the policy challenge right there: Even if all new oil sands projects added zero net emissions to the economy, Canada would still miss its Copenhagen target by about 60 Mt. If, by some miracle, you could eliminate all projected oil sands emissions by 2020 without disrupting other sectors, we’d still be on track to miss the target. Of course, neither of these is likely to happen. In fact, new oil sands production is more likely to be more emissions-intensive than existing production on average, owing mostly to the increased share of more emissions-intensive in-situ oil sands production. Low prices and/or infrastructure challenges are likely to slow the rate of growth of oil sands, but also make it more challenging politically for the government to introduce stringent policies that would render oil sands production significantly more costly. Beyond the regulations for the oil and gas sector, the government has not outlined any additional sectors for which it plans stringent regulation, and has announced no plans to revisit other sectors.
On Global Television yesterday afternoon, the parliamentary secretary for the environment, Colin Carrie, suggested that Canada not being on track to meet its targets was simply a matter of opinion. In a sense, he’s right: The stated opinion of the government is that Canada is not on track to meet its targets. This opinion was submitted to the United Nations in an official disclosure, supported by extensive, publicly available economic analysis performed by the department responsible for Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions inventories and, for most policies that might be imposed to reduce them, this opinion was validated by the office of the Auditor General, and this analysis has not, to my knowledge, been refuted by any competing projection in a material way.
Perhaps, as my colleague Aaron Wherry suggests, the government is privy to analysis that demonstrates that their own projections are not accurate. If so, they should table it. Perhaps the government is expecting much lower oil production than currently forecast? If so, that wasn’t reflected in the most recent fiscal update. Perhaps the government plans very stringent policies for oil and gas? Perhaps the government is expecting that the whole climate change issue will go away, and that it’s just a matter of a few scientists’ soon-to-be-refuted opinions? It would do them well to say so, whatever it is. Canada’s energy industry is facing mounting criticism at home and abroad, new infrastructure critical for optimizing the value of our resources is stalled at every turn, and the our key ally in global climate change negotiations, the U.S., now has an emissions trajectory and opening bargaining position so different from ours as to make harmonized targets impossible. Over the next 13 months, in the lead-up to UN climate negotiations in Paris, Canadians deserve accurate information from their government. At the same time, Canada’s energy industry, as well as the western provinces so dependent on oil and gas resource wealth, must demand that our government take this problem seriously. That, in my opinion, would start with being prepared to answer the most basic of questions about our country’s emissions trajectory and the potential impact of future policies.
The post The Harper government is doing more harm than good for the oil sands appeared first on Macleans.ca.
Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw was just named the National League Most Valuable Player and Cy Young award winner, only the 11th pitcher in the history of baseball to receive both honors in the same year.
The list of his accomplishments this year is nothing short of amazing. Still, it is rare for a pitcher to be awarded the MVP, which is usually given to a slugger who plays daily.
Since the pitch starts every play in baseball, I wonder why MVP recognition of a pitcher is so rare. This prompted me to start wondering about the value of really good pitching in business as well as baseball.
Over the last four weeks, I have judged and observed many pitches made by biotech and med-tech CEOs. I was even a “pitch doctor” at the Life Sciences Summit several weeks ago. Several companies have asked for my help in raising money and so I have been working with them on their pitches.
I was debating this with my friend, Kristian Andersen, who told me that the formula for a great pitch is quite easy. He has reached this conclusion after working with many companies through his strategic design consultancy, KA+A, and as the head of Gravity Ventures, a seed stage investment firm. Kristian worked on the road show presentations for several very successful companies, including Angie’s List, LifeLock, and ExactTarget, to name a few.
He considers the pitch to be the intersection of design and investing, and offered the following tips.
Here are the six biggest mistakes to avoid in your pitch deck:
1. Bad design: One of the simplest, but most often overlooked, aspects of a winning pitch deck is design. There is no question that a well-designed presentation is more compelling and effective than a presentation that is thoughtlessly designed. This may seem obvious, but you’d be amazed at the number of promising startups that fail to achieve lift off because they turned a blind eye to the power of design.
Above: Pitch deck design matters
2. Claiming you have no competitors: One of the most basic, rookie moves you’ll see first time entrepreneurs make is to claim that they don’t have any competitors. This is at best false and at worst delusional. Any market that is worth pursuing will have competitors, even if you don’t think of them as competitors. A competitor can be anything that is competing for your prospects’ dollars.
3. Failing to establish your own credentials: At the end of the day, investors are investing in people. Yes, market size, product/market fit, and the business model all matter, of course. But the single most important aspect of the business is, “Who’s running it?” Take the time to show your credentials and give investors a reason to believe that you are the best person in the world to launch and grow the business.
4. Underestimating the importance of storytelling: Most entrepreneurs fail to understand that a pitch deck is really a story. It’s a plot-driven narrative, complete with protagonists (your product), antagonists (your competitors), a climax (product/market fit, first big enterprise client, etc.), and a denouement (the exit). Nothing captivates an audience like a compelling story. After all, stories are easier to understand, share and get excited about.
5. Too many slides = bad. You’ve only got a limited amount of time with an investor and that investor has a very limited attention span. Relentlessly edit your pitch deck for brevity and impact. The law of diminishing returns is especially true when it comes to presentations. Ten to 15 slides are sufficient for almost any startup. Using more, you run the risk of coming across as muddled and indecisive.
6. No clear call to action: Many a great pitch has been ruined by a conclusion that lands with a thud. You’ve done a great job of explaining your business and painting an ambitious vision for the future but then you fail to provide clear next steps to your audience. Always finish your pitch with a clear ask (usually funding, but it could be advice, connections, etc.). Tell them specifically what you are asking for (and the terms) and provide them with an easy way to follow up.
Spring training is just around the corner; the Opening Day starters will soon be announced.
Make your pitch count.
Batter up!
Joseph V. Gulfo, MD, MBA, is the author of “Innovation Breakdown: How the FDA and Wall Street Cripple Medical Advances” and CEO of Breakthrough Medical Innovations, a team of biopharma and medtech consultants. An Inc.com contributor, he also teaches graduate cancer biology and business and entrepreneurship classes and maintains an educational cancer biology blog. Dr. Gulfo received his MD from University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and his MBA from Seton Hall University.
A recent report indicates that by 2017, Millennials will have more purchasing power than any other generation. Note also that Millennial brand loyalty and purchasing decisions vary drastically from Baby Boomers, and even from the only marginally older Generation X. It’s a financial imperative for companies to learn and understand exactly what makes the soon-to-be most economically powerful generation tick.
This newly released data is a far cry from the stereotype of Millennials as a generation of lazy, narcissistic man (or woman)-children who are unable to achieve sufficient financially independence to move out of their parent’s basements and start a family.
While it’s true that a significant portion of Millenials do boomerang back to their parent’s homes after graduating from college. Fourteen percent of 24 to 34 years olds live at home, and 74 percent of emerging adults receive financial support from their parents.
Millennials now claim 80 million among their ranks, and control 21% of consumer discretionary purchases in the United States, which equates to more than a trillion dollars in aggregate buying power (add to that the ability to get Mom and Dad to make purchases from time to time). Understanding who Millennials are, and, more importantly, how to market to them, is imperative for every business.
Millennials are loosely classified as anyone born between about 1980 and 2000. They make up the largest population group in the United States and have grown up in an increasingly digital world. In addition, Millennials have weathered one of the worst economic recessions in our nation’s history, and even now they suffer in the job market more than Gen Xers and even Baby Boomers. Millennials are also the most ethnically diverse generation in American history, which makes their preferences even more disparate.
Due to their upbringing in a world of the Internet, endless digital choices, and economic recessions, Millennials tend to be skeptical of large institutions (both corporate and government), and remain far more independent both politically and religiously than prior generations. Millennials are relatively difficult to convince of anything, but they remain open-minded and value social responsibility.
Millennials remain a tough nut to crack for marketers, but increasing amounts of experience and data are starting to yield the most effective ways to market to this diverse generation.
For starters, Millennials pay much closer attention to the social actions (both good and bad) of the companies they buy from. Actions that go against the ethos of a group of Millennials will be more likely to cause downward pressure on sales than in previous generations. On the other hand, positive social action (marketed on the Internet via social media, blogs, and news publications) can lead to lasting positive branding impact.
Millennials crave simplicity, as well as customizability. They prefer streamlined buying processes, options that allow them to express themselves, and responsive customer service. In a world of near-instantaneous customer support via Facebook and Twitter, the idea of waiting for 20 minutes (or an hour!) on the phone for customer service is mostly foreign (and deeply repulsive) to Millennials.
Ultimately, Millennials are willing to put off purchases until they deem the situation favorable to them, so coming to them on their terms is essential to successfully marketing to this complex yet increasingly lucrative cohort.
A lot of people will tell you that all it takes to succeed in life is to pursue your passion. But is that always true?
Photo Credit: Nina Matthews Photography via Compfight cc
There are plenty of people out there who are trying to do things they love and aren’t necessarily succeeding. So what are they missing? The truth is that passion is only one of three characteristics you need to find your calling.
When I’m working with my students or workshop attendees, I walk them through an exercise in which I ask them to answer three important questions. If you want to build a blog that people actually read, make a living doing what you love, or launch a business that succeeds, you’ll have to answer them, too. They are:
Where these three questions converge is where you’ll find your “sweet spot.” As Frederick Buechner wrote, your vocation lies in the intersection of the world’s deep need and your deep joy.
In other words, you have to do something that is both interesting to you and that other people are interested in. And of course, you have to be good (quality is assumed). These questions cover the following areas:
If you have only one or two of these but not all three, you won’t make it. Competency without passion is drudge work. And passion without demand is a hobby. You have to have all three to make a meaningful contribution.
But of course, that’s not to say there isn’t value in doing things you love. I have lots of hobbies I enjoy. I just don’t expect people to pay me for them.
And neither should you.
If you want to get the most satisfaction out of your work and make the most meaningful contribution, you have to move beyond just what you’re passionate about. You have to consider what’s in it for other people.
This is not such a bad thing, actually. Earning the right to share your dream means you value people’s time. It means you actually care about someone other than yourself. But what does that look like, practically?
Here are three simple steps you can take today:
No, passion is not enough. The world needs more than for you to just do what you love. It needs you to make a difference. And each of these steps will help you figure out what people want, how you can deliver value, and what it takes to make that work both fulfilling and satisfying.
So you had better get started.
(Note: I’m not sure who first originated this demand-competency-passion model, but lots of folks have addressed it in different ways. I know for a fact that Scott Belsky and Michael Hyatt have both written and spoken about it.)
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John Koenig calls it vemödalen. The fear that you're doing something that's already been done before, that everything that can be done has been done.
Just about every successful initiative and project starts from a place of replication. The chances of being fundamentally out of the box over the top omg original are close to being zero.
A better question to ask is, "have you ever done this before?" Or perhaps, "are the people you are seeking to serve going to be bored by this?"
Originality is local. The internet destroys, at some level, the idea of local, so sure, if we look hard enough we'll find that turn of a phrase or that unique concept or that app, somewhere else.
But no one is asking you to be original. We're asking you to be generous and brave and to matter. We're asking you to step up and take responsibility for the work you do, and to add more value than a mere cut and paste. Give credit, definitely, but reject vemödalen.
Sure, it's been done before. But not by you. And not for us.
I always find it curious when people compare our social media presence with our REAL presence in the “real world.”
What makes people think that Facebook is NOT the real world? Increasingly, we are beginning to see these lines blur.
We create our personality on Facebook.
But Facebook is also creating our personality. Facebook changes our behavior. Seriously.
Recently, Facebook demonstrated how it can alter our moods by manipulating our content. This is a company that can affect our opinions.
New research shows that social proof on Facebook contributes to our view of our self-worth, quantifies the value of friends and shapes what content we share.
Where will it lead, and in the near-term, what does this mean for marketers? Fascinating question, right? So fascinating in fact, Tom Webster and I devoted an entire podcast to it.
This one covers a lot of territory in 30 minutes!
I’m sure you are anxious to get right into this one! Let’s get on with the show!
Other Ways to Listen to this Podcast:
Click on this link to listen to Episode 36
Resources mentioned in this show
The Goldfinch: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) by Donna Tartt
Suttree
The Counselor by Cormac McCarthy
Marketing Podcasts Dotcom by Jay Baer
Original Atlantic article on Facebook numbers by Benjamin Grosser
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The post How Facebook changes our behavior appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.
As you go about your daily business it’s unlikely that you’ll come into contact with many people who think that a pair of jeans and a nuclear power plant have a lot in common. And with good reason. Both can keep you warm, but there are some blindingly obvious differences such the physical features and the level of danger (although some of those skinny jeans can be quite hazardous if one lunges unexpectedly).
The example is tongue-in-cheek, but the point is quite serious. There are fundamental differences between B2C and B2B markets. In fact, as illustrated in the infographic below, there are 12 key features which make B2B markets unique.
These unique features of B2B markets have important implications when conducting B2B market research. B2B research differs from B2C research in 10 key respects:
All of the above mean that consumer research techniques can’t simply be overlaid onto B2B markets. Rather, a unique approach is required for what is a different and potentially more challenging market environment.
How many of us have ever written a piece of content we feel confident about, only to have it fall flat on its face (*raises hand*)? In a way, content marketing operates very similarly to economics. The greater the supply, the less the demand — and this has never been more true than today. Marketers are creating content out the wazoo, but buyers can only consume so much of it.
To really make an impact — to prevent your perfectly good piece of content from falling on its face — your content needs to have it all. I’m sure you’ve read articles about how to make your content more shareable, with tips ranging from telling a story to trying a new and different medium. Those are all great tips, but I’m here to let you in on a little secret: sometimes all you need are just a few social sharing buttons to boost those sharing stats.
Think about it. Your buyers are busy and overwhelmed. They’re only going to take the time to share a piece of content if it really speaks to them, and they’re even less likely to share it if they have to craft the social messages themselves. By placing “Share via LinkedIn/Twitter/Facebook” buttons at the end of your white papers, blog posts, and even your emails, you’re making the process that much easier.
There are a few ways to approach content sharing, and it depends on the type of content you’re creating and whether you’ll be using buttons or text links. Let’s take a look at a few scenarios.
Ever noticed the buttons at the end of a white paper suggesting that you “share with your networks!”? Clicking on one of these buttons brings up a window in which you can edit your message and share a link to the content’s landing page with your networks (remember, you’re not trying to sacrifice lead generation by giving your content your content away for free).
These buttons are relatively easy to set up! Once you’ve designed the creative in a tool like Adobe Illustrator (or even PowerPoint) and added them to your white paper, you’ll place a custom hyperlink behind each one. Those hyperlinks will look like the following:
To correctly modify the link above, you’ll just need to substitute in the link to your landing page for the URL bolded above. Clicking the link will lead users to a window like the one below, where they can type in a customized message or just post as is.
Similarly to LinkedIn, you’ll need to substitute your own link for the bolded part of the link above. Clicking on this link will lead users to the following window:
There are two ways you can approach creating a Twitter sharing link, and each have their pros and cons. The first option is to modify the link below, which allows you to insert a bitly link so that you can track link clicks:
http://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Salesforce%20for%20B2B%20Marketers:%20The%20Complete%20Guide.%20Get%20it%20here:%20http://prd.to/1u5N7QM
A little daunting, right? Here’s what you do: first, write the message you would like to display in your Tweet. The “%20” represents a space, so you’ll write each word in your message with “%20” in between (this is bolded in the example above). Next, refer to the italicized section above. This is where you’ll insert the link to your landing page. I would recommend using a shortened bitly link instead of placing your full link here. You’ll also want to test your message and link to make sure they’re under 140 characters. See what this looks like when clicked below:
A simpler alternative is to use a service like clicktotweet to generate a link for you. While this is easy to set up (you simply type your message and insert your link while the service counts your characters for you and produces a final link), you won’t be able to track link clicks unless you have a paid account.
Sharing buttons on a company blog can be created a number of ways: using the technique mentioned above, using text links within the copy (for example, Share via LinkedIn), or using a plugin or service that provide sharing buttons for you. On the Pardot blog, we use a plugin called Digg Digg that places the following buttons at the top of each blog post:
Not only do these keep a count of social shares, but they also allow you to click on the social network you would like to share the post with and share a link directly from the post. You’ll see a pop up window similar to the ones posted in the section above. Easy as pie!
Another great (and mobile-friendly!) option is a service called AddThis, which places social sharing buttons like the ones pictured below (on the left) on your webpages to facilitate social sharing.
Many marketers don’t think of emails as particularly shareable, but neglecting to place sharing buttons in your emails can prevent you from reaching some key audiences! By adding social sharing functionality, you’re creating a way for your email recipients to share the content of your emails with their social networks. This is great for emails that advertise events, webinars, or new content that your team has created.
AddThis, mentioned above, is great for adding sharing functionality to your emails. For example, Pardot features an AddThis integration that allows users to add social sharing buttons to their emails. Clicking on any of these buttons brings up a window similar to the ones featured earlier in this post.
Are there other ways to share your content with just a click of a button? Let us know in the comments, and get sharing!
Value Justification tools are becoming “must-have” components in the selling equation. The ROI Insider on SearchCIO.com states that, “more than 80 percent of IT buyers now rely on vendors to help them monetize the value proposition of their solutions.” In fact, many CIO’s now elevate the ability of a vendor to proactively justify their solutions to one of the top five most important selection criteria.
There are several key concepts to using sales tools, and value justification in this so called selling equation. Here are few that come to mind:
• The right questions for the right decision maker – Too often when a sales professional gets an opportunity to meet with a decision maker they don’t have a logical, relevant, and consistent set of questions to discuss. Therefore, the sales professional ends up gathering data that is inconsistent, irrelevant, or not pertinent. Here is the critical point: Come prepared with questions and data that will enhance the conversation, not delay the opportunity. Bottom line: You must respect the decision makers time.
• The longer a sale takes the less chance you have of winning the opportunity – Sales process research consistently shows the longer a sale takes to close, the greater the risk of losing the sale to a competitor, or worse to “no decision.” Utilizing value justification throughout the sales process will help reduce your time to revenue by proving there is a cost to decision delay, and a cost to no decision. Bottom line: You need to uncover more pain during your discovery efforts, so your business case tells a more complete story.
• Quality of your ROI model separates winners from losers – An objective and credible ROI model separates lightweight ROI marketing ploys from substantive ROI analysis tools. By utilizing a Value Justification (ROI) tool throughout the sales process, and a Value Assessment Program i.e. 360 ROI, after the sale, you are setting the tone for a paradigm shift from vendor to partner. Brian Sommer, a former VP at Aberdeen once said, “everyone will figure out the spreadsheet ROI, but no one will put a post contract program in place and measure the milestones.” Bottom line: It is crucial for a successful sales team to follow-up and measure the value delivered.
• Documented decision making – Some products, especially ones filled with intangible value like custom software, are subject to scope-creep after the sale. As one vendor put it, “The customer buys based on an 80% fit to their needs, and then quickly focuses on the 20% that they knew wasn’t there when they bought.” The point is, with a consistent selling method, a well documented proposal, an ROI Selling model going into the sale, and a Value Assessment measurement program after the sale, you can keep the implementation project focused on the key requirements and benefits that originally drove the purchase decision. Bottom line: More happy customers and quality case studies for use on the next opportunity.
• Change the paradigm –Ted Matwijec with Rockwell Automation once said to me, “Using ROI in the sales process has changed the paradigm between salesperson and vendor. We are now subject matter experts and can clearly articulate to our customers that we have their best interests at heart. ROI Selling has turned the vendor / customer relationship into a partnership relationship.” Bottom line: Become a subject matter expert and change the relationship you have with your prospects.
• ROI does not eliminate risk – ROI models, custom training programs, and expertly written business cases do not eliminate the buyers risk. With low risk projects there is less need for value justification. However, when risk becomes more of an issue and it is real and important, value justification is used to help mitigate or reduce the risk by offering several metrics for financial comparison. These metric’s must be credible and objective. My favorite metrics include: Revenue / Employee, Payroll as Percent of Sales, DSO reductions, Earnings, Inventory turns, and Operating Cost Reductions. Bottom line: Use industry known metrics as a baseline when selling value.
• Educate the buyer – A credible ROI model will help educate your buyer. Through a detailed questioning process, you are telling a story that explains outcomes customers can expect as a result of using your products features. The best salespeople in the world learn early in their careers…the art of the question. Bottom line: The ability to ask a question that elicits the information you need and educates the buyer at the same time is the difference between the best and mediocrity.
• Value Justification vs. Cost Justification – These two concepts, although they may seem like the same thing, are very different. Separating value justification from cost justification is a question of attitude. When you are selling value you are taking a positive and proactive approach to selling. When you are cost justifying, you are taking a reactive approach of “defending” your price and may have already lost the opportunity. It is philosophical; you must position your product for value and take a proactive approach.
Value justification is a mindset your salespeople need to have when selling value. If they don’t know the value your products and services are bringing they are incapable of value justifying the sale. The point is, there is a difference between knowing your product and knowing the value you are capable of delivering. You must understand the difference between product features and customer value to effectively utilize ROI Selling in your sales process.
Bottom line: You are likely not talking to the budget holder (stakeholder) when the prospect focuses on how much your solution costs, as opposed to, what is the value they are going to receive from their investment.
Michael Nick is the founder of ROI4Sales and a principal at TFP, llc. Michael is the author of three best selling business books including his Amazon top 10 book, The Key to the C-Suite. Michael is available for speeches, keynote address, or workshops. Contact ROI4Sales and Michael at www.roi4sales.com or write us at info@roi4sales.com. 262.338.1824
The post Justifying your Value appeared first on ROI4Sales.com.
Apple is in the middle of a huge push into big businesses, which it hopes will revitalize its iPad business.
We're now learning more about what kind of apps businesses are looking for on iPads and other tablets, thanks to a recent report from Good Technology.
Last week we reported on the importance of custom apps in the enterprise.
Good's data shows that in fact a lot of businesses do want these apps. It was the second-most important category, with 27% of Good customers saying they wanted custom apps.
The only type of tablet app companies craved more were document editing apps — think Microsoft Office for iPad — which 36% of companies said they wanted. No wonder the free versions of Office apps immediately topped the Apple Store charts.
Rounding out the list were document access, secure messaging, and secure browsing.
Custom-made apps were also the top-desired category for smartphones.
This makes a lot of sense: companies have written millions of custom Windows apps over the years, and those apps are often an essential part of how employees work. For companies to get full value out of their tablets and phones, these apps — or some equivalent — have to become available for the newer devices.
This result also highlights one huge difference between selling to consumers and businesses. There's no way a single consumer (or even a 1,o00 consumers banded together) could tell Apple, "We'd like you to build an app exactly how we'd like it. Just for us."
That's essentially what businesses want from Apple.
Luckily, Apple enlisted IBM's enterprise expertise in July for this very reason. Big Blue is reportedly working on "100 industry-specific enterprise solutions" for prospective tablet buyers.
We'll have to wait and see if those solutions are enough to move the needle for Apple.
SEE ALSO: Companies Want One Thing From iPads — And They're Not Getting It
Most B2B marketers are probably familiar with the following marketing scenario:, You create great content, publish it, promote it and then dump it into a virtual graveyard where it waits to be unearthed by a relentless buyer on a desperate hunt for a solution.
Is this really the most optimal path for lead generation? Could there be a way to generate new leads by resurrecting these seemingly “dead” resources?
According to Hana Abaza, director of marketing at Uberflip, the answer is a resounding yes. In a recent webinar hosted by Content4Demand, she explained that the key to optimizing your resource center is to repackage existing content to create a whole new buyer experience.
Abaza suggested five ways to turn your content library into fuel for your lead conversion engine:
1. Make it Easy For Buyers – Make your content easy for buyers to find and consume on your website. It’s critical to make your library easy to browse, easy to navigate (menu structure) and easy to find (searchability).
2. Create an Engagement Path – Abaza emphasized that the key here is to create a path that takes buyers where you want them to go. Key tactics include relevant calls to action (CTAs) and recommending similar content through links, subscription options, images or videos.
3. Include CTAs – By making CTAs dynamic (moving them around) and contextual (tighter messaging), marketers gain a better idea of what generates more leads and, ultimately, higher conversion rates.
4. Easy to Update & Modify – Your resource center should be owned by the marketing department, not the IT department. If you’re waiting a month – or six! – to update your content library, you’re missing out on potential leads.
5. Track, Measure & Evaluate Performance – Content marketers need to prove ROI. With an overall marketing automation system that easily plugs in to all of your tools, you can better gauge how buyers are using your content and, most importantly, moving through your funnel.
As a sales leader and a life long sales guy, I’m prolly the worst person in the world a sales person can sell to. I can’t help myself, but I critique everything the sales person does. If a kid comes to my door selling something for his High School, she gets my money AND some tips on how to do it better, cause their approach sucks and I want the kid to sell more.
Yup, I’m that guy. I’m a pain in the ass to sell to. You’d better have your game on when selling to me. With that said, I may be a pain in the ass but I’m not an asshole and a sales person can always count on a little free advice on how they can up their game.
A sales person plays the defining role in the buying experience, and if they screw it up, they can screw up the sale. The fastest way to screw up the sale is to forget it’s not about you. Selling isn’t about you, your quota, your commission check or making your sales manager proud. Sales are about delivering game changing solutions to your customers and clients, and if you can’t do that, you’re not selling.
It’s because of this that customers and buyers hate when sales people do these four things. It drives them up the wall. So if you do them STOP!!!
Not do your homework
I recently went through a demo where the sales person kept showing us features that were irrelevant to our business. They were features that we wouldn’t use, because we’re not that type of business. I wanted to blow a gasket. It was a complete waste of my time.
Do your homework. I don’t mean some quick search, some quick peruse of your customer’s website, but actually do your homework. When sales people show up for the call and don’t know anything or almost nothing about the customer, it’s infuriating. Customers are giving sales people their valuable time. Customers have businesses to run and they have to know you’ve done your homework and that know what it is they do, who their competitors are, what their products and services are, and why you think you can help them. Doing your homework is the committing to the sale and to the buyer. Nothing pisses off a buyer more than feeling they are putting in more time than you or that they are more committed to the sale than the sales person.
Don’t screw this up. Do your homework. Know who you’re selling to, what’s important to them and how your product can help them.
Platitudes and Ass Kissing
Customers are busy; they are trying to get shit done. Telling a client their product is awesome or that you love their most recent blog post or how you love the picture of their boat that’s sitting behind their desk doesn’t help the sale, it just makes you look like a kiss-ass and undermines your credibility. No one likes a kiss ass.
Customer’s want to know you will challenge them, tell them the truth and disagree with them when they are wrong. They don’t want another yes-man. Buyers want their sales people to business people who get down to business and get things done. If they sense, for just one second, you’re inauthentic, it’s over — kissing ass is inauthentic.
When you whip around baseless platitudes, like Eddie Haskell, you look like a clown, and the buyers see it and it pisses them off.
Save the ass kissing for after the sale. Be authentic and stay focused on what matters and that’s the problem’s your customer is dealing with and how your product is gonna make those problems go away.
Wasting Time
Buyers have a business to run; they have no time to waste. Dealing with sales people who waste time is insanity. Buyers don’t want to do your job for you. They don’t want to have “follow-up” calls. They …
So, you are at the point where your client base has grown and you want to start building a community around your brand. Your business is growing, which is great, but now you need to start thinking about how to streamline your business so you have more time to run it. It is time you start looking for software that can easily communicate and stay in touch with your current and prospective customers.
Email marketing is a very powerful tool for brands looking to connect with their customers and increase engagement. Don’t listen to people who say email marketing is dead. Here are just a few statistics that prove email marketing remains one of the best ways to reach and convert your customers and leads.
– For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return is $44.25
– 95% of online consumers use email
– 91% of consumers check their email once a day
(Source: Email Expert)
Here are the Top 4 benefits of implementing email marketing into your business strategy:
1.Engage existing clients and increase retention
So many businesses concentrate on getting new leads into the sales funnel without thinking about nurturing their existing relationships. While emails are great for new leads, you should also be updating your current customers with interesting and relevant information.
2.Target and personalize emails
No longer are the days in which mass broadcasting yields results. To attract and retain your customers, you have to show that you know and understand them. What better way to do that than by sending personalized emails with their name and targeted content? That’s where personalized, automated emails come into play. (Note: The personal data in your CRM will help develop personalized emails geared toward each of your leads and clients.)
3.Measure your impact and brand awareness
Email marketing is an effective way to gauge your audience’s interest in your brand. Not only can you see which contacts opened your emails, but you can also see who clicked on what links. This is a great way to re-engage non-engaged clients as well as learn more about what each contact is interested in. A few important metrics to measure include open/read rate, click through rate, and unsubscribe rate. These metrics tell you if your content is effective, interesting, and relevant.
4.Reach your buyers on mobile
It is important to be able to reach your buyers when they are on the go so you can stay top of mind. You’ll see from some expert advice below, mobile responsive emails are crucial. This ensures that your emails are being viewed properly on every device. Movable Inc reports 66% of emails opened are on a mobile device, so don’t ignore mobile responsiveness!
I also spoke with the GreenRope team and asked them what advice they would give to small business owners looking to implement email marketing into their strategy, here is what they came up with.
Tom Suchy, a GreenRope developer, has a few points on the matter. First, he strongly advises against buying lists. This is the first way to spam people because they didn’t opt-in. He also believes that less is more when it comes to sending messages, as they can overwhelm or annoy your audience to the point where they unsubscribe from your list. Finally, Tom recommends that businesses test different messages to different subsets of your audience to gauge performance. Doing so allows you to tweak your future emails to better fit the needs and wants of your customers.
“Automation is critical when implementing email marketing within a business,” says Client Services Manager, Austin. “Refining the structure of the automation will streamline marketing communications, rewarding the business owner with more time for separate activities.”
“Make sure the content is compelling and relevant to the brand,” says Client Services Manager, Dan. “Email marketing is crucial for brand awareness, as well as facilitating communication between the brand and consumer/client.” It’s important to make sure the look and feel of your emails match your website and overall brand identity.
“Definitely make sure the emails are built for mobile devices, and tested properly on those devices,” says Client Services Manager, Ryan. “Using a responsive design is by far the best option and where the industry is currently headed.” Always test your email in different email clients and on mobile because you want to make sure it looks good in a variety of email clients, browsers, and mobile devices.
Email marketing is extremely powerful, especially when you start automating the process. It is a great way to increase your productivity and efficiency when communicating with your leads and clients. If you are ready to implement email marketing, contact us and we will set you up with a demo and free trial.
The phone is ringing off the hook, a signal that your marketing campaign is successful. Leads are pouring in on your website from your last ebook offer. This is your dream. But there’s a problem. Phone calls are going unanswered and it’s taking too long to follow up on web leads.
You could find yourself in this situation. After all, you don’t have a crystal ball, and sometimes it’s difficult to forecast the response you’ll receive to a campaign. Also, your staff may be too busy closing deals and following up on existing opportunities. Meanwhile, new leads evaporate because response isn’t prompt.
As a result of business uncertainties, the ebb and flow of demand for managing responses, and the high expectations of Internet-age customers for rapid response, more and more companies are outsourcing response handling. Also, when these organizations provide quick response, they project an image of an efficient business that cares about their customers.
Are you ready to outsource response handling? If so, ask prospective vendors these questions to ensure success:
Not all inquiries are qualified leads. So, you don’t want to hire a response management company that’s simply going to answer the phone. You want one that qualifies leads and uses your criteria to find and prioritize the golden nuggets. They must be able to probe effectively and answer questions thoroughly. After all, the sooner top-rated leads get into your pipeline, the more you can accelerate sales.
The hotter the lead, the quicker you need to respond. If you don’t get back to someone in a reasonable window of time, they’ll be contacting your competitor. So, what’s reasonable? Here are some benchmarks:
Depending on your business’ needs, you want to know whether a teleservices company will be answering your inbound numbers during regular business hours or 24/7. The easier they are for prospects or customers to reach, the more likely they can offer fast, easy access to sales literature and answer questions.
For increased response, you want to give your audience multiple ways to contact you. Some people prefer online chat to a telephone conversation. So, make sure your response handling company can take care of chat as well as phone calls.
Maybe you want to take the relationship further than the first inquiry response. If so, you want your teleservices vendor to be able to set up email and tele-nurturing programs that help your prospects get to know, like and trust your company.
If your response handling company just qualifies leads but does not connect them to the next link in your sales chain, you’ve gained little. Ask the vendor how they distribute leads to different channels such as Inside Sales and Partners. How will they ensure leads go to the right people? How do they communicate to make sure everyone involved—marketing managers, territory managers, partners and inside sales associates—are aware of the opportunity and are aligned as a team?
As you build your relationship with your teleservices company, you may want them to take care of some other tasks that just never get done in-house. Perhaps they can:
You’re better off starting up with a vendor that has a multitude of capabilities just in case you need them.
Get more sales tips to generate leads and grow your pipline with a free webinar with on 11/20 at 2pm ET.
I remember it like it was yesterday. Don’t we always?
It was the fall of 1977. I was a salesman for IBM, and I had set up a demo for one my prospects at one of my client’s place of business.
As you can imagine, we didn’t have the Internet back then, and instead of giving demos at our office, which we still did often, if we could give a demo at a client’s premises, it was much more effective.
It was the ultimate social proof. And it also allowed the prospect to ask pertinent questions to someone who was in the same boat as them.
The demo went smoothly.
My client did a great job of demonstrating how he used our product, and the success he had realized by using it.
My prospect asked pertinent questions, and got excellent replies.
I was on cloud nine, and I was already counting how I was going to spend the commission cheque.
When the demo was over, I walked the prospect to his car, and asked when he wanted to get started.
Then he hit me between the eyes?
Not literally, but figuratively. He said he wasn’t going to move forward with IBM.
I was in shock, and probably stood with my mouth open for a few seconds.
Then I asked why, of course.
He said that he could see how my client really liked the product, because it was giving him what he wanted, and he was more productive.
BUT – he needed something completely different. He needed a computer system that answered his needs. He didn’t want it for what my client was using it for.
And then he drove away.
Again, I stood in shock for about five minutes.
Wow, had I ever blown that call.
I realized that I hadn’t questioned this prospect properly. I had not used the questioning techniques I had been taught.
That was the last time that happened.
Has this ever happened to you?
I went back to the office right away, told my sales manager, who of course was not happy, and told him that I needed to review and relearn how to qualify, how to question properly.
I needed some more training and coaching!
Every sales person, marketer and executive needs coaching. Read on to find out why.
There is an increasing pool of research—from respected organizations like Gallup and the Harvard Business Review, and also many newer research firms—suggesting that the costs of a bad hire in sales, more than any other functional group, are enormous. Most hiring companies tend to grossly underestimate the negative consequences a bad sales hire can bring to their company.
Some of the costs to consider include:
Direct costs
• Lost revenue (lost and delayed business)
• Extra training and management required
• Costs of turnover (firing and replacing – from both time and direct hiring costs)
Indirect costs
• Long-term impact on market share and brand – lost customers and brand loyalty
• Impact on morale – leading to lower overall performance of other team members and higher turnover— and ultimately the loss of your best salespeople
Let’s look at a methodology developed by Croner and Abraham for a company where the sales quota of the best salespeople is $1.5 million, and sub-par performers are delivering half of that ($750,000).
The annual impact of having a poor performer on the team can be estimated at $1,360,000 (including lost revenue, lost clients, and extra management costs). The costs of delaying action, to remove this individual, are $2.6 million over 2 years!
You must remember that salespeople represent your company to your clients. Therefore, the impact of brand and market-share erosion over time, of a sub-par salesperson, can have grave consequences for your company.
“In industries that rely on their sales force to generate revenue, people are four times more important in building customer loyalty, than the products or services themselves” (Smith and Rutigliano).
CSO Insights, a sales research firm, puts out statistics it gathers every year from surveys it does with over 2500 companies.
They found that only 58.2% of B2B sales reps made quota in 2013 out of the 2500+ companies surveyed. That means that 42.8% of sales reps missed their quota.
That is a very alarming statistic.
CSO Insights had this conversation with a sales rep from one of their interview companies.
Sales rep: “Yeah, that program is great. Really powerful. In fact, the only time it doesn’t work is when I don’t use it”.
CSO Insights: “That’s quite an endorsement. How often would you say you use the principles you learned in the program?”
Sales rep: “Uh, maybe half the time.”
Now please think about that for a moment. If it works every time the rep uses it, why wouldn’t the rep use it all the time? Does he/she simply not need a win every time? Very unlikely!
Here are two interesting graphics about training and coaching
As you can see from the first graphic, training gives a one-time boost in sales behaviour and results, but people quickly slip back into their old familiar behaviour without coaching reinforcement, and increases in sales are negligible.
However, with coaching after training, you can see that although there is a slight dip in both graphics right after training, the sales people who received coaching keep getting better and better results.
Through all of my coaching years, I have found that coaching costs very little compared to the increased results that have occurred. In many cases, coaching fees were less than 1% of the overall increase in revenues.
So, if you truly want to grow your business, you need to have your sales people trained and coached by professionals. And in most cases, this means hiring outside professional B2B sales coaches. You will see a very worthwhile ROI.
Competing at the top level is very exacting and can be very trying mentally. Anyone who has ever played golf knows that for sure.
But in order to succeed at any level, people need coaching. This is true for executives, business owners, and especially for sales and marketing people.
You use coaching for two main reasons.
1. To help you learn new skills, and to perfect or change old ones,
2. To give you feedback on how you are performing those skills, and to correct mistakes.
Feedback needs to be timely, accurate, consistent, relevant, and individualized. The other four factors are fairly self-explanatory, but let’s have a look at what is needed to be accurate, and why it is important to be accurate.
In order to be accurate, you need to have some kind of measurement system in place to give you metrics about how someone is performing all the way through the sales cycle.
You need to measure things like;
1. Is she following up on leads? (I hope you have a good lead generation system)
2. Is he using the sales and marketing methodology that you have implemented? ( I hope you have one)
3. Does she qualify prospects well, so she’s not chasing people that aren’t going to buy right now? (My GAIM Plan helps here)
4. Is he demonstrating your system properly, or does he do it too early or too late in the sales cycle?
5. Does she follow a correct proposal writing script that your company has implemented?
6. Does he follow-up properly with all prospects?
7. And all the way through the sales cycle.
You need to measure everything right through the sales cycle, until you either lose or win the business.
As you can see, in order for your company to meet its revenue targets in any year, you need to be implementing coaching in your business.
This coaching should also include the executives of your company, so everyone is on the same page.
It becomes pretty obvious that training with coaching pays off.
Are your sales reps, marketers and executives getting the training and coaching they need to understand sales and marketing better, and to able to reach quotas?
Websites with 51-100 pages get 48% more traffic than sites with fewer pages. Boosting your traffic is one good way to increase the number of leads you generate. However, just any old page isn’t necessarily going to improve your lead generation. Instead, you must offer a variety of content for every step of the buyer’s journey.
What do you have on hand for whitepapers, check lists, ebooks, webinars, tools, etc.? Think about publications you may have created that aren’t yet available on your website. Can they be added? This is a quick way to increase your content offerings.
Content is a lot like cake. Let’s say you only have German Chocolate Cake, not everyone is going to want a piece. But if you also have White, Chocolate, Carrot – you have something that appeals to everyone! Creating enough content means you can have your cake and eat it too.
Some people prefer whitepapers and ebooks, while others prefer video or podcasts. Knowing your audience is good, and will help you provide more of what they love, but everyone is different, so make sure you offer a little of everything.
Creating premium content is great, but if you’re creating it for the wrong audience then you’re probably bringing in the wrong types of leads. If your buyer persona’s main job title is CEO but you’re writing content that the sales manager would like, you’re probably not getting the best leads.
Look at your 10 latest blog posts and ask yourself – is this really what my ideal buyer persona is looking for? Go ahead. We’ll wait! :)
Marketing jargon for this process is the “sales funnel.” With “just looking” being the top, “deciding on a solution” in the middle, and “I’m ready to talk to you” at the very skinny bottom.
A lead may come in at the top of the funnel, fill out a form, and download a piece of content. But it’s your job to send nurture them into the middle of the funnel and then the bottom of the funnel by sending more relevant content to help them in their decision-making process. When they exit this funnel, they should have requested a direct consultation, demo, or meeting with a sales member.
This means you need plenty of content for every stage of that buyer’s journey.
Top of the funnel: ToFu Premium Content offers will often cover the same topics as your blog articles, but will provide a more educational dive into the subjects. These are often presented in the form of tutorial or “how-to” ebooks, whitepapers, checklists or infographics.
Middle of the funnel: MoFu Premium Content offers will be centered on your company’s products or services, rather than purely educational content. At this stage it’s fine to talk more about the difference between you and the competition. This is often accomplished well in case studies, webinars, etc.
Bottom of the funnel: The simplest of all, the BoFu landing page allows visitors to request to speak to you. These landing pages don’t need to offer downloadable content – just a promise that you will be in touch soon. Common examples include offers for a free analysis or consultation, as well as the tried-and-true “contact us” page.
More than being about the number of pages on your website, having “enough” content is about making sure there is plenty of variety for all preferences and stages of your prospective customers.
Let’s go create great content!
When I took on my first client, I had no idea how to set my freelance rate. Asking for too much would make me seem greedy and asking for too little would leave me overworked and underpaid. It has taken a couple years, but I've finally come up with a system to set a rate that is best for me and my client.
Airhop cofounders Pavel Kaminski, centre, and Shai Mishali, right, celebrate their win with Braintree CEO Bill Ready, left.
A pair of hackers from Israel have won an international “hacking for good” competition with a new app that allows cellphone owners to use their devices without any sort of connection – a development that could send shockwaves through the wireless industry.
The AirHop app enables a mobile device without a connection to piggyback on another user’s device that does have service to make phone calls and send text messages or email.
“It’s absolutely disruptive,” said John Lunn, senior director of developer relations at PayPal, which sponsored the competition. “What [the team from] Tel Aviv built from a technology standpoint was incredible. I’ve never seen it before.”
AirHop uses so-called multi-peer, mesh networking technologies, including a blend of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct to establish connections between devices running the app. A device with no cellular service can thus use another device’s connection to forward data along until an actual network connection is found.
The range between devices is 50 metres, but they can be chained together so communications can be bounced along indefinitely.
The app only handles calls and messages currently, but it can be expanded to handle video and other applications, according to co-creator Shai Mishali.
“Everything can be done with enough time and programming,” he said. “You can transfer any kind of data.”
The potential is enormous, Lunn said, referring to the app as the “Airbnb of telecommunications.” Just as Airbnb is disrupting the hotel industry by crowd-sourcing accommodations, AirHop could eliminate roaming charges as users in one country extend their connections to travellers who are visiting from others.
The idea arose from that very situation after Pavel Kaminski, Mishali’s partner, found himself in an airport without a phone signal. “It just felt awkward to go and ask people if we could make a phone call,” he said.
The duo fleshed out the idea and decided to bring it to Battlehack in San Jose, Calif., the world finals of a hackathon circuit PayPal has been running around the world this year. The Israeli duo beat out teams from 13 other cities to win a $100,000 prize. Entrants had 24 hours to put together working prototypes, after which they pitched them to a panel of judges.
Each team had a few caveats to follow. They had to incorporate PayPal or one of the company’s various payments systems and they had to design an app that served a social good.
To fulfill that first requirement, Mishali and Kaminski designed AirHop to require users to exchange payments – small fees for placing a phone call over another user’s connection, for example. The PayPal connection could be dropped in the future, especially in situations where a government is trying to cut its populace off from connectivity.
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“They are unable to do that because people will hop and bounce through each other’s devices until they get to the internet,” Mishali said. “It’s decentralized and it’s not owned by any server. It’s impossible to take down.”
The app also has the potential to shake up how wireless service is sold, with cellphone subscribers potentially adopting a peer-to-peer system in which they could share usage. That could mean fewer actual subscribers and less revenue for wireless providers.
“Cellular companies get disrupted all the time,” Kaminski said. “WhatsApp came along and killed SMS messaging.”
Mishali, however, said the intent isn’t to disrupt the wireless business, but rather to help users make connections when they need them. Wireless networks are at the end of the AirHop chain, after all. “The cellphone companies are part of what we do.”
The duo plan to use their winnings to further develop the app, with no firm time frame yet on a release.
The post AirHop, the “Airbnb for phones” allows people to share wireless plans appeared first on Canadian Business.
While I aspire to build Gerr.is into a great empire, I’m currently interwoven into a patchwork of agencies, partners, clients, vendors, projects, goals, and even some very cool — but very geographically disparate — teams. It makes my head swim. It makes your head swim. Robots will enslave us all; however, until then, they make it possible to get quite a lot done on one’s own. An army of one, if you will. So, while I am building my empire, here are some of the tools I am looking at and using. This isn’t a review so much as simply a subjective sharing of some of the tools I use — and want to use — on a daily basis to make my work — and personal — life productive, collaborative, and organized. And, at the end of the day, if I love an app (such as Basecamp) but everyone else rejects it out of hand — and I can’t even threaten them into using it, either — then that’s an issue, too: the list below is also a list of productivity apps that the people with whom I work are already using, loving, and adopting (it’s a toss-up between Asana and Trello — currently, I am straddling them both, depending on task and what my clients are using). So, here we go.
I have been a client of MailChimp for years but have never sent one email or newsletter. It’s powerful but what a pain in the bottom! I thought Aweber was impenetrable but MailChimp comes in #2. I want an app that’s at least as easy as SquareSpace to use, coming out of the box as response, wizard-driven, visual, and not requiring a designer, an SA, or a tech — with one caveat: also possessing all of the same power tools that the other email and mailing list management programs offer such as A/B testing, landing page creation, and sophisticated autoresponder tools. GetResponse seems to me to be the SquareSpace of newsletter and email list managers. In the past, email marketing seemed to me to be a life-sentence. Like blogging but less fun and less cool. GetResponse seems to get the tech out of the way and make it setting up pretty sophisticated autoresponder campaigns a breeze. Finally, GetResponse sends all of your messages using responsive templates. What that means is every GetResponse email automagically adapts itself to the platform on which you read the message, scaling to fit your phone, your tablet, or your desktop so that everything’s readable and easily navigable.
Like the Mac, Trello seems too simple and elegant to actually be as powerful as it actually is It may be simple but it’s not simplistic. I am currently deeply besotted by Trello because the people behind this amazing, virtually completely free, project management app, Fog Creek Software, are generous to the point of “what!?” The app is completely free. Invite all of your friends and it’s still free. Create sophisticated projects with dozens of boards with an infinity of cards (they take the the bulletin board/index card analogy all the way, both visually and practically).
Heck, I’m using Trello to organize several projects with the founder and owner of this blog, Mike Moran. Trello accepts any rich content, it allows a couple ways to track tasks, both check boxes as well as “physically” moving cards from one board to another, from a “to-do” board to an “in progress” board and then to a “completed” or “done” board.
Every board allows sharing, tasking, commenting, and also uses the referencing tool that I believe was defined by Twitter. So, if you include @chris_abraham in a card, I’ll be notified (actually, Asana works the same way). The notification volume is as high as you want or need — and you can be notified about so many things.
You can also subscribe to any board you want, even boards that don’t really concern you (useful oversight if you manage the entire project). And why haven’t I been using Trello forever? Well, because I am sure none of the above makes much sense. Maybe that’s why Fog Creek not only gives it away but gives away a free month of their optional Trello Gold with every single person you recruit. So, if you click here and join Trello, you’ll earn me a free month of Trello Gold. The best part of Trello is that 80% of all of my clients love it, too. So, I can convince folks to get off of email and onto a project management platform with accountability, tracking, document sharing, tasking, and all that good stuff.
Finally, the Trello apps for iOS and Android are gorgeous and there’s even a version of Trello that’s compatible with that old iPad 1 you’ve pretty much given up on. The app is beautiful on my iPhone 5, Android Nexus 5 and 7, and also on my iPads 1 and Air. It’s even better mobile than on the web, IMHO. Unlike Evernote and Asana, I don’t believe Trello comes with an email you can use to send notes to Trello the way you can do with Asana and Evernote. That said, you can reply to a notification you receive via email via email and it’ll go where it should in your series of Boards and Cards.
For those of you who don’t know, an asana is a yoga position. Downward-facing dog is an asana. I really love everything about Asana except it’s just a little too complex for me to use, at least compared to Trello, and at least the way I am using it: free. If I were to spend $50/month, all my frustration would go away. Let me explain. Asana is free, sort of, if you hack it and work around some of the pay wall restrictions.
So, let’s talk Gerr.is, my company. Under my GERRISCORP.COM organization, I have a series of teams. Each team can have a number of members (for free) but without paying, there’s a catch: you can’t limit access for certain members to certain projects or tasks. Each team is an all or nothing venture. So, to management the 1U App project I am working on now, I needed to create separate teams for the campaign, one for the front office and one for the back office. So, my research and design team are invited to the 1U Back Office team and my colleagues Sally and Cokey have their own project, 1U Influencer Outreach.
If I hadn’t discovered Trello, I might have bit the bullet and paid up and paid the $504/year fee to make sure I could keep everything in once place: Team 1U with two or more projects, each project with its own unique permissions. I just discovered that you can pay your $504/year for either your entire organization (Gerris Corp) or for just one team, so you can break your needs apart, but there doesn’t seem to be a discount for paying for teams versus an entire organization. And then there’s Trello: people like it & it’s free.
I still love Asana. I can forward emails to x@mail.asana.com and they’re automagically turned into tasks. I can manage Asana via email. I will never leave Asana for my own personal tasking, however. Things that I need to do every day. Business Development and relationship management and things like writing Gerris’ capabilities deck or pimping my SquareSpace gerr.is website.
Essentially, I use Asana the way I should be using Evernote. I use it as the vessel that you’re supposed to dump all of your tasks into in order to clear your mind a la Getting Things Done. So, when I get an important email I can’t lose, I forward it to x@mail.asana.com. When I come up with a series of things I need to do, I dump it in my own space, either in Personal Projects or just in the Gerris team within my GerrisCorp organization. Dump, dump, dump. Like Trello, you can upload docs and photos, you can link to DropBox, you can call out other people by their name via Twitteresque @chrisabraham-type references. Asana has a gorgeous interface that wraps what’s really a very beautiful active text editor. You can write tasks as fast as you can type and hit return. If you want to break your lists into sections, just type a colon after your list heading and it’ll turn into one. Asana’s elegant and mostly unstructured so you can customise it into whatever you want. It’s being developed by some guru from Facebook so it’s elegant, smooth, gorgeous, and is constantly being updated and upgraded. Remember when I was crowing about how gorgeous the Trello apps are? Asana apps are possibly even nicer. I have a feeling, though, that I’ll really love Asana if and when I pay the fee, either $50/month or $504/year, but even so, it really is the world’s best collaborative, shareable, tasking, to-do, and task-based project management app out there. It’ll always be my GTD dump zone and I’ll always happily use it if my clients have a preference for it instead of Trello.
Back when I worked at Edelman, I hated keeping track of my time down to a 15-minute increment. Now, I live on Toggle. I track everything, even non-billables. It gives me an idea as to how I am spending (or misusing) my time. It also helps me understand better how many hours things take, something that can help me when it comes to pricing out proposals and projects in the future.
Toggl allows teaming, allows sharing, and the timer is integrated across all platforms of devices. I have Toggl installed on my iPhone 5, my Android Nexus 5 & 7, and on my desktop (although my desktop timer seems to be irrevocably broken — help, Toggl), and when I start tracking on my iPhone, I can stop it on the web or via any other device.
Toggl will let you know you left your timer on, it’ll pop you a note to ask you if you should be using the timer (a great reminder) and you can always pull reports from your exhaustive time-tracking, which is the perfect solution for a CYA situation if the client wants more accountability for your time and billing. Toggl allows you to set up clients, projects, and also tasks. You can be as granular as you like. Toggl with try to auto-complete with tasks you’ve done before, to make it easier. You can also tag everything, if that helps you stay organized. Each client and each project can be billed a different rates. So, I bill Wikipedia Management differently than I do ORM or SEO or SEM or influencer outreach or social media strategy.
Toggl also can link to other tools, such as BaseCamp, so that you can have your hours automatically synced over to your clients’ project management platforms. Actually, if you use the Toggl Button for Chrome, you’ll automagically have access to Toggl via Asana and Trello both. However, set it up to pester you incessantly because it only works if you work it, so work it.
I want so desperately to use Evernote all the time and for everything. I don’t really use it much but I have been reading up on Evernote so what I am doing with Evernote is using it as a repository for all of the pages of all of my notebooks and journals. As a useful backup to having my bag lost of stolen. It’s a habit that’s hard-coming for me. So, here’s what I am doing with it:
What I like the most about Evernote is how many apps, plugins, and platforms Evernote has built up around the brand. From desktop app to a gorgeous web interface down to really easy-to-use and so simple to share to apps for iOS and Android (and I am sure Windows and Blackberry, too). Plus, like Trello, Evernote is super-generous with its premium version. While Evernote Premium costs only $5/month or $45/year, you can get loads of free months through getting your friends to join and by buying Evernote-braded kit, such as Evernote Moleskine pads or Evernote Post-It notes. Another thing I love about Evernote is that the app creates a bespoke, unique, email address that only you know that allows you to throw anything and everything into Evernote via email — any email. Asana needs to know all your email addresses in order to email them first; Evernote, on the other hand, doesn’t care, it only cares that you have access to the secret email address you’ve been given. There are even a cool series of codes you can embed into your subject line. For example, if you create this subject line:
Subject: 1U App response @gerris #1uapp #1u #blogger #influencer #reply
The note that’s created would be titled “1U App response” and it would be filed under the Gerris notebook and the note would be tagged with #1uapp #1u #blogger #influencer #reply, which could and should help you find that note later. Very cool.
I hope this list has been helpful to you. Please let me know what apps and services I have missed. What’s better than Toggl? What’s better than Asana and Trello? How should I be using Evernote? Any recommendations on videos, tutorials, or books on Evernote that might really make me an Evernote convert? Thank in advance and see you in the comments! Go git ‘em, Tiger!
Last week, I had a long email conversation with Mark Cuban about net neutrality.
I emailed Cuban following a series of tweets he sent criticizing President Obama's proposal to regulate internet service providers (ISPs) under Title II, the same utility classification given to telephone lines.
Without getting too complicated, Obama and other net neutrality advocates believe all traffic on the internet should be treated equally. Rich companies shouldn't be allowed to pay for faster access to customers because that gives them an unfair advantage over tiny startups that may have a superior product.
The theory goes that allowing companies to pay for these so-called "fast lanes" will hurt innovation and allow big companies to keep getting bigger. Cuban compared that to the same kind of government regulation that nationalized the railroads in Ayn Rand's famous novel "Atlas Shrugged."
I'm a net neutrality advocate, but since Cuban is well versed in the web and how to make gobs of cash on it, I wanted his perspective as an entrepreneur.
It was a lengthy back and forth, far too long to include in the one column I published Sunday. Plus, we still didn't get to cover everything. This issue is so deep and complex you can debate it for hours.
That said, it was a great debate, and I think you should read the whole thing.
Here's the full exchange. I've cleaned it up for grammar, spelling, formatting, and swearing:
Hey Mark,
A few things that stood out from your recent string of Tweets: Yes, broadband speed and quality have gotten better. But it's still behind the most of the developed world. We pay a lot more on average for slower speeds.
The overarching problem is that there is no competition among ISPs. They each have monopolies where they operate. That in turn gives them little incentive to provide better service, invest in infrastructure, and so on. In fact, investment in those things have declined over the last four years.
Allowing ISPs to compete would be wonderful, but they're not competing now. And the way the system is set up now, they won't need to.
The unfortunate truth is that while Title II isn't ideal, it's the best and only option we have right now to ensure those monopolies continue to run away.
Anyway, let me know what you think.
If you don't like it now, let the government get involved.
Walk into any Best Buy and choose from three wireless broadband options and cable and Telco wired option.
You have choices.
How much faster are all those connections today than last year and the year before?
That article you tweeted was beyond stupid?
[Note: The article Cuban refers to is this one by James J. Heaney. Heaney, a conservative, argues that Title II classification is the best option.]
Wireless is not an option. It will be one day, but right now it is far too expensive and spotty coverage-wise to be a replacement for wired broadband. Try connecting to a LTE network outside a major city and you'll see what I mean. Maybe someone will swoop in and invest bazillions to build out a better wireless network. I hope that happens.
But for now, it's all about wired, which is monopolized. And it's going to be like that for the near to medium term. What's your solution?
Where do you live?
And I just realized you are with BI.
These aren't for publication.
[Cuban later published these emails on his personal blog.]
New York City. Manhattan, specifically.
I'd like to publish something in addition to your tweets though. A lot of people are talking about it. What's your answer to solving the wired broadband monopoly if not Title II or something similar?
First of all, I think that ISPs, however you define them are doing an amazing job increasing bandwidth available to homes.
The idea that Netflix, Hulu, and the aggregate of all OTT [over the top] services can grow to where they are, as quickly as they have, and service has gotten better, not worse in most places and cases, is a testament to the actual investment being made on increasing bandwidth.
Providers are jacking up not just to the home, but the throughput as well. Something is driving them. If not competition, then what?
And isn't there T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint in Manhattan for wireless? Don't all have coverage for most of the continental US? If you can make your phone a hotspot on all carriers (some charge more), then you have broadband options.
When you want unlimited or close to unlimited bandwidth, then you have fewer choices or you may not like your choices, or coverage, but you have options, even if imperfect. Then of course you have the option of walking out the door to any number of public hotspots to use Wi-Fi and the number and coverage of Wi-Fi hotspots is expanding every day.
You may not like all your options, but that's a different issue. But let's put all that aside. The big morass is with the nuance of defining what will be covered and how. No one can agree what net neutrality is and what Title II should cover.
What I am certain of however is that the government won't do a good job avoiding the law of unintended consequences.
What I am certain of however is that the government won't do a good job avoiding the law of unintended consequences.
And let me be clear, if the promise of the internet was content like movies and TV shows or music videos, then none of this would be a big deal to me. But it's not. We don't know whats next on the net and how it will be impacted by the need for the government to define what can and will happen on the net in some manner that they think protects consumers. What if the need for machine vision is ubiquitous for some application, say self driving cars. What happens? What if communities want to put up high res, high bit rate, real time video around schools, intersections, wherever the residents agree they are willing to accept any privacy issues. What happens?
What if some amazing application appears that wants to suck up every free bit of bandwidth available in a shared manner between every and any CPU made available to it? What about medicine and health care? There is an emergency surgery that a doctor who is in who knows where and wants to be able to help in some manner that is unknown to us today, but she can't get the bandwidth allocated to the application because it happens to be when TV and movie OTT services swamp bandwidth between the doctor and the remote hospital.
What about the internet of things? What high bit rate applications will be created and how can they, or any other high bit rate applications get past the 50 Mbps peer to peer unicast streams that kids are streaming to each other on for five hours a night? We are trying to define the undefinable because it seems like some people are afraid they may be denied movies and TV shows and the like.
That makes no sense to me.
First, thank you for responding. This is great and really clarifies your tweets from yesterday and I think everyone will get a lot out of it.
A few things:
Yes, there's great competition among the wireless carriers right now. The four major ones are available just about everywhere. And the competitive landscape is mostly working there and benefiting customers. Look at T-Mobile. The changes Legere has made there over the last two years have caused the big guys like Verizon and AT&T to react and change pricing plans and what they offer. That's good!
But wireless broadband is not designed to be a replacement for your wired broadband. It's designed to let you sip data on the go. Depending on the carrier, data plans can cost ~$60 for 3GB of data per month. If you go over that, the carrier either throttles your speed or charges you extra for more data. That's way more expensive than getting 250GB or unlimited data on wired broadband for about the same price.
What on the internet ends up being used in the way it was designed?
What on the internet ends up being used in the way it was designed?
The internet was designed for everything but video. There are networks designed to carry video signals and they deliver digital TV channels every second of the day.
You may not like the depth of competition wireless currently provides, but then wireless networks are getting better by the day and standards are being set for 5G that will compete with wired broadband.
There will come a time in the next decade when cutting the cord refers to cutting your broadband cord. It's inevitable. How will Title II deal with that? Will Title II sunset in five or seven or 10 years? Or will we find the future of broadband cut off at the knees because Title II of 2015 didn't anticipate broadband of 2022?
Unwired Wi-Fi networks are being created. There are thousands of broadband hotspots. How is that happening? How far will it go and how will Title II impact their growth?
It's unfair to say wireless and wired broadband providers compete with each other. They don't. They will some day, maybe, but not now.
It's unfair because it doesn't fit your argument.
I also disagree that broadband has gotten as good as you think it has. Yes, it's incrementally better, but still far behind other developed countries. Investment in broadband networks is declining, not going up. And the ISPs have no reason to build out their networks because there aren't any viable competitors. (Google Fiber is an exception, but it's only available in a handful of cities.) I also don't consider free hotspots at coffee shops, etc. a competitor because they use the same ISPs folks use in their homes. Plus, I doubt ISPs are very worried about people sitting in Starbucks all day using free Wi-Fi.
Nonsense. How much wired bandwidth do you have today to your home versus three years ago what's the comparative throughput?
And add some context.
Netflix started streaming in earnest five years ago and the usage exploded. It went from DVD to consuming 30% of prime time bandwidth. Networks built out to cover it, and as a result Netflix is able to support tens of millions of subscribers.
If the networks aren't keeping up, why are the number of over the top video provider startups exploding right now? Are they all stupid?
If the networks aren't keeping up, why are the number of over the top video provider startups exploding right now? Are they all stupid?
The amount if video consumed on the net is growing how fast? Right? How has that happened if networks are so bad?
How is it that 4K video is now being streamed? 4K. Seriously, if there was a fear of unequal access how in the world would 4K over the top even be possible? That's 4x the bandwidth of HD.
What about cloud computing? How did it explode from nothing to huge?
Millions of companies are trusting the net to provide access to any digital type of content and Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and others trusting the net to provide access to their clouds and hosting servers on the networks you want to regulate.
What is the impact of net neutrality going to be on clouds?
What about cyber security? The minute there is an attack that does damage, you can bet that Title II will be used as a weapon by politicians and we will have discussion of Title III start.
What about content delivery networks (CDNs)? With net neutrality in place, CDNs will explode. They will pay the networks a ton of money to host their servers and then charge the same people that you think will buy high-end commercial fast lanes a ton of money to assure their streams are better to the last mile than smaller competitors are. Should we regulate CDNs?
And of course what about the many other reasons beyond lack of choice in the last mile that impact consumer experience?
When your next door neighbor streams his live gaming all day to his friends at 50 Mbps and everyone else on that last mile buffers all that the time, who takes responsibility?
Should Title II throttle upstream bandwidth to make sure the last mile isn't impacted by bandwidth hogs?
What happens if after Title II investment doesn't keep up for the last mile and people start complaining that their service suffers because their neighbors stream all the time? And the question is why should they suffer so their neighbors can watch streaming video rather than TV? Why should a non-OTT subscriber pay more so streamers get their video?
What about nonessential, but ground breaking bandwidth hogging applications?
Things like machine vision, high bit rate internet of things applications, self-driving cars, peered sensors? What if there is a groundbreaking collaborative computing app that eats a ton of bandwidth?
If you want to see bandwidth and innovation throttled, have the government regulate network management and investment.
On your example of bandwidth for medicine and healthcare: Obama's proposal would prioritize traffic for essential services like that. So that's not an issue.
NOT true. First in line in a traffic jam is still slow and buffering.
And how are you going to regulate quality of service settings?
Will Title II decide how last mile consumer usage will be prioritized versus downstream?
Who is going to say what an essential service is?
I do agree with you that we don't know what the internet will become, and what kinds of services it will power down the road. But I think it's a narrow view saying net neutrality advocates just want faster Netflix. They don't. Netflix is often used an example, but those who support Title II see the internet the same way you do. Who knows where we'll be in a few years! And I think that gives us even more reason to make sure it's protected now.
You can't protect what you don't know. If that is the right approach, why not further regulate everything?
What happens when some new internet service takes on a political tint or is perceived as impacting an election?
What if they get the legislation wrong?
No one trusts the politicians we have in place to do anything right, but we think they can take on a difficult issue like this?
Based on what you've written, I think our goals are the same, but we differ on how to get there. I find that comforting!
No they aren't.
There is a place for more government if the net wasn't working. It's working.
The issues above are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there are thousands more.
The net is working. There is no better platform for innovation in the world right now than the net, and you think further regulating it is good?
You keep on saying that more money is being spent elsewhere on networks than here in the USA. Show me those numbers. I see more per capita being spent here.
And you talk about our ranking in the developed world. You and many are being intentionally obtuse.
All the surveys are based on average speed. We rank 11th I think, but the difference between 11th and 2nd is 3 Mbps.
3 Mbps, and that's based on averages.
When you look at peak speed it's a smaller delta.
And all the countries above us are denser and less populous.
As far as growth in speed, we are increasing 9% or more quarter over quarter.
How is that bad?
I'm still not convinced by your argument that wired and wireless broadband compete. If LTE from wireless carriers won't work everywhere (indoors, basements, dead zones, rural areas, etc.) and it costs much more than wired broadband, how are those direct competitors? How are wireless carriers offering a viable alternative to wired broadband? (That's not to say they'll never be able to do it. But in the near to medium term, it's not going to happen.)
I also don't buy the population density argument when it comes to internet speeds.
I live in Manhattan, which is very dense (duh).
Here's a speed test from my apartment on Time Warner cable in April:
Here's a speed test I took from a random coffee shop using free WiFi in Seoul, Korea in April:
That's a huge gap. And while I can pay Time Warner extra to get speeds like that, I wouldn't have to in Korea.
You got me. We aren't as good as South Korea.
Now explain to me how government intervention is going to change that? And explain to your internet cafe how they are only getting 50 Mbps when they are paying for more.
Your wired broadband doesn't have drops that cover every inch of your apartment. And your Wi-Fi won't either. And you risk interference from your neighbors appliances. It has limits like mobile. Have you checked to see if you can get mobile service in your apartment? Maybe with an amplifier? You aren't a typical internet user. What percentage of internet homes use under 40 gigabytes per month?
That still doesn't account for the cost thing. Watch two movies on Netflix and you've eaten up your data cap from Verizon.
Most households aren't Netflix users. At least not yet. Most just use the internet like they did pre Netflix.
That was just an example. What about YouTube? You don't think the average person can eat up 3GB of YouTube along with other basic stuff like emailing, web browsing, facebooking, and so on? 3GB is nothing.
My point is, wireless plans are designed for on the go. Wired is designed for heavy usage. They're not the same. I hope that changes, but it's not the reality of things now. Also! Next time you're in New York you should come by BI's office and hang out. We've grown so much. You should see it. Crazy, exciting company to be at. I've been here four years and I love it.
Would love to come by.
And remember we aren't typical users.
You took a nice discussion and cherry picked it into bull---- so you could make your point.
Often times, budding entrepreneurs think the hardest part of starting a business is just that: Starting it. The simple act of biting the bullet and going it alone. Yet with most good businesses come future employees; and with every employee comes management and mentorship challenges and opportunities.
Today, the challenges of simply managing employees are compounded by the ubiquity of working remotely. How many entrepreneurs wake up to notices of employees deciding to work from home or letting you know that they’re “online… but sitting in traffic”?
Most employees don’t abuse the privileges of mobility, but what do you do when you have employees that are no longer engaging with their team or not handling their assignments at the levels needed to help your business scale simply because they’re not always in the same room?
Not only is mobility leading to the employee falling short of expectations, a non-responsive team member can put a huge damper on the productivity, efficiency, and creative output of those that have to work with them.
We’ve all been in the scenario where you send an email and your only option is to wait – it’s not a proactive situation. When you can’t turn to your employee, or stop by their desk to get the answer in a timely manner you are swiftly ushered out of the driver’s seat of your own productivity.
Infuriating as that is, it’s only made worse with the ever-present “just following up” note, subsequent phone calls, even a text message as a last ditch effort. The real problem with these situations is that with every touchpoint, a few components are heightened: your need for an answer and your irritation with their lack of responsiveness.
I’m a firm believer that this workplace problem is solvable by ensuring channel and message alignment. For example, email, while distributed and somewhat magical, is not the right channel for a question where a word or two will suffice. It’s also not the best channel to send a message for which you need an answer stat.
The most successful organizations I interact with offer employees professional solutions for the three most common forms of messages: email that’s always-on but appropriate for longer form or official communications, quick chat-like messages via mobile app or IM that require immediate attention from an individual, a team or your whole company, and group calling.
With those options and colleagues positively influencing one another’s behaviors, you’ll see the right messages start to funnel towards the right platform to ensure speed of response and thereby productivity across even the most lackadaisical distributed team.
Consider this common challenge: I need to get a hold of my co-founders, right now. One workflow towards a solution is to send an email to ask if they’re available, wait for them both to confirm when they’re free, send an email or calendar invite with a dial-in, ensure everyone dials in to the right number at the right time when we’re all often in different time zones.
Ever tried to call into a dial-in from your mobile device? The back and forth of looking for the login code while you’re dialed in – it’s crazy that people still operate like that.
One game-changing solution we employ at Lua is two-touch conference calling meaning that I can initiate a call with them and their phones ring simultaneously – no dial-ins. By directly reaching out to people you’re reducing the barriers to a given interaction and getting things done with speed, accuracy and ease. Two quick taps of the screen beats several emails and a conference bridge any day.
Time-to-action can also be accelerated via the right kind of messaging to an individual, a team or a whole organization. Obviously, the enterprise messaging space is blowing up with Slack becoming the latest startup to hit a billion dollar valuation.
There’s also HipChat, Cotap, TigerText, Avaamo, and others on the block competing with legacy players from Microsoft Lync to Salesforce Chatter.
The question should be, what do I need my messaging solution to actually do? We often hear in technology that you want to “do one thing exceptionally well” and messaging is important enough of a channel to warrant focused solutions. However, 100 integration partners later and a solution can become just as much of a time sink as it was a value-add.
I genuinely believe that most employees want to do a good job. They want to support their teammates and they want to feel productive and that their contribution matters to their organization. Email alone is not enough to enable efficient workflows anymore.
That’s not to say it’s not incredibly valuable, but it needs to be freed of correspondence that is best suited to another channel. By providing the right solutions to deliver the specific types of communications that your team is reliant on to get their jobs done, you will see the response rate increase both on those new channels and on internal emails as well. That’s a promise.
A blog post excerpt is a brief summary of your blog post. Depending on your blog settings, this text is displayed in lists of posts and pages, such as:
The blog post excerpt is like a commercial for your blog post. Your readers need a reason to click through to a particular post, and your excerpt shows them the potential benefits.
Without a customized blog post excerpt, not only are you missing an opportunity to attract your ideal readers and customers, you could be turning them away. That’s because by default people will see the beginning of your post but it will be cut off arbitrarily (for example, WordPress cuts off after 55 words).
If you have a bullet list or other special formatting early in your post (as I do above), it can really compromise the readability and effectiveness of this text.
Another key benefit of customizing your blog post excerpt is that you can include keywords and phrases that your ideal customers may be looking for. This won’t affect your ranking, but it does affect how your listing is displayed.
In Google search results, for example, these words will be highlighted in bold if they match what the searcher had typed into the search box. This will draw more attention to your post and reinforces the benefits to the reader.
Content: Put yourself in your readers’ shoes, after they’ve already read your post. Why are they glad they clicked? What key lessons did they learn? What benefits did this have in their life or business? Summarize what’s in it for them.
Length: The experts at Moz recommend 155 characters (including spaces) as the ideal length of a meta description. Use this guideline for excerpts as well, so you can streamline your blog writing and promotion and use the same summary for both purposes.
Logistics: First you’ll need to find the excerpt box/field in your blogging platform. In WordPress, this isn’t always displayed automatically. If you don’t see it, look for the Screen Options menu at the top right-hand side of the screen, and make sure Excerpt is checked.
Next, in order to customize the meta description of your blog posts, you’ll need to be using an SEO tool (plugin) such as WordPress SEO by Yoast or All-in-One SEO Pack. Once that is set up on your site, you will see this additional field where you will paste your excerpt text.
When you customize your blog post excerpt, you show your readers and prospective customers the value they can expect from you, your blog post, and your business.
Can QR codes contribute to the success of your internet marketing campaign? Depending on who you ask you’ll get contradicting answers. So, how would you know whether or not to include QR codes as part of your internet marketing strategy?
QR codes started in an automotive company in Japan. It was labeled on car parts and once scanned, you’d receive details about the car. QR codes were adopted in marketing mainly because a QR code can store a lot of information that can easily be presented to consumers. With QR codes marketers can lead consumers to the company’s website, sign-up page, or sales page, among others.
All it takes is a smartphone with a QR code reader to move consumers from an offline to online experience. And who doesn’t own a smartphone? According to CRTC Communications Monitoring Report in 2013 over 27.9 million Canadians are mobile phone subscribers and the number has since grown. This year, 55% of Canadians own smartphones, which means more than half of the population can easily access your web content given that they would want to.
But apparently QR codes failed to catch on while the smartphone market continuously grew. So how are QR codes doing as a marketing tactic? Marketing charts collated data regarding QR codes, which includes research on how many marketers plan to use QR codes in their campaign and how many consumers are actually scanning code.
One particular industry that benefits with QR codes is the real estate business. A QR code on the For Sale sign can lead a potential buyer to pictures of the inside of the house or similar houses for sale. In large-scale tradeshows, consumers get more information about products without talking to support staff. Freebies in exchange for sign ups via QR codes is another tactic. Clearly, if you give consumers a reason to scan your code, they will gladly do so.
One company’s marketing garbage is another’s treasure. If you are already using QR codes, analyze which of your visits are coming from the QR codes and which are from others to get a clear picture as to whether QR codes are working for you. QR codes may not be as popular as they were predicted to be but given the right implementation in the right business model and industry, you could really leverage their usefulness.
Studies show that phone calls are the most valuable type of lead, converting to revenue far more frequently than web and other leads. And it makes sense: inbound phone leads tend to come from people further along in the buying process. They have specific questions they need answered to make their decision and engaging with the right sales rep right away can make or break the sale.
But at the same time, not every call that comes in from your marketing should be sent to a sales agent. Many calls that originate from search engine inquiries and marketing campaigns aren’t qualified leads and should not be handled by your reps. But how do you separate the good from the bad?
First, if you haven’t already, you should meet with your sales team (or your client’s sales team, if you work for an agency) and agree on:
Once you have this information, you can begin to implement a process for qualifying, routing, and scoring phone leads automatically as they come in with the end goal of helping sales close more deals (which ultimately improves your marketing ROI – a win-win). Thinking of it as a step-by-step process is often helpful, beginning with call qualification and ultimately examining post-call data to understand how to optimize your marketing for what works.
If you can’t track phone leads back to their source to see what’s working, your marketing and sales will suffer. And being able to direct calls differently for different marketing sources first requires the use of a technology called call tracking. Call tracking enables you to pinpoint which ads, search keywords, content, and campaigns are generating phone calls, opportunities, and revenue, and which are not. Then you can work to optimize ROI.
Read the “Marketer’s Guide to Qualifying, Routing, and Scoring Inbound Calls to Optimize Sales” now to learn ways marketers have implemented processes to weed out the bad calls and route the good ones to the best sales reps to close them.
What metrics do you use to measure the success of your marketing?
You may be aware of the term ‘vanity metrics,’ or numbers that don’t represent true value for your business’ bottom line, but do you really know which metrics are ‘vanity’ and which are more meaningful? As I recently heard it (aptly) put, “vanity metrics just show that marketing is busy;” what you’re looking for are metrics to communicate that marketing contributes value to a business’ bottom line. Let’s break down the difference:
It’s not that you shouldn’t pay any attention to vanity metrics; in fact, vanity metrics can be quite helpful in a number of cases. Say you’re just getting started on trying to improve your social media; you’ll definitely want to keep track of your follower counts and the types of posts that are receiving ‘Likes’ and shares. And if you’re kicking off your paid search efforts, keeping an eye on the number of impressions and clicks an ad receives is an important part of the process. Vanity metrics can speak volumes about your site’s ability to engage prospects and provide invaluable insight into how your visitors interact with your web property; the problem lies in the fact that vanity metrics don’t tell the whole story — and they can serve as a major trap for unsuspecting marketers.
The ‘Vanity Metrics Trap’ is a real risk — particularly in smaller businesses where measuring marketing success with hard numbers may be a newer concept. Marketers fall into the trap of spending too much time focusing on these kinds of surface-level metrics and fail to spend enough time on the metrics that truly matter – the ones driving revenue. How many leads are your marketing efforts driving, and even more importantly, how qualified are these leads and how many are turning into closed deals? When it comes to conversations with upper management (and particularly those involving marketing budget), these are the numbers that are going to be of interest. Knowing the number of times that a white paper was downloaded is a nice little boost to your ego (hopefully), knowing content influence, or the amount of pipeline generated by deals that interacted with your white paper during the sales process — well, that’s the information that’s going to secure your Q1 budget.
Check out the infographic below to see some common vanity metrics, and a few of their more meaningful counterparts. Ready to start improving these metrics? Click the banner on the bottom of the page to check out our e-book, The ROI of Automation, and learn how marketing automation can help!
As marketers, we hear a lot about the importance of understanding buyer preferences and catering your marketing to the customer. Now let’s get a little more tactical: how do you give the buyer what they want, when they want it? And, most importantly, how do you achieve this 1:1 personalization on a scaleable level?
The answer is simple: lead nurturing. Let’s take a look at what lead nurturing allows you to do, and the four major benefits of nurturing cold leads to a sales-ready state.
Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost. (Forrester Research)
Whether you’re a one-man marketing department or a sizeable sales team, one thing’s true across the board: today’s marketing and sales teams are strapped for time and resources. Think of lead nurturing as a simple way to put time back into your day — automating many of the time-consuming, manual tasks that go into educating leads to a sales-ready state, and allowing your marketing and sales teams to focus their resources on more strategic initiatives.
Companies with mature lead generation and management practices have a 9.3% higher sales quota achievement rate. (CSO Insights)
Lead nurturing makes for a more efficient business process — not only by automating simple and tedious tasks, but by allowing each team to focus on their respective areas of strength. For marketing, this means messaging, email creation and targeting, content distribution, and the development of campaigns that can successfully nurture leads to sales-readiness. And with these more marketing-related tasks off of their plates, your sales reps are free to concentrate on doing what they do best: closing deals.
77% of business buyers want different content at each stage of the product research process. (Pardot)
Today’s buyers have come to expect a buyer’s journey that’s highly interactive and caters to their specific needs. Not only do nurturing emails deliver the right content at the right time, they also come across as personalized communication. By using plain-text emails instead of HTML, including a personalized signature from a sales rep, taking advantage of variable tags, and sending content based on a prospects’ actions or interests, your sales emails can reach that 1:1 marketing ideal.
Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. (The Annuitas Group)
Today’s buyers have all the tools they need to research products on their own before talking with a sales rep — and they often prefer to do so. In fact, recent studies show that 60% of the buyer’s journey is now complete before a buyer even reaches out to sales (Corporate Executive Board). But this doesn’t mean that you can’t kickstart the relationship-building process before a prospect is ready to talk. Lead nurturing not only serves as an unobtrusive way to introduce a prospect to the sales rep they’ll be working with, it also begins to establish your company as a credible source of information — so when a prospect is ready to talk, a foundation of trust has already been built.
Want to learn more about lead nurturing? Check out our Complete Guide to Automated Lead Nurturing for 10 must-try campaigns, as well as helpful checklists, worksheets, and tip sheets. And be sure to share your own thoughts and ideas with us in our comments section below!
It’s a simple truth: marketing and sales teams that successfully work together, win together.
And yet, in too many organizations, marketing and sales teams are still operating in silos, with disparate priorities, separate tools, and very little communication. Marketing is focused on generating as many leads as possible and wonders why hard-earned deals are going nowhere, while sales complains that leads are low quality and can’t be worked.
Sound familiar?
The most important thing to keep in mind is that both teams ultimately have the same goals: to close more business, in less time, and to scale efforts to reach as many new prospects as possible. The disconnect lies in misalignment of tools, data, and communication — and this can be fixed.
We recently hosted a webinar about the major benefits of integrating the platforms on which each team relies: your CRM system and marketing automation. Let’s take a look at a few of the benefits discussed, and how they impact both marketing and sales.
Marketing automation’s lead scoring and grading capabilities automatically qualify leads based on both demographic and behavioral data. This information is synced between platforms, allowing sales reps to see a prospect’s score and grade from within the CRM.
For marketing: Take the manual labor out of lead qualification. Talk to your sales team (don’t forget that aligning communication is as important as aligning tools!) to determine what your top identifiers are for a qualified lead. Set up your customizable scoring and grading model based on these criteria, and let automation do the rest!
For sales: Identify your most qualified prospects at a glance, prioritize your time accordingly, and rest assured that a lead is worth your time before you ever pick up the phone.
Leads can automatically be assigned to the correct sales rep once they reach a predetermined threshold.
For marketing: Cut one more tedious task out of your day (manual lead assignment) and avoid disagreements with sales reps over unfair lead distribution.
For sales: Rest assured that the lead assignment process will be standardized and fair, and will be passed over a threshold that you determine as indicating sufficient sales-readiness.
Build automatic drip nurturing campaigns that will distribute valuable content to colder leads over time, via what appear to be 1:1 emails from the assigned sales rep.
For marketing: Increase the value of your database by nurturing leads that may not be ready to buy yet (and may have otherwise slipped through the cracks). Furthermore, ensure that you’re delivering quality and approved messaging (let’s be honest, writing content isn’t necessarily your sales team’s strong suit).
For sales: Let marketing kick off the relationship-building process for you, freeing up your time to focus on the hottest prospects and ensuring that colder leads are sales-ready and prepared to talk business before you get on the phone with them.
Check out the full recording on this webinar to learn more about what the integration between marketing automation and your CRM will look like, and the benefits for both sales and marketing.
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