Rnordman

Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz, a master of the econo-metaphor, has described the relationship between the Canadian dollar and oil in many colourful ways—as oil drops, the impact on the terms of trade might not immediately impact the dollar, but, “like walking a dog on one of those leashes that stretch out and snap back,” the value of oil and the value of the dollar will be linked. Over the past couple of weeks, the dollar has been pulling a lot of leash off the reel, depreciating rapidly against the U.S. dollar as oil dropped. The impact has been stark, especially in the longer-term outlook for oil in Canadian dollar terms.  The question producers must be asking is whether a sub-90-cent dollar is a long-term reality, or whether the leash will snap back and leave Canadian producers and governments feeling a much greater hit from the drop in world oil prices. Still, no matter what happens with the Canadian dollar as the oil shock propagates through the global economy, this is a long way from 2008.

Let’s start with a look at oil in U.S. dollar terms—over the past month, we’ve seen oil prices for the West Texas Intermediate crude benchmark at their lowest point since mid-2010, with prices holding well-below $80 per barrel. As you can see in the graph below, this is not simply viewed as a short-term fluctuation—the futures market has oil barely above $80 60 months from now — a forward view of oil about as bearish as it has been over the past five years.

WTI Forward Curve. Source: Bloomberg.

Over the same period of time as oil’s recent decline, the Canadian sollar has seen an equally rapid fall, as shown below. If we look just over the past year, the slide has been dramatic, with much of the drop happening since oil’s global slide started to accelerate in the late summer. In the first six months of the year, as oil was appreciating, the Canadian dollar had begun to climb slowly again.

Canadian dollar forward curve. Source: Bloomberg

If you combine these two curves and ask what the $CAD-hedged future price of oil (the Canadian dollar price at which you could lock in future oil purchases or sales) has done over the past six months, you get a very different story than that which you’d see if you looked only at the WTI forward price alone.

Canadian-dollar-hedged oil forward prices. Source: Bloomberg.

With the impact of the Canadian dollar taken into account, the long view on oil in Canadian dollar terms is not anywhere near as bearish as you might think. In fact, looking three to five years out, which would be the relevant time horizon for the start-up of a new oil sands projects, the market is now reflecting expected future cash flows higher than we’ve seen in at the same period each of the last three years — the question, as I mentioned above, is whether the Canadian dollar has run too far, and that leash will snap back.  However, it would have to snap back a fair bit, especially in the long term, to make this year’s oil prices look worse than 2012′s or even last year’s long view.

To put this recent drop in oil prices into perspective, the Canadian dollar doesn’t always buffer producers against a fall to the degree that it has this time around. In the figure below, you can see five forward curves, a comparison between this year’s June and November curves, hedged in Canadian dollar terms, compared to the same time periods in 2008 over which time the financial crisis was just beginning to take hold. For reference, I’ve also included the Feb. 12, 2009 curve, the week in which WTI hit its lowest value during the crisis.

Comparison of 2008 and 2014 oil price forward curves. Source: Bloomberg

In June, 2008, a Canadian producer could lock in future production at or around $130 Canadian dollars per barrel. Within five months, this had dropped to a little over $100 in the long term. Within another three months, crude bottomed out, with spot prices more than 50 per cent lower than those we see today, but with significant optimism looking ahead. Over the past five months, we’ve seen a drop a little less than half as large in the front end of the oil price curve as what was seen over the same period in 2008, and we’ve seen virtually no drop at all in the long-run view in Canadian dollar terms. That should give producers, and Alberta’s new premier, some relief.

So, what’s the bottom line? Over the past four months, the Canadian dollar has done what you’d expect it to do—it has acted as a shock absorber, buffering the Canadian economy from a significant commodity shock. Of course, this shock absorption isn’t free—it comes at the expense of our global purchasing power and, thus, Canadians’ real wages and real wealth, but it’s important to recognize nonetheless. The as-yet-unanswered question is whether, channeling governor Poloz, the shock absorber has bottomed out and we should expect a hard rebound, or whether there’s still travel left in the system. Over the coming weeks, as you watch the oil price, make sure to take a quick peek at the Canadian dollar as well before you hit the panic button.

The post The loonie, oil’s crash, and why this isn’t anything like 2008 appeared first on Macleans.ca.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – The large electrical transformers bound for Mexico were the perfect place to hide cocaine. It was a matter of chemistry to dilute the drug into an oil mixture that could be concealed as coolant, a job handled by a Mexican engineer working discretely in a suburban warehouse near Buenos Aires.

The transformers carrying 2 tons of liquefied cocaine from Bolivia were loaded onto a cargo vessel at a Buenos Aires port and shipped out to sea. But investigators had been watching the operation and when the shipment arrived, an Argentine judge was on hand to insist on a test that, to the astonishment of authorities at one of Mexico’s most secure ports, revealed the drug.

The traffickers, Judge Sandra Arroyo said, had used “an ingenious and logistically novel method for the deception.”

The interception earlier this year called attention to a worrying trend in Argentina, the increasing use of its roads and ports as a trade route for cocaine and other drugs bound for markets in the U.S., Europe and beyond.

Bordered by long stretches of sparsely developed land to its north and west, and nearly 5,000 kilometres of Atlantic coastline on the east, Argentina is proving attractive for traffickers exporting cocaine from neighbouring Bolivia and from nearby Peru, which last year surpassed Colombia to become the world’s biggest cocaine producer.

U.S.-led efforts to stifle the drug trade in more northern countries and in the Caribbean have pushed the traffic south to Argentina, according to drug experts and justice officials. The country also is proving to be a place where artisans are crafty at hiding contraband. Drugs passing through Argentina have been found in the hollow frames of wheelchairs, moulded into religious statues, tucked into baby diapers, in shipments of lumber and apples, and hidden in Louis XV-styled furniture.

“Argentina’s specialty is logistics,” said Marcelo Aguinsky, a criminal judge who has investigated trafficking cases. Its status as a shipping point for all sorts of Europe-bound products, he said, “has made it an important logistical platform.”

Argentine authorities have not publicly released statistics on the drug trade, a subject considered sensitive by the government of Cristina Fernandez. But several narcotics experts told The Associated Press that seizures being made at sea and abroad point to more drugs passing through the country.

Argentina “is used to send drugs to Europe,” said Søren Pedersen, spokesman for Europol, an umbrella organization for European Union police forces. “This isn’t a phenomenon that is completely new, but the signs that Latin American cartels are operating from there and especially maritime seizures (indicate) that it has increased.”

In 2013, 6.1 tons of cocaine were seized according to Argentine officials who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. While that’s far less than the hundreds of tons seized each year in countries such as Peru, Colombia or Mexico, officials say the amounts seized in Argentina have been trending higher since 2010.

On average, between 70 tons and 110 tons of cocaine and other drugs move through Argentina, according to a U.S. federal antidrug official who refused to be named because he was not authorized to talk publicly about the matter. Judging from recent drug busts in Europe, Africa and Asia, he said, the figure for 2014 could be higher.

The rising use of Argentina as a passageway is also leading to greater consumption within the country, fueling growing violence between gangs battling to control turf and markets.

For example, the city of Rosario sits at a strategically important pathway between Argentina’s northern border and Buenos Aires. Last year, the city of fewer than 1 million people had a homicide rate of 27 per 100,000 inhabitants, up from 15.2 per 100,000 a year earlier and nearly four times the rate for the much larger city of Buenos Aires, officials said.

Observers say Rosario’s important position as a transit point is leading to corruption, evidenced by the arrest last year of the police chief for Santa Fe, the province that includes Rosario, who allegedly provided protection for an Argentine dealer and conspired with him to sell drugs.

Arroyo, the judge who in April insisted that Mexican port officials test the transformer oil, said the investigation into that case suggests Argentina’s role in the drug trade is expanding and that major drug cartels use Argentina “no longer just as a strategic route for drug smuggling and money laundering activities, but also for several stages of drug manufacture … preparation and conditioning of significantly sized shipments.”

The cocaine seized in Mexico, in fact, left Bolivia as coca paste and was processed into cocaine in Argentina. The entire operation involved several stages, leading to charges against six people. Argentine businessmen were among those accused of working with Cesar Cornejo, a Mexican industrial engineer suspected of ties to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.

Arroyo said multinational groups are setting up in Argentina as seemingly legal entities, hiring professionals such as accountants, engineers, chemists and customs agents. The seizure at the Mexican port, for one, was carried out “with the help or acquiescence of import-export companies, both national and international” and heavy financial and logistical backing, she said.

In Argentina, there is little consensus over how to keep the country from falling further into the hands of drug dealers. Officials and experts debate ideas as diverse as deploying the armed forces, as Brazil has done; following Bolivia’s lead of shooting down suspicious planes; or trying Uruguay’s experiment with decriminalizing drugs for personal use.

Argentine Security Chief Sergio Berni recently acknowledged that “with our laws and judicial system, we are facilitating (the traffickers’) actions.”

And, while the extent of the problem in Argentina has not reached the levels that disrupted Colombia years ago or is now plaguing Mexico, Argentines fear what may come.

A recent statement from the country’s Catholic bishops urged authorities to choose a course of action before it is too late. If political and social leaders fail to act urgently, they said, Argentina “runs the risk of passing a point of no return.”

——-

Associated Press correspondents Alicia Caldwell in Washington D.C., Jorge Sainz in Madrid and Frank Bajak in Lima, Peru, contributed to this story.

The post Argentina emerging as attractive transit path for drug traffickers appeared first on Macleans.ca.

TORONTO – Rogers Communications has unveiled a new wireless roaming strategy for customers visiting the United States.

The telecommunications giant says its new Roam At Home discount ensures that its customers will be charged a maximum of $50 a month for roaming fees when they use their smartphones while travelling in the United States.

Chief executive Guy Laurence says the changes come as Rogers works on a multi-year plan to simplify its offerings for customers who are signed up to its Share Everything plan.

Rogers (TSX:RCI.B) users will be able to text the word “travel” to 222 before they leave or once they arrive in the U.S. to activate the discount, which then charges $5 per day to a maximum of $50.

Laurence says the deal is an extension of an agreement with AT&T and will take effect on Monday.

Canadian wireless carriers have faced many complaints from subscribers who say they’ve unknowingly driven up their wireless bill by hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of dollars when they’ve used their data plans in the U.S.

The post Rogers takes new pricing for wireless customers visiting United States appeared first on Canadian Business.

Sarah Ladik

Like a lot of northerners, Mike Sharpe was fed up with sky-high food prices. Unlike most, he leveraged that frustration, channelling his anger into a unique business opportunity. This fall, Sharpe converted an old Edmonton city bus into Cash ’n’ Carry, the Northwest Territories’ first mobile grocery store. “I’ve seen these prices get to the point of being outrageous,” says the 41-year-old Inuvik native. “We can do better.”

And he is. Sharpe, who, for the past five years, drove giant haul trucks for Syncrude in Fort McMurray, Alta., bought the bus for $4,500 with his wife, Joyce Paes. They tore out its seats, installing shelving to allow room for six customers. Then they drove to Edmonton and stocked it with everything from meat to canned goods, from Costco, Wal-Mart and Real Canadian Superstore—wherever they could find the best deals. Every day since, the pair have hit the road, a route that takes them across southern N.W.T., from Fort Simpson to Fort Smith. Sharpe claims his customers will save an average of 30 per cent on their grocery bills.

For Sharpe, navigating the grocery aisles in Hay River, where he and Paes settled in the spring, is an exercise in sticker shock: Two rib-eye steaks cost $26. Heads of cabbage can run $28. A 24-pack of water—in northern communities that don’t have access to safe drinking water—costs $65. “I get upset. I can drive to Edmonton and buy that water for $4.99,” he says. “You’re telling me it costs $61 to ship it 12 hours north? I don’t think so.”

It’s no surprise, Sharpe says, that one-third of children are going to bed hungry in the Northwest Territories, where feeding a family of four is estimated to cost $19,760 a year. The farther you get from Yellowknife, where incomes average $63,000, the worse the problem gets. In remote hamlets like Tuktoyaktuk, incomes drop to $35,000, and to $26,000 in Ulukhaktok. That far from the capital, food prices soar, meaning the territory’s poorest residents are paying its highest food prices.

Ottawa used to help by subsidizing shipping costs, but, in 2011, the Harper government switched to a more market-driven system, giving the subsidy to retailers instead. Under the Nutrition North Canada program, stores are expected to pass on savings by cutting food costs.

But northern food prices appear to have only increased since, says MLA Norman Yakeleya, who represents Sahtu, in the N.W.T.’s central-north. Politicians aren’t just alarmed by soaring food costs: “It appears retailers are making a tidy sum,” says MLA Fred Schell, who represents Nunavut’s South Baffin region. “We just don’t see evidence the subsidy is being passed on,” says Leesee Papatsie, a Nunavummiut mother of five who launched grassroots protests against the territory’s crushing food prices last year. Since then, more than 20,000 people, roughly two-thirds of Nunavut’s population, have joined her Facebook protest site, Feed My Family.

Concern with the new federal program led the three territories to demand a federal audit of Nutrition North. Results of Michael Ferguson’s audit are due later this fall.

For Sharpe, business, driven by fierce anger over price-gouging, will remain strong, no matter what comes of the audit. Priscilla Lafferty, a Fort Resolution mother of three, says local residents are willing to wait two weeks, until Mike comes to town, to buy their groceries. Sharpe’s prices are roughly half what Lafferty says she’s used to paying. At the town’s northern store, she says, diapers run her $70 for a package of 28. Sharpe charges $23.

Sharpe is committed to equal pricing. No matter how remote the community, prices will remain flat. His goal is to expand by “growing customers, not by growing prices.” This was the philosophy behind the Inuvik car wash he launched at age nine. He ran it every summer until he turned 19. Over 10 years, he charged $5 per car, not once increasing fees. Instead, he found ways to increase productivity and his customer base by extending his business to taxis and tour buses, and purchasing a pressure washer that allowed him to stay open in sub-zero temperatures, lengthening his season by six weeks.

His wife is also a born entrepreneur. Growing up in the Philippines, Paes used to sell crackers and candies to her schoolmates every morning, earning enough to buy herself lunch and dinner.

“There’s no model to follow,” Sharpe says, chuckling. “I’m the model. No one else is doing this.” So he’s learning as he goes. Northerners, it turns out, prefer Nabob over Tim Hortons coffee. They like Tenderflake, not no-name lard. They’ll only buy Robin Hood flour. And, he adds, you can never stock enough toilet paper.

The post The ultimate food truck heads north appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Small businesses need big websites.

Squarespace can help. The website-builder has become a go-to for folks looking to create their own sites, an alternative to popular services like WordPress. The professional site has a three-tiered, monthly pricing system: $8, $16 (which is the most popular) and $24.

Creating a site for your business can be complicated. But there are plenty of little ways to make the most of the site's clear-cut template. We spoke to Jeremy Schwartz, Squarespace's business development lead, who shared his tips for small businesses creating their site. Read more...

The automotive industry faces several significant challenges when it comes to marketing and selling cars. The market is crowded, and the internet has forced the industry to change the way cars are sold. They’re not the only industry facing these types of changes. Most businesses have had to adapt to the reality that the internet has empowered consumers like never before. With access to thousands of sites that share pricing, discounts, product reviews and more, it’s clear the consumer controls the buying cycle.

Things are no longer sold. They are bought.

How do you compete and deliver your marketing message?

As the old saying goes, “if you can’t beat em, join em.” Embrace the change and tell your story. Accept that buyer skepticism is high. Gary Vaynerchuk summed it all up when he said, “The brands that connect with clients in a real way will win.” His INC. video explains how to connect on social media with customers who are tired of being sold to and therefore tune out traditional marketing.

Car manufacturer Lincoln heard this message loud and clear. The brand’s recent collection of videos made in partnership with actor Matthew McConaughey have connected with their audience in a real way. The proof is in the numbers. Their Intro, Bull and I just Liked It ads have gone viral with more than 3.5 million views on YouTube and parodies by the likes of Ellen Degeneres.

Stop manufacturing reality

In a time when scripted shows pass for “Reality TV” and marketing messages are manipulative at best, why are we surprised by consumer attitudes? If Photoshop can be used to manufacture a beautiful model from a slice of pizza, should consumers place their trust in most of the marketing they are exposed to?

Probably not.

Inbound marketing is all about earning the trust of consumers. It’s marketing that builds your message in the real world and focuses on teaching what you know to those that are interested. The reward is lower customer aquisition costs, motivated prospects, and greater customer loyalty.

Make marketing people love

If inbound marketing (also referred to as content marketing) is so great, why isn’t everyone doing it? The short answer is that it isn’t a quick and easy solution. Creating great content requires real work, but the payoff can be huge. By placing what your audience loves at the center of your marketing plan, you attract customers to your business.

What are some things your costomers love? They LOVE: being educated, not making mistakes, saving money. Commit to sharing what you know with your audience. Take them through the decision making process.When at Blogworld, inbound marketing evangelist Marcus Sheridan was asked how he helps clients in “boring industries” create marketing people love and find “sexy.” His answer, “Teach people ways not to screw up…. Not making mistakes with your money is very, very, very sexy.” That’s marketing people love.

Accept this customer centered approach and win the hearts of your audience. With their hearts will come their wallets. The Washington Post and Market Watch recently reported that since the McConaughey ads have aired, Lincoln sales have surged 25%. Not only have the new Lincoln ads connected with their audience, they have earned the company media exposure Lincoln could never buy. The Detroit News writes that since airing the ads Lincoln has inspired parodies poking fun from Ellen DeGeneres,(skip to 1:10) Jim Carrey on Saturday Night Live, Conan O’Brien and others. The combined views of the DeGeneres and Carrey YouTube videos is over 12 million.

We found the urge to parody the ad so great we had to create our own, and thanks to our friends at Take-One Media we did it in 24 hours.

Image Credit 

Since cloud computing has gained stream, there is an industry wide "Race to zero" in regards to price. Cloud services keep getting cheaper and many analysts wonder if some cloud services will be free by default. If you caught some of the sound bytes Box's CEO Aaron Levie last week, Levie goes on to mention that he sees "A future where storage is free and infinite." It's starting to seem as if Cloud's Big 3's pricing competition has put pressure on other vendors to drop their prices and because of this, we are seeing what could be described as survival of the fittest within the cloud market.

When public cloud first hit the scene in the mid 2000s, storage, compute and other IaaS services were heralded as being the darling of cloud computing. Since then, vendors such as AWS, Google and Azure have each cut their prices over 40 times. If this trend keeps happening, vendors will no longer see IaaS as a profit stream; they will see if as a necessity that must be offered freely or cheaply in the future.

Cloud companies are looking for ways to differentiate their cloud offerings. With OneDrive, you get access to many of the online versions of Microsoft Office apps. When big players such as Microsoft began undercutting cloud start ups in efforts to gain cloud market share, start ups such as Dropbox are faced with an interesting decision.  Although a company like Dropbox has been in the cloud storage arena since the beginning, Dropbox and other companies must make a huge decision: innovate against your competition or integrate with your competition. Dropbox's answer is to try to do both.

It was recently reported that Dropbox adopting Microsoft Office online apps which will help improve the functionality of its free cloud storage app. Julie Bort at BusinessInsider writes that tech companies should be scared about the "Race to zero" in cloud pricing as the trends means that cloud companies must continue to be on the cusp of innovation or risk being left behind.

The post Box CEO: Storage to become “Free and Infinite” appeared first on CloudWedge.

According to a new LinkedIn survey released today, our definition of professional success is changing. Professionals are no longer solely focused on getting the big raise or promotion; increasingly, they’re searching for those small victories at work — like getting a compliment from a boss, a colleague or client (38%) — that can lead to a greater sense of fulfillment.

When I think back to some of the most memorable moments in my career, a few milestones come to mind, the release of my first book or when I launched my own business. However, when I think about my most poignant accomplishments, it’s actually the small wins like hearing that my first client landed her dream job or getting the keys to my first office space, that made me feel the most fulfilled and proud.

At LinkedIn, we’re committed to helping our members achieve all types of success and have been sharing some of the amazing stories we’ve heard. We’ve also discovered key insights about professionals and what they really care about when it comes to being successful at their jobs. Here’s more on what we found…

The Ripple Effect

LinkedIn found that when managers express gratitude or praise for everyday contributions, it goes far beyond the individual and can have a widespread effect on a company. U.S. adults are more likely to have a better attitude (58%), do a better job (45%) and stay at the company longer (32%) when these small wins are recognized. Take Dr. Oscar Chavez who co-founded a dog-food company focused on whole foods; his contributions are being felt beyond the confines of an office, and within the homes of dog owners across the country. His motivation? The opportunity to share his ideas with the rest of the world.

Recognition Reigns

More than one in five professionals in the U.S. would rather have a job where their everyday contributions are recognized than one where they receive an extra vacation day. But recognition does not only have to come from a manager or boss. We hit the street and found that many professionals cite the most gratifying type of recognition is seeing the impact their accomplishments have on loved ones.

It’s All About The Journey

Everyone’s career path is different, as are the experiences that bring us happiness and pride along the way. For Jenni, landing a job after her yearlong hunt was not enough. It was the moment she sat at her new desk and saw her name and title front-and-center on her phone that made her feel she made it! This experience propelled Jenni’s confidence and overall passion, so much so that she is now the founder of her own marketing company. Or take Gurmukh, a LinkedIn member who invested 13 years in a career as an architect before going back to school to explore his true passion: robot and spaceship design. “Had I not had such a long journey, I would not be where I am today,” Gurmukh shares.

LinkedIn is celebrating all types of success – both big and small – and we want to hear your stories. Use #workhigh5 and share with your network what professional success means to you.

Think back to five or six years ago. Who were the networking giants online? People hadn’t heard of Instagram (growing in popularity with young people today) and many didn’t know how to tweet. Now, “hashtag” is a part of people’s everyday vocabulary.

You can be sure that there will be new social media sites launched this year and that some of the older players may fall out of a favor (think MySpace) and newer players will take over in popularity.

Photo Credit: Cendrine Marrouat

Lesser Known Social Media Sites to Add to Your Marketing

If you’re doing any social media marketing (SMM), you are probably already promoting your business on sites like:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest

There are the current most popular sites for networking online. A smart self-promoter will start with these big five. In fact, if you only have enough time to promote on these, stick with the current big players.

However, as you have more time for promotions or more helpers for social media marketing, there are a few additional sites you’ll want to add to the list.

Tagged

Alexa ranks Tagged.com as number fifteen out of the social media networks available and describes it as one of the top social networking sites in the world.

It has a global rank of 550 and a bounce rate of only 10.3 percent. The average visitor spends an average of 20:48 minutes on the site. This is impressive, since most visitors bounce from a site in less than a minute.

Tagged was founded in 2004. Some of the features will be readily recognizable and are similar to sites like Facebook. You can browse profiles of other users, share “tags” and play games. Tagged can be linked to your Facebook or Google+ accounts.

To start using Tagged, sign up for a free account. Once you sign up for the account and log in, you can create a custom profile page. Post a biography, share your interests, upload photos and post updates for those you are linked up to.

Quantcast estimates that Tagged has about 18.6 million members globally, so the potential to reach a wide new audience is there.

URL: www.tagged.com

Ask.fm

This site offers a unique approach to interacting socially with others and could be an excellent opportunity to share your expertise on a topic with others. The platform is quite simply a profile and an invitation for others to ask you questions, which you then answer.

When someone asks a pertinent question, you can quickly establish yourself as an expert with well thought out answers. Just be aware that there are a high number of young people on the site and some may choose to hound you a bit. Be prepared to ignore their nasty comments.

The site was founded in Latvia in 2010, so this is a fairly new site. It was formed to compete with Formspring. The site has had some hiccups as young people used it to anonymously cyber bully and this is through to have resulted in suicides by several young people.

However, it is a site that has taken over Formspring as far as traffic. The potential is there to reach a new audience in a way that other business owners may not be doing. Is your competition on Ask.fm? There are about 60 million users worldwide on the site, so it could be worth your time to test it out and see if you get any traffic from there.

URL: ask.fm

Photo Credit: Yelp.com via Compfight cc

Yelp

Do you have a presence on Yelp? Yelp is a review site. People go online and review products and services they’ve had a chance to try out.

The site gets about 139 million unique visitors each month. The company was founded in 2004.

So, if the site is one where others go on there and review your business, how can you use the networking aspect to promote your own website?

There are several things you can do that will help you have a more professional presence on Yelp. First, set up your business profile by going to biz.yelp.com.

Fill in your profile completely with as many details as possible. Add photos of your business and a complete description. If there is already a profile for your business on Yelp, you can “claim” it.

Yelp allows business owners to respond to reviews. This is a goldmine for you to connect with those who have come to your business and to handle any issues that have occurred.

Did you get a negative review? Respond with concern and respect. Not only will you have the opportunity to win that customer back and give you another chance, other potential customers will see how you handled a difficult situation and may be willing to give you a try.

URL: www.yelp.com

Hi5

One of the advantages to using Hi5 is that you’ll reach users from more than 200 different countries.

The site is not as popular as a social networking medium in the United States, but there are plenty of other social networking sites already meeting that need in the US.

If you want to reach potential site visitors from other countries, Hi5 is worth a look. It was founded in 2003. The site has more than 80 million registered users.

Hi5 is similar to other social networking sites as far as the ability to post updates, connect with others and network. However, there is a big focus on entertainment on Hi5. You’ll find a wide variety of games.

Once you’ve established a presence on Hi5, you may want to consider offering a game that relates to your website to draw even more attention, since that is a popular way to spend time on this social media site.

URL: www.hi5.com

Buzznet

Buzznet is a bit different than some of the other social media networks out there, but is well suited to promoting a website.

The focus on this platform is sharing ideas, events and interests. What an opportunity to get the word out about what you do by sharing news stories and events you come across. Much of the focus is on celebrities and events surrounding them, so if you can tie your topic into celebrities in some way, you can really reach some people on this site.

The site was started in 2005. There are about 10 million registered users on the site.

URL: www.buzznet.com

Wrapping Up

There are dozens of additions social media sites you could choose from. These are five to get you started.

Remember to use landing pages to help test the effectiveness of any promotions you do, learn each of the social media sites before promoting on there and always add value over blatant self-promotional posts to avoid sounding spammy.

What do you do after you’ve clearly defined the KPI’s and benchmarks you need to hit in order to consider your business to be successful?

You may have read our previous post on getting started on the path to figuring out how you want to define your business success by nailing down KPIs and benchmarks. But what now? We have 5 next steps for what’s to come using Perfect Audience.

1. Assigning Revenue Value in Perfect Audience

Ensuring you have a conversion set up properly in Perfect Audience is critical for executing a successful campaign. There are a few things to consider here. If your KPI is a certain CPA, then you can assign a Revenue Value to each conversion while setting up your goal using the process above.

You can assign a Revenue Value by going to Manage > Conversions > Editing a Conversion Goal.

2. Calling in Dynamic Revenue in Perfect Audience

If your KPI is ROI, you will want to pass your revenue back to us dynamically. When placing your site tracking tag on your website, make sure to include the “pa.revenue” portion. Perfect Audience will apply the appropriate revenue value to each conversion, and display the total in your dashboard. When you hover over the revenue value you can easily see the Post-Click and Post-View value’s broken out. You can quickly see your revenue at a glance and compare to the cost of the media.

Read more about calling in revenue dynamically here.

3. Adjusting Attribution in Perfect Audience

Another thing to consider when setting up your conversions is your attribution settings. You can set different conversion windows and attribution rates for CTC and VTC. These will be applied to your aCPA in the dashboard. Keep in mind that your aCPA accounts for your attribution settings. For example, if you choose to give 50% attribution to VTCs, we’ll reflect that in your numbers. You can also hover over the CPA to see the Post-Click CPA at a glance. This can be a helpful indicator of your percentage of Click to View conversions.

4. Sort Function in Perfect Audience

Utilizing the sort function can help prioritize high CPA campaigns with one touch. Just click on the column heading and it will sort from highest to lowest CPA. You can easily manage your budget by moving money to the campaigns with lower CPAs. In the example below the weekly budget is higher for the most efficient campaigns.

5. Evaluation

Once you have launched your campaign and gathered some data, you can refine your benchmark. If you set your KPI too high and you are not meeting your goal, you may need to optimize toward achieving those goals. If you are still not able to obtain the goal, you may need to consider whether or not you’ve set it too aggressively.

Always remember it is important to define your goals prior to launching a campaign.

If you have anything to add, please feel free to leave us a comment in the comments box below to keep the conversation going!

Every entrepreneur is a leader. You might not have a staff right now, but you could in the future. Furthermore, as a business owner you are a community leader as well. So even if you’re still a “solopreneur” and focused on keeping your head above water, it’s time to develop some serious leadership skills…and in fact, it might be those very leadership skills that help your business get past the startup stage and into growth more quickly.

Listening

Listening is a key ingredient to being a strong leader. Leaders need to be able to listen to staff members and people who are on the “front lines” and doing the work that is impacted by top level decisions. Leaders also need to be able to listen to experts, so as to make the most of their knowledge and experience, especially when their expertise is in areas where the leader is lacking.

Development Tip: To develop your listening skills, spend a full day focusing on what other people are saying. Specifically, listen carefully and focus only on the other person in each conversation. Turn down the dialogue in your head that helps you formulate a response and wait until you’ve heard everything to decide how to respond. This is a great exercise to do every day, in each conversation, but start slowly and build up.

Forward-Thinking

Each leader must be forward-thinking. The organization’s strategic plan should always be in the forefront of the leader’s mind, but thinking even past the long-term strategic plan enables the leader to see a lengthier future to the business and organization.

Development Tip: To develop your forward-thinking skills, carve out time every day to focus on your industry. Study up and gather data. Try to identify trends and patterns, and envision what might be ahead for your industry and your company. What might be coming in the next five or ten years? What might be on the way in twenty?

Decision-Making

Leaders must be adept at making decisions. A true leader is willing to make the hard decisions, even the ones that ultimately hurt feelings. It’s not easy to do, but tough decisions are a natural part of any leader’s life. Further, if you struggle to make even small decisions, you may find your business lagging behind and moving very slowly.

Development Tip: To improve your decision-making ability, start by reducing the number of decisions you have to make each day. The research shows that the more decisions we have to make, the harder it is to make bigger decisions—it’s almost as if making tons of little decisions takes up so much bandwidth that there just isn’t enough left to make big decisions. That’s one of the reasons that Steve Jobs wore the same clothes every day, by the way.

You’ll also want to improve your confidence—lack of decision-making skill is often the result of low levels of confidence and believe in oneself. You can work with a coach to improve your confidence levels so you have more faith in yourself to make the right decisions.

Failing Forward

You’re going to fail. That’s just a truth of being in business. We all fail. How big and how often, well, that varies. But every entrepreneur and business owner will fail. So given that, plan ahead to fail forward. Be prepared to learn from your failures. Celebrate what went right and learn from what went wrong. Failure doesn’t have to be a dirty word!

Development Tip: Look back on a time when you failed. What went right and what went wrong? What can you celebrate about the failure? And what lessons did you learn from the experience? Specifically where in the process did the failure occur? When we begin to look back on our failures and pick apart where the failure began, we can start to plan ahead and create a more successful future.

Being Organized

To be a good leader, you must be a good organizer. I’m constantly teaching my clients about the value of being organized. If you’re organized, you are far more productive than if you’re disorganized. Being organized means having your ducks in a row. It means that, if you have a project, that project has a plan and a timeline and a budget, and you know exactly what those are. It means that, if you have an email that you’re going to have to personally send out to lots of people over the next year or so, you have that email pre-written so that you can copy and paste and make slight adjustments as needed, rather than rewriting the same email over and over. It means you automate and systematize as much as you possibly can in your business, so that you do repetitive tasks one time instead of several times.

Development Tip: Analyze your business and your life. Are there any repetitive tasks that you can adjust, setting yourself up for greater simplicity in the future? Are there emails that could be pre-written, tasks that could be systematized or automated so that you don’t have to do them again? Are your files organized? Are your finances organized? Look for any place that you can become more organized and don’t just think about doing it…do it!

To become a more effective leader, you’ll want to begin developing these skills immediately. Don’t wait! Start down the path of great leadership today!

The following is an excerpt from The Predictable Revenue Guide To Tripling Your Sales:

Heather R. Morgan runs a B2B cold emailing consultancy, and these are some of her tips…

What’s the difference between the cold email template that no one opens or responds to and the one that generates leads from dozens of new customers?

Read more on How to turn cold emails into conversations & clients (+ brazil pics)…

The post How to turn cold emails into conversations & clients (+ brazil pics) appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

Phone leads drive business. Studies show that inbound calls often convert to revenue 10 to 15 times more frequently than web leads, making them the lead type sales managers want most. It’s why marketers are spending $68 billion annually on ads to generate those sought-after calls.

Yet marketers are now also finding that creating effective campaigns and web content that drive high volumes of phone leads may not be enough to ensure a high ROI. True ROI from a campaign isn’t measured in calls generated by your marketing, but rather in new accounts and revenue generated from those calls by your sales reps or clients. Just getting your phone to ring off the hook isn’t the goal. Making an impact on your company’s bottom line is.

That’s why marketers are now establishing processes to define what a quality phone lead is for their business, then implementing technologies to help weed out the bad calls and route the good ones to the best sales rep or store. They are proactively qualifying, routing, and scoring the calls they generate to optimize the chances those calls convert to revenue.

Understand Your Business: Define A Quality Lead And How To Assign It

Not every incoming call is sales-ready or should even be connected to a live agent. Studies show that only 19% of inbound calls are high-quality sales leads – most are not. Therefore marketing should work with sales to answer two questions:

• What is the definition of a qualified phone lead?
• How should phone leads get assigned?

Once these questions are answered, businesses and agencies can use that data to establish call qualification, routing, and scoring strategies to maximize ROI.

Not All Calls Are Created Equal: Qualify Them First

We mentioned the 19% figure above: that means 81% of callers are not calling to engage with sales, but are often misdials or mundane inquiries for business hours and store directions. To combat those types of calls, marketers will first send callers to an IVR (interactive voice response) virtual receptionist to help qualify callers automatically up front and shield sales agents from wasting time on non-sales calls. The IVR can be as simply as “Press 1 to speak to a sales agent, Press 2 to speak to an operator” or can provide a more elaborate list of qualifying questions to determine the caller’s lead score based on your definition of a qualified lead.

Marketing ROI Depends On Who Handles Each Call: Route Them Optimally

Routing phone calls optimally can be the difference in winning the sale. Contextual call routing technology enables you to making sure each caller is routed to the best rep to handle that particular lead.

With call routing technology you can direct inbound calls in a wide variety of ways based on the structure of your business and how leads are assigned to your sales team. You can:

• Route calls differently based on which marketing source drove it
• Send a higher percentage of calls to top-performing agents
• Direct calls to different locations based on the time of day
• Route calls based on the caller’s geographic location
• Ring a group of agents (or a single agent’s work, mobile, and home phone) in succession or simultaneously

To Determine Caller, Agent, And Campaign Quality: Score Your Calls

Looking for a way to determine the quality of callers and the performance of your agents and marketing campaigns? Call scoring is the answer. By scoring a call you can assign values to a conversation based on specific metrics you’ve set and are then identified within the conversation.

Call scoring can be as simple as monitoring call duration or examining call recordings, or as complex as using keyword spotting technology to scan a conversation for specific keywords and automatically scoring the call based on who said them. By analyzing these metrics you are able to uncover which sales strategies are working best, which agents are performing better, and which marketing campaigns are driving the most valuable callers.

Understand Your Business: Optimize Your Marketing For What Works

The ultimate goal is to understand what marketing campaigns are driving quality phone leads and which agents are best at converting those leads to sales. You can then optimize for what works. While any of these call management strategies can be used a la carte, it’s often helpful to think of it as a step-by-step process:

If you are interested in learning more about how marketers are making the most of their inbound calls by qualifying, routing, and scoring to drive sales, download our new white paper, “Marketer’s Guide to Qualifying, Routing, and Scoring Inbound Calls to Optimize Sales.”

All prospects are not created equal. Not all want to buy right away and move into the qualified status. For these lead types, lead nurturing campaigns give prospects and marketers what they’re looking for – more conversations and higher probability of buying relevant products or services.

If you’re living in the day of interruption marketing to put more prospects into the sales cycle, you’re going down the wrong path. Today, you have more savvy buyers and most don’t want your interruption marketing speak. They want information and lots of it, in most cases. Then, when they are ready to buy, if you’ve stayed in touch, you will get the call.

That’s where lead nurturing comes into play. Staying in touch, while staying the mind of your prospect ensures they call you when they want to buy.

To understand what are some ways to stay in touch with prospects, consider these lead nurturing program options:

4 Ways To Boost Your Lead Nurturing

1) Business blogging – Yes, email and newsletters are one of the most effective ways to spread content for lead nurturing, but business blogging is just as good and sometimes better at nurturing leads. With a blog, you can:

• Get plenty of search traffic and convert that traffic into leads
• Share quality content via social and point followers to the blog
• Publishing content more often and sometimes with less effort

2) Answer offer content through email – If you fulfill requests for content, email is a perfect option to deliver, quickly. That way, you can see things, such as links to white papers, to prospects faster in email.

3) Use goals – For any effective lead nurturing program, you need to create goals first. Without these goals, you’ll see a lack of results and as a result, have no business benefit from your efforts. Want some examples of goals? Try these:

• Convert software demo downloaders into paying customers
• Keep in touch with prospects and ensure they call you when they’re ready to buy

4) Test everything – Since you repeat many things in a lead nurturing program, testing is key to learn what works and what doesn’t. Ensure you’re getting your efforts worth, look at these areas to test:

• Headlines and subject lines in emails
• Offer variations
• You copy length, in every communication

Lead nurturing programs are meant to convert prospects that are not ready to buy. By using different platforms and tactics other than just emailing, you will ensure you get more conversions from your lead nurturing efforts.

For a sure way to use business blogging to stay in touch with prospects, consider organizing your content with a editorial calendar.

More than 70% of B2B marketers who use lead nurturing said a better response rate is the biggest benefit, but two-thirds are challenged by developing content for buyer stage/interest—another contributing factor to response rate.

These findings come from a survey of 239 marketers across multiple industries that probed for benchmark data on program type, favored formats, benefits, challenges, metrics and other attributes of lead-gen campaigns.

The full report, 2014 Lead Nurturing Benchmarking Study, is available here from Demand Gen Report (DGR). About a third of the participants have used lead nurture campaigns for more than two years, and about the same amount started a year or less ago. Most (76%) describe their programs as different series of emails based on the actions/interests of the respondent. The least-popular type of program is a drip campaign, i.e., sending pre-set messages to an entire database over pre-determined periods of time. The findings clearly define the benefits of lead nurture campaigns:

• 73% Better response to campaigns/offers due to targeting/relevancy
• 61% Ability to segment prospects based on interests/behaviors
• 61% Generating more warm, sales-ready leads
• 46% Higher acceptance of leads from sales
• 31% Lower-cost for qualified leads

These gains don’t come without specific knowledge and capabilities, though. Developing targeted content is the No. 1 challenge (66%), followed by building the right timings/workflows for campaigns (45%); lack of insight into best practices on lean nurture frameworks (39%); a shortage of data on which leads to nurture (37%); and lack of support from sales teams in following up on nurtured leads (32%).

The top three tactics used are thought leadership (61%), webinars (54%) and research-based content. Whitepapers came in fourth at 50%. Interestingly, thought leadership, webinars and whitepapers are made more relevant with research, which buyers perceive as high-value when it provides new insight or answers questions they have. The survey didn’t include videos as a tactic, but other DGR research documents this as popular with buyers. The 2014 B2B Content Preferences Survey reports that 58% of marketers viewed videos during the past 12 months to research B2B purchasing decisions.

When it comes to channels used, marketers are sticking to traditional outreach for lead nurture campaigns, with 96% using email, and 49% using telemarketing. Retargeting (42%) and Web optimization/personalization (40%) are slightly less popular but still common. Only 20% use chat.

Most send out five or more touches using an every-other-week cadence, while 38% send three our four pieces, and 18% send two to three. Given this volume of touches, its clear a diverse library of content is needed to effectively engage busy buyers. A third of respondents use a weekly cadence to send touches.

These findings point back to a need to develop targeted content because format types vary by effectiveness at each buyer stage. Some are best used as early touches, while others are more effective in later stages.

I had four sales meetings in one day recently. At the end of the day, I spent some time reflecting on how — and why — my sales strategy has completely changed over time.

The traditional sales approach that that helped me succeed for years looked something like this:

• Focus on heavy outbound calls and emails. Attempt to reach hundreds of prospects every week (35 decision maker contacts was the weekly “activity minimum”). Try to earn at least 3 new meetings.
• Go to the meeting and give a 45-minute pitch about the value my company could offer. Spend the majority of my time selling why my stuff was better than the stuff they were using. Convince, push, persuade, close.
• Win the business.
• Transition the relationship to the service team. Get back to pounding the phone and pavement.
• Beat my performance targets. Celebrate. Start my January again at zero.

That strategy worked for years. Until suddenly, it didn’t. The world changed.

We’re now living in what Forrester calls “the age of the customer.” If you haven’t felt a seismic shift yet, it’s coming your way soon. Customers have the power, and sellers have a choice: Respond and evolve, or become increasingly invisible and irrelevant.

Fast forward five years. Here’s how I spend my time now.

• Spend time every single day actively building my brand online. Write blog posts about my experiences and my work. Contribute to conversations on social media. Research trends and best practices that affect my clients. Share interesting content with my network. Look for opportunities to connect people and make referrals.
• Set up meetings with clients and prospects who have found me through previous work, referrals, reputation and my online content. Some of them I know; some of them are brand-new contacts. Even the new contacts know a lot more about me. No one goes into meetings “cold” anymore. Every sales meeting I take now is a legitimate, qualified opportunity.
• Show up to meetings prepared. Invest time in reading, researching and educating myself about each prospect’s industry, business and related trends. Make every attempt to also know a little bit about everyone attending the meeting.
• At each meeting, have an open dialogue about the customer’s challenges and goals. Listen. Talk through ways we could solve problems. Mutually consider how we could potentially work together. Explore new ideas and unchartered territory. Make recommendations. Stay completely transparent about how (and if) I think I could contribute. Refer my competitors if I think they’d be a better fit. Land on plans and solutions.

No pressure. No presentations. No time spent validating who I am and what I can offer. Just transparent, collaborative conversations to arrive at the right business decisions.

Another big change: My days of responding to the RFP are over. RFPs definitely still exist in the world of speaking and training. But I’ve decided not to participate. I spend my time pursuing qualified opportunities that are the right fit for me and for my customers. I believe that focus has been a leading accelerator in my business’ growth.

My sales strategy has evolved to the point that I don’t spend time cold calling, or convincing, or pitching. I had to evolve. Those traditional techniques and tactics just aren’t effective ways to make sales anymore.

Instead, I get to focus on listening, learning, sharing, and helping shape decisions. It’s a completely different sales job, and for me, it’s one that leads to both a lot more opportunity and personal satisfaction.

Politicians, used car salesmen, cold callers. What do they all have in common?

Well, they’re the butt of lots of joke, and most people will do almost anything to avoid interacting with them. See, more often than not, the value they claim to deliver never comes to fruition—not the most inspiring of roles.

No little kid wants to grow up to be a cold caller, but it happens.

I started my business development career—later than most—at 27. After moving across the country, I took a job at a well-known tech startup in Boulder to develop my skills and become a selling machine. I learned to cold pitch and deliver qualified opportunities to my inside sales representatives.

The first 2 months felt disastrous. I was the worst performer on the team. But with leadership and coaching, I turned it around. In 6 months, I became leading performer and was promoted out of the role.

Then, the company couldn’t secure funding and restructured. I was one of many casualties.

Why Content Is a Cold Caller’s Best Buddy by @dacontentking

That’s when I followed a friend and leader to Kapost. I wasn’t looking forward to the grind I thought I’d left behind. Back to Sales Development Rep a.k.a. Cold Caller a.k.a. Scum of the Earth.

Do I believe in cold calling?

Yes, it works, but to be extremely successful you need to be able to establish rapport, deliver value, and close quickly.

In my past role (Business Development Rep), I smiled and dialed, pitching the same value prop to every prospect with little to no insight into their businesses—and I was great at it. But I wasn’t delivering any value, simply using their pain and lack of success then promising them the world, all this could be fixed by “speaking with a solutions expert” (a.k.a. a 30-minute demo). Even though I had the highest close rate on the team, my leads felt duped into taking the meeting.

In my current role I expected a deja vu, but we preach a different gospel here.

By focusing on content and using marketing automation, our marketing team transformed my sales role.

No longer would I be a cold caller. My focus wasn’t to trick someone into an appointment, instead to educate digital marketers about content marketing software, identify the value they gain from using our platform, and introduce them to an expert who can help guide a demonstration of our platform to determine if we can help.

Sales development no longer encompasses the profession that I am in. I am an educator that helps introduce new concepts to people who understand the impact that content has on their prospects and potential customers.

I am a content marketing analyst.

As a marketer, proving the impact of your campaigns through conversions and ROI is how you demonstrate your value to the company. It has always been important to measure the results of your marketing efforts, and professional marketers now rely more heavily on the technology that supplies this statistical evidence. There are many technologies that provide this data, and knowing which to use can make a big impact on where you choose to spend your marketing dollars. The following six technologies are those rated highest in our annual State of Marketing Measurement Survey:

• Web Analytics: Web analytic technologies, like Google’s Universal Analytics, are currently being used by 73% of marketers. Track visitors’ activity on your websites, as well as the referring source, and when they left. Web analytics tools are helping marketers to create a formidable online presence by optimizing the way consumers interact with their websites.

• SEO and PPC Tools: 63% of marketers are using SEO and PPC measurement tools in order to get the most out of their search engine presence. Technologies from companies like Kenshoo, Marin Software, and Acquisio help marketers to select the best keywords and optimize conversion and click-through rates for various search engines. If keyword-level advertising is part of your marketing mix, you don’t want to miss out on the benefits that come from this technology.

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Just over half (52%) of marketers are using CRM solutions such as Salesforce.com, to deliver insights on sales conversions. Being able to track a prospect all the way through the sales cycle can provide valuable insight. The more data you have on each lead as it progresses through the pipeline, the more impact the marketing team will be able to have on future leads. CRM technology provides both marketing and sales managers the tools to close more business.

• Call Tracking Solutions: Phone calls have surges in conjunction with the rise of mobile advertising. As a result, 38% of marketers are using call tracking technology from Ifbyphone to measure and optimize inbound phone leads. With phone leads being reported as your most valuable lead, you don’t want to miss out on the data that proves where your calls are coming from. Being able to determine where your inbound phone leads originate can make a huge difference in your marketing efforts.

• Mobile or Responsive Website: With the rise of mobile phones, 46% of marketers are turning to mobile web measurement tools to optimize their mobile efforts. Mobile is thriving right now due to the influx of smartphones. By 2017 it is estimated that 92% of all mobile phones will be smartphones. Marketers are beginning to realize this and have started to heavily incorporate mobile into their marketing mix. Measurement of this channel, using services such as Optimizely, is on the rise and is necessary to demonstrate the impact mobile has on your conversions and ROI.

• Marketing Automation: Only 33% of marketers are using this powerful technology, yet it provides some excellent data. When all marketing activities are flowing through a marketing automation platform, such as Act-On or HubSpot, this provides an abundance of data on the success of each marketing activity. Knowing where a lead originates and how they are interacting with your company can generate drastic improvements in your marketing efforts.

Proper use of all of these technologies can provide marketers with an abundance of data to demonstrate the effect your marketing campaigns have on conversions and ROI. When you have strong, data-driven marketing, it becomes difficult to argue against the value you provide.

You’re going to thank me for this . . . .

I’m going to show you how to exponentially multiply your visibility, leads, revenue and profit in your business using the Pareto principle: that 20% of your effort that leads to 80% of your results.

As a small business owner, you need to be ruthless with how you spend your time. The marketing efforts that aren’t not paying off — ditch them. In a moment I’m going to show you how to identify which marketing efforts are paying off and how to do more of them to grow your business.

Forget coaches who tell you how to get more time in your day and expensive consulting for someone to tell you how to grow the revenue in your business.

Today I’m going to show you how to do all of that yourself.

1. Identify Your Marketing Goals

Can you articulate the goals for your marketing? According to a recent survey of SMOC members, their top three business goals are:

1. Grow their business
2. Get more sales
3. Develop a personal brand

Awesome! Now, exactly what is your plan for doing that?

If you’re not sure HOW to achieve these goals, take a look at my three-part series on setting SMART Goals/Creating an Action Plan/Measuring Your Results. It walks you through every step of that process so you can turn your goals into actionable tasks you can measure to identify your progress.

First, you learn how to set SMART social media marketing goals for your business:

Second, you learn how to turn those goals into actionable tasks you can accomplish:

Third, you learn how to measure the results of your goals & action plan. This is the critical part of the process most people skip. Don’t miss this post:

If you can’t articulate what your goal is, your customers don’t know what you’re asking of them. Tie your marketing to your business goals using the three-part series.

2. Identify What’s Working Now

If you’re already doing social media marketing, do you know which of your marketing efforts is is generating the most business? Being able to look at all of your marketing efforts, from social media to content generation to advertising is neither simple nor easy. But it’s essential for you to prune the campaigns not paying off and double-down on those that are generating the most revenue.

If you don’t already have Google Analytics (GA) installed on your website, then do it now (or hire someone who can).

It’s easy to be overwhelmed with the amount of data GA throws at you. Don’t let that happen to you.

Also, you need to be able to read Facebook Insights and identify who your most profitable fans are. This post identifies how to use Insights to drill down to find where your results are in Facebook:

3. Automate Social Media Tasks Not Requiring Engagement

Social media marketing is an effective marketing tool, but it can be a huge time drain if you’re not savvy about how you spend your time. Not every administrative task requires your attention. Instead, identify what you can automate or delegate to a staff member.

The tasks I like to automate:

• posting to Pinterest – because it requires little engagement and we use the Pinvolve.co app to automate this process
• posting to multiple social networks — use Hootsuite to post once and have it go to all your social accounts
• creating a library of content — we create a content library by adding each social media post URL to a Google Spreadsheet file. We automate this task using IFTTT.com.
• repurposing content – my assistant creates our Weekly Top posts from the most recent lessons, blog posts, and forum Q&A here at SMOC
• automating blog post creation — be careful with this one. The only time I automate a blog post is when I upload a video to YouTube: I created a recipe in IFTT.com that creates a blog post draft automatically that contains the video. We then edit the blog post, add an awesome title, a transcript and time stamps. I do have social media services clients, however, for whom we’ve created an entire blog post automation process: these clients are working multiple jobs or on the road 50 weeks out of the year. Their staffs are overworked already and dread writing blog posts. So we created a process where they can automatically create blog posts generated by tasks they were doing already.
• create content in 10 minutes – yes, this is an authentic tactic I use. Not all the time, but when I’m pressed for time, this workflow saves the day. In fact, I created the framework for this blog post using my 10-minute tactic.

Before my current role as manager of editorial content, I was the senior reporter for MarketingSherpa. As such, I interviewed hundreds of great marketers and industry thought leaders for case studies and how-to articles. I’m still writing some case studies, but not nearly at the pace I did for over four years.

Because of that past, it is fun to have the tables turned on me, and a few weeks ago I agreed to be interviewed on the topic of marketing automation and small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

The interview covered a range of ideas within that topic area and I wanted to share some of my extended answers with the B2B Lead Roundtable Blog audience.

Why marketing automation software is relevant to SMBs

A major factor is how marketing automation can help optimize the SMB marketers time. The marketing department at an SMB is typically small just based on the size of the business, but at the same time the customer base – the database – can still be very large and automation software can help with activities such as lead nurturing.

If you think about an enterprise-level company, automation is almost a requirement to augment the CRM software. There’s just too many records in the database to handle this world of highly segmented and personalized marketing any other way.

For the SMB marketer, let’s say you have a one-person staff. I’ve spoken with many marketers doing great stuff with only one person. Maybe you have one, two, three people on your staff. You want to maximize their activities.

They are doing creative things instead of some of the grunt-work associated with handling email campaigns and the like. Automation does a lot of things under the hood that you just physically can’t do even if you wanted to.

How the disconnect between Sales and Marketing can be alleviated with technology

For this section, I’m going to reprint part of my original answer during the interview:

I think I’ll provide an interesting answer for you. The first part is Sales and Marketing alignment is a challenge. I’m hearing more success stories which is awesome. The technology is bringing people together because, if nothing else, Sales instead of getting more leads, they’re getting more qualified leads. Technology helps out on that end.

I think Sales and Marketing should be in alignment anywhere. Every time they’re in a silo, it never helps the company for those two pieces to be adversarial or siloed at all. If they’re working together, it’s always going to be better.

The change is, if anybody’s been reading a lot of industry stuff is the CMO is taking over the CIO and CTO, in the C-suite. Very interesting.

If you think back six or seven years ago, if you told the CMO they were actually going to have a seat at the table and not be the voodoo doll at the end of the table that it was a black hole for the budget and no one paid attention to, they would laugh at you.

Now, because of all the technology and different pieces, and the fact that they’re buying this technology and they’re handling this technology, and the data that’s coming in — now marketing activities are no longer a black hole. Now they’re trackable. Now there’s ROI that can be attached to it. Now all of the sudden, CMOs are surpassing and taking over the role of the CIO because they’re buying the technology and telling the CIO, now you make this work for me.

I think the actual alignment issue now is between marketing and the IT department. I would like to Marketing and Sales as a team become aligned with the IT department, but given where we are, and just the direction things are going, if you look at various pieces of research of some of the bigger research firms, that’s the direction that things are going.

I read articles every single day about the CMO and the CIO need to get together. They’re not getting together because of this.

I think the bigger challenge now is for Marketing and IT to be in alignment, and obviously technology is that piece there. I think technology helps get Marketing and Sales in alignment, but technology is the reason that marketing and IT have to get into alignment. If they don’t, it just makes things a lot harder for everybody.

Creating a culture that allows for marketing automation implementation at an SMB

This goes back to some of that Marketing-IT alignment.

Within marketing, the case for implementing automation should be fairly obvious – “This is going to make our world easier. We’re going to have to learn how to use it. We’ve got an initial training going on, but in the long term, it’s going to make our lives easier.”

Automation is going to allow the team to track its activities, and hopefully begin handing Sales a higher quality of lead, rather than a higher quantity of leads. The internal sales job to Sales should be just as easy with the quality of leads argument in place.

When getting buy-in from the company C-suite or leadership, the IT department can be your worst enemy or your best friend. By fostering an aligned relationship with them, they can advocate the that internal sell.

You want them to be part of this process, one, because they’ve written those contracts. They’re going to see the pitfalls before the marketer does. They know this is a really nice SLA on this contract. The agreement looks good, but IT will see a loophole that might not be obvious to a marketer. IT will know if the new tech piece will actually integrate with the current set of systems already in place.

I think having IT on board with an automation implementation gives a lot of credibility across the board when creating a culture from leadership down to the sales team.

You might also like

Industry Insights with David Kirkpatrick [Original interview from the SalesFusion blog]

Marketing Automation: 200% increase in lead volume [MarketingSherpa webinar replay]

Lead Generation: Revamped marketing automation and CRM technology drives 75% more leads [MarketingSherpa case study]

B2B Marketing: 7 tactics for implementing marketing automation from a fellow brand-side marketer [More from the blogs]

7 ideas for exhibitors showing how you can integrate content marketing into your next event

Every B2B marketer is familiar with the lead generation and branding benefits of trade shows made possible by the highly focused audience of potential customers to the brand recognition you get from having hundreds, or with the right location, thousands of people view your display. Likewise consumer events can give similar benefits.

With the increasing interest in content marketing over the last few years, I'm surprised that fewer marketers seem to be familiar with is the potential to create amazing online content from your trade show experience. From answers to questions to interviews with industry insiders, trade shows are great opportunities to create stellar content or integrate existing content assets.

In this guide, we’ll share seven creative content ideas that you can put into action at the next trade show you attend. From time-lapse videos to summaries of the event’s top presentations, read on to learn how to turn your next trade show into content.

Idea 1. Answer people’s biggest questions and pain points

What are the biggest problems people in your industry face? What are the biggest questions they want answered? Trade shows are great opportunities to interview your customers face to face and learn about what they’re interested in.

Instead of just thinking of a trade show as an opportunity to sell to your audience, think of it as an opportunity to learn from them. When someone from your target audience visits your booth, ask how you can inform them of your company.

Based on our own experience of working with exhibitors, Display Wizard found that too many businesses weren't managing the trade show process properly and ROI was suffering as a result. To help us connect with our audience, we produced our guide to exhibiting at a trade show to help them with this specific pain point.

Successful trade shows can generate hundreds of leads, but they can also generate hundreds of great content ideas in the form of questions to answer and problems to solve in your next set of company blog posts.

Idea 2. Interview top customers and industry insiders

Are you exhibiting at an ultra-popular trade show? If your event attracts an A-list audience – or, alternatively, if it attracts people who are very popular within your industry – it’s a great opportunity to reach out and connect with them.

Interviews with experts are great traffic magnets, and speaking to the right person – even if it’s just for a few minutes – can result in tens of thousands of highly targeted visits to your company website once the video goes online.

Download Expert Memeber resource – Event Marketing Guide

Whatever your business goals, live events can help you achieve them. This guide will give you the strategic advice you need to run successful events.

Access the Event Marketing Guide

Reach out to industry insiders and thought leaders prior to the event – to arrange a meeting - influencer marketing could be far easier than you think . While you’ll never have a 100% success rate, a single interview with the right person is often all it takes to create killer content for your website.

Idea 3. Tell the event’s story by embedding tweets in a post

It’s no secret that attendees tweet during trade shows. In fact, during certain events, people tweet like crazy. Apple’s iconic keynotes are infamous for their side effects: a temporary overload of mobile service caused by so much concentrated tweeting.

Capitalise on the huge amount of social updates that step from trade shows by using them to build a timeline of the event on your website. Once the show is over, you can publish a play-by-play summary of the day, complete with real tweets from visitors.

It’s easy to embed tweets in your blog post - see this Twitter guide. You can even embed Instagram photos to give your event summary a more visually appealing look. Curating other people’s content lets you provide total coverage of the event that’s sure to attract attention.

Idea 4. Publish summaries of the event’s best presentations

There’s more to most trade shows than just the sales floor. From masterminds to presentations, popular trade shows typically feature several guest speakers, group discussions and industry-related shows.

Once the show is over, people are still going to want to learn about what’s going on in your industry. By publishing summaries of the best presentations, you can turn your website into an authoritative, informational resource on industry trends.

Before you exhibit at any trade show, take a look at the presentations and speakers list. If there’s someone (or a group of people) who matches your brand’s values and field of interest, summarise the key points of their presentation in your content.

Idea 5. Post live updates of the trade show to your website

Does your company use Twitter? If so, you have a fantastic opportunity to keep both attendees and non-attendees up to date with what’s going on at your trade show via live tweets.

Whether you’re watching a presentation or interacting with a cool digital display, let people know about the coolest and most helpful presentations, displays and brands at your trade show via Twitter.

Live tweeting not only gives you the chance to build web content in the form of an event timeline after the event – it also gives you the chance to gain followers in the form of people attending the trade show or interested in your industry.

Idea 6. Create a video of the event for attendees to share

Online content doesn’t have to be in text form. Trade shows are great places to film videos for your company. From event summaries to interviews with experts in your industry, the right video can become powerful authority content after the event.

Instead of interviewing customers and industry experts and writing their comments down for a future blog post, do a quick and simple video interview with a variety of attendees. This way, you can make a “Best of Event” video for your website.

Summary videos for popular events receive a huge amount of traffic, often directly from YouTube searches. As well as funnelling traffic to your company website, they can be fantastic tools for building your YouTube subscriber base.

Idea 7. ‘Recruit’ guest bloggers for your company website

Who says you need to create all of your own content? Trade shows are hotspots for experts in your industry, and if you’re an established brand, there’s a great chance that these experts would love to contribute to your company blog.

As well as generating sales leads, focus on generating blogging leads at your next trade show. When someone visits your booth, ask if they blog. If they say they do, ask if they would be interested in contributing to your company’s website.

Everyone wants to spread their message, and the people you meet at trade shows often have a very engaging, helpful message to spread. If your blog is already fairly established, you could find your next standout guest contributor at a trade show.

Have you ever used a trade show to create or integrate content?

From blog posts to videos, trade shows are wonderful opportunities to showcase the latest trends and developments in your industry. Have you ever used a trade show to create content? If so, please share the strategies you used.

Thanks to Peter Symonds for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Peter Symonds is a trade show marketing expert from Display Wizard. For more practical tips on how to increase the ROI of your trade show marketing, download the Display Wizard Guide to Exhibiting at a Trade. Show You can connect on Google+

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Customer data and management is an important aspect of any online business. Obtaining a customer insight is crucial to business marketers and the majority of big enterprises are using big data for their business in today’s online marketing industry. IT executives harness the competence of their businesses to deliver high quality customer experience using big data.

About 78% of online marketers are using big data to grow their customer database especially to help them understand the latest marketing trends that keep their products and services relevant to their potential leads and to achieve customer retention and loyalty. A survey on different enterprises revealed that more than 50% of the respondents view big data analytics as an important marketing strategy priority of their company in the next three years.

Big data for better customer experience

Small to big enterprises acknowledge the challenge of using big data into more actionable insights in crafting a better customer experience. Obtaining data through analytics may come easy but putting the data gathered into work for your business takes the most challenging aspect of your marketing campaigns. Using data as actionable customer intelligence can empower your business by being able to deliver what your customers need, want and expect from your business.

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The big data obtained from analytics may come be raw and needs further extractions in order to apply them into actionable business intelligence that will empower your business marketing strategies of engaging your customer’s retention of interest by delivering them their expectations and needs from your business. Big data analytics will involve the process of data mining and transforming abstract data into more usable data as part of your acquired customer intelligence.

Empowering your business using a big data driven customer services

Technology offers online marketers the comfort of making it easier for them to extract big data using analytics tools. Combining big data analytics with search engine optimization to promote the search rank of your business can easily make your business more accessible to your potential customers. The greater challenge now is how to develop your digital marketing structure in such as way that you can deliver better customer experience.

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Here are some useful big data marketing strategies that your company may pursue to promote better customer experience:

1. Tune up your big data using analytic tools

Your years of being in business already provided you with data that you can use to start understanding your customer behaviour and preferences but you can appreciate them better using analytic tools. The tools can help optimize the quality of data to use for better understanding of customer behavior and response to your business. Making your business highly responsive to your customer’s needs entail real time data analytics and management. By acquiring the following aggregate customer data will help you optimize your ability to make your online marketing strategies more responsive in real time:

• Customer geographical data

Using the customer geographical data will enable you to consolidate your target marketing sales by regions and according to your customers’ cultural background. You can view your customer’s physical location and track down data that can influence their buying behaviour and preferences about products based on their geographical background. Interpreting the data will help you target specific marketing strategy on how to deliver better customer experience by satisfying their geographical needs and circumstances.

• Customer interaction behaviour

This data can provide an insight on how your customer interacts with your products. You can view the number of clicks on specific web page elements of your website where your customers tend to engage better. Use this data in order make your business deliver better customer navigational experience on your web page design for instance.

• Transactional behaviour

You can build your business to become customer centric by assessing its ability to provide an engaging transactional behaviour from your customers. Is your web design engaging enough to your customers? Perhaps your web page element may be loading too long causing your customers to leave your website. Perhaps your shopping cart isn’t convenient to use which prevent the completion of your customer order to finish the check out process.

• Recency of customer visits

The analytic tool will give you insights about the number of times your customer visits your web page or specific product pages on your site. You can gauge from this data how you are able to provide your customers a satisfying experience when visiting your site that gives them good reasons for a repeated visit.

• Customer social attributes

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The social attributes of your customers is important if you want to deliver them highly satisfying experience for your business. Big data can give valuable information regarding the social interactions of your customers and what their shopping preferences are and the kind of products that they regularly need. Social media users like to share or tweet their own personal comments and ideas from which you can track down and highlight those that you can use to help you improve your business services to provide them an excellent customer experience when using your products or services.

• Lead conversion for every product and category of interests

Just as you want to make profits to your business, using big data to develop a customer-focused marketing strategy will require the integration of big data to your lead generation strategies. By covering the tracks of your visitor’s interaction to your product category is a great way to pulse their interest about a particular product and review their engagements to it such as reviewing the length of their stay to a particular product page category, their clicks and other navigational activities that will indicate their interests. By pursuing to offer products that are within the areas of interest of your target leads it is easier to convince them to convert.

2. Big data management and organization

Big data can be overwhelming making it crucial for your organization to learn how to manage them and apply a good concept on how to understand its significance in delivering your customers better services and satisfaction.

• Align your big data gathering to your marketing goals to implement initiatives directed towards a particular marketing strategy such as aiming for the acquisition of new customers, improving customer loyalty, increasing conversion rates and building the lifetime customer value of your business. This will keep you focused on which data to use that will be relevant to a particular marketing goal that you want to achieve for your business.
• If your organization is big, it is essential to sell the concept of the customer service value of your business to your team to foster an environment where each member is focused in extracting data that will be relevant to your marketing goals of improving customer experience to your business.
• As your business grows, the big data acquired also grows and to be effective in managing big data you will need a team of experts to help interpret and undertake a more efficient big data analysis. This may include a team of It experts, web developers, search engine optimization professionals and online marketing strategists.

Digital Warriors has a team of experts to help digital marketers to strengthen their marketing campaigns with more customer-focused strategies that will give their business more value by delivering customers a superior customer experience and services.

Learn more about the big data trend and its significance to your business. Get the free Big Data eBook here: http://www.digital-warriors.com/big-data-marketing-analytics/

So here’s the deal, you may either be considering hiring a marketing agency or have already done so.  There is plenty critical information about your company the marketing agency should be aware of before they start going to work.  Here at SmartBug Media we gather all this information during the discovery phase of the program.  We have multiple conference calls with all the key stakeholders and experts at a company.  Questions are asked about the company, the products, your history of marketing programs, etc… But there are some critical items I’m going to talk further about that are key for your marketing agency to know.

Personas

Personas are fictional representations of your different buyers.  Companies often have different types of people who would purchase their product or service and it’s important for the marketing agency to know who these people are.  For example, let’s pretend we are a company that sells lawn mowers.  I can already think of a couple different types of people who would buy a lawn mower.  One would be a middle-class man who lives in the suburbs.  He’s on the market for a new lawn mower to make his grass greener than the neighbors.

Another persona could be an owner of the lawn service company.  His needs for the product are somewhat different than that of the middle-class man.  So why does this matter?  How does identifying these different people help a marketing agency?  Well the marketing agency will be developing content for you.  That may come in the form of blogs, white papers, case studies, etc…  It’s critical for them to know who they are writing to.  Blogs can be structured and written different for different personas.

Sales Cycle

In relation to identifying all the different personas, the marketing agency should understand your sales cycle.  Make sure your sales team and agency iron out the whole process.  The cycles could be different for each persona or for each product.  Having an understanding of this cycle will give the agency more vision into the content being created.  The agency may deliver a good amount of top-of-the funnel leads, but guiding those leads through the sales cycle is where the ROI is seen.

Goals for Marketing and Sales

This certainly isn’t the last thing an agency should know about your company but a critial one as they plan out a marketing campaign.  What’s the company trying to accomplish this quarter, year, three years from now?  Is it to drive more traffic to the site?  If so, how much?  Maybe it’s to fill up the sales funnel with leads.  If so, how many?  It could be to close a certain amount of revenue by the end of the second quarter?  The more communication with and agency the more goals will align and goals will be met.

What’s one important piece of information a marketing agency should know about your company?  What makes you so special?

SPONSORED POST

This sponsored post is produced by Localytics.

As much as marketers may wish otherwise, mobile and web have some important differences that come into play when you start analyzing user data. Simply put, the rise of mobile app usage has led to an overhaul in the traditional metrics marketers measure. So while the rules for engagement have been thoroughly defined for the web world, that criterion doesn’t directly translate to the mobile world.

One similarity, however, is the importance of conversions on both the web and in apps. In web marketing, a conversion typically means getting a lead to self-identify on a conversion event, and to then move him through a funnel from lead, to sales qualified lead, to an eventual purchase. In app marketing, conversions are more about moving the user through the app to one “ultimate” in-app action.

What does this mean, exactly? Here are three things you need to know when comparing web and app conversions, and what each means for your marketing.                                                         

ONE

Web conversion is based on accessing an offer

When we think of inbound marketing today, typically a conversion is considered to take place when a visitor fills out a form to access some kind of offer such as downloading an eBook, registering for a webinar, signing up for an event, or entering their information for a contest. The first conversion is about gaining that prospects’ information and creating a lead. Many marketers today concentrate their efforts on creating attractive offers that will motivate a visitor to give up that information.

App conversion is based on completing an event

App conversions are defined by when a user completes an event in-app. No information is shared; just an event— or action— is completed such as adding items to a cart, clicking on an ad, reading an article, inviting a friend, playing a game, or viewing a video.  The events are determined by your goals, and depending on your app type, you can have a number of important conversion events. In-app, marketers want to concentrate on identifying key events and improving the number of conversions on each.

TWO

Web conversions further qualify a lead

Once a web lead has converted, the job is on the marketer to provide additional educational or product-related information and further qualify and nurture him through the inbound funnel. The goal is to create a quality relationship built on value, resources, and knowledge that results in a sale that’s beneficial to both brand and customer. In this sense, web conversions start at the point of finding and identifying a potential customer and evolving that relationship into an educated partnership.

App conversions move a user through a defined path

However, because app conversions are based on in-app events, the goal is instead to move a user through a defined path. That path is your funnel, and each event in it is a separate conversion. Take for example the common eCommerce funnel: the purchasing process. In these purchase conversion steps, a user is viewing shopping categories, getting to search results, then looking at items, adding them to their cart, entering the address and credit card information, confirmation, and/or actually checking out. Instead of working to move a lead through the inbound funnel, mobile marketers need to optimize the flow of this in-app funnel, and move a user from step to step — without dropping out, which happens frequently between the “added item to cart” and “completed checkout” conversion events.

THREE

Web conversions rely on email marketing

A key tactic in inbound marketing nurturing is using automated email marketing to send new and relevant information to your leads. Using emails, you can send different content at different points along the prospect’s journey according to what they’ll find most useful, when. Email marketing allows inbound marketers to construct a flow of information that better informs your lead, offering the kind of content they’re looking for at that moment.

App conversions rely on push and in-app messaging

App conversions rely on similar tactics: push and in-app messaging. No matter how well-designed or optimized your funnel is, there’s still a significant chance that a large percentage of users will drop off between events instead of converting. To keep users converting, mobile marketers use targeted (and automated) messaging campaigns.

Push messages can re-engage users who have fallen out of a funnel and exited the app completely, using timely reminders or even special discounts (Example: “Wait! You left something in your cart — check out now and receive free shipping”). In-app messaging can also target users who have left the funnel but are viewing other screens in your app (Example: “New stories every day. Articles that matter. Subscribe now and get your first week free”).

Learn more about effective push and in-app messaging. Download Localytic’s ebook: How to Create Truly Awesome In-app and Push Messaging Content

Put your inbound foot forward

While the two channels are distinct, when it comes to app marketing, there’s a lot that can be borrowed from inbound marketing. Treating web and app users with respect and optimizing for conversions by bettering their experience is the key to creating long-lasting relationships. For more on how to take inbound marketing lessons and transition them to creating an engaging app, read our latest blog post.

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An effective lead generation strategy is essential for growing your business. If you aren’t measuring and optimizing inbound lead gen strategies, you may be wasting valuable resources. Ensure your lead generation is on the right track by tracking these 8 key lead metrics.

1. Total Number of Inquiries

Start with an easy one: How many site visits and content downloads does your team generate a month? A quarter? A year? This number helps measure the effectiveness of your team’s marketing initiatives.

2. Leads Per Channel

OK. So you now know how many inquiries you’ve generated, but where are they coming from? Events? White papers? Social media? Utilizing this data is crucial when deciding where to focus your marketing efforts in the future.

3. Spend Per Channel

Once you break down where your leads are coming from; relay that information to the rest of your marketing team so that they can adjust focus.  If those banner ads your team purchased aren’t generating any inquiries to your site’s landing pages, it’s time to consider a different approach.  By addressing what’s been working and what hasn’t, you’ll save your team a considerable amount of time and money while generating more leads in the process.

4. Number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

There are good leads, and there are bad leads, and it’s the marketer’s job to identify and separate the two. MQLs are leads that are ready to be engaged by sales; however, it is important to be able to measure a lead’s quality quickly to tee up sales reps with the freshest and most qualified opportunities.

5. Ratio of Inquiry to MQL

It’s easy to get excited when there’s a traffic spike in landing pages, but where’s the value if the majority of visitors don’t fit a customer persona? Get your content in front of the right people. It’s imperative to generating strong MQLs. Determine the ratio of total MQLs divided by total number of Inquiries. Use this formula to derive a working figure:

Total MQLs
Total Inquiries

6. Cost Per MQL

Unless you work for Apple or Google, your company’s marketing team has limited resources.  The goal here is to strive toward achieving maximum results in lead gen while minimizing cost per MQL.

7. Ratio of MQL to SAL (Sales Accepted Leads)

Of the leads that you qualified, how many have been accepted by sales? Sales are not burdened by lead qualification, but rather lead verification.  Thus, it is vital to do as much research as you can on an MQL to ensure that your busy sales team doesn’t allocate too much of its time to leads who aren’t qualified (i.e., no buying power or no influence).

8. Total Number of Sales Qualified Leads

If you get to this point, the lead is validated as an opportunity and enters the pipeline.  A favorite metric, it very clearly demonstrates the overall effectiveness of the marketing team as well as the synergy between marketing and sales.

All companies are different, and there is not a one size fits all customer acquisition program that works for everyone. Therefore, it is up to the marketer to decide what lead gen initiatives will work best for their company, and track metrics based off of that plan. While this is not a comprehensive list of metrics, these 8 high-level metrics are a great place to start.

In her recent study on video marketing, the Aberdeen Group’s Chief Content Officer, Maribeth Ross uncovered a few interesting correlations between adopting video for content marketing, and improved overall performance. Now, it’s a rare thing to have a single tactic deliver such transformative results. What’s more, it’s extremely ill-advised to rely on technology without having the right people and processes in place first, but interestingly enough, video adoption actually forces the issue of establishing a firm, effective marketing foundation. Specifically, below are three aspects of your marketing activities that must improve (by design) as you develop your video marketing capabilities:

Tracking Content Performance:

You can’t improve what you can’t measure, and fundamentally, as a format, video drives you to think about content measurement more strategically. Should you be tracking views alone? How does that translate to value for the business? What about video engagement – how long are people watching, is the content being shared, should there be room for comments, are the Calls to Action driving conversions? In video, nearly all the metrics you could think of that can be critical for tracking content performance come to a head. This is why the video marketing research shows that users of video in content marketing have a 129% higher reported capacity for being able to track how specific content performs (64% vs 28%). Because video can be – and often is – easily shared across multiple channels, it also forces marketers to have multi-channel tracking capabilities in place – which the research reflects with 43% of video users reporting an ability to capture content metrics across all channels, vs only 16% of non-video users.

• The Change Factor: Video forces you understand why content assets matter to your business, how to measure them, and what to do with that data.

The Content You Can and Should Create:

According to a report from Kapost, “32% of B2B marketers are challenged with finding trained content marketing professionals.” You’d assume that adding video to the content marketing equation would only exacerbate this issue. Interestingly enough, however, Aberdeen’s research shows that 83% of leading companies report the ability to generate original video content internally, and 73% of companies who do develop original videos rate their execution as effective or very effective (4 or 5 on a 1 to 5 scale). In other words, leading companies aren’t asking “why” video, and stopping there; they’re asking “how” and finding a way with the people and resources they have in-house. What video adoption does, in this case, is to force marketers to think about what matters to their audience in terms of their content mix, and ensure that they can deliver in that format.

• The Change Factor: Adopting video makes you question what you can and can’t do in terms of content, while also aligning what you can do to the needs and interests of your audience. This kind of customer-centric approach often yields a distinct competitive advantage.

Lead Management:

How many times have you had Sales ask you for more leads? At times, it may almost seem like a chanted mantra to appease the business gods – “ooom, more leads please… ooom, more leads please…” but more leads, alone, isn’t what Sales really wants. What Sales is actually asking for, and what video measurably delivers, is a flow of leads with a higher likelihood to convert. In fact, Maribeth’s report shows that those who adopt video content report conversion rates that are 65% higher, on average, than those who do not (4.8% vs 2.9%). This kind of effectiveness not only delivers better results outright, it also shines a light on what effective lead management can be. When better leads with a higher likelihood to convert significantly trump the old “more lead” mantra, marketers often start considering what other tweaks can be made to their lead management funnel to achieve even more efficiency. Thus, a cycle of continuous lead management improvement begins.

• The Change Factor: Video counters the “more leads” business imperative by delivering better leads with a higher likelihood of conversion, thereby triggering an efficiency-oriented focus toward lead management.

Again, let me stress that adopting video isn’t a silver bullet marketing tactic to solve all your marketing challenges at once. If anything, the structural changes necessary for adopting video highlight how important it is to work on continuing to improve the people, processes and technologies you have in house. What it important in closing, though, is to see how interconnected content can be within your business operations, from tracking and reporting to lead management, content marketing practices like using video often span across multiple departments and initiatives.

For more information on video for content marketing, download the free report: The Impact of Video on the Hidden Sales Cycle.

Black Friday gold prices

Black Friday has long been the kick-off of the holiday shopping season, a day famous (and infamous) for big advertising pushes, big crowds, and – fingers crossed – big revenues for retailers.

Here are the U.S. numbers from Black Friday 2013, as reported by statisticbrain.com:

• $57 billion: Total spent
• 307 million: Average number of consumers shopping (in stores or online)
• $213: Average consumer spending in bricks-and-mortar stores
• $194: Average consumer spending online
• 23%: Retail shoppers who camped out at a store (arriving before midnight)

But what if you’re not a retailer?

Is there a B2B Black Friday equivalent? More to the point, can B2Bs get in on the shopping-frenzy action and gain some top line love?

The consensus is a resounding “yes.” And although the revenue lift may not be as spectacular as what B2C’ers experience, the bright side is that you’ll likely not have any newsworthy, caught-on-camera fistfights breaking out in the aisles.

So although B2Bs generally can’t compete with door-buster deals and midnight store openings, you can definitely reap the benefits of Black Friday … and Cyber Monday, for that matter. Here are some strategies and tips to make it happen.

4 Strategies that Make It Easy for Businesses to Spend Money with You

• Make the most of use-it-or-lose-it budgets. For most organizations, there’s no such thing as “rollover budgets”; that is, if allocated dollars aren’t spent by the end of the year (or the quarter), they’re generally gone. Take advantage of this by promoting your products and services at a range of price points that meet the budgets of your target business customers. BUT …

• Know your customers’ budgetary cycle. Not all businesses have fiscal years that align with the calendar. So it’s wise to know when your customers are keenest to spend, either in general or due to leftover budgets that are on the chopping block if unused. This is not necessarily tied to Black Friday, but it’s a best practice at any time.

• Tailor your products and services to your customer’s needs. Sounds pretty obvious, particularly since we’re so used to retailers targeting and retargeting us based on our search patterns and purchase histories. B2Bs need to take a page from the retailer’s playbook and analyze what their customers want, why they want it, and when they want it. Tailor product and service offerings, pricing, and promotions to meet these needs and you’ll likely increase your sales.

• Address the need to invest, and communicate it repeatedly. According to research consultancy Chadwick Martin Bailey, businesses (just like consumers) are always interested in making life better; e.g., through new technologies or fashions. So just as retailers promote the latest tablets and gaming systems to bring joy to consumers, B2Bs can promote products and services that will “bring joy” to their business customers in the form of new opportunities to grow and advance their businesses. In a B2B sale, personal value has twice the impact of business value in closing the sale, says Executiveboard.com.

3 Tips to Break Through the Clutter

• Send emails over Thanksgiving weekend. Biz Dev expert Matt Heinz has often referenced studies that show most people check their work email over the holidays. While it’s true that Cyber Monday has increased the volume of emails hitting the Thanksgiving airwaves, planning email campaigns right before and on Thanksgiving is still a viable tactic for B2Bs to increase leads, particularly at the top of the funnel. For example, business customers who seek a bit of peace from family activities may be quite interested in signing up for a future webinar or downloading a case study.

• Optimize your landing pages. According to SiriusDecisions, 80% of B2B buyers conduct their own research online before ever engaging with a seller. That means they’re trawling your website and viewing your content to figure out if you can deliver what they want and need. After employing some of the above strategies, be sure your landing pages are designed to capture your target’s attention and convince them to spend money with you. For example:
  • Create “business guides” – landing pages that showcase your products and services based on specific business challenges.
  • Practice good search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to help your pages get found by prospective business buyers. Our eBook, SEO 101: The Basics and Beyond, shows you how.
  • Make your site (and your emails) responsive to ensure they render well on any device and screen size. Why? According to Google, 75% of users prefer mobile-friendly websites, and EmailClientMarketShare.com says 43% of email opens are on mobile devices. For B2Bs this may be a stretch goal, but it’s becoming increasingly important. (If you’re an Act-On customer, you can get to the finish line quicker with our responsive template designs.)

• Mix up your promotions. Just like your retailer counterparts, putting a twist on your marketing mix can help you generate traffic, both foot and cyber. Here are some ideas:
  • Extend sales and/or warranties. Add a bit of urgency to grab attention and leverage some psychology (e.g., “Another 23 hours and 56 minutes to save!”)
  • Join forces with partners and associates – aka “if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” Cross-promote complementary products and services (e.g., salesman tablets and ERP system integration, or plumbing fixtures and custom tile). Like each other’s Facebook page to help build strong connections between your respective businesses and fans, thereby widening your potential audience.
  • Create and heavily promote deals that only come around at the end of the year. For example, Laurentian Bank of Canada offers new investors a 3-day opportunity (every Nov 29 – Dec 2) to take advantage of its most flexible terms. The bank hasn’t published how many new customers this rakes in, but I’d bet one whole Canadian dollar that it’s a bunch.

What about Cyber Monday?

According to comScore, Cyber Monday 2013 was the heaviest U.S. online spending day in history with consumers spending $1.7 million clams. (That’s 18% more than in 2012.)

So yes, B2Bs should absolutely grab onto the coat tails of Cyber Monday just as they do for Black Friday, because the two shopping days (three if you include Small Business Saturday) are bleeding into each other.

It was bound to happen, right? B2C and B2B customers now seamlessly engage with physical and digital shopping experiences – online campaigns are being used to drive bricks-and-mortar visits and in-store promotions are being used to drive online purchases. And remember this: retail consumers are also business owners and business buyers.

Since approximately half of all Cyber Monday purchases are made at work, why not get your B2B products in front of your business customers … who are online right now searching for – and receptive to – deals?

I can’t think of one good reason not to.

“Black Friday gold prices” image from Library of Congress. “Cyber Monday” image by Kevin Marks, used under a Creative Commons license.

Some people believe that there should only be one kind of sales rep. While this kind of view has its perks, it can be a bit unrealistic for other organizations.

It’s like you’re one of those medieval fantasy guilds and there’s an adage going around saying there’s only one good type of adventurer. If that were true though, you’d think your sales leads would be like the same kind of quest on the quest board.

To be fair though, sticking to only one kind of sales rep (and consequently one kind of sales lead) means you’d rather be consistent and specialized. It might mean you’ll have to ignore a lot leads that don’t meet up to your standards (much like hiring reps) but the close rate could be worth it.

It’s just that other organizations may have already diversified their target market (or alternatively, their sales employees). If you’re one such organization, it could mean a very drastic overhaul that could prove more bad than good.

The good news is that plenty of experts are well aware of the situation and understand that things are no longer so simple.

More than that though, there are also perks to generating a diverse set of sales leads and having different sales reps to handle them. Using the quest board analogy, it’s like opening your guild to taking up a bigger variety of tasks than just a particular specialty:

• Not all quests require combat – In fantasy, not all quests involve some kind of typical skirmish. Sometimes they require strong negotiation skills, political savvy, and giving the right response. It’s kind of like saying not all sales leads will require force of personality to close.

• Of course, some will always do – The other side of the coin though is still open to you. There will always be prospects who’ll need an emotional stuff to get them going through the funnel. There’s nothing wrong with this but it does require you to think beyond the facts.

• A few more might be very special – Sometimes it might even involve something that’s a mix of both or something entirely different. You never know if a sales lead will even require a sales rep that’s good at giving an odd spin on your offer.

Again, specialization has its perks. But for older organizations, they might be long past the time they can sustain purely on a single type of sales lead and sales rep. Don’t be ashamed when your own corporate quest board is filling up with far more different sales leads.

If you drive the winding roads of the Sierra foothills and look for one of the many streams, you can still spot modern-day 49ers prospecting for gold. Decked out in thigh-high waders, these miners dig up vast quantities of sediment from the riverbed and use pans to painstakingly strain the sand and gravel in their search for gleaming grains.

Lead-generation professionals are post-modern miners. Rather than splashing through cold mountain streams, they sift through thousands of names in a database in their never-ending search for prized customers.

But not all miners or lead-generation professionals are created equal. Superior knowledge of geology, topology, and good old tricks-of-the-trade can mean the difference between ending your day with a shiny nugget—or a few sparkling specs floating in a vial of water.

As I interviewed marketers about their lead- and demand-gen efforts and successes, I asked them to describe their own hard-won lessons learned. Here’s what I found.

1. Understand Your Audience

All marketing campaigns start with understanding your audience. “With endless money, you can do everything,” said Victoria Grey, Chief Marketing Officer of Gridstore. “But if you don’t have that, you need to be targeted and understand your audience, how to reach them, and why they’d respond to you.”

2. Expand Your Audience

While you may think your decision maker is obvious, there can be more to your audience than meets the eye. For example, if that decision maker relies exclusively on a gatekeeper or influencer and your marketing neglects that person, you could be out of luck.

“Don’t be afraid to think outside the box,” advised Kieran Taylor, Chief Marketing Officer of Blucarat. “We really believe that developing and testing multiple user personas is key. We’ve found that it’s useful to think beyond the decision maker to see who else we can activate to see our message. This is one way to avoid clutter and competition and ultimately get your message seeded within the company.”

3. Build Your Campaigns Around Useful Content

“I’m a believer in useful content,” said Frank Barry, Director of Digital Marketing at Blackbaud. “We try to understand our buyers and personas and create content that’s extremely interesting for them to consume. To determine what’s interesting, we talk to current customers and sales reps. We write about interesting events. We read news and see what’s going on in social. We have a blog and publish to see what’s shared or viewed the most.”

4. Be a Contrarian: Go Where Your Competitors Aren’t

Marketing channels are incredibly crowded so it’s important to be strategic about which ones you choose. Kitty Franklin, a marketing consultant based in Southern California, recommends, “When you’re looking at allocating marketing spend, figure out where your competitors are spending. Instead of going toe-to-toe, see where they’re underinvesting so you can capitalize on that.”

5. Measure Results that Matter

When you’re dealing with online marketing, you have a wide choice of metrics to choose from. But it pays to make sure you measure the metrics that really matter for your business. “Eyeballs and clickthroughs are a mere stopping point, not an end point,” said Grey. “I care about opportunities and the associated pipeline. Real deals. In fact, when I set goals, I set my Q4 lead-gen goals based on the salesforce’s Q1 revenue targets. My job is to build a pipeline for sales so they have the right number of leads to meet their goals.”

6. Keep Trying and Keep Testing

Today’s market is constantly evolving. Just when you get one tactic to work, the market veers in a whole other direction. To respond, smart marketers exist in a state of perpetual experimentation.

“You need to keep trying things,” said Maia Tihista, Vice President of Global Marketing for Flexera Software. “We have a good marketing-analytics tool. We keep trying tactics to see which ones have better open rates and which are generating pipeline and bookings. We keep looking at those numbers and making adjustments. We do this for each of our product lines. For example, we know that one of our solutions has a long buying process and buyers need to consume technical content. In that case, white papers work better. In another area, pay-per-click was working so we invested more in that area.”

Overall, said Tihista, “We develop something and test. It’s an ongoing cycle.”

7. Make the Most of Your Marketing

Any company, particularly a small company, needs to squeeze the most out of everything they do. For example, when Lisa Snyders, Senior Manager of Marketing, Denodo Technologies, embarks on a marketing program, she makes sure she looks at how she can truly capitalize on her efforts.

“At events, we go through a rigorous plan,” she said. “I look at: Which analysts will be there? Who should our executives brief beforehand? Which speakers will attend? Can these speakers potentially reference our technology? I’ll get a list of companies that are attending the conference and cross reference them with our internal list of prospects and contacts that sales can use to schedule onsite meetings. In other words, I look at all the angles to maximize our investment in the event and draw up a plan to drive all activities before, during and after the event so that we get the most out of it.”

Do you have a fascinating story about content marketing, lead generation, demand generation, or social media?