Rnordman

Recently, our new friend Debra reached out with a question:

Your Brains on Fire blog is particularly great and before I get started with this somewhat daunting task, I’d love to hear if anyone at BOF has some intel to share on best blogging practices. Since I work in post-secondary in Canada, examples of my colleagues doing this type of work are few and far between, and while I love the idea of being a maverick, there is also a little bit of fear there.

Debra, you’re in luck. A few of our frequent BOF bloggers had thoughts to share…

ROBBIN PHILLIPS

Writing is like a muscle. You have to practice writing often and with wild abandon. You will see yourself improve and get better. That is exciting.

Don’t edit yourself too much. Write and put it away, then come back to make it more concise.

Write like  you speak. Try to forget you are writing and just start sharing.

Make a list of 10 ideas for topics. See how fast and often you can create a list of ten topics. Keep a little notebook by your side so if an idea strikes for something to share, you can make note.

Read. Read. Read. 

Writing inspires thinking and thinking is a REALLY good thing. The world is thinking out loud now and blogging/journaling is an amazing way to really connect with others. 

Have fun. BE happy. Try to help others. Be you. 

JOHN MOORE

Jump in. The water is fine. There is no need to fear blogging. Yes, sharing your opinion with the world seems scary. It’s not. It’s quite freeing. And if someone challenges your opinion then that’s an opportunity to learn, which is a good thing.

Expect to be more energized at work. When I started blogging in December of 2003 I was working as the director of marketing at Whole Foods. Something amazing happened that first week I blogged. I found myself more engaged at work. By sharing interesting articles and thoughts on my blog, I was more on top my game and my co-workers could feel my renewed energy. 1,600+ posts later… I still feel energized when I blog.

Blogging builds thinking muscles. When you write a post you must synthesize information. That process helps you to think smarter because you must first form your opinion to share your opinion. Dig?

Stop thinking. Start typing. The more you wait, the longer you are depriving the world of your voice. Stop thinking about blogging and start typing your blog. Jump in. The water is fine.

AMY TAYLOR

Take a stance. There is a lot of noise in the blog world — lots of people talking just to hear themselves speak. Anyone can regurgitate someone else’s thoughts. If you’re going to take the time to write about something, add to it what you can: your viewpoint, your opinion, your take. My most successful blog posts have put a stake in the ground. Sometimes my take has been a popular opinion, sometimes not. Either way, it gives people something to think about…and that gets them talking.

Become a hunter and gatherer. Get familiar with Pocket, a great way to squirrel away all those inspirational tidbits you come across while you’re surfing your way through the internet. You may not always have time to sit down and write a full post when inspirational strikes, but you can definitely harvest links for later. Also, read more than you write. Inspiration has a habit of striking in the shower, but it won’t happen in a vacuum. Make time to check out what other people are talking about and sharing.

Participate in Twitter chats. Seek out Twitter chats relevant to your industry — and start participating. It’s not uncommon to walk away from an hour-long chat with three or four or five new ideas for blog posts. Conversing and engaging inspire great thinking…which inspires great writing. Don’t expect literary genius to strike just because you sit down at a keyboard.

What would you add to the list? What are your blogging best practices? 

The post Best Blogging Practices appeared first on Brains on Fire.

Image Credit: 123RF/Anatolii Babii

Content marketing is white hot right now. In our recent B2B Mobile Marketing report, marketers identified it as not just one of their top priorities but as the top priority in their current marketing efforts. But it’s also experiencing a significant crisis of confidence, as more and more content is being produced, making it harder for any individual marketer’s “hello world” blog post to stand out.

The bottom-dollar question: Is content marketing still worth it?

For most marketers, content marketing is a massive waste of time, according to one marketing technologist. And sales enablement tools that are improving how demand generation teams sell via email, via phone, and in person are taking their place.

“There’s a big disconnect between where marketers are investing money versus where customers are coming in,” says Ilya Lichtenstein, cofounder and CEO of MixRank. “Content marketing doesn’t scale anywhere near where it needs to be in B2B to generate enough leads.”

Of course, you might expect Lichtenstein to say that. His company, after all, makes software that helps sales and marketing teams land new clients via innovative data-driven targeting — not by content marketing. And in a previous startup, he founded a performance marketing company — also not content marketing.

170 B2B marketers told us what’s working in mobile. Click here to get the results.

But if that’s the case, it’s also the case that the biggest voices promoting content marketing are often those who offer tools that enable content marketing.

Unsurprisingly, that’s one of Lichtenstein’s key points:

“The people who are really good at content marketing are promoting it and producing a lot of content about it,” he told me recently. “It’s appealing — you think ‘I’m going to create this content and it’s going to go viral’ — and that does happen at the top, but it doesn’t scale.”

One of the companies that is really good at content marketing, of course, is Hubspot.

Above: Content marketing tactics

Image Credit: Content Marketing Institute

The marketing automation company just IPO’d with a nice pop and isn’t shy about the benefits of content marketing. In fact, it recently released a massive 3,600-marketer study on inbound marketing that says companies that blog — AKA do at least one component of content marketing — are 13 times more likely to be increasing ROI year-over-year.

But even Hubspot doesn’t recommend content marketing for everything.

“I think there are some industries that aren’t a great match for content marketing,” Hubspot’s VP of content, Joe Chernov, told me via email. “Let’s say you sell widgets for nuclear plants in the U.S. Your total addressable market is 62 companies. Content probably isn’t the most direct path to success here.”

But baby, meet bathwater.

“Just because it’s hard to win at something doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time,” Chernov says. “Content helps bridge the divide between being unknown and known. Certainly ranking on the first page of Google helps, a lot. And while it’s difficult to rank for a head term, even companies that are new to content marketing can succeed in ranking for tail terms.”

In fact, in that huge Hubspot study, 82 percent of marketers said they are now using inbound techniques.

Lichtenstein’s point, of course, is that outbound and sales enablement matters — perhaps more than we typically hear. And that it is a faster strategy when you need to ramp quickly.

“Content takes so long to scale, longer than six months,” he says. “Building that audience with all the noise, 1,000 different things that people are sharing … it’s really hard to break out. And the traffic the top result gets versus the tenth is a big, big difference, with major drop-off.”

For him, the old standby tools like email, conferences, referrals, prospecting, and even cold-calling work faster — especially updated for today with sales enablement technology — at helping companies kickstart and scale revenue. In fact, they helped MixRank itself scale to over $1 million in revenue in its first year, Lichtenstein says. One benefit, of course, is that the conversation is commerce-focused from the start. In content marketing, the first job is getting attention, and then converting that attention into intention — buying intention.

It’s also a question of lead quality, of course.

A lead scored by a marketing automation system or lead-scoring algorithm based on what content people have viewed or requested is a best guess that may or may not be accurate; while a lead evaluated in person should hold more water. Perhaps two-thirds of sales reps are giving marketing an “F” for the quality of sales leads, Lichtenstein says, while leads sourced from sales prospecting teams are typically higher quality.

But that sword cuts both ways.

“You can buy a list and blast a generic message to the entire audience (which I did in a prior job — and of the 8,000 contacts, precisely one opened the email),” Chernov says. “Or you can build a list organically over time and email people who want to hear from you.”

The bible of content marketing itself, Copyblogger, acknowledges the contemporary problem, mentioning the impending “content cliff,” the “period where content collapses in on itself as audiences max out on their ability to consume it.”

There is a solution, CopyBlogger says: better quality.

“There is not a glut of content that is useful, passionate, individual, and interesting,” Copybloggers’s Sonia Simone says.

There’s truth to that. But it also opens a big fat door to comebacks from the Lichtensteins of the world: Essentially, content marketers are engaged in an ongoing arms race of better and more useful and more passionate and more individual and more interesting content.

And arms races, as you know, benefit mostly arms manufacturers.

To Lichtenstein, the pendulum is swinging back towards sales and sales tech.

“We’ve had all of this investment in marketing tech and that’s great, but now we’re seeing a lot of sales development tech like Yesware … and that’s where the responsibility for generating leads should be,” he says.

Focusing on that, he says, has lowered MixRank’s cost of qualified lead from an industry-standard average of $400 to under $40, thanks to very accurate targeting of prospects as his sale reps eat the company’s own dogfood.

The upshot?

Content marketing is getting harder. Not only from proliferation, but also in the new mobile-first world that sees users spend most of their time in third-party apps, not engaged in traditional web surfing and not googling very often. And the new-old tools of outbound marketing, plus the new tools now available to demand generation teams are powerful and quick. So savvy marketers are definitely engaged in massive outbound marketing efforts, using everything from sales enablement to emerging adtech.

And yet good content marketers, with the right skills and the right products and the right content, are still driving great results. And it’s almost impossible to complete avoid content marketing if you want to tell an appropriate story when someone comes to learn more, regardless of how they first learned about you.

Which leads to the logical conclusion: Do what works for you.

HubSpot is the world’s leading inbound marketing and sales platform. Since 2006, HubSpot has been on a mission to make the world more inbound. Today, over 10,000 customers in 65 countries use HubSpot’s software, services, and suppo... read more »

Yesware helps salespeople sell smarter, right from their Gmail or Outlook inbox. By injecting data insights and custom-tailored communication features into your existing email workspace, Yesware removes barriers to productivity and emp... read more »

SALES QUESTION:

 "With prospects having so many choices and easy access to information, how do you become the vendor of choice when they are ready to buy?"

SalesBuzz Answer:

Here's a simple three-step plan to help earn your prospects business while leaving your competitors in the dust.

Step 1: Know Whom Your Targeted Audience Is

Anytime I ask a salesperson "Who's your targeted audience?" and they respond with "everyone", almost always that salesperson is struggling to meet quota. 

Even if "everyone" truly can use or benefit from your product / service, there are critical KPI's (key prospect indicators) that will identify higher probable prospects.

You have to know what those KPI's are for your industry. 

Here's a few examples of what I mean:

• If you sell fixed asset software - maybe one of your KPI's are prospects within a specific vertical that currently use Excel to manage their assets. 
• Maybe you sell logistic services and your primary audience ships items that need to be temperature controlled. 
• Maybe you sell Kegerators and your targeted audience is high-end luxury homebuilders (and / or buyers) that want a unique bar in their home. 

(The point is, it doesn't matter what you sell, every business has KPI's) 

Most businesses will have multiple verticals of prospects, no matter if they sell one specific product/service or hundreds. If you don't narrow it down and get specific, you'll feel like you're lost at sea without a compass. 

Step 2: Build Up Your Value, In Their Eyes

Once you've identified and picked a targeted vertical (or two or three) to go after, use a combination of email, LinkedIn, webinars, twitter, etc. to brand yourself (or your company) as an SME (Subject Matter Expert) in your field by offering free advice / help in areas that will matter to your targeted audience.

So for example, if you sell in-home kegs, you could have email newsletters / articles that discuss what the perfect beer temperature is for taste, how to clean your tap with ease, or a special recipe of the month. You could also do an occasional webinar on how to brew your own beer or how to make three unique drinks that will knock your guests socks off!

With today's automated and semi-automated low-cost drip marketing platforms, you can routinely "touch" prospects with valuable information, simultaneously, without picking up the phone.

Offering those kinds of useful solutions while having a strong, but subtle call to action at the end of the webinar or newsletter, will start to drive so many INBOUND requests, you won't have time to sit and ponder about how much you hate cold calling.

But for that to happen, you need to separate yourself from the rest of the competition. And in order to do that, you need to be willing to do what no one else is willing to do to earn your prospect's trust and business. Working with your marketing team (or if you are a one-man band) to have a simple drip marketing process in place, combined with knowing EXACTLY what to say in order to pique your prospect's interest on the phone, will give you a competitive edge that will have you winning more business.

Speaking of knowing EXACTLY what to say on the phone... 

Step 3: Know How to Pique Interest in the First 30 Seconds of a Sales Call

Calling your prospect and saying the traditional:

"Hi, this is (your name) with (your company) and we offer blah, blah, blah and wanted to see if I could get a few minutes on your calendar to show you blah, blah, blah" isn't building up value, it's creating a wall between you and your prospects.

When you take the time to build a vertical list of prospects to go after based off of past clients that are happy with your services, you can easily make successful cold calls to NEW prospects by simply saying:

"Hi, this is (your name) with (your company). Reason for my call is we recently helped (competitor 1, 2 and 3) avoid (pain point) while reducing (or gaining) ______ by _____% and wanted to see if we might be able to do the same for you."

Now here's the best part... even if on that sales call attempt, you've identified that right now, there is no need... If you continue to follow the advice given in step 2 above, when a need does arise, you will be the first person they call. 

If most managers have the best of intentions when supporting their salespeople, then why do they keep asking them questions that result in lost sales?

Do You Emphasize Results Over People?

It’s not uncommon to hear that companies are developing KPI’s and measurable objectives around coaching. While encouraging, sadly, it is doomed from the start unless the manager is actually observing their people perform on a consistent basis.

Why is it doomed, you wonder? Here’s how some managers have responded.

“Okay, I’m supposed to coach each person on my team for one hour each week, based on a list of core competencies and best practices that the company has identified. Let’s see, I actually spoke to each of my salespeople for at least two hours this week, and probably an hour or so last week, since we’ve been doing a bunch of deal reviews and forecasting sessions in order to close this quarter strong. I guess that time can count towards the mandated coaching hours for each direct report. Check!”

A fine example of “Check-box Management.”

Of course, I’m simplifying this to make the lesson clear. Management cannot assume that the quantity of coaching equates to its quality!

Quantity Control

It’s counter-intuitive. Managers believe that in order to achieve your goals and attain quota, keep focusing on the results. “If you stay focused on the results, keep your eyes on the prize and on our sales targets, we will get there faster.” Paradoxically, focusing on the result actually gets in the way of achieving the results you want.

Why?

Because if you’re always focusing on the result; you’re not focusing on your people.

Think about the questions you ask during a conversation. Do your questions focus on how your people do things or focus more on what’s been done or getting done? How consistently do you actively observe your people when engaging with customers and prospects on the phone, in person, even how they communicate via email? Are you truly certain of the processes they use, how they communicate and how they perform or are you assuming that based on the reports, results and data?

Think about any coach of a sports team. Without consistent observation of their players, they will miss out on a myriad of authentic coaching opportunities that would build a strong bench of champions.

How You Think Is What You Speak

But it’s not enough just to become more mindful of the “how,” or the process, while focusing on the “what” or the goal that you want to achieve. It has to manifest in how you communicate and engage with people, especially your direct reports.

What does the word ‘process’ means to you? Do you think about your HR process, sales process, onboarding process, project management? Basically, most people would perceive a process as a series of consistent steps you take to produce a somewhat consistent result.

Now, think beyond defining the word, “process” as some measurable steps, path or strategy you follow.

When I suggest becoming more process driven, I’m referring to moving beyond your strategy and into your thinking. Think about how this line of thinking would impact how you communicate. If you become someone who is more process driven, it affects the type and quality of the questions you ask.

Here’s an example of the type of questions that are continually being asked by managers who have a result driven mindset. These questions focus on one thing and one thing only; the outcome.

1. What are you working on that’s currently in your pipeline?
2. How many meetings did you schedule this week?
3. You’re putting everything we need into the CRM, right?
4. Is your sales forecast accurate?
5. Did you get in touch with the decision makers, as well as influencers in the company?
6. How many calls did you make today?
7. You qualified the prospect to ensure there’s a fit, this is a priority for them and they had budget, right?
8. If we’re going to put a pilot in place, did you confirm that we are their vender of choice?
9. Did you demonstrate a solid value proposition that’s aligned with the customer’s needs?

Are these questions important? They most certainly are! However, these questions enable managers to facilitate only half of the conversation you need to have with your salespeople. While these questions certainly focus on results, they are also, for the most part, all closed-ended questions, providing no additional insight into the situations, facts, behavior or what was discussed.

You’re Having Half Of a Conversation

Review these nine questions I listed. What are you really learning when you ask your salespeople these questions? You only succeed in uncovering their opinion around what’s been done (yes or no) and not necessarily how it’s been done.

Here’s the real cost incurred when asking these closed ended, result driven questions. The manager assumes their salespeople are emulating the best practices, knowledge and the behavior of world class sales champions – and so do their salespeople!

Where in this conversation are the questions that focus on who they are, what they know, their current skill-set, what their communication sounds like and how they actually do things?

Besides, how would you feel if you were asked these questions? In many cases, you are probably being asked them by your boss! Does it feel empowering or conversely, do some of these questions sound condescending?

Change Your Questions – Change the Outcome

Notice what happens when you become more of a process driven thinker. While these questions are in no particular order, be mindful of the spirit behind each question. Here are some examples of open ended questions that are truly open ended. That is, they don’t have your judgment, agenda or solution baked into them!

• How have you handled that situation before?
• What have you tried so far? How did you do that?
• What is their expectation of exceptional customer service?
• How does the customer define value and ROI?
• How did you respond when the customer pushed back on pricing?
• What steps can you take to resolve that?
• Walk me through the last conversation you had with that customer.
• What questions did you ask to qualify this opportunity?
• What are the titles and names of all the people involved in this decision?
• What did they tell you their decision making criteria was?
• What are the top concerns the prospect shared with you that could get in the way of earning their business?
• How did you confirm that your value proposition was perfectly aligned with their objectives and needs?

These are the questions that salespeople appreciate being asked. While they challenge people to assess and improve how they do things, they do so in a positive, rather than a confrontational way. These questions demonstrate that you actually have an interest in them. It shows that you’re not only focused on the results but on them, as well.

As you can see, beliefs certainly precede experiences. When you become someone who is more process driven, notice what happens to the quality of the questions you ask. Now, you have the power to positively impact the outcome of every conversation.

Sure, you manage data, however you develop people. Besides, if you keep focusing on the result, then nothing changes, including your people.

Alternatively, if you focus on change and growth, the byproduct is, you achieve what you want most; your business objectives, a strong bench of champions and future leaders, and your new competitive edge.

Photo Credit: Nick Wheeler (Edited by Keith Nerdin)

So recently the feted poster girl for consumer tech hardware, this month Samsung posted a profit warning triggered primarily by a decline in sales of its flagship Galaxy smartphones. Given that only last year its dominance in the smartphone market was such that wild editorials speculated that it was in a position to wrest control of the Android operating system from Google, this is a somewhat precipitous decline. Forecasts of doom were swift. Quoted in the Guardian, a mobile consultant commented that it looked like the “beginnings of the vicious cycle which ended the dominance of Ericsson, HTC, Motorola, BlackBerry and Nokia.”

Strong words, but given the history of the technology hardware market this is all in no way surprising. Though whilst Nokia and Blackberry are the obvious comparison for Samsung’s apparent woes, their problems were quite different. Those two companies, fallen titans of the mobile phone world, foundered because they failed to anticipate and keep up with consumer expectations. Apple’s iPhone was a revolution in how the user experience needs of phones were perceived. By the time Nokia and Blackberry had pivoted to match the new consumer expectations, it was too late and they were too far behind to catch up.

Samsung’s mobile trouble has more to do with operating systems. But rather than Samsung being left behind, the problem is that no one is being left behind. The reasons for Google’s move to create an open source mobile operating system have been discussed and pontificated on at length, and here’s not the time or the place to go into them. The result of their success, though, is it makes it incredibly difficult for any handset makers using Android to maintain a market lead for any significant length of time.

Mobile phones are becoming more and more similar

When you’re selling a mobile phone, you can differentiate yourself from competitors on hardware, software, or price. Differentiating in hardware can involve bigger screens, faster processors, better cameras, or new, innovative features such as an NFC payment mechanisms or a 3d screen, whereas differentiating in software is a matter of the operating system on the phone, and the third party software available. And as third party software is written for specific operating systems, in the end any software differentiation comes down solely to the operating system.

Developing a good operating system is an incredibly, spectacularly difficult thing to do. Most operating systems and user interfaces are at best unwieldy and unintuitive. Apple’s genius has always primarily been in operating systems, focusing heavily on design and user experience. Testing and retesting relentlessly, focusing on the tiniest details, and just putting a lot of time and thought into it, in order to make sure things work so well that anyone can use their products. Their phones are pretty good, but it’s their mobile operating system, iOS, that is the cornerstone of their success.

With Google pouring resources in Android and then releasing it open source, all this trouble and expense and risk could be bypassed by companies wanting to get into the mobile handset business. Whatever the specific flaws or advantages of Android, it’s good enough and it’s free. Happy days. But whilst this is a wonderful boon for a mobile handset maker trying to make their way in the big bad world, it’s also a terrible risk. Because everyone can have Android. Having Android doesn’t make you special, it just makes you another phone. Which means the only way to differentiate yourself is on either hardware or price.

The commoditisation of hardware, and a cautionary televised tale

One of the most salient features of tech hardware as an industry is its tendency towards extreme and rapid commoditisation. Prices for new technology start high then fall massively, and in some cases continue to fall so much that the marginal cost of something approaches zero. Take hard disk space. Costing $950 for a gigabyte 20 years ago, it’s now $0.03. Dropbox give 2 gigabytes of cloud storage away to people for free.

The travails of the television industry are a case in point. Sony was once a giant, a colossus that bestrode the electronics industry, its name synonymous with quality and corporate success, and televisions were central to this. Come 2014, its electronics division bleeds red ink and is kept afloat by Playstations, with the TV unit having made a loss every year for a decade.

For decades, televisions kept improving in ways which matched consumer needs, and market leaders maintain their market and margins by producing better products for the same price. Bigger screens, sharper screens, flatter, thinner screens. However this eventually brings increasingly diminishing returns. Is Ultra HD worth a big price premium over standard HD, for most people? Are curved screens? 3d? Not really. Eventually a product category reaches a stage where a basic offering is ‘good enough’, new features have niche appeal or are gimmicks, and market share passes from companies that make the best products to who make good enough products for the cheapest price.

At the same time manufacturing know-how and expertise that was once the preserve of a few companies becomes dispersed widely, to competitors in lower wage countries without expensive legacy concerns. Anyone can make cheap televisions or hard drives now, and as a result prices are low and margins wafer thin.

Coming to a mobile handset maker near you

Mobile phones are expensive, as televisions used to be. The pricing model in the UK, where the price is amortised over the course of a two year contract, serves to disguise this, but a new handset generally retails outside of a contract at over £300. Up until now there have been enough improvements in the hardware to make upgrading every two years was worth the money for enough people. That won’t last forever. In fact, it probably won’t last very long at all. The rate of new features and hardware improvements has slowed with each passing year. Unable to differentiate on software due to Android, and with hardware increasingly good enough, the resulting race to the bottom on price will be good for consumers and bad for manufacturers one and all; with the exception of Apple, holding their trump card alone in the corner.

As I get ever close to launching my own eCommerce website, my attention increasingly turns to the bottom line: profit & loss (hopefully, mostly “profit”). For me, though, I’m terribly bored by crunching numbers. Don’t get me wrong: I love making money and counting it. But my background is not in accounting. So the challenge for me is to keep my accounting in order, my tax information in check, and my sanity in tact! In this installment of App Guinea Pig, I’ll be testing out three small business accounting apps for “dummies”… like me!

For personal finance, I’m a longtime user of Intuit Mint, which is a great app for personal use. But for my small business, I want to keep my business expenses and transactions separate from my personal finances. Ideally, to achieve this, I’m interested in a tool that is as efficient and accurate as Mint, but aimed at small business – not to mention, affordable.

So, with my mind open, once more unto the breach, dear friends, I head into the uncharted territory to do the hard work on your behalf. Here are three small business accounting apps, tested by me, the App Guinea Pig.

QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks Online is an obvious starting point for me, as a Mint user. I’ve looked at QuickBooks Online before, here at GetApp, for various reasons, and while I haven’t always loved what I’ve seen, I have to say, there are some great features of QuickBooks Online.

For one thing, Intuit has unrivaled bank synchronization. My personal banking is done through a regional bank in the southeastern US. and my bank syncs perfectly with Intuit products. What’s more, as the original cloud-based small business accounting app, QuickBooks Online has refined visualizations. There’s no denying how plainly pretty graphs, charts, and other visual elements are in QuickBooks Online.

Features of QuickBooks Online:

• Create & manage invoices
• Track sales & expenses
• Multi-device document sharing
• Print checks
• Track payments
• Automated online banking
• Create estimates
• Enter & manage bills
• Export data to Excel
• Smart phone compatible
• Support for Mac23
• Free Trial
• Dashboards and feeds
• Mobile receipt capture
• Actionable insights
• Banking data synchronization
• Create custom invoices
• Automatic tax calculations
• Pay online link in invoices
• Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet reports

Visually, I love QuickBooks Online. The only downside is that I think I might be able to get everything I need for a little less than $26.95 a month. That said, my business is basically micro, at this point. If you have even a couple of employees, QuickBooks Online quickly becomes worth the price.

Xero

Xero, a rapidly rising name in the cloud-based small business accounting app space, again makes its way into my line of sight. I love Xero, for many reasons. Its simple interface, its strong bank compatibility, and its appreciable $9 price tag.

Xero’s interface is incredibly clean – a refreshing splash of white and high-contrast charts that splits bank reconciling into two columns. Aside from that, I like the fact that it is free for small business to share data in Xero with accountants and other advisers. Since it’s easy to foresee myself getting in over my head when it comes to accounting, I’m liking Xero’s ability to let me call in some professional help without costing me additional funds.

Features of Xero:

• Online Accounting – Access Xero anytime, anywhere
• Bank Rec – Automatically import and code transactions
• Invoicing – Create and send invoices automatically
• Add-ons – Pick from a wide range of powerful add-ons
• Dashboard – Instantly see your bank balances, sales & bills
• Files – Attach documents to your financial data
• Smart Lists – Segment contacts based on purchase history
• Contacts – Keep track of customers and suppliers
• Login from anywhere
• Payroll
• Multi-currency
• Purchase orders
• Expense claims
• Inventory
• Quick & easy 1099s
• Mobile apps (iPhone,iPad, Android)
• Receive bills electronically
• Free, Unlimited Email Support
• Multi-currency
• Financial Reporting

Xero is an able, stable small business accounting app. I dig it – there’s no other way to put it. That said, I’m an ever-so-slightly bigger fan of the visualizations in QuickBooks Online. That said, it’s hard to argue with the price of Xero.

FreshBooks

FreshBooks is one of the biggest names in small business accounting apps – and it’s with good reason, too!

A big part of my small business is invoicing. FreshBooks has solid invoicing functions, which is an immediate draw for me. What’s more, FreshBooks has great visualizations, much like QuickBooks Online. FreshBooks also works with my regional bank, so that’s another feather in its proverbial cap.

There’s no mistaking, though, that the focus of FreshBooks is on invoicing, recurring billing, and time tracking. Those elements all feature heavily in my small business, so that makes FreshBooks a particularly interesting package, for me, specifically.

Features of FreshBooks:

• Online Invoicing
• Time Tracking
• Recurring Invoices & Auto Payment
• Team Timesheets
• Late Payment Reminders
• Expense Tracking
• Accounting Reports & Taxes
• Automatic Expense Import
• Mobile Apps
• Attach receipts (PDF or Image)

FreshBooks has great billing features and clean visuals. That makes it a strong contender for my purposes. At $19.95 per month, FreshBooks falls nearly in the middle, between the other two offerings on this list. That’s another compelling reason to pick FreshBooks over the competition.

And the winner is..

FreshBooks!

As you could probably tell from my comments up to this point, FreshBooks is my choice for a small business accounting app. QuickBooks Online, Xero, and FreshBooks are all great contenders, truly. QuickBooks Online has the best visuals of all. Xero has the cleanest overall interface. But, for my purposes, FreshBooks has the best balance in terms of graphics, ease-of-use, and pricing.

If you don’t think one of these three apps is the right one for your small business accounting needs, be sure to check out GetApp’s rolling, regularly updated list of all the small business accounting apps currently on the market!

Practical customer retention tactics that any business can apply

For any digital marketing strategy or digital communications plan, defining a set of objectives and clear strategy behind your plan is essential to the success. This post focuses on creating an actionable online customer retention plan, which by definition is maintaining or growing your existing customer base loyal to your product offering.

Retention should be at the heart of your digital strategy in maintaining and building communication with your existing customer base. Separate to this post, I’ve also created an outline covering techniques for creating a digital marketing strategy for acquisition.

So, where to start? I advise the same place as for all marketing plans!

• Know your audience

Before embarking on your retention strategy, understanding your audience is a key requirement to ensure the chosen retention tactics are in line with your existing customer base – so begin to build up a profile of the type of customer/s that interact with your brand.

Retention is about engaging with your existing customer base, so you should already have a wealth of analytical insights on who your customers are, how they interact with your organisation and their purchase patterns.

Key insights to consider when analysing customer data for a retention plan:

• Search marketing metrics – brand/non-brand search terms, referral sites, bounce rates (based product sections/items)
• Sales – Average Order Value, Repeat purchase rates, Geographical split (UK, rest of world), Most popular products sold, seasonal sales trends
• Channels of interaction with your brand – e.g. Affiliate, Social Media, Search (SEM), Email – and impact in driving existing sales revenues i.e.which channel is most profitable for the business
• Personas – To bring this existing data 'to life', think about creating various personas of who your existing customer is. Types of Personas should be built based on the data you’ve collated such building an age profile, the channel they interact with, level of frequency in visiting your digital platform (website, mobile, app) and frequency of purchase.

Examples of Personas

A Persona (definition) helps the rest of your organisation understand the characteristics of customers and helps you to get buy-in from across the organisation – for example, here are a few Persona examples for an online sports retailer:

• Persona A: Steve is a 28 year old professional who is single and with a high disposable income. He has a keen interest in Football and supports a premiership football team. He likes to display his allegiance to his club by wearing the latest replica shirt as it is launched each new season. Steve is comfortable in ordering online and engaging with social media to keep up to date with the latest football news and football product launches through online forums and partakes in football games e.g. Fantasy Football.
• Persona B: Clare and Rob are both 34 year old professionals who are married with two children. Both Children partake in Football lessons at school and are both avid Manchester United and Liverpool supporters, each having favourite footballers in Wayne Rooney and Steven Gerrard. They both like to show off to their friends with the latest club replica shirts and ask each year for the new football shirt from their parents.

What are the objectives for your retention strategy?

By bringing together the background and situation of the organisation (Understanding your audience), this content should now provide you with a set of Objectives as to why there is a requirement for a retention plan. To ensure success and buy-in within your business, create your set of retention objectives around the SMART principle, for example:

• Achieve 25% of existing customers to service their online account within 12 months. This would be defined such as: visiting the site, logging into their online account, making a repeat purchase as a few examples.
• Drive 30% of existing customers to make a repeat purchase within 6 months through the website

Retention Tactics

Now begin to define how these objectives will be realised – by identifying which digital marketing tactics you plan to use as a retention technique in meeting the objective of the plan. The chosen tactics should be justified from the findings you uncovered in evaluating your existing customer and how they interact with your brand in section 1.

As an example, here are a list of digital techniques tailored for retention with defined retention measurements linked back to the Objectives laid out earlier in this post:

Search Engine Optimisation for retention

Whilst SEO will be mainly be considered as a tactic to drive your acquisition objectives, there are many opportunities to utilise SEO to assist with your retention communications.

• Personalised search results – Ensuring your brand appears in both head terms and long tail search terms for personalised search results ensures your existing customers continue to interact with your branded content.
• Google Sitelinks Search Box – with the roll-out of the Google sitelinks search box, this means any branded searches will display an integrated search box on Google, encouraging further searches into your content marketing strategy whilst remaining on the search engine.
• Create and optimise content for your existing customer base in order for them to service their existing account through a content plan
• On page optimisation – key on page factors influence on rankings within SERPS so it’s essential the content created has been optimised for visibility within search engines through best practise on page techniques – think about the URL of the page, who the content page is for, heading and image tags,  as well as internal URLs and how would this page be found through the existing site architecture?
• Product descriptions – Each product on site should include relevant imagery and product information that is unique on site. Ensure the content is tailored to the defined audience from the creation of personas as mentioned in section 1
• Link building – Pro-actively target websites your existing user-base also use. From analysing your site referrers and most effective affiliate websites, this should provide you with a pool of prospects to launch a link building campaign to drive referrals to your site. Also consider your competitor sites – ensure you’re providing a level of differentiation and ask the question how is my product offering unique and why would a website link to this content over a competitor?

Email tactics for Retention

Creation of email templates – create and test out multiple email templates to your existing customer base and begin to monitor the effectiveness of your emails – look to segment your customer base and see which segment drives the best performance based on your retention measures e.g. repeat purchase

Ensure the right email technology is in place – if you’re using a 3rd party email software provider, does it provide you with the opportunity to create multiple email templates? the right metric reporting?

Ensure email lists are data cleansed before commencing a campaign – have you removed and are up to date with existing customers who wish to be unsubscribed? Have you tested out your email success rate in hitting your customer inbox?

Personalisation: Segmentation of your email audience by product or defined persona group

Social media for Retention

Analyse your current database of Social Media followers/fans

Create an Editorial content plan in place to drive timely content through SM channels – this should be based around the editorial plan mentioned under SEO in defining your content plan

Ensure you’ve provided in-house training for staff to use SM channels in communicating with customers – SM provides a timely and cost effective channel in providing a real-time customer service channel

Affiliate Marketing for Retention

• Evaluate current program on commission levels offered compared to competitor programs – are any of your competitor programs incentivising affiliates to drive existing customer purchase and if not, could this be an opportunity for your own channel?
• Analyse trends and performance of your existing affiliate program e.g. what % of sales driven through affiliates are from repeat customers?
• Segment affiliate sites by performance to date.
• From your personas, commence a recruitment drive in driving  more affiliate websites to sign up to the  program that relate to your personas

Monitor, manage and measure your performance

With the chosen retention techniques in place, it’s crucial to measure and monitor the effectiveness of each channel throughout the campaign, so consider setting specific KPI’s for each channel. By setting KPI’s, this means each measure can be quantified and used as objectives and provide on-going measurement. The control phase of the report also provides insight into whether the overall objective of the campaign is being met within the set timeframe, e.g. 12 months.  

KPI’s per retention channel

Here are a list of suggested retention measurements that could be considered.

SEO

• No. of Outbound links generated
• Traffic referral volume
• SERP position for keywords
• Pages viewed per visit
• % of brand & non-brand search terms generated
• No. of in-bound links generated

Email

• No of email sent out
• Segment email lists by existing customers
• Click through rate to website
• Open rate of email campaign sent
• Repeat purchase rate through channel

Social Media

• No of followers and fans
• Measure engagement through re-tweets, likes
• % of referral traffic through to website
• Volume of content pushed through SM (based on the content plan)

Affiliate Marketing

• No. of active affiliates
• Recruitment of new affiliate accounts
• % of total traffic to website
• Repeat purchase rate generated through affiliate channel
• Segmentation of affiliates by level of repeat purchase to the main site

The retention part of the customer lifecycle  is the most profitable, where the greatest level of relationship value is greatest. So take time and ensure you have a defined strategy and tactics in place that listens and builds communication with your existing customer base.

The Smart Insights Online retention planning guide has more detail on structuring and implementing a retention plan.

When people think telemarketing technology, half the time it’s usually the unnerving combination of robo-calling with a human operator. What’s the other half though? Can it be what is truly needed to transform the telemarketing practice?

First off, you need to understand what was wrong with the robo-calling half of today’s supposedly ‘innovative’ telemarketing technologies.

• #1. It’s still a robo-call – A pre-recorded response is still just that, pre-recorded. You can let your human user augment it with their own judgment but it’s going to catch on to your prospect real quick. There’s also the tendency

• #2. It’s not dynamic – Much like robo-calls, the conversation isn’t dynamic enough to really allow flexible responses (and call evaluations). In B2B marketing, this can be a major pitfall because any information from that process will be too simple to be of any value to sales reps.

• #3. Humans aren’t machines – There’s nothing wrong with eliminating the false enmity between man and machine. It’s just that the solution isn’t turning man into one. Technology should only enhance human functions like communication, not come at their expense.

Now with that out of the way, what does it mean for the other half of telemarketing technology? What defines it that sets it apart from the embarrassment associated with robo-calling?

• #1. It automates non-thinking processes – Auto-dialing is one example, along with the database that accompanies it. There’s not much thinking required to dial a number. It’s just a bit of menial labor that takes up too much concentration.

• #2. Transformation doesn’t result in a cyborg – Sometimes the transformation isn’t about the machine. It’s about how the machine impacts and advances a process. Auto-responses don’t make much for an improvement. Analytics however can improve the flow of conversations and negotiations.

• #3. It expands the dynamic – Sometimes a telemarketing conversation can then switch to an email correspondence. After that, it takes off again in an live web conference. You retain the dynamics of a conversation while at the same time, using technology to add more convenience to prospects who want to take it across channels.

Instead of merely blurring the line between man and machine, maybe the best way to understand technology’s role in transformation is to understand the way it improves the human element (and not just stunt its potential).

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

– Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
Lewis Carroll

Imagine you’re at a networking event, and — Hey, where are you going? Come back, please? We won’t stay long, promise!

OK, so you’re at this networking event when someone you’ve never seen walks up to you and asks, “Who are you?”

Like Alice, you may think this an unorthodox opening for a conversation, but you politely respond with your carefully prepared elevator speech.

Then she leans in and says, “No, I mean, who are you … really?”

You think “Ummm, okay, this is weird …” but then you check the person’s name tag and notice she works for a company you’d kill to have as a client. So you keep the game going, telling her a bit about your background and what you do for your current company.

She nods slowly. “Better,” she acknowledges, “but I want to know who you really are.”

You resist the urge to call security and take a deep breath, ready to give it another go …

Aaaand, scene.

Now, granted, in real life this conversation would be off the charts on the Creep-O-Meter … but it’s actually taking place just under the surface every single day, with the role of your inquisitive conversation partner being played by your potential customers.

Simple Question, Tough Answer

Here’s the deal: In today’s marketplace, customers don’t just want to see a slick image and a catchy tagline — they want to know who you are before they even consider doing business with you. And much like our eager friend in the example above, they won’t be satisfied with your glib, rehearsed, PR-committee-approved answers.

So how do we even start to think about answering this question “Who are you … really?”

We tell stories.

Think about the people in your life whom you know really, really well. What is it that makes you say you know them? Knowing their stories.

Copy Tells, Story Sells

So, how do we start telling the stories that honestly answer the question “Who are you?”

I’ll give you a couple of ideas to start with, with one word of admonition: Remember that you’re creating stories to connect, not to paint some slick picture of They Who Can Do No Wrong. Keep it real, keep it honest, keep it human.

Tell the Origins of Your Company

Tell the story of how your company was founded, from the very first notion up to the day it opened its doors. Who were the players involved? What obstacles arose along the way, and how did the founder(s) work through them? What was that first office/store/location like? Was it a suburban retail space, a tiny downtown office, or a dining room table?

When you tell the story of your company’s origins, especially the struggles and pitfalls, you put a human face on your brand, one that your audience can truly relate to.

Tell the Story of Your Product or Service

How did the idea for your main product or service come about? Nike’s founder, Bill Bowerman, was a track and field coach whose athletes needed shoes with better grip but were still lightweight, so he tried pouring rubber into his wife’s waffle iron … and the rest is history. What story can you tell?

When your audience knows the story behind your product or service, they get a deeper understanding of its value and the passion behind it.

OK, your turn: How has storytelling enabled you to create deeper relationships with your potential customers? Tell us THAT story in the comments — we’d love to hear from you!

Before you do anything, please watch this:

It's almost perfect, isn't it?

I don't even own that much clothing from Patagonia. But, after watching this twenty-plus minute video on YouTube, that will change. So, it's a video with only 300,000 views and they describe the video as a documentary that is an "exploration of quality - in the things we own and the lives we live. This short film takes you to an off-the-grid surf camp in Baja, Mexico; a family's maple syrup harvest in Contoocook, New Hampshire; an organic farm in Ojai, California; and into the lives of a champion skier, a National Geographic photographer, and a legendary alpinist. It also features exclusive interviews with Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard. Released as an antidote to the Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping frenzy, Worn Wear is an invitation to celebrate the stuff you already own." I am sure that some of you have seen it (it was released about a year ago), but it only recently came to my attention. It is called, Worn Wear: a Film About the Stories We Wear, and I do believe that every brand (whether you are B2B or B2C) should watch it, take notes and think about it before they do any kind of digital marketing. Yes, it's a powerful statement.

The stuff that true case studies are made of.

People who know me, know how much I laothe case studies and white papers. Most of them (if not all) are just trumped up stories about how great a brand performed on some kind of platform or campaign. Sure, it's nice to get a peek behind the curtain, but it doesn't add much value if everything written (or being produced) is just another way to trump up the brand. Where are the mistakes, the foibles, the struggles... and the true challenges? Also, many brands use these documents to validate their own actions, always failing to realize that one brand's success does little ensure that your brand can replicate or leverage that success for yourself. If digital marketing has proved anything, it has proved that every type of success is the exception... and not the rule. We're no longer in the land of being able to simply outspend and out-shout the competition (or block them from media access because we've locked it in). Yes, the world of abundance is upon us. It's no longer a scarcity model.

Why is Patagonia so good at this?

There is no denying that these are just well-produced testimonials. Testimonials have been the cornerstone of marketing since... well, just about since marketing was invented. The premise is simple enough: let's not tell people how great our brand is, let's just enable our customers do that for us. Media has enabled this form of word of mouth marketing to have layers of distribution. With the Internet (and, social media in particular), this scales to the world with very little (if any) cost of distribution. If you were to ask any brand what they would most like their consumers to say about them, it would be:

• Great quality.
• Great price for value.
• That it lasts for a very long time.
• That it helps to build memories.

Tags: advertising b2b b2c black friday brand brand attributes case studies case study commercial customer loyalty cyber monday digital marketing documentary internet culture marketing channel media national geographic online video patagonia retail shopping short film social media testimonial white paper word of mouth word of mouth marketing worn wear youtube yvon chouinard

Make no mistake, discovery of content through search engines is more important than ever. But the practice of optimizing content for search visibility has changed substantially.

As search engines look for signals of credibility amongst content and links, humans do the same thing. In the way that links alone used to drive the search visibility of a web page up, endorsements and mentions from industry influencers can still boost the visibility of a brand. As a result, the trend towards influencer and advocate marketing is on the rise.

While SEO and influencer content might seem more meatball sundae than PBJ, I assure you, the combination can be whatever you want it to be, because it’s content. Understanding demand for topics reconciled with the brand’s ambitions around a topic, search optimization insights applied to an influencer content program can boost both the quantity and the quality of attraction.

We have to start with some assumptions though. This is not about technical SEO, markup, schema, page speed, and so forth. In this post I’ll share 5 tips focused specifically on two essential characteristics of content that help people and search engines understand and filter information that’s credible, useful and actionable: Keywords in content and external citations of that content.

1. Campaign Keyword Alignment – First things first: Start with an understanding of what singular or at least focused topics best represent the essence of the influencer content campaign. Ideally the target keyword / topic is used in the title of the content object. Here are some examples we’ve used for ourselves in the past:

• 29 Secrets About Content Marketing
• Building a Content Marketing Strategy
• The Future of B2B Marketing
• Digital Marketing Trends
• 25 Women Who Rock Social Media

You get the idea.

But it’s ok if you don’t have the explicit keyword phrase in the title of your project. Just be sure it is mapped when making references internally and from external sites and used in a sub-heading. For example, “In our latest report on predictive analytics (linked to “Prospect Predictions – How to Find Your Best Customers Before They Find You”. You can also add a subheading as a keyword qualifier like: Riding the Waves of Social Medial – 38 Social Media Marketing Tips from the Pros.

The takeaway isn’t so much the specific naming of your content assets (yet) but that you focus on something specific – whether it’s a theme or a particular thing that is actively being searched for. Of course the way you find out the demand of the theme, topic or keyword is to use a keyword research tool like Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, Ubersuggest or Keyword.io.

Some social media monitoring tools will provide word clouds and word use by popularity as well, so you can anticipate demand of a topic in social conversations. Sysomos is a good option for that.

Based on this research into what people are actually actively seeking out and talking about online, you can make more informed choices about the titling and naming of your influencer content assets.

2. Influencer Domain Expertise and Network Affinity – Identify, qualify and recruit influencers that are aligned in their published expertise with the topic. Take into account the topical focus of their community as well.

There are a host of influencer discovery tools like these that can provide insight into the topics most aligned with a particular influencer. It usually works the other way around with these tools – you start with a keyword to find out who the influencers are for that particular keyword. Some tools like Traackr allow you to import lists of influencers you have already qualified.

Either way, consider the relevance of your influencers to the main theme of the content program. Do they talk about the topic? With what frequency and what impact? Do people take action when they post or share on the topic?

This is where niche influencers that inspire a high percentage of action come in very handy.

3. Content Sourcing & Topics - Use target phrases in the actual questions used to collect content from your influencers. This will likely inspire organically optimized answers relevant to your theme. Try to ask questions that will return specific and even tactical answers. These are easier to optimize and to make “Tweet friendly”.  Being able to extract a zinger quote from an influencer’s response will be highly valuable for inspiring social sharing. People love quotes, statistics and clever statements.

Then organize content within the finished influencer content piece according to the themes being focused on. In the case of a recent series of 4 eBooks, each was themed according to a specific topic with keywords to help make them easy to find. Content + strategy, + audience, + visual, + ROI.  As a package, all content objects are relevant for the overall theme of “content marketing”. Individually, they are relevant for specific sub-topics that are a part of the overall theme.

This same organization can apply to chapters within a white paper or eBook. Or even sections of a modular infographic.

4. Topical Pitching – Create assets that complement the content like an infographic or video and pitch them to topically aligned blogs and publications.

With the overall theme in mind, content assets can be created from the influencer content in different formats that align well with high profile blogs and publications in the industry. A particular blog might be prone to publishing infographics for example, so be sure to create one from your influencer content and share it with them. Another blog might prefer videos, so do a few Google HOAs with the influencers and provide that asset in your pitch.

The objective with topical pitching is the make sure the pitch itself aligns well with the theme you’re focusing on as well as discovering the preferred topics and media formats of the blogs and publications you’re pitching to. BuzzSumo is handy for topic research with specific blogs and Keyhole offers some interesting media identification in relation to topics – i.e. what media are most popular in conjunction with topic “xyz”.

5. Attract Themed Citations –  Within the influencer content object itself or in the content assets used for promotion, mention people known for the topic you’re focusing on. Cite 3rd party sources for validation of concepts and it may attract organic inbound links and shares.

When organic content starts to pick up on social channels, apply paid social to amplify. In combination with influencer sharing, a growing organic presence in combination with targeted social ads will attract a momentum of social shares, visits and links to your influencer content.

Of course, none of this works unless the content is relevant, creatively packaged, well-edited and involves highly credible and active influencers.

There you go – 5 ways to inspire themed content and citations for your co-created influencer content project.  The operative word here is “inspired” and earned attention. Think beyond the notion of “keywords” for SEO and focus more on topics and themes that represent the interests of your audience. Connect with influencers that are already well known, authoritative and visible for the themes you brand wants to align with. Then create mutual value with those influencers by creating content together.

Optimize that content from planning to promotion and everybody involved will see the returns in the form of more relevant content that people are actually looking for.

Photo: Shutterstock

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It is now common for companies with no revenue, or negligible revenue, to be valued in the billions of dollars. Snapchat. WhatsApp. Instagram. Tumblr. Pinterest. All have been sold or valued at over $1 billion.

None have declared revenues that in any way justify those prices.

They might in the future. But they haven't yet. So if you're looking for evidence that tech is at the top of a peak, you're in the right place. This is a boom, and we're at the highest point of it since 2000.

But if you believe this boom is also a bubble — assets with values literally inflated out of thin air, as they were with web sites in 2000 and real estate in 2007 — then the jury is still out. Parts of the tech sector do look bubblicious. But we're not seeing an exact repeat of 2000 ...

... Yet. Behind Snapchat and Tumblr is a new crop of tech startups with no revenue whatsoever:

• Houzz, a home design web site, is valued at $2 billion even though it has no revenue (it's planning to add an e-commerce function).
• Ello, the social network that has promised it will not show ads, just got $5.5 million in venture funding even though its founders have promised in writing to never sell ads or user data.

None of this is a coincidence. There are specific reasons why we're seeing a massive in-rush of money into the tech sector.

So let's look at whether the boom is sustainable or not.

Interest rates are effectively at 0%, and this explains everything.

Before we get into specific evidence that the tech sector is inflated, it's worth restating the macro-economic context: Interest rates are basically at zero and have been for some time. When borrowers are paying close to zero interest on loans, that makes money cheap to get. This chart shows the Fed's target rate for interest since 1970.

People with money generally have a choice: save it in interest-paying, risk-free bank accounts or invest it in riskier assets that may pay more money over time. When interest is at zero, virtually any other kind of investment is likely to pay more because the risk-free alternative is so lousy. So investment asset bubbles get created. Stocks, and other investment assets, tend to go up.

Total tech investment is now back to where it was in 2000.

This chart from PwC measures the total dollars invested in software firms and the number of those deals. Note that the total investment amount is now back above $6 billion, where it was during the dot com crash of 2000. The number of deals is smaller. That could be a good thing — it might mean that investors are withholding dollars from companies they feel are weak. Or it may be a bad thing — more dollars chasing fewer companies could lead to a situation in which those companies are massively overvalued.

The number of deals has eclipsed its 1999 peak.

This chart uses a different dataset from PwC. In 2014, we're likely to see more than 1,600 venture capital funding deals for software companies. Last year was also a record, there were 1,523 private investments in software tech startups, PwC says. Through Q2 2014, there have already been 877. (In 2000, a record 2,167 deals were done before the dot-com bubble collapsed.)

Most importantly, notice that although we're not quite at the same level as the year 2000, we're already way ahead of the year 1999 — which was the beginning of the end.

Tech M&A is also hitting new highs.

We got this data from the Jordan Edmiston Group:

The media, information, marketing and technology sectors saw 1,128 transactions worth $94 billion announced in the first three quarters of 2014. Deal volume increased slightly over 2013, but Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of mobile messaging app WhatsApp in Q1 and several other mega transactions drove deal value to more than double 2013’s $45 billion ...

Here's the chart. Note that although the total value declined a little in Q3 2014, the total volume is up, and value is also up when you look at the first nine months of the year vs. 2013:

A majority of IPOs are coming from companies that lose money.

Tech companies tend to go public on NASDAQ, and that index has once again arrived at a notorious threshold indicating a bubble: The  percentage of companies filing initial public offerings with negative profits is nearly back where it was in 2000, and 2014 isn't even over yet. This data comes from Jay R. Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida:

The S&P peaked just 8 minutes after the Alibaba IPO.

It's recovered some ground since then — and gone higher still! Nonetheless ... it's tempting to call the world's largest ever stock flotation, at $25 billion, the top of the market. Alibaba is, of course, the Chinese tech online trading giant.

The tech hiring market has never been tighter. Salaries just hit a new record.

We asked Glassdoor to run these numbers for us. Base salaries — that doesn't include bonus — are nearing $100,000. Glassdoor's salary survey is based on 3,600 software engineer salary reports.

Some companies are rumored to be offering up to $4 million per engineer.

We can't verify whether this rumor — seen on the gossip app Secret — is true or not. But it's interesting that all of the commenters seemed to believe it. (Secret is widely read by Silicon Valley types; Dropbox is a super-hot cloud storage company.)

Many companies will not be able to retain those employees if their stock valuations are suddenly corrected — because the incentives on top of those salaries are often in the form of paper equity.

Hedge-fund manager David Einhorn, who runs Greenlight Capital, thinks this is the basis of a bubble. He described the compensation-bubble link in a recent note to investors:

Bill Gurley notes that salary demands and dysfunctional business models have distorted the way employees make career decisions.

Gurley has invested in Uber, OpenTable, and Zillow. He says:

There's a phrase that I love: "discounted risk." Do people discount risk? Right now you've got private companies raising $200, $400, $500 million. If you're in a competitive ecosystem and you raise that amount of money, the only way you use it—because these companies are all human-based, they're not like building stores—is to take your burn up.

And I guarantee you two things: One, the average burn rate at the average venture-backed company in Silicon Valley is at an all-time high since '99 and maybe in many industries higher than in '99. And two, more humans in Silicon Valley are working for money-losing companies than have been in 15 years, and that's a form of discounted risk.

In '01 or '09, you just wouldn't go take a job at a company that's burning $4 million a month. Today everyone does it without thinking.

Serious people are now saying out loud that we may be in a tech bubble.

Peter Thiel is best known as the founder of PayPal and a billionaire tech investor. He thinks we're in a bubble, due to the low interest rate environment we discussed earlier:

I think we have a bubble in the US in government bonds, because of the quantitative easing and the negative real interest rates, and to some extent, that increases asset values across the board, including in startups.

Marc Andreessen: "That will not last."

Andreessen is the legendary investor/partner at Andreessen Horowitz who has backed Netscape, AOL, Reddit (and Business Insider). He notes that today's tech CEOs are burning money the same way their counterparts in the bubble did:

New founders in last 10 years have ONLY been in environment where money is always easy to raise at higher valuations. THAT WILL NOT LAST.

When the market turns, and it will turn, we will find out who has been swimming without trunks on: many high burn rate co's will VAPORIZE.

Gurley, again: "An excessive amount of risk right now."

He's got an eerie feeling right now that we've seen this all before:

Every incremental day that goes past I have this feeling a little bit more. I think that Silicon Valley as a whole or that the venture-capital community or startup community is taking on an excessive amount of risk right now. Unprecedented since ‘'99. In some ways less silly than '99 and in other ways more silly than in '99.

Fred Wilson is fears that too many of today's crop of tech startups are burning money without plans to generate enough revenue to be profitable.

Wilson is the founder of Union Square Ventures, which has backed Coinbase and Hailo, Flurry, and Etsy. He says:

Valuations can be fixed. You can do a down round, or three or four flat ones, until you get the price right.

But burn rates are exactly that. Burning cash. Losing money. Emphasis on the losing.

And they are indeed sky high all over the US startup sector right now. And our portfolio is not immune to it. We have multiple portfolio companies burning multiple millions of dollars a month. Thankfully its not our entire portfolio. But it is more than I’d like and more than I’m personally comfortable with.

I’ve been grumpy for months, possibly for longer than that, about this.

... I’m really happy that I’m not alone in thinking this way. At some point you have to build a real business, generate real profits, sustain the company without the largess of investor’s capital, and start producing value the old fashioned way.

33 Silicon Valley venture capitalists just said they have less confidence than they used to.

This survey is taken every quarter. For the first time in two years it recorded a decline.

Yet suddenly, CFOs have an alarming appetite for risk

Times have never looked riskier for investors. Ukraine. Islamic State. The Russian economic crisis. The Eurozone crisis. Deflation. They're all bad for people who want risk-free returns.

Yet CFO's are suddenly bullish! According to a survey taken by Deloitte, risk appetite among financial directors has hit a seven-year high:

Nearly three-quarters of the 118 CFOs contacted by Deloitte this month believed now was a good time to take greater risk on to their balance sheets – the highest since the firm launched its quarterly round-up of views in 2007 and up from 54 per cent a year ago.

“What surprises me is that, despite all the news around Ukraine, the Middle East and weakness in the euro area, risk appetite among CFOs has risen,” said Ian Stewart, chief economist at Deloitte in London.

Now put that toxic mix together.

Low interest rates have triggered investment money to seek returns in ever-riskier companies. Investment "exits" — IPO's, acquisitions, etc — are once again approaching their 1999/2000 peak. Hiring is so tight that some investors are saying that compensation requirements for engineers are themselves the cause of the bubble. (Meanwhile, tech's most prominent VCs believe we're at or near the top.)

CFO's, on the other hand, are shouting "Damn the torpedoes!"

To quote Bill Gurley, "No one's fearful, everyone's greedy, and it will eventually end."

SEE ALSO: SHADES OF ’99: New Data Show The Tech Boom Is Looking More And More Like A Bubble

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The problem with Brand Value is really simple: no one agrees on it.

The GE brand, for example, in 2011, was variously estimated to be worth $30.5B, $42.8B, and $50.3B by different brand valuation services. That’s a difference of about $20B between the high and low estimates. It gets worse. One firm estimated that GE’s brand value was rising, while the other two calculated a declining brand value.

These are not small numbers. In fact, they’re large enough to qualify as annual GDP numbers for many small countries — like Uganda. And GE isn’t the only example of the problem with Brand Value.

In a recent article on the issue of Brand Value, The Economist noted: “…arguments rage about how much brands are worth and why. Firms that value them come to starkly different conclusions.”

It’s obvious that brand valuation has a “starkly” real issue. None of the firms estimating brand value agree on the same value for a given brand. And if none of them agree on the value of brands, how can CMO’s and CFO’s begin to understand the brand value they’re creating with their Marketing spending?

Brand Value – What is it?
Other industries have no problem placing a common value on valuable things. For example, the stock market. There, we have buyers and sellers, and while they may have different views of the future performance of the stock, they agree on one thing: the price at which the stock is currently selling.

And that price is, in essence, the present value of the perceived future earnings of the company. The irony here, of course, is that a significant amount of the value of a firm’s assets are in, you guessed it, brand value. Can you imagine a world with three different stock market exchanges, each of which quote different stock prices for the same stock ?

Brand valuation should be no different. Essentially, the value of a brand is the present value of the brand and all of its intangible assets that generate future earnings for the company.

If it’s really this simple though, then why are brand valuations so different from one another?

The Need for a Standard, Validated Model
First off, we need a model for how brand economic value is created. The model needs to have a consumer measure of “brand impact” that is increased (or not) by marketing spend, and then how this brand impact drives economic value.

This is a really important concept. So important, that an independent 3 party, the Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB), has created just this model.

MASB, in case you’re not familiar with it, is an organization charged with aligning CMO’s and CFO’s behind evidence based marketing measurement and methodology that demonstrates how Marketing drives real business results—including the creation of Brand Value. Think FASB for Marketing applied to research methods and metrics.

MASB has developed a simple model for how a consumer or customer brand strength measure creates economic value. In the schematic below, the customer brand value measure drives volume, market share and premium pricing. These, in turn, drive cash flow. These cash flows, taken over a number of years and then discounted back to present value, create brand value.

Brand Preference – The Linchpin
The model is simple enough. But, the linchpin in this model is the customer brand strength measure, since it is what drives share, volume and price premium. Without a validated, proven connection between brand strength and key outcome measures, the measure has no real significance. What is it? Well, it could be a number of measures, but an early favorite is “brand preference.”

MASB research with member companies shows that brand preference is highly correlated with volume, share and price premium across many brands and categories. Said simply, higher consumer brand preference yields higher volume, share and price premium. Lower consumer brand preference yields lower volume, share and price premium. This seems to be true across brand and categories—both fast moving consumer goods, but also consumer durables.

Given this, we have a simple model: Marketing and brand activities drive brand preference; brand preference causes higher volume, share and premium pricing; and these deliver greater cash flows, which can be discounted back to the present to create an evidence based brand valuation model.

Brand Valuation – Something that CMO’s and CFO’s Can Agree On
Creating more brand value is an axiomatic objective for Marketers. But having multiple estimates of Brand Value that don’t agree with one another is hardly helpful to the CMO.

MASB has created a framework for how brand marketing activities create brand value and, more importantly, demonstrated that there is a standard customer metric that works in the model across brands and industries. This is the foundation of proof that Marketing creates real economic value beyond simple ROI measurement of individual marketing programs.

The next steps are up to CMO’s and CFO’s: to align on the brand value methodology and begin experimenting with how to best use it. Why? So they can agree on at least one thing: the value of their brands and the contribution of Marketing to that value.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Randall Beard

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

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

Will people buy smartwatches? What is it about smartwatches that interest them? 

A global survey BI Intelligence conducted among Business Insider readers during October 2014 illustrates what consumers are looking for in a smartwatch, and whether they intend to purchase one. We generated over 2,000 responses from Business Insider readers, who tend to be young, affluent professionals — ostensibly the target market for a smartwatch. 

To Access The Full Survey And Mobile Market Report And Data By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>

Here are the main takeaways: 

• The smartwatch only appeals to a minority of possible purchasers. Of 1,678 respondents who said they planned to buy a new phone in the next six months, just one-fifth said they are interested in buying a smartwatch to pair with their phone. 
• Apple has done a better job than competitors selling the smartwatch. Prospective iPhone buyers were significantly more interested in a companion watch than likely Android purchasers. About 31% of those who said they would buy an iPhone in the next six months plan to buy a smartwatch, more than double the proportion among those buying Android phones. 
• These are the top use cases among likely purchasers: Almost 40% of nearly 400 likely smartwatch buyers told us that the most important benefit of the device is its ability to funnel phone notifications, information, and other content if users happen to be away from their smartphone. Another one-fourth of our respondents said they already wear a watch and the added functionality of a connected watch appeals to them. Health- and fitness-tracking was another popular reason. 
• But there is no killer app, and hence most people don't see the point. Overall a majority of people still don't see the point of these devices. This is the reason 51% of those uninterested in smartwatches gave us for why they wouldn't buy the device. At a distant second, 13% of respondents said they just didn't like wearing a watch. Until consumers see a clear reason why smartwatches will improve their lives and productivity, the smartwatch category will remain small.

Of course, the next six months could bring about new applications for smartwatches generally and the Apple Watch in particular, but the data shows that the smartwatch still has a long way to go before it is seen as an essential consumer electronics device. 

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Tunnel designed by misirlou

Many of us have heard of the term tunnel vision. It is usually described or defined as follows:

The tendency to focus exclusively on a single or limited goal or point of view.

We have seen extreme points of views in every walk of life. From politics to religion and everything in between we have seen a singular focus on a goal or point of view. Unfortunately, tunnel vision can cause intended as well as unintended consequences.

In the world of business marketing, organizations can exert all their resources towards focusing in on a single view of buyers. Doing so in a way, which blinds them to the multiple stories, buyers are experiencing. Leading them also to tell only a single story about themselves with a limited point of view.

Unintended Consequences

This type of tunnel vision or single view of buyers can result in the unintended consequence of organizations widening the gap between themselves and their buyers. Missing out on the multiple stories involving relationships, resources, goals, influences, and situations impacting buyers on many fronts. What can happen over time are misperceptions about customers and buyers can set in within organizations. Whereby, these misperceptions become taken for granted – as facts.

In my work conducting B2B executive interviews over the past few years, I have noticed executives can become storytellers about customers. However, the stories being told can be a single story about customers or buyers. These single stories can oftentimes be fraught with assumptions and inherent misperceptions turned into accepted beliefs on the part of an entire organization.

The Danger Of A Single Story

A single story or view about customers and buyers can become rooted firmly within organizations if they perpetuate over years and even decades. These firm roots taking years sometimes to undo, even when given evidence to the contrary. A person who articulates this point very well is novelist Chimamanda Nogozi Adichie, who offers this important perspective: if we only hear or believe a single story about a person or country, this can lead to critical misunderstanding.

I welcome you to take a pause and listen to this gifted novelist and storyteller expound upon this very point in the most entertaining manner:

One of my favorite lines from Chimamanda Adichie’s talk is: “but stories can also be used to empower and humanize”. A powerful call indeed for business marketing and sales leaders today is the notion of understanding stories can ultimately empower internal teams as well as customers and buyers. Rather than relating in objectified approaches common in marketing and sales, we can use stories to humanize how we relate and understand.

Evolving Beyond A Single View Of Buyers

The good news is we are beginning to see a renaissance of the idea stories can be used in business marketing. If you look up the word story in a thesaurus, you will also find a listing of every “new” approach around buyer storytelling these days. You will find terms beginning with the word buyer such as buyer narratives, storytelling, story lines, myths, legends, chronicles, biographies, folklore, and on and on. These are not new. My advice is to keep it simple and not to lose sight of an important element. Whatever you may call your buyer storytelling efforts, if you only have a limited single view of your buyers, you may be telling a story with little meaning. Worse yet, you may cause unintended consequences.

What can business marketing and sales leaders do to ensure they are not working from stereotypes or a single view of buyers? Here are a few helpful suggestions:

• Develop a story listening and story gathering mindset. Within many organizations and in the daily lives of buyers, there is rarely a single story. Work from the premise of story listening before storytelling.
• Be intentional about discovering stories and different points of view. You cannot gather stories or develop different views about buyers through guessing. It takes qualitative buyer insights research.
• Male use of buyer scenarios for discovery. One of the essential components of buyer persona development since its’ origins has been the use of buyer scenarios. An effective means for not only uncovering the many different stories buyers find themselves in, but also helps to inform how to develop your own narratives (around ideal as well as multiple buying scenarios), which resonates with buyers.
• Lead by authenticity, not by telling. In corporate cultures, a single view or story of buyers can take on mythological proportions over time. Whereby leaders can perpetuate myths by building strategies and tactics aimed at only a single view. Often, putting them in a position of telling the organization what it will do to grow by targeting a single story. Instead, lead by helping the organization to discover the many authentic stories of buyers.

Multiple Views Lead to More Opportunities

When organizations take time to truly understand the multiple stories and views of buyers, it is making an investment in not only uncovering more opportunities, but also truly being helpful to buyers. The daily operations of companies or the daily work and personal lives of buyers are rarely stereotypical. To approach companies and buyers through a single view can result, as aptly presented by Adichie, in critical misunderstanding of buyers and the goals they are attempting to accomplish.

Such critical misunderstanding can lead to not only lost opportunities, but also set in irreversible decline. Therein lies the danger of a single view of buyers.

A recent survey of 386 B2B software buyers conducted by technology review firm Software Advice and Research Now, revealed intriguing facts about buyer behavior in regards to online reviews.

The most staggering:

75% of B2B software buyers consult online reviews before making purchasing decisions.

It’s widely understood that buyers make 57% of the buying decision before approaching a salesperson, and this new data suggests that online reviews could be the ticket to influencing B2B buyers when they’re conducting independent research.

Here are more staggering stats that could encourage you to incorporate online reviews into your 2015 marketing plan.

87% of large companies consult online reviews.

Overall, online reviews make an impact on the buyer decision; however, large businesses are more likely to take action from online reviews than smaller businesses. 87% companies with 500 full-time employees were more likely to consult online reviews before purchasing software than buyers from smaller businesses (70%).

Online reviews expedite the buying process by three months.

B2B software is a space notoriously known for it’s lengthy sales cycle, however, enterprises are starting to make more informed decisions as a result of consulting reviews, which is expediting the process. 63% consulted reviews when building a shortlist of software products to evaluate.

44% of buyers wrote reviews after a positive experience.

That’s right: most online reviews are positive. This trumps the number of people who write reviews after a negative experience (29%).

100% of buyers found online software reviews valuable.

Are Online Reviews the Key to Gaining B2B Software Customers? [New Data] by @ringlead

Whether the reviews were positive or negative, all buyers found the reviews at least somewhat valuable when making a software purchasing decision. Other interesting stats:

• 68% said online reviews were extremely valuable or very valuable.
• Only 2% found the reviews minimally valuable, but valuable nonetheless.
• 59% were either extremely or very likely to choose one product over another based on favorable reviews.
• 78% of buyers who consulted reviews were satisfied with their purchase.

The best news of all about this buyer behavior: The majority of buyers who purchased based on a review were satisfied with their new software.

According to Software Advice:

“This data proves that having online reviews—and positive ones, at that—is crucial to the sales success of a business software product.”

Strong data is required for great studies and reports. Learn more about data best practices with the free ebook.

In the late '90s, Stella got her groove back. Now it's time for Sales to do the same.

It's common knowledge that buyers have changed. They're more informed and less patient with salespeople. But what isn't as well established is how salespeople should react

This post is part of a series of Executive Interviews of top sales and marketing solutions company executives. We ask the same questions of every executive so readers can learn about their unique positioning  and their vision for the industry. 

This week I interview Garin Hess, CEO of DemoChimp.

Nancy: What does DemoChimp do? What problem/s are you solving for sales and/or marketing organizations?

Garin: DemoChimp is software intelligently automates product demos, so sales people can spend less time demoing, and more time closing sales.  Marketing teams have told us that they need their leads to become better educated and more qualified, and sales people are always searching for ways to be more productive and close more deals – and both need deeper insights into their prospects’ buying interests.

Nancy: How does your solution uniquely address the problem (or in what way do other solutions fall short from solving the problem)?

Garin: DemoChimp’s personalization engine that intelligently configures a demo to each prospect’s unique needs, just like an expert salesperson, so that when a prospect and sales person meet, they can get right to closing conversations.  DemoChimp also tracks insights into a prospect’s buying interest and their behavior during the demo, what we call Demolytics™, so they can more intelligently lead prospects to close.

But here’s my favorite thing: when prospects share the demo with others who are weighing in on the purchase decision, we capture that too so that our customers can uncover, engage and track the buying panel. Can you imagine a sales force that had few to no repetitive sales conversations – only specific and personalized closing conversations with the right people in the buying panel?  That is what we’re creating.

Nancy: What’s the most important thing that today’s business decision-makers should look for (or ask, or consider, or solve)?

Garin: You already automate a lot of different aspects of your sales and marketing process. Why continue the labor intensive live demo? Live product demos and repetitive sales conversations can be a huge drag on growth.  Consider the portion of prospects that engage with a sales person or receive a product demo and don’t buy.

The wasted time and resources on these prospects is staggering when you actually calculate it (most don’t bother).  That’s why we built DemoChimp, to help companies take advantage of this untapped source of sales productivity.

We’re unlocking that additional revenue growth that companies could have with the exact same sales force but are currrently leaving on the table.

So, today’s decision-makers shouldn’t be looking for more data, or even more analytics to understand that data, they should be looking for more ways to actually put that data to work every day to run their entire business.

Nancy: What are you most excited about for the next 12 months?

Garin: The success stories we’re seeing already should only improve as we continue to expand our solution.  We’re hearing about 65% sales productivity increases. I’m hopeful that in the next 12 months we’ll see that rise to nearly 200% productivity gains across our customers’ sales teams.  We’ll see if we can make that happen–we think so. That’s the way it’s trending.

Nancy: What do you think is the biggest underlying theme or trend for sellers and/or marketers in the next 12 months?

Garin: Personalization.  As the noise level continues to rise in competitive markets everywhere, personalization will be key to continue marketing and sales growth.  That is where we are putting our stake in the ground.  Churn and burn may be a thing of the past, and expecting your prospects to slog through mountains of text content before making a buying decision is less and less realistic.  Surgical precision–right message, right time, right sized–all personalized, and using the most capable medium–that’s video, not PowerPoint–is the answer.

Nancy: What would you challenge sellers and/or marketers to think about for the near term? 

Garin: Before you hire that next person, make sure that you’ve analyzed your marketing/sales technology tool kit.  Be sure you’re efficient with your current team before you add more. Whether it’s DemoChimp, or other tools, you might be surprised at the increase in revenue growth you can gain for a fraction of the cost of another employee.

Note: To learn more about DemoChimp, watch their own automated DemoChimp Demo.

Selling your products and services online doesn’t have to be stressful. These days, there are numerous ecommerce services that make it easy to grow your business on the web.

But with so many options, the overwhelming part can be finding the right fit for your needs.

To make that task less daunting, this month we’re featuring four ecommerce tools to help increase your sales. All of these services integrate directly with AWeber, so you can connect them with your email campaigns and stay focused on marketing, not coding.

We asked these four ecommerce partners to explain why you should consider them, and to provide special offers for AWeber clients. Here’s what they had to say …

1. WooCommerce

Joel Bronkowski, Chief Business Development Officer at WooThemes. Twitter: @woothemes

1. Who is WooCommerce best suited for?

Anyone who is looking to sell online and wants to get started affordably and quickly. WooCommerce is a free plugin that works with the popular WordPress platform. If you use WordPress to manage your site and create content, WooCommerce is for you.

2. What sets WooCommerce apart from other, similar apps?

Store owners can fully customize their site, extend their site via WooCommerce extensions, and take advantage of thousands of WordPress plugins. WooThemes/WooCommerce customers get developer-level support, which can be incredibly valuable when building your ecommerce site from the ground up. And WooCommerce includes a stunning user interface plus a ton of built-in features to help boost your sales.

3. What benefits/results can marketers expect from using this integration?

Google loves WordPress and that makes SEO a whole lot easier. WordPress plus WooCommerce provides an amazing platform to create content with multiple user permissions.

4. Why should AWeber customers connect to WooCommerce right now?

Selling online has never been easier or more beautiful. Ship your idea! Our WooCommerce-AWeber integration will enable you to connect your WooCommerce customers to the best mailing service in the world.

5. What’s the pricing model? Is there a special offer for AWeber clients?

WooCommerce has a free package with several features built in. The AWeber extension is only $29 per year for a single-site license, with annual licenses available for $49 (up to five sites) and $99 (up to 25 sites).

AWeber clients can use the code wooaweber20 to save 20% off WooCommerce and WooThemes products until November 15, 2014.

Create your account with WooCommerce here

Get step-by-step help integrating AWeber with WooCommerce here

2. UltraCart

RJ Sakson, VP of Sales and Marketing at UltraCart. Twitter: @ultracart

Who is UltraCart best suited for?

UltraCart is best suited for savvy online businesses that want a robust cloud-based ecommerce platform.

What sets UltraCart apart from other, similar software (SaaS)?

A powerful conversion and tracking area with special attention given to affiliate networks. All UltraCart accounts include a free affiliate management system and free phone support for the life of your account.

What benefits/results can marketers expect from using UltraCart?

UltraCart integrates with AWeber, and a host of other platforms, to ensure that you can continue to leverage the relationships you’re already using to keep current customers and attract new ones.

Why should AWeber customers connect to UltraCart right now?

Often it’s what you don’t know that can kill you: slow loading times, lack of features, or buggy systems can cripple your sales and you won’t even know it. Switching to UltraCart can help to eliminate those issues.

What’s the pricing model? Is there a special offer for AWeber clients?

All new accounts are $49.95 per month with no hidden fees. As a special offer for AWeber clients, we’re doubling the standard 30-day free trial period to a 60-day free trial!

Create your account with Ultracart here

Get step-by-step help integrating AWeber with Ultracart here

3. @Pay

Mike Hogan, Senior Account Executive at @Pay. Twitter: @atpay

Who is @Pay best suited for?

@Pay makes it easier for consumers to quickly and safely make any type of monetary transaction, such as purchasing a product, sending a donation, or renewing an annual membership, with only two clicks in an email — and with no credit card necessary. This is perfect for merchants that feature instantly recognizable products, such as fashion accessories, or non-profit organizations seeking donations.

What sets @Pay apart from other, similar apps?

These days, more and more emails are read on mobile devices. Since all smartphones have an email client installed, @Pay is easy for everyone to access. The @Pay 2-Click Email Checkout enables payments and purchases to be made without ever leaving the email program.

What benefits/results can marketers expect from using this integration?

Checkout complexity leads to a 70% cart abandonment rate. This is what @Pay helps to alleviate with a vastly simplified checkout process: two clicks instead of multiple pages, clicks and keystrokes. The simplified process leads to happy customers, who buy more products. Retargeting and remarketing to prospects who abandon shopping carts with an @Pay button is another major sales opportunity. One of our merchants experienced a 30 percent lift in transactions and increased the average transaction amount after implementing the @Pay Email Checkout.

Why should AWeber customers connect to @Pay right now?

AWeber is a Certified Email Marketing Provider for @Pay. Connections with the leading payment gateways and processors are in place, there’s no long-term commitment, and you can use as many @Pay buttons as you want. This is a fast, easy, effective way to increase your sales with email.

What’s the pricing model? Is there a special offer for AWeber clients?

The subscription model is $10 per month for the service plus $0.25 per transaction. Note that it is a per-transaction fee not a per-button fee, so merchants only pay when their buttons are generating revenue.

Create your account with @Pay here

Get step-by-step help integrating AWeber with @Pay here

4. Zaxaa

Welly Mulia, CEO of Zaxaa. Twitter: @zaxaaautomation

1. Who is Zaxaa best suited for?

Zaxaa is best suited for digital product sellers who want to easily and quickly sell their products/services, set up sales funnels, and recruit affiliates to help sell their products.

2. What sets this Zaxaa apart from other, similar apps?

Zaxaa is very easy to use even with so many built-in features. The sales and performance reports are a strong point that most other shopping carts can’t match. We provide both detailed and “at-a-glance” reports, including Lifetime Customer Value and Retention Rate, within a few clicks.

3. What benefits/results can marketers expect from using this integration?

AWeber clients can automatically add customers to their email list. This allows them to easily follow up with customers, ask for feedback, offer help, and continue marketing and selling with greater relevance.

4. Why should AWeber customers connect to Zaxaa right now?

So that they can automatically add their customers to their list.

5. What’s the pricing model? Is there a special offer for AWeber clients?

Zaxaa offers three pricing plans: Instant Automation (3% per sale), Premium Automation monthly ($67 per month) or annually ($399.95 per year).

Through Thursday, Nov. 6, AWeber clients can use coupon code “aweber” for an exclusive 20% discount for new Zaxaa Premium Automation plans (monthly or annually).

Create your account with Zaxaa here

Get step-by-step help integrating AWeber with Zaxaa here

What’s Next?

Whether you’re new to ecommerce or a seasoned seller, we want to know how these apps are working for you. Leave us your comments and questions or share your tips for growing a successful online business.

Missed the latest roundups? Revisit them here (October, September, August, July) or check out the AWeber App Showcase to see more of our third-party integrations.

Olivia Dello Buono contributed to this post.

Do you feel that some days your marketing department is speaking in a different language? Are they swapping terms that you’ve heard before but can’t remember what the heck they mean? We’re here to help, with our list of 10 inbound marketing terms and definitions to keep you in the conversation. Getting the lingo right is critical to making sure your marketing team are in-tune with your business objectives.

1. Inbound Marketing

Above all, you need to understand what the term inbound marketing itself means. Those who are identifying themselves an inbound marketers are seeking or earning the attention of their customers. They are making the online business easy to find with engaging content that will draw their customer into the site. In contrast, outbound marketing is about pushing the message to the consumer out through traditional advertising, trade shows, commercials, cold calls and even email blasts.

Photo courtesy of toolstop(CC Attribution)

2. SEO

Search engine optimization, normally called SEO, is one of the most common terms you can expect to come across in inbound marketing. SEO is the practice of making changes or optimizing of your website or blog to improve rankings in search engines.

3. Conversion Path

The conversion path alludes to the events that lead to capturing a lead. A typical conversion path could look like this:  a call-to-action sends visitors to a landing page where they are presented with a lead capture form. Users submit their email address in return for access to premium content — helpful information that goes into greater detail than regular content with the intent to persuade leads to make a purchase.

4. Landing Page

Landing pages market a particular offer, such as an ebook or webinar, to capture a lead. Normally a business would create several landing pages, catered to a particular type of content and designed for a specific persona.

5. Personas

Personas are customer profiles within your target market. They are very comprehensive and including such intimates as consumers’ behaviors, demographics, and psychographic information.

6. Dynamic Content

Dynamic content allows you to display content differently according to the type of visitor, determined by data captured during previous interactions with your website. An online clothing store might want to display different clothing types depending on the user’s sex.

7. The Funnel: TOFU, MOFU, BOFU

The process that visitors take, starting as leads and ending as customers, is called the funnel and it consists of three stages.

• The top of the funnel (TOFU) is the beginning of the conversion process, where leads are looking for information. This is your chance to provide engaging, useful content that will cause prospects to become interested in your company and offerings.
• The middle of the funnel (MOFU) is the point where leads are seeking further information. Here, you provide more in-depth content that further emphasizes that your business is a good option.
• The bottom of the funnel (BOFU) is the final phase, where leads are about to convert into customers. Marketers pass the leads to the sales team, who will typically offer leads a promotional deal, free consultation, or demo.

8. Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing, also called drip marketing, moves leads from one stage in the funnel to the next.  In order to successfully create conversions, you need to design campaigns with a certain stage in the funnel in mind, advises Savvy Panda.

9. Closed-Loop Marketing

It is necessary to track your inbound marketing efforts in order to ensure they are going as planned. Closed-loop marketing allows you to watch how a visitor interacts with your website and content to eventually become a customer.

10. Responsive Design

The ever-increasing number of mobile users has made responsive design still more critical. Responsive design enables your website to act differently according to whether a visitor is using a laptop or desktop computer, tablet, or smartphone.

And that’s just the first 10, but they are probably the most critical. Staying familiar with these terms will keep you on the right track to online growth and business success.

Did you know that the Google Display Network reaches over 90% of user audience? It’s fair to argue that the Google Display Network is not only an effective branding tool, but also great for lead generation.

From my experience, many of us rely on contextual targeting and ignore placement targeting. Just to recap:

• Contextual targeting: where we choose categories relevant to our website, and Google automatically places our adverts on the sites opted into the display network.
• Placement targeting: we manually choose sites to place our advert on.

With its reach, the exposure is essentially unique for online marketing, and can be used as a lead generation medium – not just branding.

Placement targeting can outperform contextual in terms of lead gen, and these three tactics can get you there:

1. Forum Placements

Believe it or not, people still look for information in forums. According to ProBoard’s 2013 social media survey, 67% of respondents found forums to be valuable media tools, with an average of 3.5 people visiting them and interacting on a daily basis. Blows your mind, doesn’t it?

They let consumers read real experiences with different products and services, as well as discuss their experiences. This can affect consumers in the research stages of the sales funnel.

Threads vary from people discussing blenders to which internet services provider they use. I know I use them!

Forums Keyword Strategy

First, create a broad keyword list for what you’re advertising. Your display keywords can be broader than traditional keyword strategies, like ‘blender.’ With display, advertisers can be as broad as possible and even bid on competitor’s brands.

In my previous role, I managed an e-commerce store that sold blenders. I used placement targeting to advertise in a few forums and created image and text adverts in them.

The traffic that poured in to the site was cheap, and most importantly, relevant, unlike some of the contextual placements I’ve seen. This led to an effective branding exercise for my client and interrupted consumers during the best stage of the buying cycle – the information stage, which resulted in sales.

2. Gmail Ads

Have you ever noticed that the adverts around your Gmail relate to the content within the message? To snag one of those spots, the placement would be: mail.google.com:Inbox,Top. Then a list of display keywords is set up relating your service or product.

Gmail ads are perfect for products that require a lot of research, since consumers are going to be in the researching stage a lot longer and want to ensure they’ve checked out all their options.

Gmail Keyword Strategy

Let’s say you’re an online marketing company that offers SEO, PPC, and other digital marketing services. You would be to create ad groups with keywords that relate to your offer, from broad ones like ‘search engine marketing’ to more closely targeted ad groups that can list your competitors.

Not only is the cost of this run cheaper, but you as an advertiser are targeting consumers during the information stage.

3. YouTube Video Ads

YouTube is the second largest search engine. According to “Don’t Outlook the Second Largest Search Engine Anymore” by Gould, YouTube processes 3 billion searches per month, meaning video targeting on YouTube will get you a lot of visibility. And since it’s owned by Google, it’s available on the display network.

We can all upload any video to YouTube and advertise it on related search queries. Bid on competitors’ keywords, other relevant keywords, and phrases that might be relevant to audiences watching the video. The traffic is significantly cheaper, and best of all, you can appear underneath a search result for your competitor. Score!

YouTube Keyword Strategy

In my previous role, we had an installation company that wanted relevant exposure for their brand. We created a keyword list of their competitors and set these keywords in-search for the video on YouTube.

This made the company’s video appear when consumers were researching the company’s competitors. It tied in with a promotion that improved their branding and they were able to acquire leads because they had effective landing page strategy.

Final Remarks

Placement targeting should not be ignored. Take it from me, the Google Display Network does take a bit of work, but placement targeting has really opened my eyes on how it can be used effectively for lead generation- not just branding.

Feel free to ask any questions and/or comment below.

First of all, get over your own stigma of being in a boring industry. Just because you’re not selling a Tesla car or the latest craft beer doesn’t mean you’re in a boring industry. While it may not be the perfect industry for a highly entertaining Super Bowl commercial, your business is interesting to a vital group of people: your leads. More specifically, warm leads.

Think of it this way: Would you walk door to door, knocking on strangers’ doors and pitching your product or service? Or would you rather have people knocking on your door, asking you to tell them all about your business? That’s the difference between outbound and inbound marketing.

Keep It Fresh With Helpful Content

So, now that you know you’re not boring the leads who want to know about the problem your business solves, how do you overcome the stigma of staleness? In a word: content. From relevant content directly tied to your business to peripheral information tied to your industry, content can come in many forms.

I run the marketing department for a mortgage lender. Talk about boring. Who really wants to talk about a mortgage payment? Interest rates? Yawn! However, if you’re looking to buy a home, especially for the first time, you’re probably looking for a lot of answers to very specific questions. You’re also probably interested in many things about the home.

The key to being not-so-boring in an otherwise drab industry is to be helpful and interesting in the way you deliver your message. In fact, as I prepared to talk about this subject at a major marketing conference, I decided that super models and fast cars are no longer the measure of what’s sexy.

Helpful is the new sexy.

Think about it: when it comes to business, a helpful company is an attractive one. Good customer service and friendly reps are sexy. We’re drawn to helpful, interesting content.

Below are the five tactics I’ve found extremely helpful when it comes to marketing in a boring fascinating industry.

1. Buyer Personas

The first tool any marketer needs to have in their tool kit is the buyer persona – a deep dive into who their customers are. It’s more than just demographics. Think of personas as your customers’ stories. Get to know their demographics, their pain points (and how your company can solve them), their technology appetites, where they “hang out” to consume information and more. Really get to know them.

A great way to develop buyer personas is through interviews. Talk to your sales team about the people they work with every day – their “usual” customer. Once you’ve developed your first draft, go back to the sales team and ask them if that person sounds familiar.

Share your buyer personas with your entire company. From sales to marketing to customer service to the receptionist, every person in your organization should know who it is you’re working with. Consider putting these personas on posters and hanging them in your break room or a hallway each employee walks every day.

2. Blog/CTA/Landing Pages

Blogging and other forms of content creation are the bedrock of inbound marketing. Research shows that companies who blog more than once per day tend to acquire customers through their blog. In fact, according to HubSpot, 92 percent of businesses blogging multiple times per day drive customer acquisition through their sites.

But it’s not just about throwing some content on a page and hoping for the best. Your articles need to have purpose, complete with a call to action (CTA) that goes to a landing page.

What, specifically, is a CTA? A CTA is the instruction in your article for the reader to take the next step. It can be text or an image, but it must let them know the next logical place you’d like them to go. Whether it’s for more information, a demo or another offer – the CTA moves the prospect through your process. Every article should have a CTA of some kind, even if it’s as top-of-the-funnel as “subscribe to receive updates.”

And what, specifically, is a landing page? A landing page is the web page where an “offer” lives. A landing page contains a form for the prospect to fill out in exchange for something of value that you are offering. Guides, videos, case studies, research whitepapers and free consultations are all offers your prospects would trade their contact information for.

A landing page and its offering are what drive your next level of connection: email marketing.

3. Email

Email marketing is a lot like courting. This is where relationship develops.

Imagine this scenario:

I’m a prospect, and I find your business because you’ve done your SEO and promotion well. On your website, you offer me the chance to download some terrific content that takes me on a deep dive into the solution to my problem through your product or service.

Now that I’ve downloaded your offer, you have my email address and first name. You’ve probably also asked pertinent questions about my situation. If it’s a B2B relationship, maybe you now know how many employees my company has, the area of the country we’re located in and the greatest challenge we face.

Now that you have data on me and my business, you can create emails to speak to each of my pain points. You can use the size of my company to craft a message speaking to the unique challenges of a small company – or a large one. Your emails will be smart and connected – developing my trust that you’re helpful and knowledgeable.

Segmentation & Personalization – A Winning Combination

Building trust through email marketing isn’t ridiculously difficult: continue to offer more helpful, relevant content rather than just another sales pitch. Tailor the information to me as a buyer persona, so you know what level of information I require.

Email marketing isn’t just a way to “blast an email out to a list.” It’s a way to nurture the relationship. With the right tools, you can see if I’m clicking links you’ve embedded in the emails. You can tell if I’m ignoring them altogether, in which case editing the subject line may be necessary. Use data and personalization to help increase engagement.

Emails are even more effective when the information found within them is so valuable that it’s shared with another person. Think of it like this: if I tell my friends what a great experience I had at a specific restaurant, they’re more likely to try it than if that restaurant bought ads on a local radio station they listen to.

Social proof is powerful. We trust our sphere of influence. Forwarding your company’s email to someone I think it might help means I trust you, and in turn my friend trusts me, so they’re starting off with a higher level of confidence in your organization. As you already know, referrals are golden. The best email marketing becomes a way for you to empower your leads (and customers) to become your very own promoters.

4. Social Media

Social media can take your marketing – and your customer satisfaction campaigns – to new levels. Whether it’s delighting current clients, developing business partnerships or looking for new customers, social media can really add to your communications portfolio. It’s also another way to empower an army of evangelists for your brand.

Let me say that I adhere to the philosophy of Dan Zarrella in that unicorns and rainbows need to be ignored. When it comes to social media, terms like “engagement” are an elusive measurement. However, I’ve also come to realize that social media is often a terrible place to sell.

Allow me to explain. Think of most social media platforms as a social entity, like a party or gathering of friends. Imagine you say to a friend, “I really can’t stand my apartment. I think it’s time to buy a house” and then some guy appears and says, “You should look at this no-down-payment mortgage option for buying a house!” Would you want a random sales person interrupting your time with a sales pitch?

Always Be Connecting

As businesses, we often tend look at social media as a place to reach new customers and sell to them. But what if we looked at it as a place to develop relationships and deepen our connections to customers instead? What if social media became a place for us to find business partnerships that could become guest post opportunities?

When we look at social media as a real place with real people, we tend to interrupt less and instead offer helpful content that empowers others to share. When we share and connect, we – as a business – become real. This strategy takes time and planning – and it can certainly include the things we already do like share articles, images and videos – but it also shifts our attitude from “always be closing,” to “always be connecting.”

Social media can be a powerful tool and PR opportunity when we’re using it for things like customer service and delighting our brand advocates. Just like any other business development strategy, it takes time, effort and strategic planning to pull off. You can’t simply have a Twitter account and never visit it. That would be like opening an office on a main street in town and keeping the lights on, but never going in to answer the phones or talk to people walking in.

5. Video

Much like email marketing helps develop deeper relationships, video can add a very personal touch to your marketing and sales cycles.

Connect With Your Audience Through The Screen

When I was a TV news producer, I was friends with the on-air folks like news anchors and weather personalities. I noticed something back then – people treat you like they know you even when they’ve never met you, simply because you’re “on TV.”

Think about it – that anchor is in your living room every morning or every evening. As a viewer, you see them every day. You hear their stories and you trust their delivery of news. You get to know them through the screen.

Every time I’d go out to lunch with my on-air friends, someone would approach them and talk to them like they were old friends despite the fact that it was the first they’d met each other. Video had allowed a connection that fostered a relationship that seemed reciprocal to the viewer. You can have the same thing with a YouTube account.

When you create videos that answer questions about the problem your business solves, offers advice, gives information or positions you as the expert, you add value to your content. Your viewers talk to you like they know you. That trust leads to deals and referrals. Video is powerful.

Think of all the questions you and your sales team hear. Every one of those questions can be a video or a series of videos you send to prospects. You’re answering their questions before they even realize they have them.

Tips for creating a video marketing strategy:

Just start. Don’t be afraid of video; it’s not open-heart surgery. Even if you start with your phone’s video camera and you don’t upload the videos, get in front of the camera and begin to tell your story. Or find someone to be your “face.” But the key is to just start. A marathon begins with that first step.

Be patient. Your videos will likely be average at best when you start. It takes time to build an audience and get better at producing video. This isn’t an overnight initiative. Someday you’ll look back on your early videos and wonder how you ever got through them. Patience pays off.

Get the right tools. You don’t have to have a Hollywood budget for the right tools. Keep in mind, however, that consumers buy high definition TVs and enjoy quality video. As consumers we can be pretty forgiving, but video with bad audio, no lighting and the steadiness of a drunken sailor in a storm will turn us off quickly.

Get the right equipment from the start. You’ll need a camera, a tripod and a microphone. The microphone can be hard-wired or wireless, but it needs to be an external mic that plugs into or syncs with your camera. When shooting, be sure to take lighting into account. Light your subjects with natural or artificiallighting, but make sure you can see them. Finally, editing software is likely available on your computer already. Start with that, then look at upgrading to Adobe Premier or Final Cut.

Hire internally. Video production can get very pricy. If you want to create consistently great videos, you’ll need to hire internally. A production house can produce a great “company” video. If you go this route, learn from them. You’re paying for more than the video – you’re paying for their expertise. Ask questions. Then when you’re ready to create weekly or monthly videos, hire someone and buy them the equipment to help you on the inside. Even if you think you only have one video idea, you’ll be surprised at what you can do. We create two-to-four videos every week at our organization and we “just do mortgages.”

Who should you hire for video? My suggestion is to hire a TV news photojournalist with a few years of experience. They know how to tell stories through video and they’ve worked with reporters. They’re also paid terribly in the TV news world and will be receptive to your budget.

Be helpful and concise. Video doesn’t have to be just 60 seconds. One of our most popular videos at AmeriFirst is 11 minutes long, but it’s full of helpful information. Your video should be as long or short as it takes to tell your story. However, two minutes is good rule of thumb to follow.

Remember: help, inform and educate. Don’t aim for a viral video hit; that’s not a solid strategy. Build your audience with consistency and you’ll drive leads over time.

So here is your rally call: Helpful is the new sexy. You don’t have to be in an industry that everyone clamors to be a part of. Your industry is interesting to those warm leads you’re trying to reach with relevant content in a digestible manner. You can be sexy and not boring – be helpful!

Metrics that influence brand engagement, brand perception, revenue and customer retention

CUSTOMER RETENTION

Digital marketing can help any ecommerce site do more than just acquire leads and build an audience; it can help transition those users into returning customers and ultimately, loyal brand advocates. Returning customers are generally more engaged and generate more revenue. Building customer loyalty requires a solid customer service mentality combined with a well-planned digital marketing strategy. Retargeting through advertisements and optimizing landing pages, for example, are essential components and the following metrics can indicate correctly implemented strategies.

Analytics that measure customer retention: retargeting metrics, and A/B experiments and in-page analytics

Retargeting metrics

Retargeting helps convert customers that have already visited a website and serves as a great tool for loyalty programs. Through strategically placed ads, customers are incentivized to return to make additional purchases. There are several ways that retargeting campaigns can be measured, including view-through-conversions (VTC), the number of times a user is served an ad and then searches or types in a website; and click-through-conversions (CTC), the number of times a user clicks on an ad and then converts. Additionally, click-through-rate (CTR) indicates how many times an ad was clicked, divided by the number of impressions served, and multiplied by 100 to express a percentage. Effective ads will have a higher CTR and conversion rates, indicating that more individuals engaged with the content of the ad.

A/B experiments and in-page analytics

Another way to entice customers back is through social media marketing. By offering your existing fans exclusive offers, you can encourage them to purchase additional products or services. One of the best ways to optimize this process, as well as other digital marketing efforts, is through A/B testing. By testing the various content components of these campaigns on a small group, you can repeat the most successful version. This includes optimizing content on-page that drives people to act, as well as the messaging you are using to drive them to the site in the first place. It may include testing which images of a product drive the most sales if you are an ecommerce site, or it may be optimizing the language on a call-to-action button if you are trying to get individuals to sign up for your newsletter. Either way, A/B testing is the key to most effectively using your digital marketing budget.

CONCLUSION

There are many metrics that indicate the effectiveness of digital marketing. The decision to invest in digital is crucial to the development of any brand. But once that decision has been made, questions on how to spend and where to allocate resources are bound to arise. By following best practices, and using metrics to guide the decision-making process, marketers can take full advantage of the cost-effectiveness of digital marketing. When correctly evaluated, analytics can help optimize resource allocations, drive strategy, and, ultimately, increase revenue.

Most people think content promotion is something you do after you’re done creating it. But the reality is that you need to plan your promotion right from the beginning. Seasoned entrepreneurs don’t build a product until they know how they plan to sell/market it. Likewise, seasoned content marketers shouldn’t build an epic piece of content unless they know how it will reach a wide audience.

I decided to ask 13 content marketing experts to share their strategies for promoting content. I also got them to reveal their biggest challenge with promoting content. Read on for their insightful responses.

Michael King, Seasoned Digital Marketing & Lead Generation Consultant

1) What are some ways to plan content promotion before you hit publish?

Certainly it depends on the goals and the type of content, but one of the most common ways is to leverage Snip.ly to promote it even when tweeting other people’s content. We of course plan out influencer outreach, sharing wireframes and ideas before a piece of content is launched to get buy in and convince people to link to share it before it’s done. Additionally, we identify similar content types and the people who shared them using BuzzSumo and a number of other social listening tools.

2) What’s the biggest challenge you face in promoting content?

It’s never a question of buy-in from clients for us because we wouldn’t be able to create something if it they hadn’t bought into it. Boring industries represent opportunities to me since there’s not much cool stuff already in existence in that space. Typically the biggest challenge is lack of budget. With clients seeing content marketing as a largely Organic function, they are leery of putting paid media into it. Therefore we have to do all of the leg work through outreach of some kind. Launching content works a lot better when you have a Paid, Owned and Earned strategy to support it.

Simon Penson, Founder of Zazzle Media

1) What are some ways to plan content promotion before you hit publish?

This is a very big question as we do a huge amount of work in the planning phase. That starts with audience research to understand, in real detail, the likes, loves, hates and interests of the people we want to build relationship with (the audience). We do that by pulling lots of data from existing marketing channels within the business we are working with and then adding to that with search and social data.

The result of this work is the creation of 1-4 personas, upon which we will design our content strategy around. This info then rolls into our content ideas process; a structured way of surfacing consistently great content ideas. Those ideas are then approved by the client and come back to a content strategist, whose job it is to pull it together into a cohesive content calendar that conforms to our rules around content flow. The final calendar is then approved and the creation process begins.

2) What’s the biggest challenge you face in promoting content?

The biggest challenge is education. Getting the client to fully buy into the fact that it is not a short term investment and committing to that investment can be tricky in a digital world that has traditionally delivered fast results. That time has, thankfully, gone for good and we must now work hard every day to achieve that success through the process of real marketing and brand building. We know it does work but the brand must have a long enough runway to allow it to work.

That buy in also includes giving the agency the ‘power’ to create the content they need to guarantee it will be taken by journalists. Often that process will cross teams so we have to work hard to gain the trust of all of those stakeholders to ensure they are comfortable with us working with them to create content that may not necessarily be what they are used to working with. Creating something with a sales message simply doesn’t work and getting over that can be tricky, initially at least.

Debra Mastaler, Alliance-Link

1) What are some ways to plan content promotion before you hit publish?

I plan around product launches, holidays and keyword cycles. If a number of competitive websites are blogging about a certain topic, I will research different topics and/or keyword sets so the client stands out and isn’t lost in the content crowd.

If the client is getting ready to launch a new service, we’ll create content to pitch to the media and source to key bloggers for low-key viral impact. I rarely recommend creating content unless there is a promotional tie-in, things like product launches, coupons, updates, etc., really help make a piece of content link and shareable. Unless informational content is new or answering something not previously known, its success rate tends to stall without a promotion.

2) What’s the biggest challenge you face in promoting content?

Lack of budget. With competition increasing, you have to step up your game which usually means adding elements (video mostly) which makes the campaign cost more.

Chad Pollitt, Co-Founder of Relevance

1) What are some ways to plan content promotion before you hit publish?

That’s a loaded question! It all depends on what kind of content I want to produce. If it’s an article or blog post I want to promote I may not even publish it on one of my owned websites. Instead, I may publish it on HuffPo, The Guardian, Moz, HubSpot, Social Media Today or Business2Community. These websites have way more audience than I do so getting an article on them exposes my content to way more folks. I just make sure I include a strong call to action in the copy to download something on one of my sites. That way I’m driving leads or subscribers. After a week or so I may syndicate that content back on my site for my audience to consume.

If I publish exclusively on one of my own sites I might give a couple industry friends a sneak peek at the content before it’s published to solicit their feedback. Soliciting feedback is a soft way to pitch influencers. Once you have their feedback and agreement on the content piece they’re much more likely to share it once you ask them to. In addition, I have my RSS feed tapped into over 10 different native paid networks. That means I have the full distribution logistics infrastructure in place to ensure my content is amplified before I hit publish.

If the content is something more advanced, like a study, survey, guide, ebook, etc., I’ll likely take a different approach. I’ll put the research in and figure out who I want to write for, where they hang out online, what content is most popular on those sites, who the influencers are around that topic and which keywords are they searching for. This information is critical in the creation and promotion of the content piece. Ultimately, what I’m going to try and do is get some influencers involved in the content production (interviews, quotes, etc.), identify the problems my target audience is trying to solve and solve them, and uncover the media outlets and trade publications they read in order to pitch them later for content coverage. Any coverage I earn I’ll put some native paid amplification behind. Earned media coverage of this nature is validation that the advanced content is indeed valuable. That usually comes in the form of higher conversion rates.

2) What’s the biggest challenge you face in promoting content?

The biggest conundrum I’m facing is when to quit promotion on any one particular content piece. I guess that’s a good problem to have because most marketers aren’t even doing content promotion yet. On native paid channels I’ve capped promotion at $200 per article. However, for advanced content I spend the entire budget I’m allocated (usually between $500 to $2k). I have to request budget up the chain for each advanced content piece. There’s really no rhyme or reason other than budgetary constraints that I use caps on native paid channels.

On the other hand, earned media for content coverage really doesn’t have an expiration. If we have an ebook that was written two years ago and it’s still relevant today we’ll drop a link to the ebook in a byline, guest post or syndication if that ebook is prudent to the topic of the article written. Some of the bylines we’ve done on HubSpot are perfect examples of this. However, middle or bottom of the funnel content rarely gets promoted because it’s value is typically appreciated by folks in our sales funnel. The paid and earned channels we use aren’t typically littered with folks in our sales process.

Our email and social media broadcasting for content promotion really never stops either. As long as the content is still prudent we’ll continue to include it in our lead nurturing workflows and scheduled social posts.

Brittany Balog, Inbound Marketing Consultant at BluLeadz

1) What are some ways to plan content promotion before you hit publish?

A detailed content calendar is crucial for me when it comes to promoting content. Ensuring new content aligns with other, ongoing marketing efforts is essential in creating a clear path for visitors. Building buzz about a topic we are already creating offers for creates a need for our resources. The weeks leading up to a new content launch are just as important as promotions afterward.

2) What’s the biggest challenge you face in promoting content?

The biggest challenge I face in promoting content is getting it in front of the right audience. It is easy to publish content on your own site; guest posts, links and mentions by industry influencers are a different, more difficult matter. However, these provide very valuable results for content promotion. Researching areas you want your content promoted, and creating a plan to appear in these places, should be a big part of any content promotion strategy.

AJ Ghergich, Ghergich & Co.

1) What are some ways you plan content promotion before you hit publish?

I start thinking about promotion as soon at the idea is formed. If you wait until it’s time to market to start to think about promo you are setting yourself up for a disaster.

In fact, once we have a great idea for content we do some research and make sure there is a market for the content we are about to create. Once you prove to your content has a receptive audience that you can easily define/target you can move into production.

While your content is being created you need to be building custom outreach lists with tools like Buzzsumo and Followerwonk.

You should also, start to reach out to high end journalist and try and find one who will collaborate on the piece with you. If you get their feedback along the way, and offer them first dibs on the content, you already have a great launch partner lined up!

You should also have your paid social media campaigns queued up and ready to go with customized targeted lists. Also, make sure you/your client have emails ready to be set to their audience/newsletter.

On launch day you and your team should personally reach out to “friends” and influencers you know who would be interested in the content in parallel to your outreach campaign.

I am over simplifying this a lot but hopefully you get the idea that promotion goes hand in hand with and through production.

2) What’s the biggest challenge you face in promoting content?

I think scale is something we all struggle with. It’s not that hard to produce a great piece of content here and there and promote it. However, it is much harder to do that X times per month for yourself or clients month after month.

You really have to plan our your promotion so you don’t burn out your outreach contacts. This why I like to setup content schedules to hit different sectors of niches each month so I can skip certain sectors for a few months before circling back.

You don’t want to promote 5 pieces of Social Media Marketing content at the same time ☺

Steven Sparber, SEO Associate at Seer Interactive

1) What are some ways you plan content promotion before you hit publish?

Content is planned through a combination of research and reflection. The research is what’s tangible – What are people discussing today in your industry, and can you measure the popularity of those discussions? The reflection is what’s intangible, and perhaps more potent than research – What do you find interesting that others may connect with? Where do you see the discussion headed? Original, creative observations will generate content that resonate with people.

2) What’s the biggest challenge you face in promoting content?

The biggest challenge I’ve faced in promoting content is motivating clients to adhere to a schedule and stay organized. Processes and strategies have been created, but cooperation is needed for them to actualize. You must respectfully convey expectations, but more importantly, continually revisit why expectations are in place. What are the goals and projected results? Ultimately, the why is the common purpose between you and your client.

Casie Gillette, Director of Online Marketing at KoMarketing

1) What are some ways you plan content promotion before you hit publish?

The nice thing about writing content for ourselves and/or our clients is we have a solid understanding of who the target is and where those people are. That means that before we even start writing the post, when we are simply creating the topics, we’re already thinking about who the people are we want to get that content in front of.

For example, we have a client who targets those in the HR industry. When an HR related post is set to publish, we’ve already identified which groups we may want to promote it in (LinkedIn or Google+), which hashtags to use on Twitter, and if we are paying to promote it, which segments we want to hit in which network.

The idea is you aren’t reacting when your content goes live. You have written a piece of content with a specific audience in mind, and now your job is to get that content it in front of that audience.

My colleague Ryan Young actually just wrote a great post about this and the different tools we use to identify people.

2) What’s the biggest challenge you face in promoting content?

I’d say it’s time. Many of our clients just don’t have time to go and promote it in the right places. They don’t have to time to go and build up their presence in social networks or build out the relationships that are required to successfully promote a piece a piece of content.

Often, it’s publish then simply promote everywhere, without regard for whether or not they’re reaching the right audience.

Craig Sutton, Search Engine People

1) What are some ways to plan content promotion before you hit publish?

Before publishing content our Social Team at Search Engine People likes to create editorial calendars to plan content for the months ahead. Editorial Calendars allow us to plan content around promotions, events, holidays, etc, helps us in planning to find outside content that will support the clients content and allows the client to give us feedback and support materials ahead of time. A big benefit is this allows to get approval and buy-in from the client before content is written and it gives us the opportunity to take advantage of seasonal search trends.

We also create snackable bits of information around a piece of content that we can use to promote one piece of content in multiple ways. Say the client has a blog our team pulls any tips, facts, stats, from it and creates graphic tips, eBooks, whitepapers etc related to content we will be publishing. This allows us to post on multiple platforms multiple times without looking repetitive.

2) What’s the biggest challenge you face in promoting content?

BUDGET! It can be very hard to convince some clients that there is strong ROI in social media. Often they don’t understand the effort and costs involved. There are many working parts: you have to create the content, have content to support it, pay for promotion and have someone managing it. Many clients don’t see the benefits or need for a paid promotional budget on platforms like Facebook- they believe just creating the content should be enough; even when we tell them that the average organic reach of content on a Facebook brand page is only around 6%. (http://social.ogilvy.com/facebook-zero-considering-life-after-the-demise-of-organic-reach/) and that even $5/post will go a long way.

Another reason for the gap in understanding how much time and resources it takes is that they typically don’t understand that using social media as a selling tool is different from the effort they put into posting on their personal social media profiles.

Allison Boyer, Content Marketing Consultant

1) What are some ways to plan content promotion before you hit publish?

I actually go through an entire checklist before I hit publish to make sure I’m setting my content up for good promotion, but my biggest tip by far is to use CoSchedule. This handy tool allows you to get your social promotion lined up before you even hit publish, and you can see the entire editorial calendar to make sure you have a comprehensive content publishing and social schedule ready to go.

The other monster promotion tip I have is this: when planning content, think about topic “hubs” you can create. Whenever you publish a massive blog post, guide, or other long-form content, make sure you have several shorter, detailed posts set up to support it. I think of them like spokes on a wheel, with the huge resource being the center hub. It’s great when other people promote your content, but set yourself up to be your own best promoter with robust internal linking. As a bonus, these shorter, detailed posts make great guest posts. Most bloggers link to their blog home page in a guest post bio, but you’re often better served linking to an individual post directly related to the topic at hand.

2) What’s the biggest challenge you face in promoting content?

Great promotion takes time, and it’s always a challenge to help clients understand that.

First, you need to actually devote time to doing the promotion. Often, I’m hired to just do the writing part of a project, and when a client comes back to me unhappy about the results after publishing, 99% of the time it is because they didn’t do any promotion of the piece beyond an auto-tweet when it first went live. The “if we have great content, readers will find us” model doesn’t work.

Second, you need to give a content time to perform well. Sometimes, content takes off right away. But these initial traffic spikes rarely lead to conversions. It’s the long-term traffic you need to watch. Is the post still getting social love three months later? Have the backlinks to the post brought in a ton of search engine traffic once it was indexed? Can older posts be revived through internal linking and repurposing? Clients often don’t have a plan for long-term content promotion – they just want new content created. Changing that way of thinking, so people see how their content can work for them over the course of months or even years, is my biggest challenge. We all love immediate gratification. But with smart planning, I’ve seen a single blog post bring in MILLIONS of new readers for relatively small niche blogs.

Devin Harper, Nifty Marketing

1) What are some ways to plan content promotion before you hit publish?

I don’t know how many content guys are doing this, but Reddit is an extremely insightful polling platform. Before I push content, I want to know if it will stick. So part of my planning usually involves me checking out different subreddits to find upvoted questions and other stuff. It helps me gauge what is popular in a client’s niche and steers me in the right direction when brainstorming content ideas. If you can bear the distraction of surfing the front page of the web, you can always find some inspiration there.

2) What’s the biggest challenge you face in promoting content?

My biggest challenge with content is making it sticky. It requires wit, humor, creative genius, imagery, utility, good timing and client approval. None come easy. It’s when these elements all come together that the content promotes itself!

Krystian Szastok, RocketMill

1) What are some ways to plan content promotion before you hit publish?

We have a structured template for promoting one off pieces. More importantly though we plan things in advance so that the pieces of content complement each other and allow anyone to access the content in a few ways. Another crucial element in the preparations is the pre-outreach, I will talk to people and ask what they think about an idea, and then about the first draft/mockup of a piece of content and ensure there is interest. Then at a later stage I’ll make my ‘ask’ and see what actual help on the day of launch I can count on.

2) What’s the biggest challenge you face in promoting content?

The biggest challenge is definitely breaking through in the noise. There is so much content produced at the moment that having buy-in from the audience in advance of publishing anything is crucial.
Also the attention to detail – content has to have the right design, headline, concept, data, outreach, budget – everything, to succeed, in the old days it was a lot easier and you could get away with less detailed proposal.

Harry Gardiner, Content Marketing Executive at Koozai

1) What are some ways to plan content promotion before you hit publish?

I’d recommend having a detailed content promotion plan before any content is created. Use an editorial calendar to ensure your content follows trends and that there is a relevant audience available for when it is published. This way you’ll also be able to take advantage of specific dates, events and news stories to aid your promotion process.

2) What’s the biggest challenge you face in promoting content?

Whilst a client’s budget may stop you from promoting content on a larger scale, the restrictions also help you become more creative in the way in which you push it to your users. Free promotional techniques such as news jacking and Social Media updates are often very successful in their own right.

What are some tips you have in promoting content before you hit publish? And what would you consider your biggest challenge in promoting/distributing content? Share them in the comments below.

Today’s B2B sales and marketing folks struggle with the overwhelming number of channels for finding and reaching new leads. The customer “funnel” continues to expand as buyers do more of their own research before raising their hand to connect with a sales rep. But imagine if you could make the funnel wider by identifying leads when they’re just browsing your site and haven’t yet filled out your “contact me” form, or leads who haven’t yet visited but are likely to be a good fit for your product?

That’s hard to do with the primitive tools that are available for sales and marketers today, unless you bring together some very rare assets — which just so happen to all exist at LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the only company with fairly clean and accurate details on pretty much every contact that matters in the business world. Unfortunately, most other data providers’ contact info contains 80 percent garbage, and they can’t really improve it without violating CAN-SPAM laws. LinkedIn also reflects the direction sales is heading with strong channels for thought leadership. Via LinkedIn, you can educate and advocate for your customers versus just selling to them.

The Holy Grail of B2B Sales

Here’s a hypothetical scenario: What if you included some JavaScript from LinkedIn on your company’s website so that whenever a signed-in LinkedIn user visited your site, you could see who they were in LinkedIn Sales Navigator? Since the overwhelming majority of potential leads just browse and don’t fill in your forms, this would give you insight into a whole new population of potential customers that your Marketo and Salesforce systems can’t track. If LinkedIn offered a more sales or marketing automation-style interface, you could select, group or filter those web visitors and send them educational LinkedIn InMails or purchase targeted advertising on LinkedIn or in their LinkedIn email digests.

If we take this scenario a step further, marketers and salespeople could eventually use LinkedIn to reach new prospects who haven’t yet visited their sites. LinkedIn would know which types of users find your company interesting – especially if the company worked itself down the funnel towards Salesforce’s territory to offer CRM functions. By knowing the history of your leads (i.e. which ones end up converting to customers), LinkedIn could help you pinpoint your hottest prospects even before they hit one of your landing pages or contact forms.

While LinkedIn claims that Salesforce.com isn’t a competitor, it sure is running a course that brings it closer and closer to Salesforce’s bread-and-butter. LinkedIn’s recent acquisition of the Bizo marketing platform is a clear indication that the company is serious about taking on B2B marketing. A leaked document related to the acquisition details LinkedIn’s strategy to do this with an approach that builds upon its incredibly valuable social graph, online presence and other unique assets. And LinkedIn’s revamp of its Sales Navigator product is another sign that the company’s focusing more and more on building solutions for sales teams.

How LinkedIn Could Win in CRM

LinkedIn has an opportunity that none of today’s automation vendors can match. Even if Marketo and Salesforce joined forces, they’d be unable to give companies the true full-circle understanding of customers that LinkedIn could provide. That’s because LinkedIn has four unique assets that position it well to make a considerable run into this space (if it chooses to).

First of all, LinkedIn holds a treasure trove of data about companies and individuals. Whereas CRM and marketing automation systems start empty and you have to fill them up with contacts to campaign and prospect into, LinkedIn already has a pre-populated database. That’s why many sales teams leverage its Team Link tool to share networks across reps. This makes it easy to determine the right contacts, retrieve lead recommendations, and see updates on key people or companies. LinkedIn could add even more value for salespeople by automatically lighting up all the right prospects tailored for their business, and offering one-click actions so they could easily reach out to them with the best personalized offers.

In addition, LinkedIn is a hub for thought leadership.

LinkedIn provides a social network for promoting educational content in an organic, viral way that’s way more enticing than the blast emails we get from today’s marketing and sales automation systems. For example, LinkedIn’s Influencers feature has already attracted numerous successful business leaders like Richard Branson, Jack Welsh and Bill Gates. This kind of approach has tons of potential, especially for under-tapped sales and marketing opportunities around emerging trends or topics.

Finally, LinkedIn has a data-driven DNA and a great culture for smart products. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner knows first-hand how important data science is, and he hired one of the best data scientists I know – Deepak Agarwal. They understand that these techniques will also be crucial for redefining sales and marketing. In fact, the company has built an advanced lead scoring system that its sales team uses internally. It leverages data science, LinkedIn’s network graph, and numerous interesting company and profile signals to predict the best prospects for LinkedIn to sell its hiring solutions into. Although this system is heavily customized for LinkedIn’s internal corporate needs, it’s clear that the company has seen the future.

What Might Hold LinkedIn Back

With such assets, it’s a no-brainer to make a run into a $30 billion market, right? Well, not quite, because for LinkedIn to make this move, it must overcome significant challenges, including the innovator’s dilemma. The company already has a cash cow in its recruiting solutions and is loved by the public markets. But if you’re going to take on an existing market like CRM, you have to be very, very focused. That’s hard to do when you’re already making a lot of money from a totally different buyer. LinkedIn is a focused company, so it’s hard to see its leadership taking on the risk of spreading their focus too thin.

Another issue is the company’s consumer roots. Protecting users’ privacy is paramount for a company like LinkedIn, and this would get more challenging if it moved into the enterprise space. Salespeople and marketers would demand more data about LinkedIn users, and want more aggressive and effective methods for eliciting responses from them, but that would very likely run afoul with consumers’ expectations. Crossing over into the enterprise would mean longer sales cycles, more support, less profit, more engagement with partners and consulting firms, and a lot of pressure to do deeper reporting and analytics.

And while LinkedIn would probably prefer that we do all our work end-to-end in their experience, enterprise software is just messy. It has to interoperate with back-office applications for things like contracts, bookings, website analytics, customer support and ticketing, lead routing, territories, CRM triggers, etc. Even if LinkedIn had all these workflows and integrations (and the implementation partners and consultants to support them), it would be an uphill battle to take over existing sales and marketing workflows from within Salesforce and transfer those to the LinkedIn island.

Although the risks of moving into the sales and marketing space are high given the safeties LinkedIn enjoys today, the market is just too lucrative to ignore. I predict LinkedIn will incrementally chip away at pieces of marketing and sales automation over time rather than going all-in and calling out Salesforce. That said, I would love to see LinkedIn go on the offensive like Salesforce did against Siebel. It has the goods and is the most well positioned to pull off such a game-changing feat.

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Technology companies like Uber and Jawbone collect massive and intricate datasets about consumer behavior, and in the process, they’re tackling critical issues with data science. These kinds of innovative organizations are revolutionizing the way businesses interact with each other by automating the complex techniques data scientists use to extract value from big data. And as a result, we’re seeing a lot more interest in the impact data science can have on the enterprise organization.

Becoming a data-driven marketing & sales organization

B2B marketing and sales executives are no strangers to data. In every area of the marketing and sales funnel, data drives decisions. On the marketing end of the funnel, data drives decisions about which market segments to pursue, how to identify the best new prospects, which opportunities to re-engage with, how to increase conversions, and how to measure success. Today’s smartest marketing leaders use predictive marketing algorithms built on data to make better business decisions.

However, to run a truly data-driven organization, marketers need rich proprietary data sets, real-time integrations, sophisticated record matching, machine-learning — and they need it delivered through intuitive software. Despite the rise of the marketing technologist, most marketers just aren’t wired to grapple with billions of unstructured data points while developing strategic messaging roadmaps.

Matching your own CRM data to a massive database of businesses 

Every time you record a customer interaction in your CRM, you store data about customer behavior. Most companies hold incredibly valuable insights in their CRM and marketing automation systems, but they don’t have the time or the technology to identify those insights. Companies like Radius help marketers find insights by matching CRM account data to a proprietary database that tracks tons of signals about every business in the US. By matching our customers’ CRM data to our data, we can determine which signals impact pipeline activity — even if our customers have never evaluated those signals before.

On the sales end of the funnel, data drives decisions about which prospects to contact, when and how often to contact them, on which channels to conduct prospect outreach, building pipeline, forecasting revenue, and measuring sales rep success.

InsideSales.com uses data science to solve some of the challenges salespeople face in the qualification and conversion processes. InsideSales.com tracks call and email data for customers, and applies machine learning to predict which channels perform at which times, as well as which leads are most likely to convert, qualify, and close.

Adopting predictive intelligence

Rather than developing these complex systems in house, most B2B marketers look to technology partners that can help them achieve better results using data. Today, the best-funded companies in the marketing and sales space use data science to build predictive tools.

At its core, predictive analytics refers to the practice of analyzing current and historical facts to make predictions about the future. The science of predictive analytics requires statistics, modeling, data mining, and machine learning.

“It’s math, not magic,” says Mick Hollison, CMO of InsideSales.com, the sales acceleration company that’s developed a patented technology which uses data science to predict lead conversion, called Neuralytics.

A 2014 Bizo report on data-driven marketers found that less than 20% of B2B marketers feel that their organizations use data well. A number of chief marketing and sales officers face pressure from CEOs to hire data scientists, but skilled data scientists are some of today’s most sought after professionals; building data science teams often isn’t a feasible goal for modern marketers and sales professionals. And marketers that try to mine insights from their data without the help of data scientists struggle to stay ahead.

Building an Intelligent Marketing & Sales Funnel

We refer to the Intelligent Marketing & Sales Funnel as the revenue process that uses data science to find, convert, and close customers. The Intelligent Marketing Funnel isn’t your average conical funnel that moves leads from the top to the bottom in a linear fashion. The Intelligent Funnel uses insights from won customers and lost deals to build audience segments for targeted campaigns, identifies which new leads within those segments are most likely to convert, and predicts when and at which price point opportunities will become customers.

The intelligent funnel automatically suggests how you should market based on a data-driven understanding of your customer, and recommends the most efficient and effective sales actions to help you close your most valuable prospects.

Data science has been slowly revolutionizing the way businesses interact with each other for decades, and the movement has finally begun within the sales and marketing organization. We’re currently seeing a swift rise of importance in the sales and marketing leadership roles as tech giants at Oracle and Salesforce turn their attention to the CMO, and the marketers and sales leaders that align with data science have an unprecedented opportunity to solve major problems from their helm at the sales and marketing table.

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