Wouldn’t it be nice if content marketing were as simple as just creating stellar content?
Sure, you can say that crafting the most compelling content possible is your number one priority. (After all, it should be.) But no matter how good you are, or how much time you spend writing and perfecting your work, the problems you run into are the same ones that affect literally everyone else.
Part of it is a matter of numbers, because effective marketing isn’t just about quality content – it’s about algorithms. The other part is a matter of whether you allow your content to expire and go to waste, which is all too easy to do.
Fortunately, there’s a single solution that addresses both of those problems – but first, it’s important to understand just why these issues affect your business (and every business) as much as they do.
Problem One: You need to post more updates on social media.
Social media visibility just isn’t what it used to be.
For one thing, the algorithms that dictate who sees what on social networks are always changing. Particularly over the past year, Facebook has implemented big changes that have decimated organic reach for brands, as well as smaller changes that affect what types of content get the most advantageous placement in your followers’ newsfeeds.
Long story short? Every update you post is seen by only a fraction of your audience – a fraction that seems to get smaller and smaller over time.
Twitter is scarcely any different. Though the network doesn’t pick and choose which of your updates show up in a follower’s timeline, its continually booming growth and the fast pace at which updates are posted mean anything you tweet has a relatively short shelf life – it might be buried in a matter of minutes.
None of this is to say that social is no longer valuable, though – in fact, quite the opposite may be true. Recent analysis shows that while Facebook’s organic reach is still declining, for example,engagement rates are actually up – while each update is seen by fewer people, those people are engaging more.
The bottom line, then, is that you need to post more updates. Because each one is seen by a small section of your audience, updating more frequently allows you to continue to reach more (and different) followers.
Take Time Magazine, for example. Time’s Facebook and Twitter accounts each post dozens of updates per day, but the average follower is likely to see only a few of them at the most. Of course, Time is also one of the most prominent news publications on the planet, and generates enough new content on a regular basis to create the fodder for dozens of new updates every 24 hours. Even an above-average business doesn’t have those kinds of resources – after all, you can only post so many blogs in a day!
The conundrum, then, is that you need to post more updates, but you don’t necessarily generate the volume of new material that you need to share only your latest and greatest.
Which brings us to the second big problem:
Problem Two: Your old content is going to waste.
The old content on your website gets buried under the new. In some cases, that isn’t a problem – old content may be dated, irrelevant, and replaceable. Other times, though, that content is evergreen, and burying it means allowing it to go to waste.
Just look at the blog here at Convince & Convert, for example. Over the years, this blog has built up well over 100 pages of posts. Even the most interested visitor isn’t likely to sift through that entire back catalogue in search of reading material, especially when they don’t know in advance whether a particular post is still relevant.
If you post social updates linking to those posts, you’re creating a shortcut that directs fans and followers straight to older, evergreen content, but writing and posting those updates takes time – and the more evergreen content you have, the more time you theoretically have to regularly dedicate to promoting them on social.
Every piece of evergreen content represents time you spent on your business – time you allow to go to waste when you allow that content to remain buried. Directing social traffic to that evergreen content is a potential means to an end, because it allows you to post more frequent updates while also preventing older work from going to waste, but the time it takes to continually write and post those updates represents an exponentially bigger time investment.
Fortunately, there’s a way around it.
The Solution: Repurpose and repost.
Posting social status updates that link to your evergreen content kills two birds with one stone, but you need the proper strategy to keep the process from becoming prohibitively time-consuming.
The solution? Create evergreen social updates for your evergreen content – updates that you can use over and over again.
Repeating the updates that promote your evergreen content is a natural solution to diminished reach on social networks. Because every update you share is seen by only a small part of your audience, when you repeat an update in the future, it’s likely to be seen by different people – a new slice of the pie every time you post.
(Not to mention the natural churn of social followers, which constantly introduces new people to your audience who simply haven’t seen your older updates.)
Sort through your existing catalogue of evergreen content, and for every blog post or article, write one or two social media updates. When you’re finished, disperse those into your existing schedule of posts. Essentially, you’re using evergreen content to fill in the gaps between links to new content, and the other updates you share on a regular basis.
This is where planning ahead with a schedule comes in particularly handy. For example, you may save all of your evergreen social updates externally in a spreadsheet, so that you can copy/paste them into your social media.
There are easier solutions, though. This is actually why earlier this year, I launched Edgar, my first social media marketing app. Edgar saves every update you post in an online library, and pulls updates from that library according to a schedule you create, so that your evergreen updates are automatically filtered into your queue. This ensures that you’re always meeting your goals for posting frequency and preventing your content from going to waste, all without creating additional work.
Whatever approach you take, the important thing is that you stop thinking of the work you create as one-time-use-only. Whether it’s the blog posts you write for your website or the updates you share on social, the life of your content can be as long as you make it – and the longer you make that content work for you, the better off you’ll be.
Is print really dead? What about email? Did video kill the podcast star? Did karma finally catch up with QR codes for killing kittens? The list of supposedly “dead” marketing practices goes on and on, but does that mean once something is said to be six feet under, it can never rise again to deliver results? Not at all, in fact, breathing new life into “dead” marketing tactics is actually a savvy way to capture or recapture mindshare in the media, channel, or technology gaps that others have left behind. Moreover, these undead opportunities, or “zombie tactics,” if you will, are not only theoretical possibilities, but measurably proven best practices…
Email Marketing Gains New Bite on Mobile Devices:
Presumably declared dead more often than any other marketing practice, if email were a character on South Park, it’d undoubtedly be Kenny. Yet like Kenny, email just keeps coming back over and over again as if it never left. In her post, Email Marketing is Not Dead! Or is it?, Pam Moore reports that “91% consumers check their email at least once daily, and 88% B2B marketers cite email as their most effective lead generation tactic.” Still, despite such high performance, email has often been declared dead simply because seemingly cooler communication channels became available. Some said social media would kill email. Others thought Facebook Messenger alone would finish it off. Some also cited regulations such as the CAN SPAM Act or CASL as the death knell of email. Recently, however, mobile marketing technology research has shown that companies using mobile touch-points within marketing programs drastically outperform their non-mobile peers in key, year-over-year growth for business metrics like customer lifetime value (4.8% vs 0.3%), average order value (3.4% vs -2.7%), and improvement in cost to acquire a net new customer (2.1% vs -4.7%). Email being the easiest and most seamless way for marketers to expand into mobile channels, it’s only gained more life in its overall utility to marketers.
Print / Direct Mail Marketing Lives Because It Was Declared Dead:
Email may have new legs of its own through mobile, but it also had a hand in killing off print marketing… for a while at least. Aptly summarized in this cartoon, for a time, marketers’ print proclivities seemed to have exhausted the utility in the medium, as targeted recipients were inundated with overwhelming volumes of marketing mail items. When email marketing supposedly killed print marketing, however, marketers naturally decreased their print spend and overall activities. As far back as 2012, marketing research showed that only 30% of marketers were increasing their direct mail activities, highlighting a notable void in the channel that has only grown over time. This gap has actually created a novelty for print marketing, as Vladimir Gendelman reported in his post, Print’s Not Dead: Print Marketing Will Thrive in 2014 and Beyond, “73% of consumers actually prefer mail over other advertising methods. And according to Research by Mail Print, 85% of consumers sort and read their snail mail on a daily basis, and 40% try new businesses after receiving direct mail.” Of course, this doesn’t mean forgetting the things that killed print marketing in the first place – namely unremarkable, overwhelming volumes of useless collateral and increased mail costs – but in creating unique value through print, at the right time in the buying cycle, marketers may gain a revived opportunity.
Frankenstein’s Facebook Marketing Monster:
Admittedly, I myself thought Facebook to be dead, which is why in rolling out CMO Essentials, I had no intent of including a Facebook page in our launch plan, or even in our expansion plan, for that matter. For all the algorithm changes, restrictions, and new pieces and components, I didn’t think it’d be worth all the time and effort. But after talking to our team, and sitting through a session on Facebook at a prominent B2B marketing event where a panel of top marketers (John Haydon of Inbound Zombie, Joel Book of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Katie Keating of IBM, and Amanda Maksymiw of Lattice Engines) all highlighted their own successes with the channel, it was clear that Facebook still matters to our own audience as well. As you can see in our newly launched Facebook page, we’re still figuring out our own formula for success, but because it matters to our audience, it’s worth the effort.
In her post, Six Facebook Myths: Why We Don’t Think Facebook is Dead – Yet, Laura Donovan concludes, “Businesses must continue to interact on the Social Media platforms their target customers’ are using… Smart business people will assess their options and spend their time and money wisely.” To Laura’s point, no matter how much Facebook has changed, and continues to change as the chaotic, ever-shifting channel that it is, if your buyers are engaging there, find value from the medium, or can connect to your brand in a unique or meaningful way, you still need to be there.
Ultimately, what Facebook marketing represents in terms of zombie marketing tactics is that even if a channel is declared dead by popular sentiment, if it’s still relevant or valuable to your audience, it’s vital to still find a way to breathe life into it.
The elegance and efficiency of digital advertising really dawned on me a couple weeks ago as I was streaming Pandora (Isley Brothers channel). I use the free version, so I get the periodic commercial. That’s when I heard a spot for the 10PM news on a station I once worked for in Kansas City. I said out loud, “Well, Pandora’s algorithms sure got that one right.”
What Paul’s point expresses is the capacity in digital advertising to wow on relevancy and responsiveness. Traditional advertising, however – which relies on exposure to massive amounts of eyes and ears in order to reach the few relevant hearts who may actually convert – had to die to make room for the more effective digital advertising adaptation. As digital advertising research shows, with 59% of leading marketing organizations reporting that they place a strategic focus on integrating digital advertising into the buyer’s journey, advertising itself, is hardly dead. What’s more, in traditional advertising, the success of delivering relevancy and value shown in digital advertising can serve as a model for ad placement, content, and calls to action – making even traditional advertising able to rise again.
These are just a few undead marketing tactics that still have plenty of life of their own if used correctly. Do you have any tactics or trends that you’ve seen declared dead that still seem to work for you? Please share your insights in the comments below.
Don’t let your online leads go cold. In an increasingly buyer-centric selling environment, marketers play a pivotal role in pipeline growth by attracting prospects with engaging content and landing pages.
A dedicated lead generation specialist on your marketing team can manage marketing-generated leads, identify promising prospects quickly and efficiently, educate and nurture as needed, and finally hand them off to a sales rep to close.
As the bridge between marketing and sales, the majority of the lead gen specialist’s day is filled with e-mail follow-ups to in order to get the sales process started.
Here are 3 key best practices:
1. Do Your Homework
Fortunately for all of us; there are hundreds of tools that you can utilize to learn more about a prospect before you get on the phone. For instance, ask a customer to fill out a form before downloading a piece of content. Gating your ebooks, white papers and webinar recordings. It’s a great way to get basic information about an interested prospect.
Once you have basic data, you can explore user accounts on LinkedIn, Twitter, and a target’s company website to gain valuable insight on a prospect’s role, company, and industry. But don’t gate everything. Leave blog posts, videos and infographics open for anyone to consume anonymously.
2. Build Rapport
Nobody wants to be sold to anymore, so find a way to connect with each prospect individually, and educate your target without coming off as too salesy. This skill comes down to knowing your audience; doing your homework plays a huge role.
When you have an idea of what your prospect is looking for, you can tailor your messaging to resonate with her objectives and move her further along the sales funnel. It’s rare that a prospect is willing to hop on the phone right away, so it is essential to speak the prospect’s language and nurture her into wanting to get on the line with you.
3. Set The Agenda And Stick To It
Your prospects are busy people. They may have responded to all your emails and consumed all of the content you’ve sent them; but when you finally get them on the phone it is important to first outline why the call will be valuable to both parties.
This final strategy is helpful with prospects who have a difficult time opening up about their businesses and would rather go straight into pricing conversations. When a prospect has a clearer understanding of what the purpose of the meeting is, the better.
With the senior population projected to grow to be 19% of the population by 2030, marketers in all industries will start considering how to use content offers to turn seniors into customers. Whether you are growing your own medical practice, trying to reach an elderly audience for a product launch, or wanting to acquire new residents for a retirement community, content marketing can be a really effective way to reach an elderly audience.
What Is a Content Offer?
As a refresher, a content offer is a valuable piece of information that is leveraged to gather contact information on websites. Content offers help marketers generate leads from their company’s website and can be delivered in a number of formats including these examples:
eBook: X Ways to Stay Active After Retirement
Template: Weekly Healthy Eating Chart
Webinar: Q & A with Experts on Senior Living Costs
Content offers are an integral part of your customer’s buying process. Actually, content offers can simplify the buying process by educating website visitors about problems you help them solve and build trust.
Here 6 considerations for marketing to seniors through content offers:
Build Trust: Speaking of trust, trust is something that is important to sales and marketing with a target prospect of any age, but it is especially important for seniors. Use “stamps of approval” on your website to show that you can be trusted. Testimonials, certifications, and awards can all be used to show that your content offers are worth exchanging information for.
Don’t Assume Seniors Are All Alike: The term “senior” can apply to anyone that is over 50. With that in mind, seniors who range in age from 50 to 100 are significantly different from one another. A woman in her eighties is more likely to be widowed and less active, while a man in his early sixties may be working and married. Point being is that you have to know your buyer personas even when creating content offers for seniors.
With that said, there are some data trends with seniors that should be considered in developing and launching content offers for seniors; however, keep in mind that you should always carefully evaluate whether those trends will apply to your audience.
Develop Offers for Their Children or Loved Ones: When your target audience includes seniors who are significantly influenced by their children or loved ones, create offers that appeal to those influencers. For example, “How to Tell if a Parent Requires Senior Care” is a content offer that would appeal to a concerned child.
Integrate On and Offline Marketing: While seniors are becoming more and more tech-savvy and connected to online resources, they do still frequently engage with offline content. There are several ways you can integrate on and offline offers, but here a few quick tips:
- Make it easy to print eBooks and other online content
- Invite seniors to your website content offers through offline media
- For brick-and-mortar companies, offer exclusive online offers to bring seniors to your storefront.
Promote Offers on Social Media: According to data from Mashable.com, 60% of 50-64-year-olds and 43% of Americans over 65 actively uses social media. With increasingly more seniors adopting social media every day, there is a big advantage to spreading the word about your content offers through social media.
Use the Right Design Elements: Seniors are more likely to have vision problems, which means it is important to keep design simple with a lot of white space, use larger fonts, avoid colors like green, blue, or yellow, and finally, use images that represent the senior population well like active and happy seniors.
Have you been successful at marketing to seniors through content marketing? Share your insights below!
My love for football (and the Houston Texans) has grown stronger and stronger over the years. I’ve always refused to be the typical girl stereotype football fan asking her boyfriend “Like OMG! Like what the heck is a 3rd down?” during a game.
So this year I decided to give Fantasy Football a shot. I thought I did a solid job drafting my team. I thought the hard work was over. I was just going to relax and watch my team slide into victory and would sing “We are the champion” to all the boys who thought girls aren’t any good at Fantasy Football. But as the weeks went on, I got a little more than I bargained for.
Of course I compare everything to my career, so I thought I’d give you 5 things that fantasy football has taught me about inbound marketing (so far):
1. Do your research.
You can’t just show up to a draft and hope for the best. It takes a lot of research, planning, even participating in mock drafts. And there’s no “right” pick. You can draft the #1 pick according to ESPN, and he will be your lowest scoring player (I’m not bitter).
Just like you have to research your players, you have to do research on your buyer personas. You can’t expect your customers to read your content, contact you, much less buy your products if you don’t understand them and what they actually want from you. So do your research to get to know your team, I mean, your buyer personas.
2. Make changes to your team and keep an eye on your bench.
As much as I thought I drafted the perfect team, I had to see how my players were actually performing. I had to keep an eye out for when my players were on bye weeks. I had to see how many points they were getting and if I need to make any changes. If your bench has a running back consistently getting 20 points a week, why is he still on your bench!?
I’m not saying get rid of your entire marketing team (unless they are Dallas Cowboys fans). What I am saying is that sometimes you need to make changes to your everyday marketing routine. Try out a new social media channel like Pinterest, LinkedIn, or even Instagram. LyntonWeb had great success stepping out of our everyday blog routine and shooting Friday Fails videos for a few weeks.
3. Your defense is important.
Not every team can have JJ Watt on your defense. That man is a beast. If you don’t know who JJ Watt is then you must have a very cozy rock you’ve been living under. If your defense sucks then you can even get negative points from them. Picking a defense is just as important as your offensive players.
Let’s say your boss comes to your desk and asks “How much money is this inbound marketing making me?” Your defense is to immediately go to your sources report in HubSpot, show him Google Analytics, show him the leads that have converted into sales in your CRM. Having those reports and numbers prepared will help your inbound marketing defense in any situation. Yes, I know how cheesy that sounded.
4. The competition matters.
When choosing your starting players for the week, you always need to keep an eye out on what team they are playing. If the competition has an amazing defense or explosive offense you might consider starting another player.
You have to know what your competition is up to, no matter what industry you’re in. You need to make sure you’re staying on top of the latest trends, and you’re not just copying what other competitors are doing. Staying original and fresh while still keeping an eye on your competition is key.
5. Home field advantage can make a difference.
The Houston Texans are lucky enough to have an amazing fan base. Even when we were on the road and played the Cowboys, Tony Romo had to use a silent count since the Texans fans were so loud. So when it comes to my fantasy team, I always look at where the teams are playing.
So if home field advantage can make an impact in fantasy football, it certainly can make an impact on your business. So take advantage of local events in your city. Network with other marketing professionals. Check out the local Hubspot User Group in your city. Finally make sure your business is optimized for local search, has a Google+ local page, and your business information is correct on getlisted.org.
So far I’m in first place (6-1) in both leagues. Not too shabby. Any valuable life lessons fantasy football taught you? I’d love to hear them. Tweet me!
B2B marketers are attacking mobile with budgets that are jumping 11 percent over the next six months and an additional 17.5 percent over the next 12 months. But it’s clear they’re not terribly happy with the tools vendors are providing.
“Compelling solutions are still lacking,” one of the marketers VentureBeat talked to said.
The new data, published in a report released today, reveals that the biggest problem holding back B2B mobile marketing is lack of support and integration in the marketing technology tools they use every day. Almost 40 percent cited marketing software tool makers as the key issue:
Above: Key challenges holding back B2B mobile marketing
Image Credit: VB Insight
The second biggest issue — and likely one vendors will point to as more important than marketers care to admit — is that many marketing professionals do not sufficiently understand mobile marketing. That’s been a challenge for years, of course, and will continue to be one as this space evolves rapidly.
Other issues include lack of budget — and a surprising cohort of 15 percent who don’t believe mobile marketing is effective.
One challenge with the tools is that many of the big marketing automation systems are designed for a promotional world built around content marketing and inbound lead-gen. This is perfect for the Web, but it can be more challenging on mobile, where your potential customers are buried inside native apps almost 90 percent of the time, and marketers have to reach into those apps in order to attract their attention. That drives many marketers to turn smaller purpose-built tools such as a Sumotext, a ThumbVista, or a RevMobile (which can be difficult to integrate at a data and lead level) into bigger marketing automation and CRM tools.
For social apps, traditional Web approaches can be successful, because people share great content on mobile as well as the Web. But even so, the challenges are a little different on mobile.
For most, the answer is not a native app of your own.
“It makes more sense for most companies to focus their mobile marketing on a mobile Web experience, because dedicated apps are expensive, and only your most interested customers and leads are going to bother to download and install an app,” Hubspot CMO Mike Volpe told me via email. “You will get 10x or 100x more usage of a mobile optimized website, and that is the first place to start.”
So mobile optimization makes sense. But mobile marketers also need to seriously look at mobile advertising solutions as part of their B2B mobile marketing campaigns.
Above: Where B2B marketers will focus their ad buys over the next 6 months
Image Credit: VB Insight
“We definitely see B2B marketers driving convergence between adtech and martech, especially but not only on mobile,” IBM global strategy director Jay Henderson told me as well. “B2B customers are syndicating profile attributes like product interest, purchase intent, lead scores, and more, to adtech platforms that then drive buys across channels – including mobile.”
Native ads will be B2B marketers’ favorite choice over the next six months, at 53.1 percent, followed by traditional banner ads at 43 percent. But video ads are a key — and rising — component as well, at 36.7 percent.
Almost every single B2B marketer we talked to believes that his or her mobile budget will increase over the next 6 to 12 months. That makes perfect sense, given that the overall U.S. mobile ad spend is projected to quadruple by 2017 to $31.1B.
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Earning the title of CEO is a huge accomplishment. Doing it eight times over is almost unheard of.
Almost.
Fred Mouawad, the French-Lebanese serial entrepreneur and heir to the world-renowned Mouawad diamond jewelry company, has managed to do just that by the age of 45.
Mouawad, who is worth an estimated $1.1 billion, according to research firm Wealth-X, first became a chief executive just after graduating from Harvard Business School in 1994 when he founded Synergia One Group.
He has since founded and become CEO of six more companies — including tech, consulting, food, retail, and media businesses — and also runs the 125-year-old family business, Mouawad Jewelry (the only company of which he's chief executive that he didn't also found).
Mouawad's most recent venture is Taskworld, an online task and project management platform that allows teams to collaborate while tracking individual performance.
"As a serial entrepreneur I have spent a lot of time building businesses from scratch," Mouawad tells Business Insider, "learning all there is to learn about the business, building a team, and slowly moving myself out of a job. As my portfolio is growing, I have the dual responsibility of incubating a new venture while also overseeing the other companies in the portfolio."
Here are five of the most important things Mouawad says he's learned throughout his career as an eight-time CEO:
1. Know thyself.
Mouawad explains that it's extremely important for leaders to be self-aware, to constantly reflect, and to figure out how to improve their leadership. "We all have blind spots, so it's important to constantly seek and provide feedback in a respectful and safe environment to drive continuous improvements." Once leaders understand themselves, they can figure out what team to surround themselves with to maximize value.
2. You are only as good as the people around you.
"The best teams usually win," he says. "It's all about having the right people, in the right positions, and with the right motivation to fulfill the organization's mission and goals."
3. Connect the dots between the internal and external worlds.
Too often leaders are either too internally or externally focused, Mouawad explains. "The art of balancing the two is critical in order to find the right alignment between the organization and the marketplace."
4. Developing a mental framework is crucial to success.
Mouawad says he has basically approached every business with the same mental framework — and at least some of his success can be attributed to it.
"I first define where the business should be in the future so it is customer-centric and competitive. I then focus on building the right team with the right attitude, skills, and will to succeed; I make sure we have the right capital; and then I focus on building the culture that's required to win at the game we choose to play."
5. Monitor your company's culture, and know it will change.
Culture is the most difficult and dynamic aspect of building a business, he says. "It morphs all the time based on the people in leadership positions. It has to be constantly monitored, but once you get it right, it becomes a powerful driver of execution."
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A familiar name topped the list: Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.
Since the internet retailer launched in 1994, Bezos has grown its value to $140 billion. And as HBR reports, Amazon has delivered 15,189% on industry-adjusted shareholder returns.
To come up with the list, HBR pulled 832 current CEOs from the S&P Global 1200. It then calculated daily company returns from the first day that each CEO held office through April 30, 2014.
"Bezos' place atop the list says it all," writes Adi Ignatious, the publication's editor in chief.
"Here's a CEO who has frequently underperformed in the short term while continuing to make big bets on the future. Amazon often reports quarterly losses, even as sales continue to rise," he continues. "And though the company is subject, like many firms, to dramatic share-price swings, Amazon and Bezos have a long-term track record of delivering shareholder value that is second to none."
Interestingly, like nearly a quarter of the other top 100 best-performing executives, Bezos has an education in engineering. He got his bachelor's in computer science and engineering at Princeton University.
How did he climb to the top of his field? Bezos has displayed savage and savvy qualities along the way.
1. Make offers that your partners can't refuse. 2. Don't give up information unless absolutely necessary. 3. Keep teams small enough that they can be fed by two pizzas. 4. Stop talking so much. 5. And be prepared to argue your point.
For more on Bezos and the competitive culture he's fostered at Amazon, go here.
Just in time for flu season, Google is experimenting with a feature that provides live video-chat advice to searchers looking for information on some medical conditions.
We’ve all probably convinced ourselves at least once through frantic online searching, that we — or our children — have some sort of undiagnosed chronic or catastrophic disease. (Ebola, we’re looking at you.) With the video-chat option, Google may be able to alleviate some of those concerns by providing a real, live doctor to tamp down that panic level at those times when you’re trying to figure out whether it’s worth scheduling a doctor’s appointment.
Google confirmed that it’s running the program in a limited trial. “When you’re searching for basic health information — from conditions like insomnia or food poisoning — our goal is provide you with the most helpful information available,” Google said in a statement.
“We’re trying this new feature to see if it’s useful to people.”
During the trial period, Google is covering all the costs of the online consultations. A Reddit user first brought attention to the feature — part of Google’s general advice service, Helpouts — in a post showing Google offering a video-chat option for his search on “knee pain.” Not every medical query yields the option for a live chat, and in some cases searchers may be asked to set up an appointment rather than have immediate access to a medical professional.
Telehealth is an area of medicine that a lot of companies have been looking at, particularly to improve health care in rural parts of the country. But it carries its own regulatory headaches: In many cases, states don’t allow for doctors to practice across state lines, which limits physicians’ ability to use telemedicine technology.
Above: How the leading enterprise marketing software suites rank
Image Credit: Forrester Wave
Adobe has taken a lead in the fast-growing enterprise marketing software sector, according to a Forrester Research report to be published today.
Adobe has “distanced itself from the pack” of competitors, said the report, beating out Salesforce.com and six other vendors assessed by Forrester. The ranking was based on 46 criteria covering things like current offerings, product roadmap, and market share.
The report comes at a time of high stakes in the marketing technology sector: Dozens of vendors, including the biggest enterprise companies like Oracle, SAP, and IBM, are vying to serve hundreds of thousands of marketers with automated ways to attract and serve their customers using software. Until recently, marketers have cobbled together various software solutions to handle different functions, like managing email, mobile and social campaigns.
Increasingly, though, marketers are moving to buy integrated software suites that handle all of these things in one package.
And chief marketing officers are expected to invest billions of dollars into marketing technology over the next few years. Marketing technology is one of the fastest-growing areas of the roughly $1 trillion enterprise software market worldwide, where chief marketing officers are increasingly dominating the spend.
However, the traditional large enterprise vendors — Oracle, IBM and SAP — aren’t leading the race to offer enterprise marketing software suites.
“At this point in time, Adobe has set itself very well apart,” said Cory Munchbach, the Forrester analyst who authored the report. She said Adobe had customers who could speak to how they were using a significant percent of its marketing technology. “Not every vendor could do that,” she said.
According to Forrester’s ranking, Adobe and Salesforce have asserted themselves as the two leaders (see the scores the two vendors achieved on respective criteria in the chart above).
These two were followed by a group of four legacy vendors — SAS Institute, IBM, Oracle and Teradata — which remain “strong performers,” but lag in key performance areas. For example, Forrester rated IBM and Oracle only a two on a scale of one to five for application usability, where five is the best score achievable. The SAS Institute and Teradata faired only slightly better, each getting a three. But those scores paled compared to the fives scored by Adobe and Salesforce.
Finally, Marketo and SAP rounded out the group of companies ranked by Forrester. These two companies both offer the “foundations” of an enterprise marketing suite, Forrester concluded, but they lack key features. Marketo, which recently went public, is still a young company, and trailed its rivals badly on Forrester’s “capabilities” ranking. SAP, while also somewhat weak on capabilities, also performed poorly in several other areas, including usability.
Adobe did well enough in several key areas to beat out Salesforce. First, Oracle has done very well integrating its extensive offerings, which are partly based on the company’s acquisitions of Omniture, a leading analytics company, and Neolane. a marketing automation company. Salesforce.com has done less well integrating its various products, which also is based on several acquisitions.
Adobe also has a superior product strategy and better customer satisfaction when compared to Salesforce, but also when compared to its other peers, according to the report.
Forrester based its report on its own briefings with the vendors, but also on online surveys with 53 individuals who were clients of the vendors. Forrester asked each vendor to supply a minimum of 8 to 10 customers for it to survey. It conducted the survey from June to July.
One challenge was to compare pricing among vendors, Munchbach said. Vendors have such complex bundling and other varied pricing strategies that it is impossible to compare pricing on an apples-to-apples basis. Many companies also like to keep pricing details private. So the Forrester report did not use pricing as a metric for comparison, arguably a glaring omission.
Another caveat to the findings, Munchbach said, is that most customers have such unique needs and infrastructure that it is difficult to make generalizations about vendors.
“In no case, is a software suite going to look the same for Company X as it is for Company Y,” she said.
With more than 100,000 customers, salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company that is leading the shift to the social enterprise. Social enterprises leverage social, mobile and open cloud technologies to put customers at t... read more »
Whether it's a smartphone or tablet app, a game, a video, a digital magazine, a website, or an online experience, chances are that it was touched by Adobe technology. Our tools and services enable our customers to create groundbreaking... read more »
According to a recent report1, HTML is the most widely used language for mobile app developers. The main reasons among developers for selecting web technologies2 are cross-platform portability of code and the low cost of development. We’ve also heard that hybrid apps tend to be sluggish and poorly designed. Let’s prove whether it’s possible to deliver the native look and feel that we’re used to.
This article provides many hints, code snippets and lessons learned on how to build great hybrid mobile apps. I’ll briefly introduce hybrid mobile app development, including its benefits and drawbacks. Then, I’ll share lessons I’ve learned from over two years of developing Hojoki and CatchApp, both of which run natively on major mobile platforms and were built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Finally, we’ll review the most prominent tools to wrap code in a native app.
What Are Hybrid Mobile Apps?
Mobile apps can be generally broken down into native, hybrid and web apps. Going the native route allows you to use all of the capabilities of a device and operating system, with a minimum of performance overhead on a given platform. However, building a web app allows your code to be ported across platforms, which can dramatically reduce development time and cost. Hybrid apps combine the best of both worlds, using a common code base to deploy native-like apps to a wide range of platforms.
There are two approaches to building a hybrid app:
WebView app
The HTML, CSS and JavaScript code base runs in an internal browser (called WebView) that is wrapped in a native app. Some native APIs are exposed to JavaScript through this wrapper. Examples are Adobe PhoneGap3 and Trigger.io4.
Compiled hybrid app
The code is written in one language (such as C# or JavaScript) and gets compiled to native code for each supported platform. The result is a native app for each platform, but less freedom during development. Examples are Xamarin5, Appcelerator Titanium6 and Embarcadero FireMonkey7.
While both approaches are widely used and exist for good reasons, we’ll focus on WebView apps because they enable developers to leverage most of their existing web skills. Let’s look at all of the benefits and drawbacks of hybrid apps compared to both native and mobile web apps.
Benefits
Developer can use existing web skills
One code base for multiple platforms
Reduced development time and cost
Easily design for various form factors (including tablets) using responsive web design
Access to some device and operating system features
Advanced offline capabilities
Increased visibility because the app can be distributed natively (via app stores) and to mobile browsers (via search engines)
Drawbacks
Performance issues for certain types of apps (ones relying on complex native functionality or heavy transitions, such as 3D games)
Increased time and effort required to mimic a native UI and feel
Not all device and operating system features supported
Risk of being rejected by Apple if app does not feel native enough (for example, a simple website)
These drawbacks are significant and cannot be ignored, and they show that the hybrid approach does not suit all kinds of apps. You’ll need to carefully evaluate your target users, their platforms of choice and the app’s requirements. In the case of many apps, such as content-driven ones, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Such apps can typically be found in the “Business and Productivity,” “Enterprise” and “Media” categories in the app store.
Both Hojoki and CatchApp are very content-driven productivity apps, so we initially thought they would be a great match for hybrid development. The first three benefits mentioned above were especially helpful to us in building the mobile app for Hojoki in just four weeks. Obviously, that first version lacked many important things. The following weeks and months were filled with work on optimizing performance, crafting a custom UI for each platform and exploiting the advanced capabilities of different devices. The learning in that time was crucial to making the app look and feel native. I’ll share as many lessons as possible below.
So, how do you achieve a native look and feel? To a mobile web developer, being able to use the features of a device and operating system and being able to package their app for an app store sounds just awesome. However, if users are to believe it is a native app, then it will have to behave and look like one. Accomplishing this remains one of the biggest challenges for hybrid mobile developers.
Make Your Users Feel at Home
A single code base doesn’t mean that the app should look and feel exactly the same on all platforms. Your users will not care at all about the underlying cross-platform technology. They just want the app to behave as expected; they want to feel “at home.” Your first stop should be each platform’s design guidelines:
While these guidelines might not perfectly suit all kinds of apps, they still provide a comprehensive and standard set of interfaces and experiences that users on each platform will know and expect.
DIY vs. UI Frameworks
Implementing all of these components, patterns and animations on your own can be quite a challenge. All kinds of frameworks exist to help you with that, ranging from commercial (Kendo UI11) to open-source ones (Ionic12) and from ones with a common UI (jQuery Mobile13 and Onsen UI14) to many platform-specific UIs (Sencha Touch7615 and ChocolateChip-UI16). Some are really good at providing a pixel-perfect layout, while others are rather sloppy, thus making it easy for the user to identify a web app. However, my impression is that their main drawbacks are performance-related, because most UI frameworks try to be as all-embracing as possible. Judge for yourself by taking a few minutes to try the demos on your own device.
At Hojoki, we try to craft all components on our own using CSS3 and minimal JavaScript. This keeps us in control of performance and reduces overhead. We obviously use small libraries for complicated tasks that someone else has solved just fine.
Custom UI Components
Custom UI components also have many good use cases. Deciding between a platform’s UI and a custom UI will obviously depend on your target audience. If you want to do your own thing, you should have a deep understanding of UX design, because the guidelines linked to above were crafted by experts to meet the particular requirements of their platform’s users.
Whether you stick to a platform’s UI guidelines or do your own thing with custom components, know that there are certain design patterns that most people use every day and love. How are people usually introduced to a new app? Through a slideshow walkthrough or an instructional overlay. How do people navigate? With a tab bar or a sidebar drawer17. How do users quickly load or refresh data? By pulling to refresh. (Native-like scrolling will be covered extensively further below.)
One important part of a UI is the header bar, with its title and navigation elements, most notably the “up” and “back” buttons. To me, many popular frameworks fail to provide a HTML and CSS solution that compares to a native app. Mimicking this part of the UI with a minimal DOM and a few lines of CSS for each platform is actually fairly easy:
<header>
<button class="back">Feed</button>
<h1>Details</h1>
<!-- more actions (e.g. a search button on the right side) -->
</header>
Using the same DOM across all platforms is generally preferable because it results in cleaner code and, therefore, maximizes maintainability. I’ve found this to be easily possible for many UI components on iOS and Android (including the header bar, tab bar, custom navigation menu, settings page, popover and many more). However, this becomes much harder when adding support for Windows Phone, which comes with some very different design patterns.
Support High-Resolution Screens
Nowadays, smartphones and tablets with high-resolution screens make up the vast majority of mobile devices, making up more than 80% of iOS devices22 and over 70% on Android devices23. To make your images look crisp for everyone, you usually have to deliver twice the dimensions than what is actually shown in your app. Serving properly sized images for all different resolutions is one of the most discussed topics in responsive web design. There are various approaches, each with its benefits and drawbacks related to bandwidth, code maintainability and browser support. Let’s quickly review the most popular ones, in no particular order:
server-side resizing and delivering
client-side detection and replacement via JavaScript
HTML5 picture element
HTML5 srcset attribute
CSS image-set
CSS media queries
Resolution-independent images (SVG)
As always, there is no silver bullet for responsive images. It pretty much depends on the type of images and how they are used in the app. For static images (such as the logo and tutorial images), I try to use SVG. They scale perfectly without any extra effort and have great browser support as long as you’re fine with Android 3+24.
When SVG is not an option, the HTML5 picture element and srcset attributes25 are definitely where front-end development is heading. Currently, their main drawback is the very limited browser support and, therefore, their need for polyfills.
/* Normal-resolution CSS */
.logo {
width: 120px;
background: url(logo.png) no-repeat 0 0;
}
/* HD and Retina CSS */
@media
only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.25),
only screen and ( min--moz-device-pixel-ratio: 1.25),
only screen and ( -o-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.25/1),
only screen and ( min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.25),
only screen and ( min-resolution: 200dpi),
only screen and ( min-resolution: 1.25dppx) {
.logo {
background: url(logo@2x.png) no-repeat 0 0;
background-size: 120px; /* Equal to normal logo width */
}
}
However, your app might already contain a lot of content (such as news articles), and adjusting all of the img tags or replacing them with CSS would be exhausting. A server-side solution is the best choice in this case.
Starting last year, more and more Android manufacturers have gone one step further with what is called XXHDPI (or very very high-resolution) screens. Whichever solution above fits your need, keep in mind that you’ll need images that are three times the original dimensions to support Android’s latest flagship devices.
Use System Fonts
A simple yet important way to make users feel at home is to use system fonts.
Furthermore, iOS 7 offers some interesting presets that automatically set the correct font family, font size and line height. It’s as easy as using font: -apple-system-body for normal text and font: -apple-system-headline for headings. This not only simplifies font declarations, but also improves accessibility through “dynamic type30,” Apple’s system-wide font-size setting. You can dig deeper into iOS 7 font presets in a post by Thomas Fuchs31.
An Icon Is Worth A Thousand Words
Iconography is an important part of the user experience on all major mobile platforms. As with fonts, you’re usually best off using icons that your target audience already knows. Recalling what I said about high-resolution screens earlier, make sure that your icons are scaleable. Implementing them as a font via CSS’ @font-face rule is a great way to achieve this, and it comes with wide browser support32. It even allows you to change an icon’s appearance (for example, its color, shadow and transparency) seamlessly via CSS. Here are my recommendations:
Get various platform icon fonts. Ionicons33 is our baseline set because it includes nearly everything we need. This includes specific icons for iOS and Android in addition to their general ones. The rest come from specific platform icon fonts for iOS34, Android set 135 and set 236 and Windows Phone37.
Combine them with a icon font generator.
Using multiple icon fonts is confusing and quickly adds up in size. That is why we use Fontello38 to combine the different sets, adjust key codes and export them for each platform. The result is <span class="icon">s</span>, which looks like a search icon on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Also, check out the popular alternatives IcoMoon39 and Fontastic40.
Performance is usually considered to be one of the major disadvantages of a hybrid mobile app. This is mostly true if your app has a lot of heavy animations, contains huge scrolling lists and needs to run on old devices. However, if you are all right with supporting only newer platform versions (Android 4+, iOS 7+ and Windows Phone 8+), then you’ll very likely have satisfying results. It’s ultimately a question of how much effort you put into optimizing DOM and CSS selectors, writing performant JavaScript, reducing rendering time and minimizing the number of reflows and repaints. An endless number of articles and tutorials cover mobile web performance. These are some of my favorites:
Beyond that, mobile hardware and rendering engines are improving at a rapid pace, with new devices coming out every other day. Developers can make the performance of a hybrid WebView app difficult to distinguish from that of a fully native app on the iPhone 5 series and on Android phones comparable to Nexus 4 and 5.
Increase Perceived Speed
Building a performant app is one thing, but making it feel fast is a whole other. Whether your app needs some time for a certain task (such as some heavy calculation or client-server communication), presenting instant feedback is crucial to providing a fluid and responsive experience. A common technique is to delay tasks that the user doesn’t need yet, while predicting and preloading the steps the user might take next. A famous example is Instagram, which uploads photos in the background47 while the user is busy adding tags and sharing. Perceived speed can be very different from actual speed, so let’s use it in our favor. Here are some no-brainers.
Remove the Click Delay on Touch Devices
A normal JavaScript click event handler on a touch device comes with a slight delay between the touchstart and the click being fired (usually around 300 milliseconds). This feature is built into the browser to detect whether the user is performing a single- or double-tap. If you don’t need the “double-tap to zoom” feature, you can safely eliminate these 300 milliseconds to get a much more responsive tap behavior. My favorite solution for this is the FastClick48 library. Use it on everything except Internet Explorer:
if ('ontouchstart' in window) {
window.addEventListener('load', function() {
FastClick.attach(document.body);
}, false);
}
Internet Explorer 10+ is a bit easier. You just need some CSS:
As soon as the user taps an actionable element such as a button or a link, they should immediately get some kind of feedback that the app has detected their action. While the CSS pseudo-class :hover works great for this on the desktop, you need to switch to :active or a JavaScript solution for it to work on mobile. I’ve compared the three approaches to the active state49 on JSFiddle. While they all work one way or another, you judge which is best for you.
Furthermore, remove the default tap highlight while adjusting your active states on mobile. I’d also recommend disabling user selections on actionable elements, because the selection menu would be quite disruptive if the user accidentally taps the button for too long.
Whenever your app is performing an action that will take some time to finish, even just for a second, consider adding a loading indicator. If you don’t, users will think that your app freezes occasionally, or they’ll click around when they shouldn’t, or they might even break things and then blame your app. From what I’ve experienced, animated GIFs are usually a bad idea in mobile browsers. As soon as there is a load on the CPU, the GIF freezes, thus defeating its entire purpose. I prefer Spin.js50 for its configurability and ease of use. Also, check out some other JavaScript solutions51 and CSS loaders52.
Cross-platform tools like PhoneGap and Trigger.io also provide access to native loaders, which is great for showing a full-screen loading animation.
Get the Scrolling Right
Scrolling is one of the most important factors in the user experience of many apps. This is both a curse and a blessing because the success of its implementation will depend heavily on the scrolling niceties that your app relies on and on the mobile operating systems that need to be supported.
Scrollable content and a fixed header and/or footer bar are common to nearly all apps. There are two common approaches to achieving this with CSS:
Enabling scrolling on the body, and applying position: fixed to the header;
Disabling scrolling on the body, and applying overflow: scroll to the content;
Disabling scrolling on the body, and applying JavaScript custom scrolling to the content.
While the first option has some benefits (such as iOS’s native scroll-to-top action and a simple code structure), I highly recommend going with the second option, overflow: scroll. It has fewer rendering issues53 (although still a lot), and browser support is great on modern platforms (Android 4+, iOS 5+ and Windows Phone 8+), with a nice little polyfill for some older ones54. Alternatively, you could replace overflow: scroll with a custom scrolling library (the third option), such as iScroll55. While these JavaScript solutions allow for more flexibility with features (for example, the scroll position during momentum, event handling, customization of effects and scrollbars, etc.), they always penalize performance. This becomes critical when you’re using a lot of DOM nodes and/or CSS3 effects (such as box-shadow, text-shadow, opacity and rgba) in the content area.
Let’s look at some of the basic scrolling features.
Momentum Effect
The touch-friendly momentum effect enables users to quickly scroll through large content areas in an intuitive way. It can be easily activated with some simple CSS on iOS 5+ and in some versions of Chrome for Android. On iOS, this will also enable the content to bounce off the top and bottom edges.
Various solution for this are available on the web, such as the one by Damien Antipa5756. While the solutions for iOS and Windows Phone have a similar look and feel, Android recently introduced its own mechanism (see below). We’ve implemented this in CatchApp using some JavaScript and CSS keyframes. (I have yet to wrap it up nicely and put it on GitHub, so stay tuned!)
Unfortunately, disabling scrolling on the body will also break iOS’ native feature that enables users to quickly get to the top of the page by tapping the status bar. I’ve written a small script that can be added to any element and that takes care of scrolling to the top using JavaScript60, even if the content is currently in momentum. Add it to the header of your mobile website or to the status bar with a native plugin (for example, in PhoneGap).
Many other scrolling features could be implemented on top of the native overflow: scroll, such as snapping to a certain element or just infinite scrolling. If your requirements are more advanced, definitely look at the JavaScript options out there.
Make It Easy To Hit Stuff
When performing a touch action, users will quite often miss their target by a few pixels, especially on small buttons (such as the ones in iOS’ top bar). Developers can assist users while keeping the design elegant by enabling an invisible touch area around small targets:
You’ll have to put the event handler on the button element, while restricting the styles to div.innerButton. Check out the full example, including CSS61, on JSFiddle.
Using Touch Gestures
A smartphone is all about touching and gestures. We swipe, pinch, zoom, drag and long-tap all the time when interacting with touch devices. So, why not offer users the same means of controlling your hybrid app? QuoJS62 and Hammer.js63 are well-known libraries for supporting all kinds of gestures. If you’d like more choice, check out Kevin Liew’s comparison of “11 Multi-Touch and Touch Events JavaScript Libraries64.”
Don’t Miss Out on Native Functionality
Building your app with web technology doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t use native features. In fact, all major cross-platform development tools provide built-in access to the most important functionality. This includes APIs for device data, the file system, the network connection, geolocation, the accelerometer, notifications (including push) and much more.
You can usually even extend a development tool by building custom plugins. At Hojoki, we added many missing features, including reading the user’s setting for push notifications for our app, detecting the user’s time zone, and checking whether a third-party app is installed and launching it. Let’s look at two very simple examples for things that can be realized with native plugins. First, let’s enable JavaScript focus() for input fields on iOS 6+:
Web developers often overlook how to handle bad situations in a hybrid app (for example, a connection timeout, a bad input, a timing issue, etc.). A hybrid app is fundamentally different from a website, mainly because there is no global refresh button, and an app can easily run in the background for weeks on some mobile operating systems. If the user runs into a dead end, their only option will be to restart the app, which entails force quitting and then restarting. Many people don’t even know how to do that, especially on Android 2.x (where it’s hidden deep in the app’s settings) and on iOS 6 and below (where you have to double-tap the home button, long-press the icon and kill it).
So, ignore the refresh button during development, and handle bad situations as they come up. For all other situations that would have unexpected outcomes, such as ones involving client-server communication, be prepared for things to go wrong, and provide a way out for users. This could be as easy as showing a full-screen error message — “Oops! Something bad happened. Please check your connection and try again” — with a big “Reload” button below.
How To Wrap It
Developing a hybrid mobile app means using the same tools and processes that you would usually use to develop (mobile) websites. Having said that, one thing I really like about the hybrid approach is that you can deploy HTML, CSS and JavaScript code as a mobile web app with relative ease. Make sure to implement fallbacks for native features, or find elegant workarounds if they are not supported at all. Most mobile developers prefer to keep users in a native app, and you could even advertise the app to your mobile website’s users.
65A native WebView wrapper, with an HTML, CSS and JavaScript code base. (View large version66)
What about the native part? Your mobile web app (plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript) will be loaded in a WebView, which is an internal browser engine that renders an app the way a default browser on the device would render it (there might be slight differences — your mileage may vary). Additionally, native “bridges” are used to expose features of the device and operating system through an API to make them accessible with JavaScript. This usually includes access to the device’s camera, address book, geolocation, file system and native events (for example, via one of the hardware buttons on Android), to name just a few features.
A few cross-platform development tools provide that native bridge and simplify the whole process of wrapping it. Let’s dive into some options.
PhoneGap and Apache Cordova
PhoneGap67 is certainly one of the most popular tools for cross-platform development. The name itself is often used synonymously with hybrid mobile app development.
There has been some confusion about its name68 and relation to Apache Cordova69, which is understandable. The latter is a top-level Apache project that was formerly called PhoneGap. It offers a set of device APIs to access native functionality from HTML, CSS and JavaScript code running in a WebView. Now, Adobe PhoneGap is a distribution of Cordova — not unlike the way Chrome uses WebKit as its engine.
Both are open-source and free to use, with support for all major platforms and with an active community developing all kinds of plugins and extensions.
PhoneGap has shaped the hybrid lanscape significantly, and many new tools have emerged that offer additional services or that streamline the development process. They usually add a lot of convenience by enabling you to build an app in the cloud, thereby saving you the effort of locally installing all of the different platform SDKs and tools. Each tool has a different focus, level of platform support and price:
Sencha Touch7615 started out as a UI framework for the mobile web and has been around for years. Traditionally, developers have used Sencha to build an app while using another service, like PhoneGap, to deploy it as a hybrid app. Nowadays, Sencha offers this kind of functionality built in for free. Platform support includes iOS and Android (both via Sencha’s own native packager) BlackBerry, Windows 8 and more (via PhoneGap Build).
Trigger.io
At Hojoki, we started using Trigger.io77 two and a half years ago because we were looking for a lightweight alternative to PhoneGap. Even though iOS and Android are its only supported platforms, it offers a good set of native APIs, custom plugins and third-party integration (including Parse push notifications, Flurry analytics and parts of Facebook’s SDK). Trigger.io’s command-line tools allowed us to integrate the app’s packaging into our Grunt78 build process, which is great if you love automation.
One of its key features is Reload9179, which enables developers to push HTML, CSS and JavaScript updates to an app on the fly. Unlike PhoneGap Build’s Hydration80, Reload is specifically designed for development and production apps. This makes it possible to legally bypass Apple’s submission process to push bug fixes and iterate quickly with A/B testing.
Once the 14-day trial is up, Trigger.io’s steep pricing81 is probably the biggest downside for many developers.
With MoSync having gone offline a couple of days ago, Trigger.io seems to be the only remaining tool that is not associated with PhoneGap.MoSync82 seems to be another tool that is not associated with PhoneGap, however I’m not sure how actively it is being developed at the moment.
Test on Real Devices
Building a mobile app with web technologies obviously tempts us to do most of our testing in a web browser. This might be fine when developing non-native features, but definitely avoid it when releasing. Test with as many manufacturers, platforms and form factors as possible before submitting the app. Android’s fragmentation brings endless possibilities of differences in browser rendering, unsupported features and manufacturer modifications. While iOS does much better with rendering differences, Apple has a growing number of devices with varying sizes, resolutions and pixel densities. Check out “Prioritizing Devices: Testing and Responsive Web Design83” to learn more.
When Facebook famously ditched most of its HTML5 and went native in 2012, it cited missing debugging tools and developer APIs84 as one of its main reasons. LinkedIn drew the same conclusions85 half a year later, stating that HTML5 itself is ready, but basic tools and the ecosystem don’t support it yet. From what I’m seeing, the situation is getting better, with remote debugging in WebView on Android 4.4+ and an increasing number of development tools on all platforms:
When building an app for web browsers, deploying a hot fix to users is a simple step, which means that testing can lose some of its importance. This obviously needs to be reconsidered when you’re releasing an app through an app store. Think of it like software development in the ’90s: You’re now living in the world of hard releases.
So, why is this bad? First, the submission process could easily take a week or two (Hello, Apple!). Secondly, even if your hot fix is released quickly, that doesn’t guarantee that users will update the app any time soon. Here are my suggestions:
Make testing a high priority.
Have some kind of “force update” logic to deprecate old client versions.
Use mechanisms like Trigger.io’s Reload9179 to fix code on the fly.
The tools mentioned above spit out a binary for each platform, which can then be submitted to the relevant store. From this point on, the process is exactly the same as publishing a “normal” native app. Some of the tools we’ve looked at might even have better documentation for this. Nevertheless, here are the official guides:
Now that our hybrid mobile apps have been in Apple’s App Store and in Google Play for two years, I’d like to recapitulate some of the benefits and drawbacks mentioned at the beginning of this article.
For us, a web startup company with very limited resources and no native iOS or Android experience, building an app for multiple platforms in just a few weeks would have been impossible. Choosing the hybrid path enabled us to reuse a lot of code from the web app and to iterate quickly based on user feedback. We’ve even managed to publish native apps for Windows 8 for the desktop and Microsoft Surface as well as Mac OS X with exactly the same code base. The effort of moving to another platform will depend largely on the capabilities of the given browser and device and on the level of your need for native functionality. We needed push notifications, in-app purchases and access to the user’s contacts, among other things. Depending on your needs, a lot of native functionality could make you heavily dependent on the native wrapping tool that you choose.
Finally, let’s see whether hybrid apps really can deliver a native look and feel. Below is a compilation of user reviews from the app stores. Both positive and negative comments are included, but many of the negative reviews are for early releases, which had the same UI for all platforms and was comparatively slow in performance.
★ Great idea, but not a good app. The app runs extremely slow on my Samsung Galaxy Ace and Tab. The app also looks and controls like an iPhone app. This is confusing when you have never had an iPhone.
★★ Another reason apps should not use WebViews for UI.
★★ Service great but WebView app sucks.
★★★ It’s the right app in concept, but it really is too laggy to be practically used. And I’m using Jellybean so there is no excuse.
★★★ It lags a lot and the UI is not beautiful.
★★★ Good but very very slow.
★★★★ This app is very handy, but is a little slow to boot up.
★★★★★ This is working really hard well since the update. It’s a great app to begin with and now it’s working smoother and faster than before.
★★★★★ Extremely smooth and effective.
★★★★★ The app work flawlessly…
★★★★★ Beautiful designed app! Love the interface and the great overview of all your tools! Good job! Keep shippin!
★★★★★ This is an absolutely beautiful aggregate that runs buttery smooth, even on a 3GS. Recommend to anyone doing any sort of project.
We’re definitely moving away from platform-specific app development and towards the many new technologies that are emerging. Larry Page said this97 when asked at Google I/O last year about the future of the web:
In the very long term, I don’t think you should have to think about, as a developer, am I developing for this platform or another, or something like that. I think you should be able to work at a much higher level, and software you write should run everywhere, easily.
The (mobile) web is a major success story in this regard. Being able to use this platform and still be able to distribute an app in all stores is a huge step forward. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Whatever happens, using a technology that over a third of the world’s population98 (over two thirds in Europe and the US) relies on probably won’t be a bad choice.
Recently, I wrote an article about the importance of building relationships for content marketing success. In that article, I focused mainly on relationships outside of your company, but the same logic applies to team members across different departments within your own offices. Collaborating effectively across departments is a critical component of any company’s content marketing strategy. If you don’t have a cohesive effort that crosses departmental boundaries, you risk running into a number of problems.
Developing cross-functional teams is a highly effective method of coordinating content marketing initiatives across an enterprise in a collaborative way, rather than having each department creating its own content in an isolated fashion. No matter what the task, a silo mentality can be detrimental to an organization’s ability to accomplish its overarching business objectives, and this is particularly true when it comes to content marketing projects.
Content marketing should be a shared experience that spans the boundaries of all departments. Undoubtedly, there are brilliant content marketing minds in every corner of your company — you just need to seek them out. Here are a few bits of advice to help you break down the silos and start organizing cross-functional teams for content marketing success.
Round up a variety of expertise for projects
Let’s say you are dealing with a total revamp of your company’s website. It’s not as simple as bringing in a web designer and handing her or him the keys to the kingdom. Yes, the person will likely design a really pretty site for you that’s visually appealing and functions properly, but what about the content, SEO, user experience, social media, and other considerations that also require attention? It’s likely that you don’t have an expert grasp on all of these concepts, so why not create a team of people whose expertise spans these areas?
Before you start any project, break down the various components of that project, and develop a list of the different types of expertise that might be useful. For example, an SEO expert would certainly be helpful in ensuring that your new website is optimized for search. If the new site will have an ecommerce aspect, consider bringing in someone from accounting and customer services to make sure the site is set up properly from their perspectives. Recruit writers to make sure the content is tight; grab someone from human resources to help avoid any issues that might arise from messages that conflict with hiring best practices; ask your graphic designer to sit in on the meetings to make suggestions for visual aspects of the site (where does the logo go, etc.?)… you get the point: It takes a village.
Once you understand the pieces that are necessary to complete the puzzle, you’ll need to make sure that the team members you select are the ones most dedicated to promoting the success of your company and your content marketing. To be sure you have the right people, the next step is to start identifying evangelists.
Pinpoint your evangelists
The people in your company’s marketing department aren’t the only ones who care about the brand messages you send. If you’ve been in any type of marketing role for any significant amount of time, you are well aware that there are plenty of other stakeholders across your organization that are eager to voice their opinions on whether or not a marketing effort meets their standards. While you can’t please everyone all of the time, you can learn from the feedback that they provide. Instead of taking offense, consider that you may just have uncovered an evangelist that can help you achieve your content marketing goals.
Aside from listening to feedback from your team, here are a few other ways you can pinpoint these evangelists:
Gauge team members’ interest by checking out their social media accounts. Are they passionately discussing your industry and other related issues, or are they busy posting photos of their cats or their last vacation? I don’t think I need to explain which of those two you should target.
Schedule a meeting to discuss the direction of your company’s content and then send out an email inviting anyone in the company to attend. People are busy, so the ones that show up are most likely going to be dedicated to your cause.
Talk to departmental leaders to get feedback on which team members they feel are truly dedicated to moving the company forward and sending the right messages through the content you create.
Send out a survey to uncover any hidden talents that are just waiting to be discovered. We’ve found photographers in our writing team, graphic designers in our message board team, and content strategists in our human resources department. Ask around. You’ll be surprised what you find.
Pay attention at company-wide meetings. Who asks the most questions? Who offers the most creative suggestions? It’s likely that their passion and interest will carry over into your content marketing efforts. But don’t ignore the wallflowers. Use the other steps I’ve offered above to identify those quiet geniuses within your organization.
Using these tips, you should be able to compile a pool of evangelists that you can go to when your next content marketing project presents itself. The next step, then, will be to figure out how to organize those evangelists to use their talents and zeal in the most effective way possible.
Structuring your cross-functional teams
Once you’ve found your experts and evangelists, and you’ve gathered a pool of talent from across a variety of functions, the question becomes how to organize your cross-functional groups when projects come around. You’ll need to be selective to ensure that you have the right talent in place to handle different types of projects. Here are a few tips for selecting the right team members for each content marketing project:
Write down what expertise would help make each project component a success.
Make a list of the team members that fit each area of expertise. It’s a good idea to select two or more people for each, just in case your first choice isn’t available to take on a new project.
Make sure you’ve received approval from each team member’s manager. If you don’t take this step, you’re likely to crush your cross-functional content marketing team initiatives right out of the gate and burn a few bridges in the process.
Once you have approval, choose the team members that fit the components of the particular content marketing project you’re working on from the list that you created earlier. (For the sake of time here, let’s assume they’re all available when you need them.)
Now is the time to schedule your project’s first meeting. Pick a boardroom or another venue with ample space for comfort. A dry-erase board would be good to have so you can jot down ideas as the meeting goes along. Maybe even supply lunch or snacks to show team members how much you appreciate their involvement.
If the team members have never met, or haven’t worked together, start the meeting with introductions. Once everyone is familiar with one another, you’ll want to cover the following:
o The scope of the project
o What each team member’s role will be
o Timing
o Key deliverables
o The project’s purpose
o The expected outcomes
As the project moves along, make sure you are hosting periodic meetings to help keep everyone on track and to work out any inevitable kinks that might pop up. Keep the lines of communication open in between meetings through email, instant messaging, message boards, collaboration tools, or whatever works best for you and your team.
Account for file sharing. Some of the content your team creates may be too large to send via email. Consider setting up something like a team Dropbox to enable easy file sharing throughout the process. Google Docs is a good option, too.
Once the project is complete, host a post-mortem meeting to cover what went right, what went wrong, and discuss the overall project and how it was handled. This will help solidify any bond your newly developed cross-functional content team will have formed, as well as help you be more efficient when the next project rolls around.
Each project will be different, so use the above as a template for structuring your cross-functional content marketing project teams, and adjust as necessary to suit your specific needs. And remember, after each project comes to a close, it’s important to keep the lines of communication open and keep everyone involved. Content creation can come from any department in your company, so make sure you keep in touch, and let everyone know how much their help means to you, so that when the next project comes around they are eager to participate.
Share the success
Nothing can put a stop to a successful team quicker than a person who steals all the credit. While you may have led the team, you likely were only able to accomplish your goals because of the team’s efforts.
If you want to see similar success in future efforts, make sure key stakeholders and others are aware of how valuable their efforts were. Here are a few ways that you can make your appreciation known:
Send out a company-wide email expressing thanks to the team for its help. Mention members by name, and note that the project would not have been a success without them.
Stop by each team member’s desk and thank each individually, in person. The personal effect of face-to-face contact will never be replaced by any kind of digital messaging.
Reach out to team members’ managers and let them know about the value the team added to your project.
If your company has a bulletin or newsletter, contact those in charge of it and ask them to add a section about the project, calling out the contributions of the team members.
Take the team out to lunch to say thanks. There aren’t too many things that are more appreciated than a free meal. Get to them through their stomachs.
These are just a few suggestions. The point is to make sure the team members are aware of how much you appreciate their hard work. If the project was a success, chances are you’ll want to work with them again. Don’t burn bridges by failing to show appreciation.
My hope is that this article will help organizations grow their content marketing efforts, as employees form tighter bonds across departments and realize the importance of cross-functional collaboration.
Start by venturing down the hall to the next department over. Strike up a conversation with someone with whom you’ve crossed paths in the halls before, but to whom you’ve only ever muttered a halfhearted “How ya doin?” or “Hey there.” If you aren’t sure how to start the conversation, there’s a good chance you can find common ground talking about something like sports or the weather. It’s not important how the conversation starts, it’s just important that it gets started.
I’d love to read your comments on cross-functional teams and how your organization has used them or plans to use them in the future for content marketing projects. Leave your comments below.
Looking for more guidance on creating cross-functional teams? Check out our Content Marketing World Video on Demand portal for the latest expert insights and advice.
Rolling out a new software product and want to get the word out to your target audience?
Need to do a briefing on a new product or program?
Have tips and best practices you want to share with customers and/or prospects and don’t know the most beneficial way to share this information with them?
If you are looking to reach and interact with your customers and prospects in an effective and low-cost manner, webinars are a great way to reach that goal. However, planning a successful webinar can be intimidating and challenging for even an experienced marketing team. Marketers can certainly accelerate lead conversions using webinars, but without proper planning and a solid promotional strategy, the webinars that you have worked so hard to create will fall flat.
It takes time and effort to plan a successful webinar. I highly recommend the planning process starts 8 weeks out from the day of the live webinar. From my experience with clients, the average webinar requires between 30 and 40 person-hours to plan, promote, deliver, and follow through. Here are 6 essential tips to get you started on your way to planning your company’s successful webinar event.
Develop A Plan Of Action
In the first two weeks of your webinar planning process, it is critical that you develop a thorough plan of action (POA). This is the first step to delivering a successful webinar. Define the webinar’s objectives and your target audience. Pick a topic and a presenter(s). Decide what the format style is going to be based on the objectives you are trying to accomplish – one speaker, interview style, moderated panel discussion or interactive. Define your webinar goals – webinars typically get a 30-40 percent attendance rate, so to determine how many registrants you need, you should think ahead to how many actual attendees you want.
Make sure that you have a marketing team call or meeting the first week of planning to commit to a topic, content, timeline, and team roles. Send invites to each team member blocking off all key times and dates in the webinar pre-planning process. This way, all calls and meetings are locked in early enough in advance.
During POA development, coming up with a webinar title is extremely important. Create a compelling message that is going to draw your target audience in and get them excited about registering for your webinar. Make the content relevant to your audience. Let them know what the key benefits are to attending the webinar and how it’s going to help them.
Email Setup And Promotion
Now that the POA is concrete, week three and four are all about email setup and promotion along with infrastructure setup. It is always best to create two different promotional emails so you can test which one performs best. However, if you only create one promotional email, that can work as well. You will need to create a registration landing page and thank you confirmation page to go along with the email. The HubSpot landing page below is a good example of a webinar registration page.
You will also need to setup reminder emails within the webinar platform you choose to deliver the presentation. All of my clients either use GoToWebinar or WebEx. Both are excellent choices to delivering a great webinar experience to your target audience. Send out reminder emails two weeks in advance, then one week in advance, one day before and one hour before the day of the webinar. These reminders not only serve to remind registrants about the webinar’s date and time, but rebuild the value that you established with them on your registration landing page. During this stage of the planning process, take the time to create your post webinar emails – one for attendees and the other for no shows. The message will be slightly different depending on who attended vs. didn’t show up.
Make sure to integrate your CRM and marketing automation software and set up any tracking codes, UTM strings, Bit.ly, or vanity URLs so that you can identify specifically what sources are driving registrations. Once integration and tracking are in place and tested, send out the first promotional email. Add the webinar event to your website as well.
Social Promotion
Social promotion should begin week five in the planning process and run all the way through to the day of the live webinar. It is very important that you get any partners, the speaker(s) and sales team involved in social promotion. Create a series of 20-30 social posts with unique verbiage that can be frequently promoted. Use hash tags relevant to your target audience and topic in Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Don’t use hash tags in LinkedIn though.
If you plan on hosting quarterly, monthly or weekly webinars within a specific topic, come up with a unique hash tag that can be used and promoted within your presentation, during and after the live event. Should there be more questions than can be answered during the Q&A session of your webinar, this hash tag can be promoted and used as a way for your audience to ask questions and for you to answer them in a timely manner after the webinar.
This is also the time to consider advertising and promoting your webinar via social channels. LinkedIn and Facebook sponsored ads are a great way to increase registrations and visibility to your target audience. Sponsored ads can be targeted towards specific companies, job titles, job functions, and job skill sets.
Review social data daily. Are you hitting your target numbers? If not, make some slight revisions as necessary.
Dry Runs
A first dry run should take place week six. For the first dry run, review your presentation slides, perform a dry run with all speakers and moderators involved, identify poll questions and supporting content, narrow down webinar timing and your Q&A session. Have several Q&A questions ready to go just in case no one asks any questions during the webinar. This is highly unlikely to happen, but it’s always best to be prepared.
A final dry run should take place the week of the webinar. Treat this final dry run as if it is the actual live webinar. Lock down your presentation, review the final details for the live webinar, and practice your poll questions and Q&A session. Have offline communication details in place (offline chat, IM or cell phone) should any issues arise.
Record your dry runs so that you can watch and listen to them before the actual webinar. Test to make sure the recording is working properly and can be used to promote for on-demand viewing after the event.
The Day Of The Live Webinar
All of this planning and now it’s the day of the webinar. All speakers and moderators should join the webinar 30 minutes prior to do a sound check. Choose a quiet room with no cell or speaker phones distractions. Use a quality headset or handset so that you can be heard crisp and clearly. If you are performing the webinar in a room within an office, post a Do Not Disturb sign outside your door so that other employees know not to open that door and interrupt you during your webinar presentation. If possible, have one to two people (preferably from your sales team) manage the live chat. This can be a great way for sales to get involved. Ask questions during the live chat such as “where are you from?” or “what are you most interested in learning today?”
What To Do Post Webinar
Phew…now that the webinar is over, it’s time to focus on the post webinar planning details. First, you must download the on-demand version of your webinar and convert it to your video player. As you are doing this, make sure your video player plays across all browsers and all devices. Second, an email should be sent out to attendees and no shows no later than 2 days after the webinar. As I mentioned previously, the messaging in these emails should be slightly different. For the attendees, thank them for attending the event and let them know of any upcoming webinars as well as provide a link to the on-demand version so they can view it again if they’d like. For the no shows, mention that you are sorry they couldn’t make it and that you missed them and then provide a link to the on-demand version so they can view at their leisure.
Promote your on-demand webinar by adding it to your website. Update the landing page on your website to download and view the on-demand version. On our site, we have an on-demand webinar archive page dedicated to all of our on-demand webinars. Create several social posts for promotion as well.
Score and prioritize your leads. It is important to keep in mind that not all leads are equal. The prospects attending your webinar are most likely in different stages of their evaluation process. Consider this when putting together the content in your lead nurturing emails. Execute a lead follow-up process with your sales department so that high-value leads can be contacted first. Look at metrics such as Q&A questions, time attended, any content downloaded and poll answers. These are excellent metrics to study when putting together lead scoring values so that sales can most effectively follow up on leads.
Webinars can attract new prospects to your website, help move those you are already in touch with further down the sales funnel as well as increase current customer loyalty. Planning a successful webinar can elevate a company’s credibility and reinforce its position as an industry thought leader. So what are you waiting for…time to get started planning a successful company webinar!
The fast food giant reported Tuesday that global same-store sales dropped 3.3% in the third quarter.
The company has lost market share to fast-casual brands like Chipotle and better-burger restaurants like Five Guys.
In a recent call with investors and analysts, CEO Don Thompson revealed the four biggest issues facing the brand — and how he planned to fix them.
1. Offering the best value. McDonald's spent several years experimenting with high-end items like Angus beef burgers and Chicken Selects. By focusing on this, McDonald's ignored one of its biggest strengths.
"Value is one of our grand pillars," Thompson said. "So we must continue to fortify our position within this key consumer attribute."
The brand is luring back cash-strapped customers with offerings like the low-priced Jalapeno McDouble and Buffalo Ranch McChicken.
2. Customer service. McDonald's drive-thru wait times have gotten worse over the years, in-part because of an increasingly complex menu. Thompson acknowledged this problem and said that the company was sending corporate representatives in for a "service reset." This could include adding more workers and assigning new tasks to existing ones.
The company is also remodeling European kitchens for faster food assembly.
3. Marketing. Thompson is aware that many view McDonald's as unhealthy junk food. This problem has been exacerbated by a food factory scandal in China. To improve public perception of the company, McDonald's is doing a global audit of the marketing department. Thompson said he planned to make new internal hires.
"We are also strengthening our creative messages by placing greater emphasis on the quality of our food and again re-establishing the emotional connection that our customers associate with the McDonald’s experience," Thompson said.
4. Simplifying the menu. McDonald's menu has grown 70% since 2007. The new menu items are a burden on employees and have helped contribute to long wait times. Franchisees are also angry about the overloaded menu, saying that the extra ingredients and equipment were costing them money.
Thompson stressed that the restaurant was going back-to-basics.
"We are streamlining our merchandising menu board and product offerings and in addition to making it easier for customer to order their favorite products, this will reduce complexity in our restaurants which in turn should enhance accuracy and speed of service," he said.
Although the Wall Street Journal reported that sales in September may actually have risen from the previous month, few analysts will be celebrating.
Investment in the sector — a good guide for the market's expectation of its future growth potential — has been falling sharply leading to concerns that a weakening property market could drag down China's growth and pose significant risk to local government balance sheets in the country.
Here's the story so far:
Since the late 1990s, investment in China's real estate sector has been outpacing the country's impressive GDP growth, rising from around 4% of GDP in 1998 to around 14% of GDP by 2012.
The sector benefited in particular from the Chinese government's stimulus spending in 2008-09, driving up the contribution of real estate to economic growth.
However, lots of this growth was funded by China's local governments through off-balance sheet investment. As local governments were prohibited from borrowing themselves they created separate companies known as Local Government Financing Vehicles (LGFVs) that would then borrow from banks, trust companies, or the bond market.
This helps explain a large part of the mysterious gap between announced state funding and actual infrastructure investment in the country:
Unfortunately this also poses a headache for Chinese policymakers. By the end of 2010, the debt held by these off-balance sheet companies amounted to RMB 4.97 trillion ($812 billion), according to IMF estimates, while the main source of funds to repay the debt came from land sales — the proceeds from which were rising considerably.
But revenue from land sales appear to have turned recently, after several years of gains.
And as the property market weakens it is having spillover effects on consumer spending, slowing growth and weakening the government's attempts to rebalance China's economy away from relying on exports and toward domestic demand.
There are a number of possible explanations behind the recent slowdown. One of the most common is that China has massively over-invested in real estate and is now facing a supply glut with more properties for sale than there is demand to buy them.
As Yu Yongding, director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, put it in an article last year:
China's economy is being held hostage by real-estate investment. On one hand, China should not try to eliminate overcapacity by maintaining the high growth rate in real-estate investment. While investment in social housing should be welcomed, real-estate investment, currently running at 10-13% of GDP, is already far too high. On the other hand, if real-estate investment growth falls, overcapacity will be difficult to eliminate.
As the government weighs up whether to intervene to prop up the country's flagging growth rate this warning should be top of mind. Further intervention in the property market to help local governments overcome their debt burdens might end up exacerbating the problem by increasing the economy's reliance on investment in the sector.
As evolving technologies have advanced email marketing (closely followed by evolving strategies), one important factor has always been, and remains, a major player: your email reputation.
At its core, a brand’s email reputation is simply how internet service providers (ISPs) such as Google and Yahoo, email clients such as Outlook, and other receivers of mail, perceive the emails your company is sending. Multiple factors help determine this important benchmark, such as:
Do your emails provide value for both new and old customers?
Is your email constantly being flagged as spam?
Is your email sending address ending up on any blacklists?
Marketers are fortunate today to have tools such as Return Path’s Sender Score to help measure and analyze their brand’s IP email reputation, and Cisco’s SenderBase as a domain reputation resource. The creators of these tools have broken down email reputation into two important subcategories, IP reputation and domain reputation. Each is very different from the other, but they are equally important in the grand scheme.
IP Reputation
Of the two, IP reputation is more of a science. An IP reputation assessment looks at whether the email originating from your IP address (the string of numbers that is a unique identifier for the device you use to send email) contains any negative content that appears to be spam. The reputation factors in key metrics such as bounces, spam traps, complaints, and opens. Volume and frequency of the emails sent from the IP address also play a role in determining your IP’s reputation. The first step in establishing an IP reputation is deciding what kind of IP you want to use: shared or dedicated. A shared IP is one that’s used by several other companies or senders, and a dedicated IP is one that is owned and operated by one company or sender. (More information here.) Each provides a different approach in developing an IP reputation.
Domain Reputation
Domain reputation is a newer assessment technology. If IP reputation is a science, domain reputation is an art (tempered with scientific aspects). It factors in not only your IP address, but also the domain attached to your email sending behavior. With the sending domain taking such a forward-facing role, your brand becomes a pivotal part of your sending reputation. If you switch IPs, the domain reputation will remain the same, good or bad, if sending from the same domain.
Two ways to help ISPs perceive your reputation as more trustworthy are to implement Sender Policy Framework (SPF), a simple open-source email validation system, and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) which lets an organization take responsibility for a message that is in transit. These both help establish identifiers for your sending domain.
A few more factors that affect your sending reputation
Email marketers must also consider qualitative measures that can affect deliverability, such as the:
Content of your company’s privacy policy
Trustworthiness of any links in your email message, including preheaders and footers
Overall value of the content provided in your email message
Maintaining your email reputation requires a strategic blend of art and science, but the end goal is always the same – to get your email into the inbox. Both IP and domain reputation are major players in achieving this, and both must be taken into account when assessing deliverability.
Good business practice is to constantly monitor and uphold the standards of both your IP and domain reputations.
Want help? The experts in Act-On’s Delivery Insight program can provide hands-on support to help you boost your email delivery reputation.
Someone sends you an email message or a text, and you’re unsure how to respond. It’s about a complex negotiation, or a politically sensitive situation. Or maybe it’s just from a person who unnerves you.
For a moment, you pause. But for most of us, most of the time, that pause doesn’t last long. Instead we react, feeling the need to immediately craft a response. And often we then hit “send” without fully thinking. The result: an awkward or incomplete message that causes the recipient to pause, then react, often starting or continuing a cycle of miscommunication and misunderstanding.
Yes, people today expect and want an instantaneous reply to any message. We often accommodate them because delay feels like a violation of modern-day social norms.
But there are many times when we should not immediately reply. And the truth is, we usually know them when they come. That’s what that initial pause is about. The key is to heed it.
There is a simple two-step method to making the pause work for you. First, buy yourself some time to think. Second, follow the four simple C’s of effective communication that help determine how best to respond in terms of the context, content, channel, and contact.
Buying Time
There are a few practical ways to buy some time when you get a message where your gut tells you not to respond or where you are not sure how to respond.
The non-response response – “Got your message.” This is meant to serve as an acknowledgement but really is only filler. It may aggravate someone in the midst of a negotiation or other serious exchange.
The expectation-setter – “Got it. Lot on the plate today, I’ll get back to you tomorrow afternoon.” This is often a good middle ground. It provides an immediate response of acknowledgment and resets the timetable.
The confident pause – Don’t respond. Really. Just don’t. Pausing for at least 24 hours is a pretty good rule of thumb. Not responding is its own kind of response, which can often work to your advantage.
Once you’ve bought yourself some time, you soak in the information from the message and think of what the best response might be. There are four C’s that have served as a useful checklist for me to use during that pause time before I respond to a difficult message: context, content, contact, and channel.
The Four C’s of Effective Communication
Context – Having the right situational context is key. Who are the relevant parties to the conversation or discussion thread? Are there relationships and inter-dependencies and previous conversations that I’m not aware of? Do I fully understand what is at stake? In the multi-party transactions in which we often get involved in venture capital, sending out a quick response to even a simple query can backfire if the timing is wrong or the information out of date. Sometimes you can even answer a specific question in a technically correct manner, but be practically incorrect because you’ve failed to appreciate the bigger picture.
Content – The message needs to be delivered in clear manner with the right tone and style for the occasion. Having the right content means checking facts and being consistent with past discussion threads. If there is one thing that I have seen kill a negotiation or productive progress in a discussion, it is inconsistency of message, which both confuses others and diminishes your credibility. Get the facts and your message points straight in your head, then focus on delivering them in the clearest, most understandable, most consistent manner possible.
Contact – Are you even the right person to respond? It happens often: we are asked something and fail to realize that we might not be the best person to respond. Consider if someone else might be more knowledgeable or better suited in style to respond, especially in a crisis (where it is usually best to have only a single point of contact). There is a reason why terrorist and hostage negotiations are not conducted over Google Docs. And even in an open and collaborative everyday work culture, there are many times when deferring to someone else is the right answer. Also, consider if the person on the other side who is asking a question or provoking a discussion is the right contact person as well. And always — always! — be wary of “reply all” and judicious with the cc function.
Channel – Just because someone contacts you by email or text does not mean you have to respond by that channel. Email and text lend themselves to misinterpretation and misunderstanding. They are often likelier to prolong or inflame a debate than to resolve it. As I’ve written before, sometimes it’s much more effective and efficient just to pick up the phone or meet up in person. Email is great for transmitting factual information — a spreadsheet of a business model, for example, or a summary of a prior discussion. But when there are issues to resolve, talking usually works better.
As the pressure grows to respond quickly, the value of pausing and thinking is growing too. We all should work toward developing better, saner norms of communication amid the explosion of channels available to us. But that will take time and thought to get right. In the interim, we just need to stop being so damned trigger-happy with that send button.
Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway last held 70.1 million shares of IBM, according to regulatory data compiled by Bloomberg. This suggests the value of Buffett's stake has fallen by $2.1 billion this month.
Another big Buffett holding that has been a huge disappointment is U.K.-based supermarket chain Tesco.
According to CNBC, which cites a Buffett letter, Berkshire Hathaway held 301,046,076 shares, or a 5% stake, of Tesco shares listed in London. He admitted last week on CNBC that his investment in Tesco was a "mistake." He also significantly cut the stake back to less than 3%, the CNBC report said.
Year-to-date, shares of Tesco have fallen about 44%. Before he pared back his stake, he had lost about $788.7 million on the stake.
Then, one of Buffett's most iconic holdings, Coca-Cola, gave a profit warning today. The beverage company also only saw its worldwide volume grow by only 1% in the third quarter.
The stock fell more than 6% on the news.
Berkshire Hathaway, which has been a long-time investor, owns 400 million shares of Coca-Cola. His Coca-Cola position has lost about $1.1 billion in value today.
Here are some charts:
Here's how IBM has performed since October 1:
Shares of Tesco have fallen more than 44% this year:
Here's Coca-Cola's chart after it reported third-quarter results:
Every year IBM releases the key findings from their Global C-suite Study and everyone scrambles to dig through it to find that one piece of information that might change their entire marketing strategy. To save you some time, we’ve picked five key takeaways from the study of 4,183 top executives from more than 20 industries so you can learn how the big dogs are earning the loyalty of “digitally enfranchised customers and citizens.” Let us know in the comments if you’re a CMO—or another C-suite exec—who has some thoughts about what it means to be a CMO in this changing world of marketing.
1. CMOs influence CEOs more than almost any other exec.
CEOs are increasingly calling on CMOs for strategic input, according to the study. In fact, CMOs are “second only to the CFO in terms of the influence he or she exerts on the CEO.” 63% of the CMOs surveyed are involved in business strategy development, so this means it’s more important than ever for CMOs to have access to flawless data. After all, if the CEO is going to lean on the head of marketing for advice when major decisions are being made, then the data those decisions are made from needs to be solid. In this new era of the CMO’s role, all marketing successes, without exception, need to be able to be attributable. Marketers have access to all kinds of tools to help with this—clickstream reporting, advanced call tracking abilities, Google Analytics integrations—and this section of the study reinforced the fact that CMOs, more than ever, need to be on top of all the ways to prevent making important decisions on bad data.
2. Very few CMOs have implemented key components of a digital strategy.
This is an unfortunate point to be made, but one that is important for CMOs to hear: when it comes to implementing advanced analytics to capture customer insight across all touchpoints, a whopping 88% of CMOs only “somewhat” or “to a limited extent” explored those avenues. What’s more, only 16% of CMOs have integrated customer touchpoints across physical and digital channels to what they consider “a large extent,” and only 20% are using social media to a large extent. With the changing paths of how customers are making purchasing decisions and the multiple avenues they have in gathering information about companies they want to do business with, many businesses are scrambling with how to keep up with them, and marketing organizations are struggling to find ways to engage with their customers in ways that are meaningful to the customer, as well as finding ways to measure that engagement.
“To succeed in the digital era, you have to be totally in sync with the behavior and preferences of your customers in a fast-changing landscape,” a quote from the study says. “You have to be quick and adaptable.” It’s true. If marketers want to integrate customer touchpoints across physical and digital channels, then they have to get used to the idea that those touchpoints might exist in mediums they’re not comfortable with: social media, or a phone call. Many CMOs are uneasy with these one-to-one engagements, but with research showing that mobile search will drive over 73 billion phone calls by 2018, CMOs need to bite the bullet and meet their customers where they are, wherever that might be.
3. There’s a huge gap between aspiration and action.
Above, we noted the findings that CMOs are lagging in their use of digital and digitally integrated technologies. But it’s important to note that these same CMOs have aspirations to use the technology they’re behind in utilizing. 94% of CMOs plan to use mobile applications more extensively in the future, compared to 80% in 2011, and 89% plan to focus on customer relationship management more extensively, compared to 81% in 2011. Interest in advanced analytics is up too, with 94% of CMOs expressing a desire to increase usage, compared to just 66% in 2011. CMOs have their eye on the ball, but can they catch it fast enough? Can you?
4. CMOs fall into three distinct profiles.
Despite similarity in the challenges they face, the report found that CMOs fall into three distinct profiles: the Digital Pacesetter, the Social Strategist, and the Traditionalist. The Traditionalist are struggling with data, new channels/devices, have yet to integrate physical and digital sales and service channels, seldom engages on social media, etc. The Social Strategist has gone a little farther, recognizing social media’s potential and building infrastructure to operate in the social arena. But, like Traditionalists, haven’t begun to fully take advantage of the data and analytics social media offers. Finally, the Digital Pacesetters are much farther down the road and are prepared for the data explosion and are actively putting the resources required to operate as a fully integrated physical-digital enterprise in place. They regularly use advanced analytics to generate insights from customer data. Guess who’s outperforming who?
5. Winning CMOs know the value of data.
This ties all the way back to #1. With CEOs relying more heavily on CMOs for decision-making, successful CMOs know the increasingly value of good data, and according to the study, 66% of those abovementioned Digital Pacesetters who are outperforming other CMOs are integrating data from all sources to better understand customers: they understand that data and creating an optimal customer experience are not exclusive. This means embracing all channels of engagement with them: social media, mobile experience, phone calls, and more. The pressure is on CMOs, and who comes out on top will say everything about how willing they are to embrace a rapidly shifting marketing world.
Chipotle is the most successful company in the food industry right now.
The burrito chain's same store sales soared by nearly 20% last quarter. Executives announced plans to keep expanding around the globe.
Chipotle is also taking market share from traditional fast food companies like McDonald's, which just reported that sales declined 3.3% in the US.
Founder and Co-CEO Steve Ells says consumers turning away from fast food companies enabled Chipotle's success.
"Over the last decade there has been a noticeable shift among consumers away from traditional fast food and casual dining chains, to fast casual restaurants as customers are looking for better quality food, served in a convenient format," Ells said.
Chipotle is known as a fast-casual restaurant, meaning that it doesn't offer full table service, but promises higher-quality food than fast food chains.
"The companies that have lost the most customers over the last decade are traditional fast food chains, while the biggest gains go to fast casual restaurants," Ells said.
Ells cited a Consumer Reports survey which ranked Chipotle as the best restaurant. Many traditional fast food chains ranked near the bottom, with consumers citing "uninspiring food," as the primary reason.
"Despite offering dollar menus and frequent discounts, many of these chains also scored poorly in terms of value," Ells said. "The bottom line customer wants delicious food, served quickly and in interactive format and they are increasingly unwilling to compromise."
Ells said that his chain also ranks highly among millennials and teens, which bodes well for the chain's future.
"They are more concerned with how food is raised and prepared than previous generations and are willing to seek out and pay a little more for, something they recognize as better, better tasting, better for the environment and better for their wellbeing," he said.
The success of fast-casual chains like Chipotle has led to McDonald's changing its strategy to include more customizable options.
The chain has also started a series of videos to show how its American food is prepared.
Today, marketers create, launch and leverage content faster than ever but in order to stay at the top of their game they juggle many moving pieces while working to avoid the common pitfalls that plague content creation. We’ve identified 5 common issues that sabotage a content marketer’s efforts to create content that delivers value and supports the reader in their buying lifecycle.
Avoid these to secure your content’s success:
1- Silos
This saboteur sneaks into an organization silently and can often go unnoticed. Content marketers know the inherent value of creating a content library that appeals to their whole audience. Content created in a silo does not include all your stakeholder perspectives or buying personas, which can mean that you are losing some of your audience. Working with your internal stakeholders to create content that addresses each section your whole, broad audience will result in better ideas, and more variety (avoiding repetitive, bland content).
2- Planning Too Far In Advance
Planning can be both your friend and your foe. Don’t let it become the latter– make sure your content calendar is not too concrete. A successful content marketing strategy is flexible enough to respond to current events, but solid enough to reliably integrate into other marketing efforts. This balance is something that will be unique to your organization, but ideally you’d be able to map content around major events and holidays and be able to respond to industry events and news.
3- Not Budgeting Your Time
Content creation takes time, lots of time. We’re not saying you’re not amazing or efficient, but there are only so many hours in a day. Biting off more than you can chew only means that you’ll have a hard time managing expectations and that you’ll be resetting plenty of deadlines. Choose a realistic timeline and cadence of content that you can produce, and you’ll be happier and more successful in your content creation.
4- Not Tying Your Content To Goals
One of the best ways to sabotage your content is to not tie is to your goals. Know why you’re creating content. What are the goals that you’re driving toward? How do you measure your success? Brainstorm, prioritize and create content with an eye toward your goals. Use your content calendar to create a strategic mix that addresses your goals; don’t fill it with fluff.
5- No Shared Calendar
Just like silos sabotage content success, working without a shared, active calendar will make your content strategy more difficult to execute. Successful Content Marketing is part of an integrated marketing strategy. One of the fastest ways to doom your content marketing is by having multiple calendars in different places. This common communication issue is solved by a centralized calendar, shared by key stakeholders, including major events and milestones.
I hope these tips help you avoid some of the common pitfalls that you can fall into as a content marketer. I’d love to hear if you’ve encountered or combatted anything not on this list. Share your story in the comments.
More than two-thirds (68%) of B2B buyers now purchase goods online, up from 57% last year, according to a recent report from the Acquity Group. Read the full article at MarketingProfs
I never considered myself an “ugly American,” but my UK colleagues apparently thought otherwise.
Just before I moved to the UK to head up marketing for KFC International in Europe and Africa, Pepsico had bought out our joint venture partner in the UK. I was part of the new management team that was going to try to turn around a 60-year-old business that had been declining for 10 years.
Because most of the UK KFC system was franchised, it was important to win our franchisees over to a new brand strategy we had been planning before the acquisition took place. I put a lot of work into getting ready for my initial pitch to the UK franchisees, some of which had been involved in the business their entire career.
In my presentation, I did a quick review of the financial mess we were in, laid out three big strategic consumer initiatives needed to turn the business around and made a passionate plea for them to work with me to make this happen. They asked for some time to talk among themselves. I left the room. Finally, Keith, the head of the franchise group, came out to deliver their verdict.
He started with the good news. “Kip, we like you, and we like what you are recommending. You’ve got our support.” I breathed a big sign of relief. Then Keith continued, “But I want you to remember the people in that room have spent their life building this business. Even though it’s in trouble, we’re not stupid. And if you ever come here again and treat us like we are stupid, this relationship is officially over.”
That was a valuable lesson.
During my career, I’ve worked on adapting global brand strategies in 65 different countries, and I’ve learned three principles about how to do this well.
Show respect for your global partners in everything you do. You would think this would be stating the obvious, but I’m shocked at the number of ex-pats, unfortunately including way too many Americans, who totally blow their chances of success in the early days of a new international assignment by violating this principle. Stephen Covey’s advice to “seek first to understand, then be understood” absolutely applies to working with teams around the world to expand a brand from one market to another. For example, I created a “Helping Hand” award at KFC-International given each quarter to a country team that went “above and beyond” to help an emerging market team. This simple and free peer recognition was remarkably effective at fostering a spirit of mutual respect in all our markets.
Be clear about “negotiables” and “non-negotiables” for the brand. Some non-negotiables are crystal clear, such as your trademark, logo and core products (for KFC, that would include the Original Recipe). If you allow the local team to have flexibility about as many issues as possible, the more they will feel they own the finished product. For example, eBay allowed local market units to decide on the categories they wanted to focus on initially and how they wanted to promote them with buyers and sellers. With H&R Block India, we focused more on the Internet-based services and only built a nominal number of retail locations, the exact opposite of our U.S. strategy. By being collaborative and flexible in how you enter a new market, your odds of success go up dramatically.
Understanding the “why” is a lot more important than the “what” for a global brand strategy. When I came back to the United States to manage the global KFC brand, my new boss asked me to travel around the world and meet with the various teams to develop a global strategy and initiatives. When I returned after six weeks on the road, I told him we were in big trouble unless we figured out a better way to explain the importance and rationale for such strategies to everyone. That led to the creation of the KFC Global Marketing College, which brought in teams from around the world for exactly that purpose. While it took several years for this to have a significant business impact, once we had a critical mass of teams that believed in our global strategy, there was no stopping them. KFC International has since grown from a $2 billion to a $14 billion business.
The principles I’ve outlined can apply to any business with international expansion aspirations, whether you’re aiming for two countries or two hundred. If you treat your global business partners with the proper respect, give them the insight into your brand strategy they need, and let them implement it as they see fit, odds are that strategy will succeed.
86% of survey respondents said their companies are using content marketing.
70% of respondents said they are producing more content than they did one year ago.
55% of respondents said they plan to increase or significantly increase their content marketing spending.
When it’s done correctly, content marketing is the most effective way to create meaningful engagement with today’s empowered and independent buyers. However, I suggest that we are beginning to see signs of content fatigue. The irony is that the growing popularity of content marketing is contributing to content fatigue and creating a new challenge for marketers. As more and more companies publish more and more content, it’s becoming more difficult to make your content stand out.
Of course, the need to create content that captures the attention of prospects and triggers engagement is not new. In all five of the annual content marketing surveys by CMI/MarketingProfs, producing engaging content has been one of the three top challenges identified by survey respondents. The explosive proliferation of content and the resulting content fatigue have only added to the challenge.
Recent research by Demand Metric reveals that interactive content can be a powerful weapon for combating content fatigue. In the Demand Metric study, interactive content was defined as content that invites or requires some level of active involvement by the prospect. The survey provided study participants several examples of interactive content, including wizards, configurators, assessments, quizzes, calculators, and games. Passive content was defined as content that invites or requires little or no interaction by the prospect beyond reading, viewing, or listening.
Demand Metric asked study participants to categorize their content using one of five options – very passive, somewhat passive, moderate, slightly interactive, or very interactive. Then, Demand Metric grouped the responses into two broader categories. The passive content category included the “very passive,” “somewhat passive,” and “moderate” responses, while the interactive content category included the “slightly interactive” and “very interactive” responses.
Next, Demand Metric asked survey participants to rate the effectiveness of their content at performing three critical marketing functions – producing prospect conversions, educating the buyer, and creating differentiation from competitors. Finally, Demand Metric compared the ratings of interactive content users with passive content users.
The table below shows the results of this comparison, and the results demonstrate clearly that interactive content is better than passive content at performing all three vital marketing functions.
The use of interactive content is not new. Some companies, primarily larger enterprises, have been using configurators, assessments, and calculators for several years. But, the interest in interactive content is growing rapidly, and the technology required to produce interactive content at scale is becoming more affordable. Therefore, the next major phase in the evolution of content marketing may well be the marketing app.
In today’s digital world, B2B buyers are more engaged and digitally informed. The rise of the connected buyer means your sales organization needs to account for a buyer who is more educated and researched than ever before.
They’ve done their homework on your solution – and your competitors’ solutions as well. When they finally contact a salesperson, they’re ready to talk price. In order to move beyond regular vendor status, you’ll need to take action.
Use the resources available to engage buyers earlier in their buying process while establishing your role as a valuable resource and a trusted advisor. Social media tools are effective resources to help you get to buyers earlier. Consider these stats:
87% of B2B Buyers say online content has a major to moderate effect on their purchasing decisions (Source: CMO Council)
84% of CEOs/VPs use social media to make purchasing decisions (Source: IDC)
Here are three ways social media can help you improve your sales conversation
1. Provides an Effective Discovery Tool
By following your prospective buyers on Twitter or LinkedIn, you’ll be more informed on the current projects and potential business issues your customer may be facing. While your clients may not broadcast their business issues to the world, their activities can clue you in to potential opportunities and how your solution might best meet these needs. Things like earning reports, new product launches, and partnerships can all be clues that someone may be considering a new solution.
An often-accepted formula for an effective sales conversation consists of 80% listening and 20% talking. Your buyers expect you to come prepared to make your 20% count. Don’t waste their time asking questions that you could have found the answers to on the company website or social media page. If your prospects are talking on social media, you should be listening – because if you’re not, chances are someone else already is.
2. Maintain Relationships with Current Buyers
Social Media is not only an effective discovery tool for engaging new prospects. It also helps you to maintain your relationships with current customers beyond the standard 30/60/90 day check-ins. Rather than calling their office or scheduling a meeting, social allows you to engage with your customers from wherever you are. Social media lends itself to mobility more than any other form of communication. Demonstrate your value as a salesperson by sharing content that’s relevant to your customers while engaging with content they post at the same time.
Use the following tips to guide your social selling and maintain your current relationships:
Set aside time, even if it’s only 10-15 minutes, a few times a week to engage on social media.
Follow up on your current customers, their recent tweets/posts and the conversations they’re having.
Take time to respond to tweets, retweets or mentions.
Leverage the information you’ve gained towards a current goal.
Remember you’re providing much more than just a product/service solution, you’re providing value to your network.
3. Keep Up with the Competition
While social media can help to connect you with new prospects and identify potential opportunities, it can also help you to stay up-to-date on your competition. The best weapon you have in your arsenal is knowledge – customer/industry knowledge, knowledge of your company’s products and knowledge of your competition’s activities.
Tuning into your competition’s social media can alert you to new capabilities or features, which may require you to change the way you approach a sales conversation. The connected seller is more aware of his/her own capabilities in relation to the competition, more relevant to the customer’s interests and concerns and ultimately more equipped to ask better trap-setting questions.
By being informed on the latest competitor information, you will be able to better differentiate your solutions and articulate the overall value that you can provide to your customers.
Remember, there’s as much differentiation in how you sell as there is in what you sell. If your buyers are using social to research vendors and possible solutions, your ability to communicate with them in these channels helps your build an advantage over the competition.
Are you ready to become a social seller?
Social selling isn’t a new way of selling, rather it is an extension of the ways you are currently engaging your prospects and customers. It simply provides you new modalities to reach them. Using social media to maintain contact with customers, between regular intervals, will only enhance the relationships you have and potentially connect you to new opportunities.
You’re not a mind reader. There’s no way to really know what a prospect wants, right? Wrong.
If you don’t know your consumers’ intent, then you’re missing out on a verdant field of sales. Think about it this way: When you search for something on the internet, you have clear expectations of what you’re looking for. If a search query for “healthy snacks” returned a list of cat food brands, you’d be pretty annoyed. Understanding consumer intent is about preventing that annoyance, and giving consumers what they seek.
People often approach a purchase with exactly what they want in mind. Your job isn’t to create awareness of the service (they already know what they want) but rather, for your business to match consumer expectations.
Keywords are Key
First, hone in on your business search keywords online. Remember that when consumers searches for something—on the internet or even through word of mouth—they have a specific idea in mind. If you understand exactly what you offer, then you can design the keywords to match. Remember, also, that you are not necessarily your target consumer, so put yourself in the headspace of your ideal customer when creating copy. An impressive 50 percent of most business web traffic comes from search, and better search terms lead to better quality prospects.
Find the Hidden Consumer
It’s also essential to understand that there’s a long path to purchase—which often begins before you even come into the picture. If you can catch your ideal prospect at the right time—say, right after they send an email about servicing their car, an advertisement for Uber pops up in their browser—you’ll convert more leads. If you have more data about when and how people make purchases (say, people tend to book Uber rides at a certain time of day or tend to make online purchases when they’re on their tablets) then you can further tailor your advertisements. Again, the point isn’t to tell your consumers what they need—it’s to be there when they need it.
Put Yourself in The Prospect’s Place
Understand what your customers want in order to attract new, better sales. There are two ways to improve your read on consumer intent: First, think of your target customer and what they’d look for when seeking your service. Second, and more importantly, rely on hard data about who your customers are, and when and how your targets are making purchases in your field to better anticipate meeting intent in the future.
Day 2 in our 5 days to Successful Content Marketing Series
Yesterday I introduced our mini series by reviewing the key content marketing strategy questions. Today’s advice is all about working out how your brand and business offering can extend into a content proposition. What kind of content can you credibly create, and how can this content support your business goals?
Think of a classic sales funnel, such as AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action). Your content marketing activity will typically be most valuable around the Attention and Interest top end, where search and social tend to be the key triggers of engagement.
So ask yourself: what kind of content can we create that the people we’re trying to reach might care about, or be prepared to offer a click or an email address for? For a quick answer to this, consider:
What expert knowledge do we sit on? What do we know more about than anyone else?
What kind of questions are people searching for that we can provide credible answers to?
Start by coming up with a few search terms related to your area of expertise. Google them and look at related searches in any of the free keyword planner tools. Look on forums and social sites where you might find the kind of people you want to reach. What are they talking about? What do they want to know about? Where could you step in and add value?
With a bit of thinking along these lines you can start to turn your business offering into a content proposition. All we need here is a simple content mission statement that turns what you do into what you can credibly talk about.
So a commercial bakery chain makes and distributes pastries, but its content proposition could be ‘everything you need to know about down-to-earth baking’. A stationery supplier to SMEs might go for ‘ways to improve the productivity and atmosphere of your office life’. A sports gear manufacturer might focus on ‘helping you achieve peak performance in your chosen sport’, while a virtual office specialist might choose ‘the changing workplace of the future’ as their content specialism. You get the idea.
The statement might include information about your target audience (eg small businesses), what you’ll be delivering content-wise (eg tips, advice, resources) and what the outcome is for your audience (eg a more productive, happier workplace). But keep it simple, get everyone to buy into it, and use it to filter ideas – if a content idea doesn’t sit well with the mission statement, it’s not the right idea for you.
Output: A simple one-line content mission statement that you can stick up on the wall for all to see.
Case study of how content marketing can support a brand: Louis E. Page
Louis E. Page is a family-owned fencing and mesh company that sells a variety of products, from garden fences to specialised material for zoos. It’s Fence Post blog has a distinctive tone of voice and is focused on answering customer questions. Thanks to this, it has gained over 2000 leads from organic search, over a much wider and more diverse base, in a single year.
Thanks to Dan Brotzel for sharing his thoughts and opinions in this blog post. Dan is the Content Director at stickycontent, part of the Press Association. He is also Econsultancy’s trainer in Content Marketing and Editorial Planning. You can connect with Dan on LinkedIn or follow stickycontent on Twitter
“Not even that lead that closed after months of no contact happened for a reason?” you ask.
Nope.
Some trigger — prompted or unprompted — brought you back to mind and inspired contact. And while it may seem like this situation is completely out of your control, it isn’t. If you apply a strategy, you can trigger even the deadest of leads to come back to life.
According to Gleanster, only 50 percent of leads are sales ready, so building relationships for when they are ready is crucial. Furthermore, as we rely less on face-to-face communication, every salesperson must seek other ways to build relationships with new and established clients.
Overcome Obstacles to Build Relationships
Every good salesperson knows how important it is to practice empathy in the sales process. Understanding a lead’s thought process and reservations is a critical skill. However, you should also understand two important things:
Mindshare: Customers have a limited amount of thought real estate, and you’re competing with other salespeople, employees, family, reruns of “Lost,” etc. The moment you disengage from an active conversation with your customer, your mindshare with him decreases. You must retain mindshare, and something as simple as a gentle “just checking in” can do the trick.
Defense: Human beings are naturally defensive, so next time you approach a potential client who knows you want something, don’t be surprised if the answer is “no.” Building a good relationship pierces through that underlying self-defense and mistrust. Even a minor piece of personal information — like remembering that his kid was sick during your last call, for example — will work.
Nurture Leads and Tap Into Weak Ties
Breaking through defenses and maintaining mindshare are all about nurturing leads. Just as tended grapevines will yield better fruit, sales practices that involve constant attention will be more profitable.
According to Forrester, lead nurturing can generate 50 percent more sales-ready leads at significantly lower costs — 30 percent, to be exact. So here are three ways you can obtain and nurture leads:
1. Follow up, and maintain regular contact. You should always establish a desired cadence for every relationship. This contact rhythm can be based on anything from the account’s level of importance to the stage of a particular deal or process.
Set manual reminders after each interaction based on a predefined interval, or use a service like Contactually, which automatically identifies when a relationship is due for a follow-up. Finally, show your client that the relationship won’t end immediately by setting a next step on each call.
2. Focus on building strong relationships. Far too often, we get caught up in the transactional nature of sales relationships, and empathy gets stripped out of digital communications.
According to Aberdeen Group, personalized emails improve conversion rates by 10 percent and click-through rates by 14 percent, so take a personal interest in your customers’ lives. Record the personal details they reveal, and ask about the things they mention, such as an upcoming vacation, during your next contact.
3. Remember the value of weak ties. Strong ties — like those with your friends from college and co-workers — know the same people, often hold the same beliefs, and share information rapidly. This causes very little “new” information or relationships to exist among individuals in this core group.
Weak ties, on the other hand, are filled with opportunities for new connections and information, so you should reach out as far as possible from your core connections to tap into the potential of weak ties.
Build Relationships With a Scientific Mindset
Looking at maintaining business connections from a scientific or analytical perspective allows you to put a process behind the practice. Instead of leaving relationship building up to chance, you can see these efforts as an ongoing sequence of actions with set intervals.
First, give your team a system to easily track and measure relationships. It should rely as little as possible on manual entry and allow the end user to track the overall sphere of relationships. Next, identify a sequence, qualification process, or rating system to track the importance or stage of the relationship. For each “bucket,” identify priority and contact intervals for every customer or lead.
Lastly, regularly examine the health of your team’s sphere of relationships, and set benchmarks for the quantity or quality of relationships at each stage.
Building relationships is all about staying engaged with as many of your key connections as possible, and applying an analytical process allows you to do so in an organized, reliable way. In sales, building relationships isn’t about being touchy feely; it’s about showing empathy and strategically breaking down defenses and obtaining mindshare to benefit your company and put your customers at ease.
Photo attribution: Image courtesy of jiggoja at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Marketing – this one word can either make or break your business. The sooner you realize this, the better.
Because other business owners are struggling with their marketing efforts, I’d like to share with you 10 marketing tips that are proven and tested to work.
How do I know that these tips work? Simple. I used them myself!
If you’re looking marketing strategies that you can use for your business, then you can use my tips as your starting point.
However, before you even start using any of them, I’d like to emphasize how there is no one-size-fits-all marketing strategy for all types of businesses (as you can probably imagine). That said, I urge you to customize my tips based on the important elements that revolve around your business (I.e. your target market, your product, demographics, etc…).
Let’s get this started.
1.) Think inside-out. Establish your website first.
The truth is, people tend to be very judgemental. If they visit your site and see that it is poorly designed, chances are good that they’ll find you less credible and not worth their business.
You and I probably feel the same way too. If you aren’t sure about how you’ll feel, then let me ask you – would you do business with a merchant with this kind of website?
I didn’t think so. :)
So before you think about telling others about your website, you have to make sure that it’s already completed or perhaps established to a certain extent.
Telling others about your website when it still looks crappy can gravely damage your brand.
2.) Start guest posting
Guest posting is so simple to do there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do it.
Even if you haven’t done it yet, you probably have a good idea of how it works.
1.) Look for high quality and niche related sites.
2.) Contact the webmaster and ask if you can contribute to their site.
3.) Wait for their reply.
4.) Send them a well written article according to their guidelines if they say, “sure, send the article over”.
5.) They’ll then post your article with your link in it.
It’s that simple. That’s the gist of the process.
Others make it sound like guest posting is rocket science when in fact it isn’t.
So you might be wondering, what kind of benefits will you get from guest posting? I’m glad you asked.
1.) It helps you establish your credibility as an expert in your niche – this breeds trust.
2.) It can help bring tons of traffic to your website. This of course increases your chances of converting these viewers to paying customers.
3.) It helps your website rank on search results which is one of the best ways (if not the best) to bring in thousands or even millions of traffic to your site.
4.) You can do it for free. Though other sites might require you to pay.
With the comprehensive guide that I wrote, you can start guest posting immediately after you’ve completed reading the guide.
3.) Don’t use all the social media platforms you can get your hands on.
Make no mistake, social media marketing isn’t free.
While creating an account is free, keeping your account active and networking costs a lot of time and resources. And if you’re spending your resources on social media platforms where your target audience isn’t prevalent, then your marketing efforts would have been little to no avail.
Instead of getting your business profile plastered on all the social media platforms you can get your hands-on, you’ll get better results (while spending less) if you just focus your resources on platforms where your target audience usually hangout.
Using 2 – 3 social media platforms (depending on your budget) is a good number to start with.
4.) Do not compromise your web content’s quality.
Thinking that you have to produce fresh content daily is a common misconception that business owners fall for.
Publishing 2 – 3 posts weekly is a good enough number. You can even produce 1 post per week if you’re publishing something that’s so comprehensive and thorough.
If you publish a long post that’s packed with game changing tips, your readers will love you more than the sites who publish low quality to mediocre posts daily.
The key here is to give your readers what they want. We all know that in most cases, people read because they have a problem that they want solved. It’s your job to determine what that problem is and to solve that problem by publishing something that answers it.
The more problems you solve, the more credibility you build as a business. This of course can easily turn your site visitors from simply readers to buyers.
Think pull marketing. Creating quality content is one of its core elements so you should never compromise its quality in any way shape or form.
5.) Create a Linkedin account. Start connecting and prospecting.
If you aren’t in the know, Linkedin is the social media platform where professionals and business owners hangout. You won’t see anyone there posting selfies or talking about how awesome their biceps are since the users are more focused on business and career.
This is a great place for you to market, connect and establish yourself as an authority by giving expert advice to others.
This is especially true since Linkedin just recently released a feature where you can now publish long posts.
With this feature, you can start sharing in-depth advice to your target market and position yourself as an expert in the field.
You can easily get referrals and endorsements from other users who can ultimately help you get more customers.
Hold on. I know what you’re about to say. You’re about to tell me how this can get your site penalized, right?
While you may be correct, you’re also mistaken if you think that’s all there is to it. There’s a proper way of doing this so it won’t damage your site.
Think about sites like Search Engine Journal. What if someone contacts you from that site asking permission to repost your content since they liked what you’ve written. Do you just say no? Can you imagine how much of an opportunity you’d have missed if you did that?
Search Engine Journal has over 5 million visitors monthly. If they repost your article with your link in it, this usually leads to thousands of traffic headed to your site.
So what exactly do you do? Fortunately for you, if SEJ is the one who contacted you, they already know how to properly repost a content. But if there are other sites who are asking to repost your content, you need to consider these.
1.) You need to tell them to use a rel canonical tag that would tell the search engines to credit the original source of the content which is your site.
* Note – Simply adding a link in the content saying that you are the source isn’t enough. Something like this can still hurt your site. Just ask them to add a rel canonical tag and you should be good to go.
2.) Check their site’s quality just to make sure that it isn’t spammy. If it is, then I suggest you don’t allow reposting.
3.) If their site is of good quality then there’s no reason for you to say no.
Here’s a post a Quicksprout.com that talks about the dangers of other sites reposting your content and what to do about it.
7.) Comment marketing
If anyone tells you that this strategy doesn’t work, I’ll tell you right now that they either haven’t tried it, or they DID try it but didn’t do it the right way.
Before you do comment marketing, you need to consider these points.
1.) Make sure that the post/content you are commenting on is relevant to your target audience.
2.) You need to make sure that the website you’re commenting on has a decent amount of monthly visitors. Checking for social shares is also a good strategy.
A good way to determine the site’s estimated monthly visitor is to use similarweb.com.
3.) Make sure that your content provides value to the readers. You’ll never achieve anything if you just add a one liner comment on the post.
4.) Make the readers want to contact you after reading your comment. An effective way to do this is to give a solid advice and add something intriguing at the end of your comment.
Maybe something like this…
“While there are a couple more strategies that we implemented that helped grow our website’s traffic by 3 folds, what I shared above can do you wonders. Contact me if you need more help.”
5.) What I also like to do is add a signature on my comment. This is the signature I use.
This makes it a lot easier for them to contact me. And if they are looking for someone to help them with their writing projects, seeing how I’m a Freelance Writer will help remind them of that need. This then increases my chances of being contacted and offered more projects.
8.) Join groups and forums where your target audience hangout. In short – network.
The strategies I implement on this tip is quite similar to how I do my comment marketing.
The websites I frequent on are Linkedin, OpenForum and Inbound.org. I tried joining the groups in Facebook but it just isn’t working for me.
You need to show genuine concern for others if you want to succeed in networking. Without it, they won’t see you as anything more than just another person desperately spamming their links.
Instead of downright pitching your services, I urge you to ask about their needs first and talk about how you can help them. Offering your help first makes them want to know more about you. It opens bridges and is a good way for you to establish relationships with others.
9.) By using a powerful sales copy, transition your social tribe’s mindset from being a reader to a buyer.
If you’re wondering whether or not marketing on social media platforms is worth the time and resources, you need to consider these points…
1.) There are roughly 1.4 billion Facebook users worldwide.
2.) The amount of time people use in Facebook is roughly about 700 billion minutes monthly.
3.) There is an average of roughly 190 million Tweets made DAILY.
These numbers tell us one thing – people hang out on social media sites and they love being there!
And if your customers are on there, wouldn’t it make sense for you to be on social media sites as well?
If you’re new to social media marketing, you need to remember that the main challenge is usually to shift the mindset of your viewers from simply browsing and consuming content, to making them want to buy.
Using a landing page coupled with a strong sales copy is the perfect solution for that.
It’s important to note that a strong sales copy’s purpose is to get your readers to buy and not to entertain them. Other business owners tend to think that provided the copy reads well and does not have any grammar mistakes, it’ll do well as a sales copy.
They can never be farther from the truth.
More than not having any grammar mistakes and the write-up reading well, there are usually a couple of sales psychology/techniques used within a well written sales copy. These techniques can be as minute as using a “-” over a “.” or even aligning your copy’s text or not.
Some of these points can be quite subtle yet it affects the overall impact of your copy’s ability to convert.
10.) Repurpose your content to increase it’s mileage.
Because producing quality content can be expensive, you need to get as much mileage out of your published contents.
There are a couple of ways to go about doing this. You can turn your written content into videos, Infographics and slideshow presentations (among many others).
You can then publish them on different platforms to increase your business’ visibility on the web.
What next?
While reading and learning is important, it will all be useless in the end if you don’t apply what you’ve learned.
That said, don’t just read and have those “aha!” moments without actually acting on the things that you’ve read which you found valuable to growing your business.
Let’s hear it from you.
Whether you have questions, ideas, or tips about marketing that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to do so in the comments section below. I look forward to reading your comments.
Photo attribution: Featured image courtesy of jiggoja at FreeDigitalPhotos.ne
Watching the growth of digital analytics over the last several years has been both exciting and disturbing.
It’s been exciting because what was a once niche-activity has evolved into a serious, business-focused enterprise activity.
Disturbing, because many people & organizations want to compete on analytics, but are not doing the right things or adopting the right thinking about analytics.
I’ve run into organizations that don’t know how to effectively create, participate, manage or lead analysts and often believe that “data science” or the latest technology will save the day, not the team of people with different skill sets working cross-functionally to make systematic improvements.
Without the right team, a deep understanding of the business, and the ability to do analysis, testing and optimization – “data science” isn’t going to take you far.
When I wrote my second book – “Digital Analytics Primer” – I wanted to to introduce people to a perspective on how to learn the concepts and execute value-creating analyses. Both of my books articulated a concept called “The Analytics Value Chain” that explains what it means to “do analytics” and “create value” from it:
By focusing on The Analytics Value Chain, companies can understand how to control, operate, and maximize benefit from the all of the technical requirements and functions needed to successfully do analytics.
This mindset, or something like it, is necessary to help key players within a business understand how data science & conversion rate optimization play a role to business growth.
15% Of CMO’s Don’t Measure Marketing ROI, 27% Rely On Manager Judgements
Though it may seem obvious, according to the CMO Survey, which collected responses from Fortune 1000, Forbes Top 200, and other high ranking Marketers, found that the state of analytics even now in 2014, is quite dismal.
Here are the highlights:
Only 2% of companies are tracking lead generation to sales metrics.
15% of companies don’t track ROI (Return on Investment)
1 in 4 companies are depending on “manager judgements” to make decisions.
25% of all marketing teams can’t even figure out how to add data into consideration during the decision making process.
Analytics brings a level of transparency and accountability to business leaders that can be uncomfortable or unexpected because data can show the truth.
If every business were as “data-driven” as they claimed & held actually held accountable to increasing quantifiable metrics – a lot of people would be out of a job.
Why “Data” Is Misunderstood, Ignored, Or Otherwise Not Acted Upon
But I’ve been around long enough to know that data can be incorrectly collected, reported, and analyzed.
People can lose the faith in analytics and analytics teams, which causes decisions to be made from “the gut.” After all, I always say that “unless data supports commonly held beliefs or shows positive performance, it will be questioned and challenged.”
It’s easy for marketers to dismiss data when there’s a perception of inaccuracy.
Several common subjects in analytics are easy to not fully explore or elucidate with data, or to totally get so wrong, the data is just crap.
Couple this with technologies that are incompatible with each other, “Experts” who preach analytics without wide practical experience, analysts who are learning on the job, a lack of data standards or governance & vendors who don’t don’t take the time to understand how you use their tools, and it all becomes a real mess.
As a result, there are 5 common areas within digital analytics that are are not using the correct model & are being measured inaccurately or worse, not at all:
1. Measuring The Journey From Prospect To Lead
Prospects are unqualified leads. These are your “visitors” or “traffic”, and are, for the most part, anonymous.
Leads on the other hand are qualified prospects that have voluntarily given some identifying information that makes them known in some way.
If you’ve ever heard of “lead generation” site, then you get it. People visit your site, fill out a form to request something or join something (like the SmartCurrent newsletter) – and then they are leads.
Once a company has a lead, they may execute a “communication sequence” to compel the lead to buy something or give more information incrementally.
The key in understanding leads with digital analytics often starts by using campaign codes.
These codes are query-string parameters assigned to particular inbound advertising campaigns in way specific to each analytics tool.
Omniture’s standard campaign coding conventions are different from Google Analytics, which are different from IBM’s and Webtrends.
No two tools track exactly the same way.
Most tools can be configured to recognize campaign codes that fall outside of the default markup/format. Campaign codes can also be set outside of the query string in certain tools (cookies, hidden form field, etc).
Related to campaign codes are the metadata you collect via tagging within a digital experience. For instance, you may use javascript tagging to identify traffic that moves across certain sections of a site, or across certain sequences and flows.
So for example, with the proper configuration, you could track the activity of prospects that came from a retargeting campaign and begin to explore deeper areas of the site, reviewing content sections and using certain functions (like internal site search).
You may want to use tagging to capture information (metadata) about those pages and functions that go well beyond the page name. You may want to collect the type of function used on the page (i.e. search), the keyword, the type of content read, the person who authored the content, and so on.
Taken to the next level, you may want to collect specific clicks (i.e. events) that occur before the prospect reaches a lead form.
But in many cases, this type of data is not determined ahead of time nor architected into an analytics solutions. Or if it is, it may not be aligned for answering the business questions the company may have about the lead.
You need to determine the types of information about the pages and flows you want to use to better understand the prospect and lead. You want to define the specific events, subordinate to the page view, about the pages and flows that you want to track; implement, test, and analyze them in the context of the lead generation flow.
You want to tag all the elements of your forms and see where people drop off and where they complete the form.
You want to collect the full, relevant set of information that you can segment and pivot against to understand the prospect and lead flow in way that can drive hypothesis testing to improve it.
2. Measuring Actual Customer Activity
For sites that sell something, it’s completely obvious to say that “customers are important” and that “understanding who your customers are and what they think is very important.”
But I once met a CEO who told me “I don’t care what my customers do, as long as they buy.”
In that case, I found an analytics implementation that was largely devoid of real customer data or any useful instrumentation for advanced data collection and segmentation.
Customer data is often in the domain of CRM systems, like SAP or Salesforce.com, or in the absence of Customer Relationship Management platform, the customer database or data warehouse.
For publishers, it may in something called a Data Management Platform (DMP). You may have heard that your analytics tool can’t – for one reason or another – support having Personally Identifiable Information or other customer data.
No, you can’t do certain things with Google Analytics, but the reality of being sophisticated with analytics is that you aren’t likely to be using Google Analytics on customer data; you may have another tool.
In other tools, it’s completely possible to understand the customer in the context of their digital behavior by going beyond the page tag and into BI or perhaps a Digital Data Distribution Platform (D3P) in the cloud.
Adding “custom dimensions” or roundtripping data from your data warehouse, DMP, CRM, and so on can have inordinate levels of applicability for better understanding your customer’s and their behavior.
In my experience, analysts were rather excited when they were able to use DoubleClick’s gender, age, affinity, and interest group information in Google Analytics.
But that type of information, at the detailed level, has been brought into enterprise analytics implementations for years. You just had to spend a lot of money on tools (you may still need to) and have the right team who knew how to do it technically in a way meaningful to the business.
Having attributes of your customer, whether a userid, a DMA/MSA, household income, family size, race, gender, and other purchasing propensities and properties (like Customer Lifetime Value) can be helpful.
What Do You Do To Improve Customer Data In Your Analytics?
First, you find out what the customer schema looks like. Ask your Business Intelligence team or your CRM provider.
What data is available?
What business questions do your stakeholders require?
What data would help your analysis projects?
Then figure out the right definitions for it, the right place where it should live, and the best way to join it together and allow analysts and business users to access it.
3. How Well Is Your Advertising Performing?
Like understanding the sources of traffic using campaign codes, you want to do something similar for advertising.
First, your advertising is either Paid, Owned, or Earned Media. All advertising should be classified into those classifications.
Display ads are Paid Media
Your blog is Owned Media
Socially-shared content posted by others not at the company or being paid by you is Earned Media.
Better understanding your advertising in your analytics starts by simply classifying your paid, owned, and earned media using campaign codes or metadata. For example, the tools CampaignAlyzer and Tracking First can help the process of managing and governing campaign codes.
That’s a level about the simple source/medium in Google Analytics.
Next, you need to classify the types of campaigns into whether they are direct response or for branding purposes and whether the advertising was message-centric or value-centric.
Direct response means you expect people to do something when they arrive at your site. You expect them to take an action.
Whereas branding is a bit softer and meant to promote an increase in the awareness or equity of a brand or product (without the required response).
Many ads, like banner ads, or pre-rolls, interrupt the audience; these are message-centric ads. Other ads, where something is given away for free (perhaps a membership, an incentive, an offer) are value-centric.
This type of message-based vs value-centric designation may sound odd, but Netflix putting a banner ad on an affiliate site (message-centric) is a very different ad from creating high-quality content (like “House of Cards”) and advertising that custom programming via owned and earned channels(value-centric).
Then, of course, there are the simple campaign parameters, such as the type of campaign (banner, CPC, blog, video, and so on) and specificities like the ad group or keyword.
These parameters and the nature of advertising the can be expressed in analytics can be highly-specific to the company. They could even include the device target (mobile vs tablet vs site) or the size and format of the ad.
You may want to bring this data in by integrating with your Ad Server, social network, DMP, or D3P. Regardless, it is important to enhance the data in your analytics to include more information that can help you better understanding the origins and types of advertising to better understand conversion.
What To Do Next About Your Advertising?
Learn more about it. Understand how to classify it.
Determine how to pass the data into your analytics via tagging, your Tag Manager, Business Intelligence technology, or other ways to integrate the data.
4. Where Are The Leaks In Your Conversion Funnel?
The key to extra-large conversion is tracking your conversion funnel.
But the traditional idea of a conversion funnel is half-baked. Your anonymous or mostly anonymous visitors during a single visit go through a discrete series of steps before they transition to point where value is created (i.e. the conversion).
In the eCommerce funnel, a visitor:
Comes from a campaign (with a campaign code)
Searches from products
Browses the product catalog
Adds one or more items to their cart
Begins the shopping cart flow
Submits some personally identifiable information & payment info
Eventually views a Thank You or Confirmation page
That’s your conversion funnel. But is it really?
Isn’t it a bit daft to think of conversion as a series of linear steps that occur during a single visit?
And even if it is valid, when do you begin measuring it?
Does the funnel begin on the clickthrough to the site? After the product has been added to the cart? When the Shopping Cart flow starts as a guest or logged-in member?
Sure, it depends on the business questions, requirements, and definitions of a conversion, but what is the right way to measure conversion?
The answer will vary from business to business, but understand it’s these nuances that can make or break the usefulness of conversion tracking and your conversion funnel.
Taken to the next level, is the “funnel” even an accurate metaphor for expressing user behavior?
Sure the “funnel” is a clever marketing term that makes it easy to understand. But it is true that a wider funnel isn’t just making the steps in your conversion more persuasive, it actually means considering what happens in the different layers/modals, events, and in the pre and post-behavior before and after the purchase, when the purchase is abandoned, and even when completed with latency during a different visit.
What Do You Do About Your Conversion?
First, you need to define what a “conversion” actually is, socialize the definition of the steps to conversion within your organization, and ensure your data collection is appropriately instrumented to collect the specific steps you define.
That will mean tagging for goals and events – and it will mean figuring out how to determine when someone comes back and purchases later and when revenue is captured after abandonment.
In fact, it’s probably more apt to reconsider “the funnel” entirely. I sometimes call it “The Tumbler” where a visitor is Seeking, then Shopping, then Sharing.
Seeking
These are part of the off-site activities that lead people to your site. For example, the keyword search, the advertising campaign, the social media referral…
Aren’t these part of your conversion story?
Shopping
The traditional funnel you may already be measuring in all its rich glory and event-level and goal-level interactivity.
Sharing
What happens after the purchase, which is not necessarily part of the purchase, but in terms of customer satisfaction, likelihood to recommend, and other measures of brand health can have significant impact on your conversion rates.
Understanding the data behind how the existing share to conversion ratio can help you to decide whether moving into arenas like referral marketing will be right for your business, and give you a better data-informed predictions on what the success of such a program might be.
Consider the “tumble” through the journey on the path to purchase – what happens before and after the shopping & how they arrived at your site in the first place.
5. Measuring Attribution For Each Part Of The Funnel
Attribution is a fancy term for identifying what caused the conversion.
It can be a complicated type of analysis. You can spend many months preparing data, hundreds of thousands of dollars on vendor software, and significant cerebral power and data science trying to attribute what caused people to buy.
You’ve heard of “Last Click or Last Interaction” and “First Click or First Interaction” and maybe even explored the nuances of “Last Adwords” or “Last Non-Direct” attribution.
Perhaps you’ve considered “Equal” attribution where all touches are given equal credit in assisting the conversion. Or you’ve thought about “Time Decay” where all customer touches that occurred nearest to the conversion are given an increasing credit as an assist to conversion.
Or maybe you haven’t and are still wondering why your Adwords (First Interaction) is different than your Paid Search attribution in Google Analytics (Last Interaction).
Adding to the challenge of attribution are the actual financial measures behind the conversion. That is the cost and revenue data that enable you to look at things like ROAS (return on advertising spend) vs ROI (which can include margin).
What Do You Do About Conversion?
First, like all things with analytics, you need to consider your business goals, purchase cycles, the duration before a conversion, and the types of campaigns you are running.
Then you need to take a look at the different attribution models to identify what they calculating and telling you about the performance of your campaign mix.
In short, you can’t just assume credit for a source from looking at one model or not thinking deeply about attribution and how to best express credit for your conversion without just accepting the default view.
You need to consider the impact of cost, revenue, and margin on your attribution modeling.
Conclusion
So there you have it 5 areas where you may be measuring perfectly or you may be measuring incorrectly.
It’s hard to say what’s right or what’s wrong without considering your analytics as part of The Analytics Value Chain.
The value chain where you are aligning your business goals and requirements, data collection, data governance and definitions with your reporting, analysis, optimizations, predictions, and automations in order to best understand your prospects, leads, customers, conversions, and attribution.
Wouldn’t it be nice if content marketing were as simple as just creating stellar content?
Is print really dead? What about email? Did video kill the podcast star? Did karma finally catch up with QR codes for 
Email may have new legs of its own through mobile, but it also had a hand in killing off print marketing… for a while at least. Aptly summarized in this cartoon, for a time, marketers’ print proclivities seemed to have exhausted the utility in the medium, as targeted recipients were inundated with overwhelming volumes of marketing mail items. When email marketing supposedly killed print marketing, however, marketers naturally decreased their print spend and overall activities. As far back as 2012, marketing research showed that only 30% of marketers were increasing their direct mail activities, highlighting a notable void in the channel that has only grown over time. This gap has actually created a novelty for print marketing, as 
My love for football (
For social apps, traditional Web approaches can be successful, because people share great content on mobile as well as the Web. But even so, the challenges are a little different on mobile.
As evolving technologies have advanced email marketing (closely followed by evolving strategies), one important factor has always been, and remains, a major player: your email reputation.
Domain reputation is a newer assessment technology. If IP reputation is a science, domain reputation is an art (tempered with scientific aspects). It factors in not only your IP address, but also the domain attached to your email sending behavior. With the sending domain taking such a forward-facing role, your brand becomes a pivotal part of your sending reputation. If you switch IPs, the domain reputation will remain the same, good or bad, if sending from the same domain.
Every year IBM releases the key findings from their Global C-suite Study and everyone scrambles to dig through it to find that one piece of information that might change their entire marketing strategy. To save you some time, we’ve picked five key takeaways from the study of 4,183 top executives from more than 20 industries so you can learn how the big dogs are earning the loyalty of “digitally enfranchised customers and citizens.” Let us know in the comments if you’re a CMO—or another C-suite exec—who has some thoughts about what it means to be a CMO in this changing world of marketing.
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Thanks to Dan Brotzel for sharing his thoughts and opinions in this blog post. Dan is the Content Director at 
But in many cases, this type of data is not determined ahead of time nor architected into an analytics solutions. Or if it is, it may not be aligned for answering the business questions the company may have about the lead.
