I’m writing this post at Dreamforce 2014. It’s been an amazing experience, and I’ve loved meeting leaders in sales and marketing from all over the world and being part of this community.
In one of the keynote sessions with Tony Robbins, Tony talked about the power of engagement, citing a Gallop poll that showed 13% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. This was 142-country study of 180 million employees called the State of the Global Workplace.
According to this study, the U.S., which demonstrated the highest level of employee engagement, reported that 29% of employees enjoyed their jobs and their bosses. This means 70% of Americans feel negatively about their jobs.
Tony said that before we can help people get engaged (customers, employees, coworkers, etc.), we need to be engaged ourselves. I completely agree.
When I meet new people, they invariably describe what they do. I can usually figure out in about 30 seconds of listening to someone if they are passionate about their work. Think about your own workplace: You can feel who’s engaged and who’s not. It shows up in their attitude, behavior and words.
Creating engagement
How do we create engagement for ourselves, our colleagues and those future customers we hope to reach and influence? I think the answer is passion.
I’ve been thinking about passion and what role it plays in our careers as marketers and leaders. I’ve been wondering about things we marketers don’t often talk about — our hearts.
What drives us? What role does the heart play in our job as marketers? Can you market something without passion and still be successful? If so, why would you want to?
I’ve wondered how we can be passionate advocates to people outside our companies if we don’t have close relationships or trust inside our place of work.
In this age of automation, depersonalization, scoring and measurement, I’m not seeing the human touch and connection in B2B marketing. How can we humanize the process and actually build relationships?
I believe the complex sale presents a set of unique sales and marketing problems that benefit shifting away from the traditional lead generation mindset to a new way of thinking centered on the following principles:
More ROI is reaped from the patient tending of potential customers (relationships) over time. Customers for life.
Lead generation is a conversation, not a series of disjointed campaigns.
Build relationships with the right people and companies, regardless of their timing to buy.
Engage people as early in their buying process as possible (preferably before they start looking), so you can help create and influence their vision.
The first impression matters. So does the second. So does every single touch after that. Consistency and relevancy are key.
Sales and Marketing must work together as one team. See each other as internal customers.
A strategic lead generation portfolio will always outperform marketing tactics that stand alone.
Sales and Marketing should have a unified understanding and consensus in their language on things such as ideal customers and universal lead definition.
If used properly, the phone is the single best way to reach decision makers and to begin a dialogue when you have a complex sale.
Buy-in from Sales, Marketing and executive leadership is critical to the success of any lead generation program.
Be willing and prepared to close the loop with every identified opportunity.
The purpose of marketing is to help the sales team sell.
Trusted advisers win more sales than slick brands.
Companies don’t buy — people do. Don’t ever forget the human touch.
Again, I think the complex sale requires the human touch as a central element. It starts with our individual heart and our passion — do I believe in what I’m doing?
We then need to orient ourselves to our company’s collective heart and passion — do I believe in my company and what my company does?
Finally, we carry our heart and passion outside our company — do we believe in what we’re doing?
California’s drought might just be the “zombie apocalypse” that gets B.C. thinking seriously about its food security, according to celebrity farmer Joel Salatin. Salatin — a successful American farmer, former reporter and author of nine books on the food revolution — is able to produce far more food per acre than industrial-scale farms using techniques that make raising beef, chicken, eggs and even pigs palatable to the neighbours.
The problem with brand value is really simple: no one agrees on it.
The GE brand value, for example, in 2011, was variously estimated to be worth $30.5B, $42.8B, and $50.3B by different brand valuation services. That’s a difference of about $20B between the high and low estimates. It gets worse. One firm estimated that GE’s brand value was rising, while the other two calculated a declining brand value.
These are not small numbers. They’re well beyond statistically significant differences. In fact, they’re large enough to qualify as annual GDP numbers for many small countries—like Uganda. And GE isn’t the only example of the problem with brand value.
In a recent article on the issue of brand value, The Economist noted:
“…arguments rage about how much brands are worth and why. Firms that value them come to starkly different conclusions.”
It’s obvious that brand valuation has a “starkly” real issue. None of the firms estimating brand value agree on the same value for a given brand. And if none of them agree on the value of brands, how can CMOs and CFOs begin to understand the brand value they’re creating with their Marketing spending?
Brand Value—What Is it ?
Other industries have no problem placing a common value on valuable things. For example, the stock market. There, we have buyers and sellers. While they may have different views of the future performance of the stock, they agree on one thing: the price at which the stock is currently selling.
And that price is, in essence, the present value of the perceived future earnings of the company. The irony here, of course, is that a significant amount of the value of a firm’s assets are in, you guessed it, brand value. Can you imagine a world with three different stock market exchanges, each of which quote different stock prices for the same stock ?
Brand valuation should be no different. Essentially, the value of a brand is the present value of the brand and all of its intangible assets that generate future earnings for the company.
If it’s really this simple though, then why are brand valuations so different from one another?
The Need For A Standard, Validated Brand Value Model
First off, we need a model for how brand economic value is created. The model needs to have a consumer measure of “brand impact” that is increased by (or not) by marketing spend, and then how this brand impact drives economic value.
This is a really important concept. So important that an independent third party, the Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB), has created just this model.
MASB, in case you’re not familiar with it, is an organization charged with aligning CMOs and CFOs behind evidence based marketing measurement and methodology that demonstrates how Marketing drives real business results—including the creation of brand value. Think FASB for Marketing applied to research methods and metrics.
MASB has developed a simple model for how a consumer or customer brand strength measure creates economic value. In the schematic below, the customer brand value measure drives volume, market share, and premium pricing. These, in turn, drive cash flow. These cash flows, taken over a number of years and then discounted back to present value, create brand value.
The Brand Value Map
Brand Preference—The Linchpin
The model is simple enough. But, the linchpin in this model is the customer brand strength measure since it is what drives share, volume, and price premium. Without a validated, proven connection between brand strength and key outcome measures, the measure has no real significance. What is it? Well, it could be a number of measures, but an early favorite is “brand preference.”
MASB research with member companies shows that brand preference is highly correlated with volume, share, and price premium across many brands and categories. Said simply, higher consumer brand preference yields higher volume, share, and price premium. Lower consumer brand preference yields lower volume, share, and price premium. This seems to be true across brand and categories—both fast moving consumer goods and also consumer durables.
Given this, we have a simple model: marketing and brand activities drive brand preference; brand preference causes higher volume, share and premium pricing; and these deliver greater cash flows, which can be discounted back to the present to create an evidence based brand valuation model.
Brand Valuation—Something That CMOs And CFOs Can Agree On
Creating more brand value is an axiomatic objective for Marketers. But having multiple estimates of brand value that don’t agree with one another is hardly helpful to the CMO.
MASB has created a framework for how brand marketing activities create brand value and, more importantly, demonstrated that there is a standard customer metric that works in the model across brands and industries. This is the foundation of proof that marketing creates real economic value beyond simple ROI measurement of individual marketing programs.
The next steps are up to CMOs and CFOs: to align on the brand value methodology and begin experimenting with how to best use it. Why? So they can agree on at least one thing: the value of their brands and the contribution of marketing to that value.
If you’re reading this, you likely already know your brand is your promise to your customers. But there is an important extension to this: keeping customers means keeping your promises.
Let me tell you the story of what just happened to me (I admit this is a bit of a rant, but if you’ve been following my customer retention stories, you know how I love to pick on the companies with the worst customer service—they are fantastic examples of what not to do).
This story is about my mobile phone upgrade. You’re probably not surprised to learn I have not been thrilled with my mobile phone carrier. When my contract was up and the new devices became available, it was time to upgrade. I did my homework, calling and asking lots of detailed questions about devices and plans. I got great answers from very helpful people.
In other words, they made me a promise. They made promises about the features and plans, and more importantly, they made promises (implicitly) about the kind of service I would receive (friendly and helpful, making the upgrade process easy and smooth).
When it came time to place the order, things started to go wrong, and small issues turned into big issues, leaving me wanting to switch to another carrier. First, when I called to place the order, I was told I could only do that online. Just a small inconvenience, so I tried online. Even though I was out of contract, they wanted to charge me a fee for upgrading (this is a common, if customer hostile, practice). I called to complain and was put on hold, then transferred to three (!) different departments. Then I was told this fee was required, and that I could not upgrade my phone without it. And no, not even if I paid full price for an unlocked phone could I avoid this fee.
More than an hour later (trying my patience), I hung up and called another carrier. They agreed to sell me new phones (the same model) with a similar plan without any fees to get started. The only reason I did not sign up right there and then was a small technical feature I need—which they do not have.
So I called back my old carrier and told them I would leave if they didn’t waive the fees and process my order without further hassles. I was transferred to the “customer retention department.”
As you probably know, these are the people whose job it is to handle the angriest customers and the worst customer service mistakes the company has made to improve customer retention. The mere fact a customer retention department exists means customer service is failing (If you have such a customer retention department in your company, I advise you to do a better job of customer service). They succeeded (they were nice, apologetic and made the process easy for me), and I renewed and upgraded.
But they’d made me a promise: an easy process with no hassles. They broke their promise and failed in every possible way to deliver. Then they were forced to spend time, effort, and money to “retain” me.
If you’ve dealt with customer service or even customer retention departments, you probably have at least a few stories that sound just like this or maybe worse. But this, as I noted above, is the bad example.
What you can do to avoid having a customer retention department and doing this to your customers is simple: keep your promises.
When a customer comes to make a purchase—any kind of purchase —make them a promise. Your promise is not just that the product or service you sell will perform an expected task, but it is a promise about the kind of service you will offer, what the buying experience will be like (now and every time they come back), what their experience will be using the product, how they will feel about your product, and how your product will affect their reputation.
The single biggest mistake companies make when they are seeking repeat or return business is breaking promises.
As a consumer, you know what it feels like to have a company break a promise. You are left with a sour taste and a desire to seek out competitors. Sometimes you switch, but even if you stay put, you are not a happy customer.
In your business, you are probably breaking promises to your customers far more often than you think (and certainly far more often than they are telling you). Without your customers’ willingness to tell you every single time you break a promise, how do you know?
Here are two questions you must ask for effective customer retention:
What promises are you making to your customers? Make sure you know every single promise your customers think you are making and not just the ones you want to make.
Which promises do your customers value? Companies break promises all the time, but most of the promises broken are unimportant to their customers. Find out what’s important to your customers.
Once you know the answer with a great deal of certainty, you are left with the very hard customer retention work (don’t underestimate this) of finding out how you are breaking those important promises. It might be in very small ways (oops, we forgot to tell you we charge $40 to upgrade your phone. Didn’t you read the small print? And if your agent starts quoting small print or company “policy” to your customer, you have blown it). You will have to look hard.
You’ll probably have to do the hardest thing of all: get outside your view as a representative of your company and step into the view of your customer. Live the experience your customer has with you as if you are your customer. You might be surprised at what you find.
In my experience working with companies whose business depends on having customers come back again and again, the work of fixing the issues you find is the easiest part. Often there are some simple tweaks to your processes that will help. Almost always, giving your employees on the front lines the authority to solve customers’ problems will solve most of your customer retention problems.
No matter what kind of business you are in, you depend on customers coming back. Breaking your promises in important ways (even if the importance is small) can ensure they never do come back. If you are in a recurring revenue and custom retention business, broken promises will certainly spell the end of your company.
Please share how you found out about your own broken promises and how you fixed them in the comments.
Imagine this: You get a $2000 bonus from your employer for excellent work. The same day, your car’s transmission bites the dust and you have to shell out $2000 to get it repaired.
Which event sticks out in your mind a month later? If you’re like most humans, you’re agonizing over that $2000 repair bill long after you’ve forgotten the good feeling brought on by the bonus.
This is because of a psychological phenomenon called “negativity bias.” Our brains recall negative memories more vividly than positive ones, and negative associations tend to be much stronger than positive associations.
As marketers and PR pros, we strive to create a brand message that’s “sticky.” We also want that message to be positive. Yet therein lies the challenge: if humans are naturally wired to remember the negative, what’s a marketer to do to craft a message that’s both memorable but positive?
Of course, every brand has the option to latch on to a negative emotion and build their brand on that. But as Scott Monty pointed out, it’s generally not a smart (or sustainable) strategy to couch your brand identity in negativity.
Why not instead approach negativity as an opportunity to showcase positivity?
Focus on what you do have, not what you don’t.
To reference Scott once more: think about how you actively provide value (positive association), rather than how you differ from a competitor (negative association). Your audience, being human, is more than capable of drawing those negative comparisons without your help – and you end up with the stickiness of negativity without tethering yourself to the negative trait itself.
Transform haters into fans.
Ekaterina Walters’ observation at this year’s FutureM conference rings true: it is far easier to convert haters into lovers than it is to turn an indifferent audience into fans.
Like or hate the term, real-time marketing represents a killer opportunity to jump on episodes of negativity and bring about positive outcomes. By providing a timely solution to an individual issue or offering clever commentary on a current event, brands can effectively win over negatively engaged audiences. Take KitKat’s recent #bendgate Twitter win, or any number of these examples of RTM done right.
Keep in mind the “magic ratio.”
Okay, there isn’t just one magic positive-to-negative ratio. Depending on which study you reference, you need anywhere from 3-6 (Fredickson and Losada) to as high as 20 (Grossman) positives for every one negative in order to balance the equation. The point is, since negatives weigh heavier than positives in the human brain, there must be a higher frequency of positive episodes in order to obtain overall positivity.
For marketers and PR pros, this means landing more frequent favorable (or at least neutral) media mentions and inspiring more happy tweets than angry ones. Maximize positive coverage and let the flood of positive sentiment dissolve the impact of negativity in your audience’s mind.
Remember that as humans, consumers will latch onto negativity far sooner than they’ll independently notice something positive. Your ability to resonate with your audience is enhanced by the finesse with which you can identify negative sentiment and gracefully associate it with a positive message.
What is YOUR brand doing to lasso negativity and channel it into a positive brand image?
Image Credit: Hasloo Group Production Studio/Shutterstock
Healthcare is arguably the only major industry in the world that hasn’t embraced automation — and it shows.
According to CMS, the annual U.S. spend on healthcare is nearly three trillion dollars (more than 17 percent of GDP), and yet the World Health Organization ranks our healthcare system below almost every other industrialized nation in the world. Despite all the money being spent, there is still pervasive inefficiency and frustration, with minimal relative value to the patient.
One obvious and difficult result of this lack of automation is the worsening primary care provider shortage. Average wait times for a patient to get primary care are staggering. In fact, among developed countries, only Canada has longer primary care wait times, and theirs are now improving.
Above: Primary care wait times in select U.S. markets, 2014.
Image Credit: Merritt Hawkins
This already untenable strain on the system is getting worse. It’s exacerbated by our population growth, the increasing average age of our population, and the introduction of new patients to the system under health care reform.
Every year, the U.S. population grows by more than 1.5 million, and every one of those new people needs healthcare. Additionally, the average age of our population is rapidly increasing. By 2025, the Census Bureau projects a 36 percent growth in the number of Americans over age 65. Not surprisingly, the elderly need more healthcare than the young.
VentureBeat will be discussing a variety of key health tech topics with industry innovators at HealthBeat 2014, Oct. 27-28 in San Francisco. Be sure to register.
Add to that the fact that our new healthcare reform legislation will help introduce 32 million previously uninsured Americans into the delivery system – most with a substantial backlog of care needs that will have a major per capita impact on demand for care.
On top of a system that’s already overburdened with patients, we’re also expecting more complex and time consuming care from existing primary care providers. The Affordable Care Act has helped catalyze a shift from a fee-for-service model to a capitated system of reimbursement. As part of that, primary care providers are now increasingly expected to provide care targeted towards preventing disease rather than just treating it. New activities like patient panel management and coordination of care are invaluable in delivering higher quality care but are also time-consuming and labor intensive for providers.
Increasing the number of doctors we’re training isn’t the answer. That would just be throwing more (expensive) bodies at the problem. Continuing to demand that providers work even harder isn’t a solution either. Over just a few decades, the number of patients that a provider sees daily has climbed from around a dozen to more than 20. If we continue to turn up the treadmill on our providers, quality of care will suffer.
The solution is building tools to help our providers work smarter. I like to draw an analogy to the agricultural revolution. As the urban population exploded, demand for food products increased and the world was faced with two options; get more farmers working harder with picks and shovels, or invent new, efficient ways of improving crop yields. The solution for our food shortage was not harder working farmers — it was the tractor. In healthcare we need to make a similar paradigm shift and explore out-of-the-box ideas that radically change the capacity of our healthcare system. We don’t need more doctors with picks and shovels. We need to be giving them a tractor to automate their work, doing things for them that we know they’ll need to do.
Solutions that will help automate healthcare processes aren’t just sought by patients and providers, either. With the explosion of wearable devices, manufacturers and delivery systems are struggling with how to get the right information from those devices in front of providers at the right time. Through well-designed software and clinical logic, device data about a patient’s blood pressure can be presented in a usable, actionable format when they are being treated for hypertension, and not when they have an earache.
Here are a few examples of automation tools that help deliver better, more efficient care:
SweetSpot Diabetes Care (recently acquired by DexCom) recognized that providers were drowning in data from simple, common glucometers. To help solve this problem, it automated the retrieval of data from numerous patient devices; managed, processed, and stored data in the cloud; and integrated the data into electronic medical records for provider use. It streamlined provider workflow and turned an ocean of glucometer data into usable clinical information. Endocrinologists using this system are able to quickly and easily review masses of information in seconds, quickly filtering to the most relevant data for any given patient or population.
WellBe helps to automate the peri-operative workflow, starting with the patient decision-making process and continuing through preadmission, surgery, and postoperative followup. Through automation, WellBe helps to standardize care processes, improving outcomes and lowering the total cost of care.
Kaiser Permanente’s Panel Support Tool or PST is an example of chronic disease automation. It automatically analyzes whole panels of patients, identifying gaps in care while keeping providers aware of evolving best practices and national guidelines. The key to this kind of automation tool is making sure that the information is automatically available, and only when the provider needs it. That way it supports the physician’s work rather than getting in the way.
Bright.md (Disclosure: This is the company I founded) automates up to 60 percent of primary care visit volume, reducing the provider time needed for those visits from 20 minutes down to less than two. That helps make getting high-quality care faster, more convenient, and less expensive for patients. It also increases margin for delivery systems and enables providers to practice at the top of their license. It also helps to expand provider capacity by 30 percent, making time available for the waves of patients waiting for care.
Fortunately, with the new ubiquity of EHR systems, the infrastructure for these kinds of services is already in place. EHRs are already beginning to evolve into the “operating systems” of the healthcare industry. Some progressive systems like DrChrono and Kareo are even building APIs and SDKs to help move that process along.
Now it’s time to build plug-in applications that expand EHR functionality and value. The same way that SalesForce helps automate CRM functions on a Mac or Windows computer, tools like SweetSpot Diabetes, WellBe, PST, and Bright.md help to automate evaluation, diagnosis, treatment, and documentation for providers on various EMR systems. And innovative delivery systems like CareMore are using these kinds of tools to support advanced clinical practices, with huge savings as a result.
U.S. funding for digital healthcare startups is expected to reach $6.5 billion by 2017, and given what a target-rich environment healthcare is, there’s room for even more growth. Still, some targets are higher value than others. Automation holds the keys to tremendous opportunity, in terms of patient experience, cost, and quality of care. The market for these kinds of tools is massive, the demand is growing, and the groundwork is already in place. It’s where I’m placing my bets. Where do you see the future of healthcare?
Ray Costantini, MD is co-founder and CEO of Bright.md, a virtual care solution that automates care and communication between physician and patient for faster, more convenient diagnosis and treatment.
HealthBeat — VentureBeat’s breakthrough health tech event — is returning on Oct 27-28 in San Francisco. This year’s theme is “The patient journey: Connections, data, and innovation.” We’re putting long-established giants of the health care world on stage with CEOs of the nation's most disruptive health tech companies to share insights, analyze trends, and showcase breakthrough products. Purchase your tickets now and save $100!
Do you want to capture more emails with just a single campaign?
Contests, sweepstakes and giveaways in social media can be a great source to fuel your email list.
In this article I’ll share 5 tips for maximizing the effectiveness of your lead-gen campaigns through viral game mechanics.
We know that these work. And we believe in these so much that we even built all of them in to our own contest platform.
The kicker is that there is no need to spend more or be pushy.
Why collect emails as contest entries?
Social media can be effective, but it’s a rented land, so there are insecurities and unexpected situations that you need to be prepared to deal with.
For example the Facebook organic reach has never been so low, and we just lost the Like-gate.
However, your email list is one commodity that you own, and it can go hand-in-hand with your social media efforts.
Just think about advertising to your email list on Facebook. Or emailing your fans whose email addresses you captured with Facebook contests.
Here’s a Facebook contest to capture the email addresses of your subscribers.
So here are 5 advanced techniques to attract more newsletter subscribers to your contests and sweepstakes.
#1. Draw multiple, lower-value prizes
What do you think, what’s more attractive as a contest prize? A car or one of 10 test-drives?
Well, according to this research multiple, smaller value prizes can be more attractive than a single, high-value prize.
The best is if the two are combined: a higher value prize with multiple, lower value prizes.
Before we knew the science behind this we saw an example with one of our customers at Antavo. The company offered a car as a prize for their sweepstakes, but only 198 people entered.
In another case 3 simple chocolate hampers attracted thousands of subscribers.
Why?
People weigh their chances. Most people think they would never win a car because so many would participate for such a valuable grand prize. Therefore, they feel their chances of winning minimal and decide not to enter.
Takeaway: Instead of offering a single, expensive grand prize, offer multiple, lower value prizes. It’s a bonus if you offer a higher value prize too.
The best contests have multiple, lower value prizes.
#2. Combine voting with a jury round
“Enter with a selfie with your doggy! The selfie with the most votes wins!”
What do you think about this call-to-action at a contest?
At first sight it seems okay, but if you think more about what it really means, you will see that it’s not ideal. Here is why.
The conditions are intimidating.
See, in order to win the prize your subscriber needs to collect the most votes. If a subscriber has a cute puppy but not many friends who’d vote, he would collect relatively few votes. This makes him lose interest right at the beginning. Not to mention the sour feeling afterwards.
The best way is to involve a round of e.g. 15 entrants where people can qualify by collecting votes.
Then you either randomly pick the winners, or choose them with a jury round.
You can still give an audience’s choice prize.
Takeaway: To preserve interest and avoid disappointment have a semi-round in your contest. People can qualify by collecting votes, and a jury makes the final decision.
A jury round is involved to get winners in this video contest.
#3. Incentivize voting
If you only focus on motivating entrants to share their email address by offering a prize, you’re missing out on a big source of leads—your voters.
To capture voter leads, add a layer to your contest that asks voters to register with their emails in exchange for being entered into a related prize drawing.
To top this you can add another level. Those people who vote every day (and grow engagement between themselves and you) can increase their chances of winning.
Takeaway: To encourage participation and collect more email leads, draw a prize among voters too.
Incentivize voting with drawing a prize among them. Voters are just as valuable to you as entrants.
#4. Separate voting and entry rounds
Would you ever want to take part in a running race where the next runner has a one-mile advantage?
Well, neither would I. I will not run just to shame myself for being the last one!
See, this is why people won’t enter your contests if you don’t pay attention to a tiny but very important detail: timing.
With contests that require people to upload something (a picture, video, music or a story) you need to have separate uploading and voting periods.
If these periods overlap too much, or if they are exactly at the same time you might miss entrants who don’t enter because others already collected many votes.
Takeaway: To gain more subscribers – and avoid concerns about entering your contest – have a separate uploading and voting periods. So when the time comes, everyone will start with the same chances.
If there are separate uploading and voting periods, everyone has the same chances and the contest is considered fair. Entering will be more attractive, and you can capture more email addresses.
#5. Give bonus points to get social shares and referrals
“Thanks for entering! Now share this with your friends!”
Do you think this call-to-action works?
Not really.
I see marketers often making the mistake of putting sharing icons wherever they can. For example just after someone enters a sweepstakes.
But why would anyone share a sweepstakes, if it only means decreasing his or her own chances of winning the prize? If you ask for shares without other incentives, people will just not share.
Simple as that.
The right solution is to offer increased chances after sharing and for invited friends who enter. It’s a win-win both for you and the subscribers.
You can grant points both after sharing, and having friends subscribe. (Of course you need to have the technical background that can handle tracing referrals.)
Takeaway: To help your sweepstakes spread, offer a carrot on a stick. People can receive bonus points after sharing and for invited friends who enter.
Sharing is caring. But sharing that is beneficial for you is even better!
What makes a successful contest?
Viral game mechanics and the right incentives are great techniques to get more subscribers to your contests.
More contest subscribers mean more email subscribers, and that is a step forward to sustainable marketing.
These techniques are not difficult to implement.
You just need a bit conscious thinking and an understandable copy.
Did the headline grab your attention? You’ve probably come across similar headlines or subject lines in your inbox – they’re emotionally responsive. And while you might be more familiar with the straightforward, value-driven email subject lines such as, “get 10% off,” sticking to a cut-and-dry approach may wear out your readers.
Appealing to your readers’ practical side is a proven strategy. But for the sake of variety, mixing things up and connecting with your subscribers on an emotional, rather than just an intellectual level can leave a lasting impression. Here’s how to appeal to your readers’ emotions:
There are two basic types of emotionally responsive subject lines: negative and positive. While the former is used more often, both types can be used to resonate with customers on an emotional level:
Negative Responses
There are a variety of ways in which negative emotional responses can be used, but these effective ones convince your subscribers that they shouldn’t ignore your email:
Fear of losing money – Let’s say you’re running a promo for a $20 discount. Rather than using a ho-hum “get $20 off” in your subject line, try something like “Ignoring this email is like throwing $20 away.” Which subject line would entice you open?
Fear of missing out – The fear of missing out on something is perhaps even more powerful than the fear of wasting money. The fear has even earned its own pop culture acronym: FOMO. Whether it’s an opportunity, invitation, or information, most people don’t want to be left out. The title of this blog post is an example of FOMO.
Positive Responses
Nobody likes a downer, so don’t rely too heavily on negative emotionally responsive subject lines. Sometimes, it’s more appropriate to focus on the positives:
Use positive imagery – Paint a rosy picture in your subject line with wording that evokes warm, positive feelings. For example, a retail store promoting their new fall/winter clothing line might say, “Stay cozy this fall – soft cardigans and fuzzy sweaters are here!”
Appeal to their altruistic side – Some of the most successful positive emotionally responsive subject lines are used by non-profits and charitable organizations. Think about the local SPCA using a subject line that reads, “Would you give 5 minutes to save an animal’s life?”
Insider Tip
Make sure the content of your emails, blog posts and landing pages back up your emotionally responsive subject lines. Not only is maintaining consistent messaging from subject line to content required by the CAN-SPAM act here in the U.S., but failing to do so may lead your subscribers to feel misled, which will result in an increased unsubscribe rate.
If you’re new to writing emotionally responsive subject lines, try an split test to measure engagement. Send an email with an emotionally responsive subject line to half your list, and a regular subject line to the rest. You may be surprised by the results!
Have you come across some successful emotionally responsive subject lines in your own inbox? Share ‘em with us!
Visualize your brand’s ideal customer – not the numbers but the real person. Now think of how she interacts with your product. Where does it meet her in the real world? What needs does it answer? Does it make her smile or make her smarter?
You want to know enough about the people in your target market to clearly answer these kinds of questions about your relationship with them, and for content marketers, to create successful content mapping.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch understands that a customer’s relationship is the fundamental core of its content marketing. The company’s key value proposition lies at that moment when a Merrill Lynch advisor sits across from an affluent investor who asks, “What should I do?”
“The advisors spend time understanding the clients’ goals, their needs, the things on their mind,” says Joe Corriero, head of digital marketing for Merrill. “Once they understand what the person is trying to do in life, what they care about, what their priorities are, then they can come up with solutions for them. If you think about how it works in the physical world, from a marketing perspective, we try to do the same thing.”
But it’s one thing to have someone walk into, call or email a Merrill Lynch office looking for help. It’s another when they ask a search engine or a social feed. When they do, Merrill wants to be there with an answer just the same. To achieve this, Corriero enlists his team partner, John von Brachel, who leads thought leadership and content integration for Bank of America’s wealth management businesses.
As the saying in content marketing goes, content is king, but distribution is queen, and she wears the pants. So like many content executives, Corriero and von Brachel constantly refine the tactics aimed at getting their intellectual capital discovered by their audience – in their case, a challenge that is made more difficult by the fact that they target a highly specialized demographic of affluent Americans with investable assets between $250,000 and $10 million. Here’s how they do it.
It’s personal
The first step in rising to the top of the swirling content sea is to create hyper-targets that hone more specific profiles within that larger investable-asset range. Merrill goes micro by analyzing combinations of age and income and, most importantly, individuals’ financial keep-you-up-at-night questions. “There might be a segment of folks whose concerns for family are top of mind,” Corriero says. “Specifically they might be thinking about caring for their aging parents. We dig deeper into the full set of needs where Merrill could add value and go find people online where they are researching or exploring those needs. Getting the right message to them, the right piece of content, at a time when it’s on their mind is critical. That’s even more complicated than just finding your audience.”
It’s still search
Search remains paramount for Merrill. “The easiest way to detect that signal is for them to tell us, and they do that with search,” Corriero says.
That’s not to say search in itself isn’t evolving. Here are three key ways it is working well for Merrill now:
Managing SEO and SEM as a publisher would, optimizing headlines and imagery in real time to pop effectively.
Refining search terms beyond generic words like “retirement” and “investing” to words describing a specific life-stage situation. And given the importance of personal referrals, Merrill has started to own search terms for all of its advisors’ names and spelling variations. When someone receives a referral from a friend offline, he goes online to research the advisor. Merrill wants to provide as much content in that scenario as possible.
Relying more heavily on recommendation engines like Taboola and Outbrain – puts Merrill content with links on other content sites. The posted Merrill content corresponds to the subject matter the viewer is reading on that non-Merrill site. Von Brachel says it’s “an environment where people are absorbing information based on what they want and are looking for.” Beyond the vital factor of a relevant environment, the platforms allow for efficient experimentation with different terms and headlines.
Its influencers
Not surprisingly, social is another tool to identify the signals. Corriero and von Brachel use a mix of paid social campaigns and organic promotion to create a steady drumbeat – a strategy focused on targeting individuals rather than boosting certain pieces of content. The Merrill Lynch Clear™ platform and hub houses its needs-based content created for retirement-minded investors and answers to retirement-related questions – needs increasingly being addressed in social by experts.
For example, Merrill’s content marketers can identify 200 Twitter handles that are most influential in the elder-care space. It then looks at their millions of followers. “That’s a pool of people that have raised their hand and said, ‘This is of interest to me.’ We can go after them and target them with our message in those native spaces,” Corriero says. One new format that von Brachel says is seeing good engagement is embedding longer-form videos (three minutes or so) right into the Twitter feed.
It’s going native (and display)
Content-driven, in-stream ad environments from publishers offer guaranteed reach, relevant alignment and the credibility that comes from the halo of The New York Times, Atlantic, or Fortune. The challenge? Publishers are pricing these opportunities at a high premium. And while more publishers are stepping up, Corriero says there is still a shortage of quality inventory. Due to these limitations, Merrill still mixes display with native advertising to create awareness of the company’s content.
The value of native is more critical on mobile where search is less reliable and other advertising mechanisms (read: banners) are an annoyance. Placing branded content within the content feed fits the form and function of the smartphone and is driving significantly better engagement. Even though Merrill sees only 10 percent of the traffic to its owned sites coming from mobile, it designs all new content for mobile first.
Is it working?
It is working. “We’re hearing a lot of great things from our advisors,” von Brachel says. The content that Merrill uses to answer the online signals (i.e., questions) is the same content Merrill advisors use to help their high-net-worth clients.
Online and offline strategies meet again. “We talked about the targeting that gets done technologically through the site, but think about the targeting that gets done through human interaction,” Corriero says. “It’s the same core set of content, not only being curated through our targeting engines, but it’s curated by humans – the advisors who use it as a tool to share information with clients and prospects.
“It all comes back to the way Merrill Lynch and its advisors do business. It’s about understanding you, your personality, who you are, the things that matter to you in life and helping you get there. It’s the same approach whether it’s through the internet or through the advisors.”
The full version of this article originally appeared in the October 2014 issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our bi-monthly magazine.
Here are the four important factors propelling the IoT forward:
The cost of internet-connected sensors is coming down: Many IoT devices rely on multiple sensors to monitor the environment around them. The cost of these sensors declined 50% in the past decade, according to Goldman Sachs. We expect prices to continue dropping at a steady rate, leading to an even more cost-effective sensor.
A lot more money is being poured into the IoT:Large companies like Dell have begun to aggressively open IoT divisions and innovation labs. There have also been a range of IoT acquisitions including Google acquiring Nest and Intel acquiring Basis. In addition, innovative IoT startups, such as IoT cloud-platform provider Electric Imp and smart plug maker Zuli, have received a combined $70 million in funding just this summer.
Expanded internet connectivity: The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimates that currently 40% of the global population is connected to the internet and by 2019, roughly 57% will be connected. This increase in connectivity will lead to a larger base of individuals interested in purchasing IoT devices.
High adoption of "remotes," especially smartphones, phablets and tablets: The IoT is heavily reliant on "remotes," primarily smartphones and tablets that can manage the IoT. Today, smartphones account for 69% of mobile phones sold globally, and their share is still rising as developing nations introduce better wireless infrastructure.
For full access to all BI Intelligence reports, briefs, and downloadable charts on the Internet of Things and mobile computing markets, sign up for a free trial.
One of the many challenges small businesses face today is integrating and managing Millennial employees with other generations of their workforce. Millennials are the newest generation of workers, and when they enter the job market they have specific expectations that your other staff may not. It’s important to remember that the Millennial generation is the future of your company, so now’s the time to learn how to manage this generation effectively to keep them performing at the highest levels within your company.
Who Are The Millennials?
Millennials were born between 1981 and 1994. They often display a high amount of self-confidence and believe in value for their work above all else. But unlike past generations, your Millennials are not overly independent. They often rely on their parents for career advice, and some may even live at home. When dealing with Millennials, provide reinforcement and instant feedback but remember that they may reach out to their parents for additional direction and advice.
Work/Life Balance
Millennials are not willing to give up their lifestyle for their careers. They value flexibility, which means you need to accommodate that lifestyle with different shifts, flexible hours, or even part-time work. Your average Millennial is not looking for the typical nine-to-five position. Instead, they want a career that allows them to enjoy the lifestyle to which they’re accustomed and gives them the opportunity to multitask—especially when it comes to technology.
What A Millennial Needs From Management
Downtime is viewed as a negative by Millennials, and so are positions that require monotonous work. While your Millennial employees may value their job, they value their time much more, so you need to ensure they feel like their making the most of it.
Most Millennials are team-oriented, so bringing them together in cooperative groups may be the best way to maximize their potential. Diversity is also important, since Millennials have grown up in a culturally diverse environment. Millennials also rely heavily on new technologies to communicate, so many prefer to use instant messaging, email, or even texting to communicate with management and other employees. Their generation looks at these forms of communication as quick and efficient. Lastly, your Millennials demand feedback (both positive and negative). They need to know where they stand at all times.
How To Manage Your Millennial Staff
Recruitment: You want to emphasize how your small business contributes to society and how the position will benefit their careers.
Work management: Effectively managing Millennial employees also requires you to give them multiple tasks to be done at once. Unlike other generations, Millennials look for and thrive in situations where they can multi-task. They also want to work in an environment where they can collaborate and work closely with others. While you’ll want to hold them accountable for their mistakes, at the same time you should work to bring out their better qualities and help them develop the skills they need to improve.
Work environment: Offer flexible work schedules and a relaxed work environment. Provide regular opportunities for socializing. You’ll find that while they socialize, they are also working—comparing notes, discussing and brainstorming various options for getting work done, etc.
Learning opportunities: Tuition reimbursement is highly valued by the Millennial generation, as is employee training so that they can further their skills.
Motivational tools: Millennials value time and rewards, so offer paid time off, bonuses, and/or gift certificates.
Managing Millennials takes time and, for your small business, may mean making significant adjustments. But since they’re the future of your company, those management changes will eventually pay off. Their fresh ideas and ways of working will definitely benefit the company as a whole and encourage their loyalty.
I love blogging and I could give you 300+ reasons why blogging is so beneficial and how it can massively change your business and branding forever. Instead I will just give you a list of 32. Why 32 you ask? Because it’s my favorite number and it grabs attention.
There are over 100 million blogs in the world… shouldn’t you also have your own
If you can create compelling content that provides value, it shouldn’t be hard for you to make money with a blog
Using a blog as your online resume and source for individuals to find all of your information and social profiles is super easy
Billion dollars companies are paying a ton of money to rank at the top of the search results, a quality blog post with a few links could do the same
Blogs provide you with an outlet to talk about something you are passionate about
Become an expert at something you love, while inspiring others
If you don’t want to get your own domain name or hosting, you can start a blog completely free through Blogger or WordPress sites
Expand your reach and meet new people everyday throughout the world from people who are finding your content
Blogging makes you a better writer and more knowledgable in any given topic
People share and link back to content on your site that they find value in
Build a mailing list and create a loyal following through the use of newsletters and rss feeds
Give away free ebooks and course through your blog to provide extra value outside of just blog posts
With your own blog you can start a trend, following, business and concept… you just need to reach the right audience and get something going
Build a platform and following through your blog that could lead into products, coaching and speaking gigs
Learn how to use WordPress, make money online or anything else you might like by documenting the process on your blog
Get a better job by building out industry related content on your site and connecting with fellow workers/companies online
Become a published author by starting with a blog, then growing your following and eventually self publishing your own book through Amazon or possibly be approached by a huge brand
Protect your online identity and reputation by having your own sites come up for your personal and/or business name in the search results
With a blog you can established yourself as an expert in any field or topic. You only need to know 1% more than your audience to be perceived as an expert.
Master the art of SEO. Web sites and blogs are the future and ranking in the search results is always going to be important — all of which can be learned while launching a blog of your own.
Create a product, reach out to other blogs and make money off of what you are an expert in.
Every day millions of people go to Google to look for answers to there questions. You can help people by creating a blog on detailed topics that you might already be an expert in or have experience with.
Put yourself out there and see what happens. Blogging has changed the lives of many and how can it change yours?
Connect with mentors, idols and celebrities through engaging content and in-post interviews
Web sites and blogs are selling for lots of money. Create something of value and you could quickly cash in
How many blog benefits can you think of?
Now that I’ve ran through a ton of benefits to blogging that I’ve just randomly come up with off the top of my head, why don’t you add some of your benefits of blogging.
It’s been seven years since Mark Zuckerberg infamously (and supposedly) said, “Young people are just smarter.”
Zuckerberg turned 30 this year so, to me, he’s old. I’m 23 – just about the age Zuckerberg was when he said that.
To be fair, I have not reached the prestige, success or fame Zuckerberg had at this age. But I’m not fresh off the bus either. I’m an entrepreneur. I manage a Chicago-based venture capital fund of more than $9 million and have closed a handful of million dollar deals. Which means I’ve spent some time thinking about the risks and rewards of being young in the startup game.
Today, I wonder whether Zuckerberg thinks I’m smarter than he is because I’m younger. And today I think Zuckerberg was wrong.
That may not seem like a leap. His claim is somewhat outlandish. Being young by itself does absolutely nothing for you. To be fair, there are a few real advantages to being a young entrepreneur. People in the under-30 crowd never knew a time without smartphones – the first, IBM’s Simon, was released to the public in 1992. We intuitively get interactivity and to many young people, technology disruption isn’t disruptive at all. We plan on it. Even embrace it.
Young entrepreneurs also have a consumer advantage in that we are target consumers. Our peers are just entering prime buying age and making life-long brand loyalty decisions. In some ways, our market analysis is talking to our friends.
Being young, you can worry less about offending the old guard or protecting your reputation. If you’re wrong, you won’t damage a career you’ve spent decades building or risk losing your house. Which means we can take bigger risks, which in entrepreneurship can be a real advantage.
But the advantages of youth run out right about there. In just about every other way, experienced business leaders and entrepreneurs stack the deck.
Having more to lose, for example, also means you have more to risk and invest. When an older entrepreneur decides to go ‘all in’ on an idea, their investment can dwarf the resources a younger partner may be able to put on the table.
And still – no matter what – one of the most powerful business tools in any market is the rolodex. Ironically, the rolodex as a thing doesn’t exist anymore. It’s dead technology. But the contacts and connections they used to hold are still just as powerful. And older people simply have more of them.
None of that is to discount the value of plain old experience – going around the block a few times.
To me, being a young gun in the entrepreneurship and capital marketplace is more of a lack of some disadvantages than an outright advantage. My sense is that young people in entrepreneurship, and especially those in technology, aren’t better. We’re just different. We see the opportunities and challenges differently than our older colleagues may.
However you phrase it, I feel strongly that having young 20-somethings on your entrepreneurship team is an advantage. Not because they are better or smarter, but because it can expand the reach and depth of your team in a similar way that gender and social diversity do.
And I hope I still feel that way when I’m older – you know, like Zuckerberg, 30.
Vlad Moldavskiy is 23 years old and manages a (modest) VC fund of $9.5 million. He’s brokered investments of more than a million dollars three times and is an expert at digital marketing – especially search marketing for startups and new ventures. In his day job, Vlad is the COO of a digital marketing firm in Chicago.
Encouraging referrals is the best way to grow your business. However, as a new entrepreneur, to obtain referrals you have to have clients. Getting that first client can be one of the biggest challenges in getting your business off the ground. Fortunately, there are things you can do to entice new clients into hiring you.
1) Get hired by your former boss. While this doesn’t work in all cases, many small businesses get their start by turning their former employer into a client. The advantage for you is that your boss knows the quality of your work, and if it was good, he should be willing to hire you. The advantage to your former boss is that often, hiring a contractor is less expensive than hiring an employee.
2) Engage your network. Tell everyone you know about your business. While your friends, family and former colleagues may not need your service, they may know people who do and be willing to refer you.
3) Get involved in local and online business networks. When done right, with the attitude of helping others and delivering value, meeting people in your business community and through online networks, such as LinkedIn, you can get your business in front of people who will hire or refer you.
4) Collaborate with other businesses. If there is another industry that can collaborate with yours, make connections for the purpose of mutually beneficial referrals. For example, if you’re a wedding photographer, connect with caterers and bands that also work weddings. If you’re a copywriter, connect with graphic, web designers and printers.
5) Write for trade or association publications. Having your article appear where potential clients will read it increases your exposure and credibility. If you’re a virtual assistant for Realtors, write a piece for the local real estate association newsletter.
6) Speak or do trainings. Showing off what you know as an expert is a great way to build credibility and garner new clients. Find organizations that target your market and offer to do a training. For example, if you’re a copywriter, offer to do a program on writing great sales copy for your local Chamber of Commerce. Many who attend will decide they’d rather hire someone (you) than do it themselves. Plus, you can sometimes get paid for speaking, adding another revenue source.
I’ve been noticing a trend among TV watchers (at least in my own TV watching habits): The “second screen” (i.e. my mobile device) is starting to get more of my attention during first screen viewing (i.e. TV watching). Even if a show has my attention from the start, all it takes is a text, an email or a Facebook post from a friend to divert my attention away from the TV for the remainder of the show. I know I’m not alone in this behavior because I see my friends and family fall victim to this every time the TV turns on.
So why are television marketers still pushing viewers to their mobile devices?
It seems counterproductive to be constantly pushing viewers to their mobile devices during show broadcasts. It’s true that promoting social media channels and online show-related content can create a more dedicated fan. But a promoted hashtag that pushed viewers to Twitter could end up losing viewers as they get absorbed in the thousands of other conversations and tweets happening at the same time.
So how can TV marketers promote their social media channels and engage audiences without losing viewers in the process? The solution is a theory I call The Second Screen Push/Pull Dance.
The Second Screen Push/Pull Dance:
Pushing viewers to their mobile device (second screen)
- Promote the website
Create episode-specific content that allows users to engage even more with the show
NOTE: Be sure to have that remarketing pixel in place on the website
Create an incentive program that requires an email sign up to gain access to exclusive content
NOTE: That email address can be of value down the road
- Promote Facebook page
Post questions about the episode to engage the audience
Promote show-specific content via Facebook that drives viewers to show-specific content on the network website
NOTE: More site traffic = larger remarketing pool
- Promote Twitter page (Official show page / show star pages)
Live tweet during the show
Utilize hashtags to engage users
Promote show-specific content via Twitter that drives viewers to show-specific content on the network website
- Promote YouTube channel
Have exclusive content that’s only on YouTube
Pushing viewers back to the TV (primary screen)
- Live Facebook posting and tweeting with specific posts notifying followers when the show is back on
For those who get lost in other Facebook and Twitter content
- Facebook and Twitter ad campaigns that are active specifically when the show is on (and specifically promote that the show is on NOW!)
For those who may not be following show-specific profiles
- Remarketing campaigns for specific shows on the days they broadcast
For those who wander off onto other websites
- Email marketing campaign that sends reminder emails halfway during a show’s broadcast to remind fans the show is still on
For those who get lost in their emails
- YouTube Pre-roll video ads on other channels promoting the show is on NOW!
For those who may be watching other online content
As you can see, this dance is a lot of work and requires a delicate balance (you don’t want to overwhelm fans with messages). It’s also just a theory at this point (I haven’t personally executed on this strategy). But if TV networks don’t have a tactic to pull people away from their mobile devices during prime time, Prime Time TV could become a thing of the past.
Great oaks from little acorns grow. And one of the best-known online file storage services grew from small idea too. Box (the company) started with the aim of creating a business to let users share and manage files easily, sending them via mobile phone text messaging. One thing led to another, and Box became a business-oriented solution that now serves 99% of the Fortune 500 companies. It offers 10 gigabytes of storage for free, with more for paying users. But Box may have to find other ways to attract business users now that other online storage companies like China’s Tencent offer terabytes of free storage – and now that Google recently upped the stakes to offer unlimited storage to business users for a flat monthly fee with Google Drive for Work.
Game Over? Start New Game!
For anyone thinking that online data storage was an arms race to infinite space, it sounds like ‘game over’. You can’t get more unlimited than unlimited. After that, is there anything but the price left to discuss? Google gives business users all the storage space they can eat for just $10 a month and rules the roost – until another provider steps in with a lower price. But online file storage lends itself to innovation creative marketing like other IT offerings. Now that size is all but out of the running as a competitive differentiator, providers are putting the emphasis on added value.
Let’s Work Together
Box’s plan is to offer new tools to help businesses automate daily routines. The provider also wants to make it easier for third-party vendors and developers to integrate their applications directly with Box. The aim is to make Box the standard or ‘go-to’ solution for businesses when it comes to online storage with team working and collaboration. With the additional tools and partner apps, professional customers will be able to immediately access to personalized data on customers who walk into a store, or transfer patient medical data to third-party tablet applications while remaining fully compliant with health regulations.
Thanks, We Have Apps of Our Own
Google, the Internet gorilla, has not only outsized the others. It is also destroying another former competitors’ sales argument by moving to complete cross-platform compatibility (Android, iOS and desktop). Google already has apps of its own (Google Apps) so it doesn’t have to woo third parties as hard as Box does. Still, product plans include an API for developers to access the audit log, which is important for building apps for industry sectors with stringent compliance requirements. That means a choice for app builders who might otherwise have gone directly with Box.
Different Strategies Possible
Possible marketing strategies include either making yourself indispensable to the app storage ecosystem, vertically integrating to take competitive positions in specific industry sectors, or both. Box, still much younger and smaller than Google, is trying the first option, buddying up with other companies that are specialized in their own particular niches. Google, already flying high with over $40 billion in annual revenues (although still mostly from advertising), might be tempted to emulate Microsoft’s or IBM’s approach to build or acquire software expertise for targeted sectors. Meanwhile, customers benefit from vendors falling over themselves to please the market – something to make the most of, while it lasts!
There are a multitude of reasons why it’s really important to fine-tune your YouTube presence. The biggest, and maybe the most obvious, is because it’s Google owned and therefore it’s likely to affect your current digital strategy and SEO. Other important reasons include: that YouTube is the biggest player in Video Marketing, and it’s the second largest search engine on the net (bigger than Bing, Yahoo!, Ask and AOL combined!) These reasons illustrate that more and more people are turning to video to learn about how to do common everyday tasks and to check products and services before committing to a purchase. Operating without a video marketing strategy is no longer an option.
Channel Structure is Key
If you’ve already established that having a YouTube presence is a good idea and have set up your own YouTube channel, then taking the time to understand how people engage with your content from your channel is a must.
Content quality is, of course, a large contributing factor to the success of your channel and your video marketing. But it’s not the only thing you need to think about — channel structure is also critical. Videos that are poorly titled or a channel that is inconsistent may mean that a user’s first visit is also their last. A channel that delivers well thought out content, titles and descriptions is far more likely to do well than a poorly structured channel.
YouTube Channel Do’s
Below are some of the primary things to focus on that can do to make your YouTube channel even more effective:
Content: Make sure your content is fresh and regular. Have you given careful consideration to the aims and interests of your target audience? Have you effectively told a story that offers value and speaks to your viewers’ emotions?
Keep your videos in line with your keywords: On top of helping your audience know they’ve found a channel that they can relate to, it’s an important aspect of your video SEO.
Monitor and track your channel: Use YouTube analytics. Make sure you integrate your channel with any advertisements you run and regularly sit down to strategize and define the demographics you’re trying to engage.
YouTube Channel Don’ts
While you’re working to optimize your channel and incorporate the YouTube Channel “Do’s,” try to avoid these “Don’ts”:
Don’t try to make all your videos “viral”: Just because you can funnel traffic to your YouTube channel via other video websites. Vimeo and Vine, for example, can both direct users to your channel. There’s a time and a place for a viral marketing video and it’s important to choose wisely and get your video format correct.
Don’t let viewer numbers be the only metric you use to gauge success: User engagement is a key metric you don’t want to forget. For example, your goals could focus on increased Click through Rate (CTR) or new subscribers rather than view count.
Don’t put your most popular content at the top: Although it’s tempting to do so, you should avoid putting your prime content at the top of your YouTube channel because it only serves to highlight the videos with lower hits below. Your list shouldn’t be ordered by popularity but by what you think your YouTube audience wants to see.
Don’t mix up content aimed at a corporate market with that aimed at a consumer market: This might seem obvious but it happens a lot. People browsing content via your YouTube channel often are looking for something specific; so separate your consumer videos from the corporate ones.
Content is always the most important factor in any video marketing campaign, getting your content in front of as many people as possible is essential to success. Following these simple rules I’ve outlined here can really make a difference when it comes to maximizing your brand exposure on YouTube.
How have you structured your YouTube channel? Have you already incorporated some of these tips? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments below.
Many sales leaders are urging their salespeople to adopt a challenger selling methodology and ask “challenging” questions to have effective sales meetings with prospects and clients. The intent is to be more provocative, create differentiation in a crowded market, provide insight, and hopefully add more value to the conversation. This post is designed to share some mistakes I have been seeing with this approach and to offer suggestions for properly asking “courageous questions” in an effective sales meeting.
First, what is a courageous question? Many questions can take courage, including ones that are:
Direct
Delicate
Challenging to current thinking
Seeking commitment
Insightful
Thought-provoking
Courageous questions — relevant to the client and well asked — can take a relationship in a new and positive direction as part of an effective sales meeting. Yet, why are some received as “grenades?” The movie equivalent is Bruce Willis walking away from the villains’ hideout, pulling the pin on the grenade, tossing it over his shoulder … BOOM … causing a huge explosion in his wake. Throwing a grenade question on the table is not courageous, it’s a selling mistake.
On this topic, I have been seeing different problems from two categories of sales professionals. The first group of salespeople — long on confidence, armed with industry marketing intelligence, and feeling empowered by their leaders — are more than willing to ask challenging questions in prospect and client meetings. Of course, challenging current thinking is likely to cause resistance. Instead of getting either mild resistance or the “wow” factor that they are expecting, they are met with significant blowback or stunned looks. Rather than marking an inflection point from which the relationship advances in a new and positive way, it now marks the fall-away point.
The second group of sales professionals, not as long on confidence and without a process to challenge thought, avoid asking the courageous questions. And, while competitors start to make inroads in the relationship, these salespeople wonder why the client relationship has stalled.
So, how do you ensure that your courageous question is received well and not as a grenade? Here are eight best practices for integrating courageous questions into an effective sales meeting:
Know where you stand: If you are at all unsure that the foundation upon which your client relationship is built is solid, seek feedback, and know where you stand. No assumptions, as courageous questions are best delivered from a position of strength.
Establish trust: Look for signs in your interactions that trust has been established. These can include kudos for positive past dealings, an open exchange of information, responsiveness to calls and meeting requests, and client-initiated calls.
Establish credibility: This does not require you to be all-knowing on all subjects. It does mean that, because of your background, your work, and the organization behind you, the client sees value in engaging with you on this new topic.
Prepare and practice: Preparing and then practicing with a colleague tends to ground the over-confident and build conviction in the should-be-more-confident. Both language and delivery matter, so prepare to receive feedback on both prior to the client meeting.
Choose an appropriate setting: Challenging a client’s thinking can feel awkward to you and threatening to the client, especially in front of others. Choose a meeting location and time that puts folks at ease rather than on edge. And, think carefully about how your question impacts not just the intended recipient but also others who may be present.
Set the context: Courageous questions are relevant to the recipient. A relevant question reflects your knowledge about the client, as well as his/her organization and the industry/market in which it operates.
Structure the question skillfully: Combine a good preface, which expressly states why you are asking the question and/or why the customer should reply. Use an open-ended structure to invite discussion.
Allow silence, and listen: It is not tough to tell when someone is genuinely interested in your thoughts. What is tough for many salespeople is taking a breath, engaging silence and listening, being attentive to language and cues, and being curious enough to continue the dialogue by asking deeper questions based on the client’s reaction. The same guidelines go for colleagues who may join you at this meeting. Inform them about this part of the meeting, and, if they have a tendency to “ease the tension” and fill the silence, practice with them both the delivery and the silence that follows.
Remember the movie “Top Gun,” starring Tom Cruise (“Maverick”), the classic 1980s film that glamorized navy pilots? In a practice drill, Maverick locks onto an enemy fighter, and his flight instructor coaxes him to “take the shot.” Grenade questions ignore the best practices above, and taking the shot may result in a crash-and-burn, eroding trust and credibility. In cases where you’ve earned it, leverage the best practices above in an effective sales meeting, take the shot confidently, and enjoy the new dialogue stream — and opportunities — created by your courageous question.
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Complimentary eBook – click here, or on the image below to download our latest eBook, A Leader’s guide to Successfully Sell with Insights.
Information architecture (IA) is one of those buzzwords you’ve probably heard before. It refers to the organization of the information on your website and how it all fits together. When planning your IA, involve users of your website in the process as soon as you can.
In this article, we’ll discuss card sorting, a tried and true technique for doing just that. We’ll go through some practical tips for running a card-sorting session, and also cover some examples.
What Is Information Architecture?
One of the great things about modern web design is the way it considers users’ needs from the start. Successful projects are successful often because the owners commit to understanding users, their backgrounds and their goals as early as possible. Like anything else in this game, though, a successful project takes work and planning.
1Good IA helps to make a project successful. It makes content easy to find on a complex website. This is also helped by effective navigation; however, there is some confusion about the difference between the two. What is the difference, anyway? (Image source2)
Good Navigation Starts With Good IA
IA refers to the structure of information on a website, and it is depicted with site maps, diagrams and spreadsheets. Navigation refers to elements of an interface that people use to make their way through that structure — menus, breadcrumbs, links — and it is depicted in wireframes or prototypes. Therefore, improving IA starts with analyzing the website’s content and structure first — navigation comes after.
As with many website improvements, it helps to use techniques that involve users. Card sorting is one such technique that has been used for many years due to its reliability and effectiveness. To start with, we’ll examine the causes of poorly organized information — prevention is always better than a cure! We’ll then cover some practical tips for running your own card-sorting sessions and consider how they can improve the IA in your own projects.
Bad IA Is Everywhere
Bad organization can happen anywhere. When was the last time you spent ages looking for something within a complex system and couldn’t find it? A typical example is trying to find something at a large supermarket. Most people could easily find household staples in the frozen goods, dairy or fresh produce section. But which section would you visit to find more obscure products? Where would you find gluten-free bread, your favorite imported brand of hot sauce or that artisanal handmade bean dip you tried at the party last weekend?
Where’s the Hot Sauce?
I sometimes struggle when looking for products at my supermarket, which increases my frustration. I usually end up asking a store employee where to find the item, assuming I haven’t left the store already. The same is true of the web, except that users are even less patient. If users can’t find what they want in seconds, by either browsing or searching, they’re unlikely to stick around. As a result, websites (and supermarkets) benefit greatly from an intuitive structure and organization. Unfortunately, some fail to address these issues properly, leading to lost sales as customers grow frustrated and leave.
How Bad IA Happens
It’s not difficult to end up with a badly organized website, despite one’s best intentions. But how does a website end up like this in the first place?
One of the most common reasons is that the IA is created from the business structure of the organization, rather than from users’ needs. This is the default option for many clients. More common still is when the information is organized according to the preferences and whims of senior members in the company. This is often due to the influence of the HIPPO3 (the highest paid person’s opinion), usually made by an assertive individual who often lacks a grasp of what makes a good website.
The Importance of Content Strategy
For larger websites, the issue is often the lack of a clear content strategy. Managing content is crucial for websites that are large or frequently updated. Content strategy covers processes like:
who updates the website and how often,
the system for managing old or out-of-date content,
maintaining the taxonomies for content on the website (tags, types, categories, labels).
As web professionals, we take pride in our work and planning abilities. Being confronted by an overbearing HIPPO and archaic content strategies is frustrating. However, both of these problems have a common solution. User-centered techniques such as card sorting are powerful because they enable you to be much more scientific in diagnosing and fixing website problems. Later on, we’ll look at how card sorting and content strategy work hand in hand.
How Card Sorting Helps
So, how do we get users involved in organizing the information on our website? Ideally, we want a solution that’s cheap, quick and useful. Thankfully, card sorting is all three of these. The process is much like it sounds. You write down all of the discrete elements that you wish to organize onto cards, and then ask participants to collect them into groups that make sense to them. But is that all there is to it? When can it be used, and what should the outcome be?
When to Use It?
The process of organizing content is fraught with questions. Should it be grouped by type or by subject? Which category does this FAQ question belong to? Card sorting answers these types of questions and is useful in many situations. Some specific examples include:
classifying the products in an e-commerce store,
organizing questions in an FAQ section,
untangling a complex site map.
One of the great things about card sorting is that it needn’t be confined to client projects or even websites. After having used it for clients, we saw its value as a general purpose tool. We have started using it in our own internal meetings to incorporate feedback from our team about how to organize a particular business process or how to structure an upcoming presentation.
Ultimately, the goal of any card sort is to improve the labelling, grouping and organization of information. However, it is best suited to organizing content, and it won’t fix everything on its own. If your website is very task-focused (if it’s an airline-booking website, for example), then card sorting on its own will provide limited benefit. Best to direct your energies towards usability testing, especially if your time or budget is tight.
4 Card sorting can be useful in your own internal meetings when you need to organize something. It’s a great way to incorporate feedback from your team. (View large version5)
Open or Closed?
Card sorting sessions can be classified as one of two types — open or closed. Open card sorting is the more flexible option of the two. Here, users are free to organize the cards you supply into groups that make sense to them, and then come up with their own names for these groups. They are also free to rename cards or make their own suggestions for new cards if they wish.
This type is best when you want to understand how users would group your content. Gathering their ideas and suggestions for names and labels goes a long way to making your website more intuitive.
The alternative method, closed card sorting, is where the categories or labels are fixed. This is useful when you want to understand how users fit content into an existing structure. It’s also used when new content needs to be added to a website.
As an example, consider an e-commerce website and the top-level categories they might have for their products, such as technology, home and garden, and sports and leisure. Now suppose that the store has started stocking a new range of products that have just been launched. Which top-level category on the website should these products be added to? Involving users in a closed card sort could help you to arrive at an answer.
Sometimes you can mix the two techniques. Run an open card sort with one group of users to define the top-level categories. Then run a closed card sort using these new categories, and see how easy it is for users to fit existing content into them.
This Time, It’s Personal
Traditionally, card sorting is as low-tech as it gets, requiring no advanced technology or software. You simply write all of the items on pieces of paper or cards, spread them out on a table, and let your users have their way with them. This method is the most widely used because it’s cheap, quick and intuitive. Being in the same room as your users means you’ll be on hand to guide them through the process.
The focus of this article is offline sessions, but online sorting tools, such as OptimalSort309 and ConceptCodify2910, present some key advantages. Recruiting participants is easier, which makes it easier to scale up. Many feature advanced reporting tools to identify correlations and patterns, which can take a lot of time when done manually. Free tools such as Trello11 also work well for card sorting, but you lose the ability to generate reports.
The disadvantages of online services are that they are often a lot more expensive and you lose that personal touch. You’ll gain unique insight by observing people’s behavior and body language, which online sessions can’t capture.
Step By Step
1. Prepare
The first task in running an offline session is to prepare your cards. Create a document that lists all of the items you are testing, and give each one a number — spreadsheets are ideal for this. These items could be pages in a site map, product categories or labels in a taxonomy. Each item in this list then gets written on a single card, with the corresponding number written on the reverse. This numbering will help if you want to run more advanced analysis once the sessions are complete.
For the cards themselves, use actual cards instead of paper, which can get lost, worn out or torn easily. Also, don’t test too many things at once. From experience, I can say that no more than 50 to 70 items per session is about right. If you’re trying to organize a massive system, break it up into chunks, and then run sessions for each chunk.
Choosing what to write on the cards can be challenging. Ideally, the labels should be short enough that they can be read quickly, but long enough to make sense and for participants to understand what is being represented. Short titles usually make sense only in the context of the group they belong to. Therefore, summarizing the content as briefly as possible could help, rather than simply using a title.
For example, a label like “More information about our phones” would be preferable to just “More information.” The second item would make sense within an existing parent group named “Our phones,” but on its own it doesn’t make much sense.
In summary:
Use a spreadsheet when preparing your cards.
Get cards that are durable.
Find a balance for labels between simple and intuitive.
2. Walk Before You Can Run
If this is your first time using this technique, use it in a smaller project if you can. Organizing and analyzing the results will be easier, and it will be an opportunity to fine-tune your technique for next time. One decision you’ll need to make early on is whether to run group or individual sessions. The answer usually depends on the complexity of the system, as well as your time and budget. If you’re just starting out, get your feet wet with individual sessions first — you can always scale up later if you need to.
When you’re organizing a lot of content, groups of three users will reach consensus faster. However, they will need more moderation, and they could cost you more time and money. You also run the risk of dealing with aggressive HIPPOs, which can skew the results.
How many users should you include in a session? For the data to be useful, you will need more users than for a typical usability test. Jakob Nielsen recommends about 15 users15 to arrive at statistically useful results. Be wary of including more and more users in your tests, however, because the returns diminish as you go higher.
In summary:
If this is your first go with card sorting, try it on a smaller project first.
Groups reach consensus faster.
Individual sessions are easier to moderate.
Get around 15 participants to achieve useful results.
3. Find Participants
The next step is to find participants. For best results, find actual users of the website, especially if it’s a niche or specialized system. If you’re trying to improve the organization of a student intranet, for example, find students. For something more general, like a large e-commerce website, find users with a broad range of demographic indicators, such as age, income or technical ability.
If possible, involve your client in finding users. The client could even provide them directly — say, if you’re redesigning a staff intranet. Offering a small financial incentive, like a gift voucher, also helps to make sure they turn up.
In summary:
For niche websites or intranets, find existing users.
For more general websites, find users from varied demographics.
Clients are often helpful in finding participants.
4. Put It All Together
The final step in preparation is to get the meeting room ready. Get a large table or notice board — the bigger the better. You’ll also need some kind of recording system in place. This could be anything from a camcorder to a smartphone, as long as it enables you to play back the audio and video from the session. Make sure enough drinks and refreshments are on hand, too.
Once you’ve prepared the cards and your users have arrived, it’s time to run the sessions! Provide clear instructions, and let the users know you will be recording their sessions for later review. Explain that you want them to organize the cards into groups that make sense to them and that there is no right or wrong answer. If you’re running an open card sort, get some blank cards for them to write their own names once the initial organization stage is over.
While you’re running the sessions, you might need to act as a moderator. Be on hand if they get stuck (there will likely be a lot of “ums” and “ahs”), but explain that this isn’t a problem. In fact, knowing where they are getting stuck is useful because it indicates a problem with labelling. If they find some cards difficult to classify at all, then leave them off to one side and note what they are. Also, be aware that the demands on you as a moderator will increase in group settings.
In summary:
Record each session and take notes.
There is no right or wrong answer.
The demands on you as a moderator will increase with more participants.
5. Wrap Up
Once they have gotten as far as they can, feel free to ask some questions if you have time. You could ask them to explain their choices in more detail, what made them hesitate about this particular card, and so on.
Finally, record the arrangement they’ve made. The easiest way to do this is simply by taking a photo, but in a small room it can be hard to make sure that all of the cards are in the shot. Taking a photo isn’t always feasible, so if you have numbered the cards, then you can note which numbers were grouped together. This will also help you when you do a more detailed statistical analysis of the groupings, which is out of scope of this article.
Once that’s done, write the participant’s name on your notes and photos. To reduce any potential bias, shuffle the cards for the next user, and then invite them in.
In summary:
Taking photos is a quick way to record the arrangements.
Ask questions if you have time.
Shuffle the cards before each session to reduce bias.
Further Tips
Offering a small incentive is a good way to encourage participation.
When choosing what to sort, try to choose content from similar levels (i.e. category pages or individual help topics). Mixing child and parent categories is confusing.
Provide clear instructions. Have an idea of what you want to say before you start.
Provide blank cards and a marker pen for new suggestions — essential for open card sorting.
Try not to interrupt participants unless they ask for help.
It’s OK if participants can’t group everything. This is useful information.
Set a time limit for each session, which will make scheduling much easier.
In individual sessions, ensure that no one else is present. This would be distracting.
Always record the sessions, and take notes!
Interpreting The Results
Congratulations! You’ve just run your first card-sorting sessions, and your notebook is full of fresh insights. The next step is to interpret the results. Because this is probably your first card-sorting session, you won’t have mountains of results to sort.
For each participant, document two sets of observations for each session. The first step is to create a new document, and then transfer any notes that you made during that session. These should be qualitative observations, such as any new names that were suggested and whether the person hesitated on a particular card.
Next, note that participant’s groupings. You could simply arrange the groupings in a bulleted list in your document or show the groupings in a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet is ideal if you want to perform some advanced statistical analysis later. Various methods and pieces of software can do this for you, and the specifics of this could fill another article by themselves. The important thing is to depict the hierarchy, the parent-child relationships, that each participant created.
What to Look For
Once this is complete, it’s time for analysis. This is as much art as science. The goal is to identify trends that correlate across different sessions, and to answer some of the following questions:
Which items appeared together most often?
Which items did participants struggle to classify?
What new suggestions or labels were made?
Were any items put in more than one grouping?
Were any other items of interest brought up during the sessions?
If many users organized the cards in a similar way, then the job is fairly straightforward. It’s a matter of applying that same organization to your content. If you have time, then follow up with further user testing to confirm that the new structure is superior to the old one.
For IAs that are complex, users often come up with wildly different structures. You might need to involve a larger group until broad trends emerge. This is the hard part, and it might take a couple of passes to sift through the chaff and get to the good stuff. After running a few sessions, you’ll get the hang of it.
Online tools are a great help in these situations because they make statistical analysis much easier. Advanced techniques of analysis include creating dendrograms. These are tree-like diagrams that show the grouping of information within hierarchies and show how closely items are related. Some online services provide tools for making these, but they’re quite onerous and out of scope for this article.
16 Dendrograms represent visual groupings of information, but they are tricky to create without specialized software. (Image source17) (View large version18)
Example From A Real-World Project
Background
Recently, the team at Decibel Digital19 worked on the redesign of a major UK animal charity website. The existing website had a section simply named “A–Z,” which contained hundreds of pages. A lot of the pages were genuinely useful and included varied content such as news, help, videos and downloads. The problem was that there was little to no structure. Everything was simply mixed together and then organized alphabetically. It was the largest section of the website by far, so locating what you needed without relying on search was incredibly hard.
Upon speaking with the digital team, we realized that part of the problem was a lack of oversight. Anyone in the company was able to upload new content to this section, and they would often upload duplicate content with a slightly different name. Over many years, the content in this section grew into a chaotic mess, like an asteroid belt — and just as difficult to navigate.
Running a Content Audit
Getting into the habit of auditing content before redesigning a website is a good thing. We gathered all of the website’s pages and their URLs in a spreadsheet, along with a short description of the content — text, images, video, articles and so on. These URLs can be exported from an existing CMS, but we used a tool named Screaming Frog20.
21 SEO Spider is a nifty little utility that crawls a website and lists all of its pages and elements. You can use this list to perform a content audit. (View large version22)
Once the spreadsheet was prepared, the next step was to evaluate the content. We used a method called a ROT analysis. We checked each piece of content using the following criteria:
R: Is the content redundant?
O: Is it outdated?
T: Is it trivial?
Working through the website’s content like this can seem laborious, but it was actually very therapeutic. The client felt relieved once they started unravelling the content monster that their old website had spawned, which made everyone feel better about the project. Using this ROT analysis made it faster to reach consensus on choosing pages to remove or archive. Pretty soon, the content was whittled down to manageable levels. The next step was to figure out how to organize this content. Enter card sorting!
Following on our content audit, we all felt that the existing A–Z section wasn’t really fit for the purpose, despite a lot of the content being useful and valuable. We decided to run a card-sorting session to organize the content in a way that would inform the new website’s navigation. The goal was to develop a structure that made the content browser-friendly and easily findable without the user having to rely on search.
What to Test?
The website still had a lot of pages, so we had to decide which to include in the sessions. Having too many cards to sort becomes laborious and difficult, so we decided to include only first- and second-level pages to keep things manageable. We also didn’t include utility pages, such as “Contact Us,” “Privacy Policy” and the like, which are commonly found on many other websites. Once this was done, we had about 50 pages left, which we felt was ideal to begin the sessions.
Finding Users
The next step was to find users to test, for which we enlisted the help of the client. The users of the website tended to skew to an older female demographic, so having the client’s input here was very useful. Some of the users we tested had already engaged with the client in offline marketing activity and were excited to help!
Open vs. Closed
We decided to run an open card sort because the content from the existing A–Z section was diverse, comprising news, videos, blog posts, help articles and advice. We wanted to rely on the users’ input to create labels for these content types that made sense to them. As a result, we supplied plenty of blank cards and pens for them to write their own suggestions.
During each session, we took plenty of notes, particularly about the items that users found difficult to sort and any suggestions they made for new labels that we hadn’t considered. We also recorded each session as a backup, so that we could go over the recordings later to observe anything we missed.
What We Found
At the conclusion of the sessions, we took photos of the groupings and updated our spreadsheets. We looked for quantitative data — were there any trends? Did multiple users make similar suggestions for new labels? Did any labels consistently cause users to struggle? We looked at qualitative data, too: specific comments that users made or what they said out loud as they struggled to categorize a particular card.
25The results from your card-sorting sessions might surprise you. (View large version26)
Being a charity, the client relies a lot on donations and support from the public, so getting the labels for these sections right was important. We found some interesting points:
The website offered annual paid memberships as a means of supporting the charity, as well as the ability to register a free account on the website. These were labelled as “Register an account” and “Become a member”; however, many users were confused by the difference. We ended up changing the wording of the membership call to action to eliminate the confusion.
We had suggested the name “Knowledge Centre” as a label for the help content, but many users suggested alternatives. We ended up using “Help & Advice” on the website instead.
The charity ran monthly “Appeals” as another means of getting donations, and it also campaigned on many issues that were listed in “Campaigns.” Lacking any context, though, every user we tested struggled to differentiate these cards. We ended up incorporating the “Campaigns” section into another area of the website.
To indicate a desire to support, nearly every user suggested the term “Get Involved” as a major category label. We noticed this convention on other charity websites, too.
After all this was done, we presented our findings in a report. We decided not to include masses of quantitative data. While it was useful to us internally, we felt the client would be unfamiliar with the quantitative data and wouldn’t know how to interpret it without sufficient explanation.
Instead, we presented our key findings (like those listed above) in plain English, and we classified our findings as high, medium and low priority. We also included some recommendations on how to resolve the issues we found. This made it much easier for the client to identify “quick wins” with their content’s structure, and it made it easier for us to implement the required improvements.
27 The client doesn’t always need to see the messy details. Putting your key findings into a clear report is often preferable. (View large version28)
Final Thoughts
Card sorting is a favored technique because it’s cheap, reliable and easy to set up. It’s a great way to become familiar with concepts such as information architecture and user-centred design. Remember that it’s not a silver bullet, and it won’t fix all of the problems on an existing website. A website might be performing poorly or be hard to use for many reasons, and improving the IA might address only some of them. However, when used in tandem with other user-centered design techniques, it can go a long way to starting off a project or redesign on the right foot.
Hopefully, you have enjoyed learning about card sorting. When implemented well, it results in a product that is intuitive and easy to navigate. If you’ve made it a part of your own process already or you have anything to ask or share, please join the discussion in the comments section.
When someone signs up for your email list, it’s important to roll out the email red carpet and welcome them. Statistics show these new subscribers are most engaged within the first 48 hours. An automated welcome email (which is a type of autoresponder) can help you reach out to your new subscribers within that crucial window of time. Luckily, at the end of this month, we’ll be launching automated welcome emails in our newest version of VerticalResponse.
Why is an automated welcome email so important to have in your email tool belt? We’ve identified seven reasons why your business should take advantage of a welcome email:
1. Save time
What small business owner isn’t looking for ways to save time? We know you’re busy. With an automated welcome email, every time a new name is added to your list, your pre-made welcome email is delivered straight to their inbox. It’s that simple.
You don’t have to create and send a welcome email every time a new contact signs up, which means you’ll spend less time creating individual emails and managing your list. You create the welcome email once and it’s automatically sent to new subscribers.
2. Provide immediate value
New subscribers have high expectations. When they sign up for your emails, they expect high quality content in return. A welcome email sets the tone, instantly showing customers what kind of communication and information they’ll receive as a member of your email list. A welcome email is your time to shine. A sleek, well thought out welcome email shows subscribers your company can be counted on to deliver valuable content.
3. Tailor your welcome email with ease
Like many small businesses, your email lists may be divided into different groups. As an option, you can customize a welcome email to meet the needs of each group. For example, if your lists are divided by location (San Francisco or New York) you can create welcome emails that are tailored to a particular city or area. Each group receives a targeted look and message.
4. Make a great first impression
One of the biggest reasons to send a welcome email is to make a good first impression. A welcome email is like a digital handshake between two new people. It’s the first step to forming a relationship.
A welcome email gives you the chance to knock your first meeting out of the park. You only get one shot at a first impression, and delivering a professional email that extends a friendly greeting as soon as they sign up for your list can make your new subscriber feel welcome.
Plus, a welcome email can provide information about your company or offer a new-subscriber discount. All of these aspects add to the subscriber’s overall impression of your business.
5. Generate some buzz
Who doesn’t want to create a positive buzz around their business or product? Well, a welcome email does just that. As part of a welcome email, you can get prospective customers excited about what’s to come. Tell new subscribers why your email list will rock their world. For example, in the welcome email below Crate and Barrel tells subscribers they’ll get special offers, a look at new items, design tips and access to store events. That quick list gets subscribers pumped up about their new email relationship.
6. Take advantage of a potential sales opportunity
When a new subscriber joins your list, it means they want to know more about your product or business. Since the welcome email lands in their inbox while their curiosity is still piqued, subscribers may be more likely to make a purchase from your business. To provide a little extra incentive, consider adding a promotional deal to your welcome email.
Take a look at the email below. It not only welcomes the subscriber, but it also offers 20% off. The customer sees it as a nice gesture, and it opens up a sale opportunity for your business.
7. Increase email response rates
Every small business wants to see impressive email response rates. When you send an email, you want subscribers to open it, read it and take action. Statistics show welcome emails have impressive response rates.
The Epsilon Email Marketing Research Center says triggered emails – which include welcome emails, shopping cart reminder emails and anniversary emails – have an open rate of 46-53% and clickthrough rates between 9-11%. Other non-automated emails have an open rate of 26-32% and clickthrough rates that hover around 4 percent.
Simply put, subscribers pay attention to welcome emails.
If you’ve read any lists on Twitter tips, whether for beginners or for experts, you’ve likely come across the common advice to use Twitter lists.
Twitter lists are useful, helpful, and effective for managing and optimizing your Twitter experience.
There’s also a number of unique ways to go about them.
I researched the topic and found 23 popular and outside-the-box ideas for what to do with your Twitter list. See what I learned in the post below, and add your favorite uses in the comments.
23 Ways to Use a Twitter List
1. Staff directory for your team
Find all your employees who are on Twitter, and collect them into a list. It’s as simple as that!
Doing so could be good motivation for some late adopters on your team to start accounts, and it could be good incentive for others to keep sharing. Collectively, these lists can reveal a lot about the culture and the people behind the brand. If you’ve got anywhere from five to 100 employees, lists like these can be a really intriguing follow.
Example:
We’ve put together a twitter list with the 25 people on the Buffer team. Give the list a follow if you’d like!
2. Event attendees and conference-goers
For those attending live events or conferences—and just as helpful for those who aren’t in attendance—these lists collect event goers into one place so you can follow along with what’s happening.
Hashtags are another great way to collect tweets around an event. Lists help grab everything that might slip through without a hashtag.
Example:
HubSpot’s annual conference for inbound marketers gets a great turnout with a majority of attendees having Twitter accounts. This leads to a great opportunity for a list, and HubSpot was up to the bill: a list of Inbound 2014 attendees that totals over 2,700 list members.
3. Mini-communities of those with shared interests
Here’s a great opportunity for a little community outreach and engagement. If you know a group of folks on Twitter who share a common interest with you or your business—lean startup for Buffer, for instance—collect these users into a list. This comes with a pair of benefits: Insights for you, and appreciation for those you add to the list.
Take things one step further and invite others to join the list by making the list public and sending invitations out via Twitter or Facebook.
Example:
Buffer’s founder, Joel, has a number of lists based on shared interests, including one for lean startup with 10 of the leading voices on the topic.
4. Helpful resources for your customers
Mark Schaeffer’s ideas for Twitter lists include a neat take on adding value for your customers. Think of what type of resources your customers might enjoy having and which of these resources you could help create. Do you have an area of expertise? Do you have particular knowledge or experience in a certain area?
Here are a few examples that Mark came up with:
If you are in the metals business, would your customers appreciate a Twitter List of international resources?
If you are a teacher, would your students appreciate a list of the experts you follow in your field?
If you are a blogger would your fans like to see a list of your favorite bloggers?
Example:
Here’s a list from Mark that compiles the top 50 people who get retweeted by small business leaders.
5. Accounts you recommend to follow
Here’s a slight twist to the “helpful resources” list. Make a list of the accounts you’d recommend to others.
The accounts don’t need to share any similarities. You can pull from different industries, grab individuals or brands, and pick users who share lots of links or who share lots of insights. It’s up to you. The idea is to create a useful guide that others can easily grab to see and follow the accounts that you love most.
You may want to put together a collection of your clients so that you can stay abreast of their activities and what they’re sharing to social media. For agencies and marketers especially, it could be very helpful to see the types of updates—both the quality and the content.
For lists like these, you can set them to “Private” if there may be some reason to keep anonymity of who you work with. The privacy setting comes up when you’re creating the list, and you can always go back into your list settings later on to edit.
7. “Notice me” list
This is a list of Twitter users whom you wish would notice you and, eventually, follow you. Putting them here on this list is your way of tracking with their updates, engaging with their tweets, and hopefully getting a follow.
The idea comes from Julia Doherty of the Green Umbrella blog who recommends you keep this list to a maximum of 10 people. Here’s more on how Julia handles her list:
These are your key people / prospects that you would like to engage with and ultimately you would like them to follow you back. Once a person in this list then follows you back, they get removed from the list and added to your client list. Then you add your next prospect.
8. Competitors list
Keep tabs on the others in your industry who do what you do. See what type of content they share on social media, and take inspiration from the way that they compose their updates.
This is another one you can set to private if you’d like. A good rule of thumb for private lists might be to set them to private if they hold value for you and no one else.
9. Industry sector
Similar to the competitors list, the industry sector includes any and all Twitter users who work in your field, not just the ones you directly compete with for customers.
For instance, Buffer is in the social media tool industry, which covers a wide range of different apps, some of which would not be considered direct competitors.
Example:
Mashable covers a number of different tech areas, including social media. Their list for social media accounts is amazingly popular—over 13,000 subscribers!
10. Thought leaders for your niche
Who are the people in your industry/niche who always seem to be on the bleeding edge with ideas and articles? Add these thought leaders to a list.
Chances are that some names might have already come to mind for you. Feel free to constantly add and edit the list as you discover more influencers and voices that you want to hear from. This type of list is great for pulling out the signal of vital information from the noise of a hefty Twitter stream.
Example:
Dave Cutler put together a list of nearly 70 up-and-coming social media voices. I heard about this list via a blogpost as Dave not only compiled the list but then advertised it, too.
11. Celebrities
Here’s one just for fun: Make a list of the celebrities you like. It’s amazing the detail that some A-listers share online, and it can be kind of fun to keep tabs on your favorites.
The idea is to get insight and feel connection with others who are doing the same day-to-day job as you. It’s likely that you’ll share a lot of the same workflows, tools, and highs and lows, and collecting these accounts into one list makes it all the easier to connect and engage.
Example:
Web designer Brad Frost keeps a simple design list of seven designers and studies he likes to keep tabs on.
13. Customers you’d like to recognize and reward
Each time you add someone to a list, they receive a notification.
What an awesome opportunity to spread some love your customers’s way!
This “recognize and reward” list can also be helpful for organizing a community campaign to engage some of your most valued customers with favorites, retweets, or @-mentions. If you can follow and track these accounts easily, chances are you’ll be able to catch the tweets that make sense to “recognize and reward.”
Many people have hopped on Twitter to share their thoughts live and streaming during sporting events, TV shows, activities, and more. These live tweets can be a fun way to follow along. If you can think of a group that does this consistently—maybe for TV shows or games you’d be watching along with—you can drop them into a live tweeters list.
16. Your affiliations
Here’s a neat idea from Mashable: Use Twitter lists to promote any group, organization, or association you’re a part of.
For instance:
University alumni list
Local business group
Startup fund or incubator
It can be anything that you’ve had membership in or that you might associate with on LinkedIn or Facebook. Add those you know to the list, and invite others to help you fill it out.
17. Close friends and family
If you’re using Twitter lists to hear from those who matter the most to you, why not go ahead and make a list for friends and family? This way you never need to lose track of their tweets in your stream, and you can follow, favorite, reply, and retweet to everything you see.
18. People who retweet you
Post Planner’s Aaron Lee has come up with several neat uses for Twitter lists. One of them is a collection of people who retweet you often. Place them into a list so that you can see their content and share their articles and tweets. The idea is that it might encourage your retweeters to continue sharing your content as well.
Here’s the way Aaron recommends to name the list.
Don’t name the List “retweeters” or something equally vague. Instead give it a name that doesn’t give away the reason you started the list to begin with.
I call mine “Super-sidekicks”.
Example:
Speaking of Aaron’s “Super-sidekicks” list, here it is. Currently, there are over 100 members and nearly that many subscribers.
19. People you regularly engage with on Twitter
For one, making a list of these people will help you stay abreast of the conversations you’d be entering anyway. Two, engaging with these people brings around the reciprocity of their engaging with you. If you can find a way to raise the tide on your end, engagement as a whole should rise.
20. Twitter chat participants
Some of the most insightful, engaging people on Twitter participate in Twitter chats. (If you’ve yet to try a chat, we have one every Wednesday at Buffer. You’re invited!)
You can find chat participants by participating in chats yourself or by monitoring your stream for chat hashtags. Place the chatters into a list so you can refer and reference their good ideas and tweets easily.
21. Accounts worth engaging (via a Twitter tool)
I let Social Rank discover my most valuable Twitter connections, and I place the first page of results into a private list that I can monitor. If these folks are indeed valuable to me (as Social Rank says they are), then they’re worth keeping track of and engaging with.
22. New Twitter homepage
Identify the users and accounts that matter most to you. They’ll likely span a huge variety of topics and interests, which is perfectly fine. The idea is to build a homepage of all your most vital Twitter friends and favorite tweeters.
Build the list as large as you want, so long as you can keep on top of all the tweets coming in.
With this list as your new homepage, you can then feel free to follow as many accounts as you want without worrying if additional follows will overflow your main stream.
23. Your interests and categories
I saved the most common one for last. Twitter lists are the perfect way to group together users and accounts based on the topics you’re interested in and the categories you follow. These lists can be sports teams, comedians, authors, deal websites, and anything in between. Whatever you’re interested in, make a list out of it so that you never miss a tweet.
From start-to-finish: How to create a Twitter list
Once you’re logged in at Twitter.com, click on your avatar in the top-right corner of the white menu bar at the top of the page. Choose “Lists” from the drop-down menu.
You can also get there by clicking on the “Lists” link from your profile page.
Pro tip: You can also access lists with a shortcut. Press the letter “G” then the letter “L”.
Another pro tip: If you’d prefer the direct url for your lists page, add the word “lists” to your Twitter url (e.g., twitter.com/kevanlee/lists).
You’re now at your lists homepage. You can see both the lists that you’re subscribed to (meaning the ones you’ve created and the ones others created and you decided to follow) and the lists you’re a member of (meaning the lists that others have added you to).
Here’s how to create a Twitter list.
1. Click the button at the bottom of the page to “Create new list.”
2. Enter a list name. Names are limited to a maximum of 25 characters, and they cannot begin with a number.
3. Enter a description. Descriptions are limited to a maximum of 100 characters.
4. Choose whether you want the list to be public (anyone can subscribe to the list) or private (only you can access the list).
Now that you have a list, you’ll want to add users to it. This is done via the individual user’s profile page.
1. From their profile page, click the gear icon.
2. Select “Add or remove from lists.” (Helpful tip: You don’t have to be following the user to add them to your list.)
3. You’ll see a popup showing all the lists you’ve created. Check/uncheck the box next to the list or lists you want the person to appear.
4. Repeat. Do this for all the accounts you’d like to show up on your lists. (There are some handy tools below that can help expedite the process a bit.)
A couple other useful spots to know
1. You can see who is subscribing to your Twitter lists. Visit a specific list, and click the “List Subscribers” link in the left sidebar.
2. You can see what lists you are a member of. From the main lists page, click the “Member of” tab at the top of the page, underneath your cover photo.
3. You can edit/delete a list at any time. From the specific list, click the “Edit” or “Delete” button that appears just underneath the list description.
4. You can subscribe to other people’s lists. From a specific list, click the “Subscribe” button that appears just underneath the list description.
5. You can search for Twitter lists to follow. Type keywords into the Twitter search box. Choose keywords that are likely to be in the list’s name. On the results page, click on “Timelines” from the left menu. The resulting timelines page will display the lists from your search results.
5 tips to max out the benefits of Twitter lists
1. Upload your Twitter list to Flipboard
Flipboard is one of our favorite content discovery apps. It’s a visual way of flipping through content from a collection of sources—Twitter lists included.
Add your Twitter list to Flipboard, and the app will pull out all the great content and links that get shared through the list.
2. Here’s how to follow an entire list
You can subscribe to someone else’s list without following that person or the people in the list. If you do wan to add list members as followers, you can do so by using the “List members” link in the left sidebar of any list.
“List members” will show a rollcall of everyone who is on the list, and there will be a Follow button next to each name. Scroll down the list, and click to follow all the accounts you want.
3. Include yourself in the lists you make
Want to be considered a thought leader in your industry Add yourself to a Twitter list of thought leaders. Want to increase your Twitter followers and engagement? Add yourself to the most popular lists you’ve created (if it makes sense to do so).
4. Use a Twitter list tool
There are parts of the Twitter list process that can be sped up a bit (like adding users to a list, for instance). Here are a handful of tools that help with things.
Twitilist – Add users in bulk to a list with easy-click buttons and a full view of those you follow
TweetBe.at – View all those you follow, and add individually or in batches to your lists
Twitlistmanager – A simple checkbox system for adding people to lists
5. Follow @ListWatcher to track the lists you’re added to
When you follow the @ListWatcher account, you’ll receive a direct message anytime someone adds, removes, or changes you on a Twitter list. You can also find this activity in the Notifications tab in Twitter, but if it’s easier to follow up with direct messages, this would be a great way to go.
And a good opportunity for a thank you note? You bet.
Conclusion
I hope you’ll find some great use out of Twitter lists. There are clearly a tone of unique ways to put them into practice—over 20 ways listed here, and many more that I probably haven’t mentioned.
Which ways stand out to you?
Here are the few different list types that I use:
Staff directory
Notice me list
Best users to engage with
Categories and interests
How about you?
I’d love to hear how you use Twitter lists. Please do share in the comments!
What do your customers look like today? Have you considered what they might look like in 2020?
Your customers are changing. Increasingly, millennials (members of Generation Y — loosely defined as anyone born between 1980 and 2000) are having a major influence on buying decisions, at work and in the home.
Millennials include teenagers and adults in their 20s and early 30s. Gen Y is growing up, having kids and spending money. Forbes notes that every day, 10,000 millennial moms give birth. If you think of Gen Y as financially dependent “kids,” it’s time to update your stereotypes. According to Accenture research, the 80 million millennials in the U.S. spend about $600 billion every year. By 2020, millennials are projected to spend $1.4 trillion annually, representing 30 percent of total retail sales.
Millennials are your customers — if not today, then soon. You can’t afford to ignore this very powerful and relevant demographic.
Millennial customers are different than Gen Xers and baby boomers. To effectively reach and communicate with Gen Y, you have to understand them. Once you understand your buyer, you can start to shape your sales strategy to meet their expectations.
5 Keys to Selling to Generation Y:
1. Treat them like VIPs.
Millennials want to feel special. They’ve grown up in a world of instant gratification where everything is customizable. They want it their way. Now. Whether they’re buying sushi, a cell phone or enterprise software, they expect you to step up and deliver.
That means you’ll need to understand each prospective buyer and tailor your message accordingly. If that sounds impossible, think again. There’s more information available to you than ever before. You have an encyclopedia of information about your buyers at your fingertips, and it all starts with a simple Google search.
For inspiration on customizing your pitch, product and sales experience to individual buyers, take a page from the playbook of category-leading, premium brands. If a company with as many moving parts as Ritz-Carlton can make every customer feel unique and valued, you can, too.
2. Embrace technology. Your buyer does.
To sell to millennials, you need to understand and leverage technology. According to this Entrepreneur article and infographic, “the average millennial spends 18 hours a day consuming media – often multiple forms at once. These forms are completely different from those favored by prior generation. For example, the average millennial checks his or her smartphone 43 times and spends 5.4 hours on social media per day.”
Traditional sales tactics don’t cut it and often only annoy and alienate this generation (cold-pitch voicemails piss off Gen X, too). To connect, you’re going to have to explore a more progressive approach. Online content. Social media. If these new tools are intimidating for you, start slowly. You don’t have to be on Tumblr and Instagram and be an avid Snapchat user all by next week. But if you were, you’d have a big advantage!
We’re at the start of a revolution. If you’re running behind today, you could be irrelevant tomorrow. At minimum, show up where your customers spend their time and access information, and determine how you can have an active and helpful presence.
3. Make sure your product and pitch are relevant for 2014.
How has your product, service or solution evolved? How are you telling your story?
Jamie MacGregor, senior vice president for insurance practice at Celent, a financial-services research and advisory firm, shares this advice for insurance companies: “Insurers need to create flexible, short-term, low-cost products, MacGregor says, such as policies with ‘on-and-off switches’ that can be suspended rather than canceled by a policyholder between jobs who can’t make premium payments.”
The message is clear: Update your solutions or suffer the consequences of offering antiquated products that this generation is going to put off buying — or permanently ignore.
Even if you don’t work in insurance, you’d be well-served by taking a step back and considering how buyers perceive you. Does the value proposition that worked for Baby Boomers resonate with Gen Y? Then, consider how you tell that story. Per MacGregor’s advice, fear and intimidation are tactics that just don’t fly with millennials. Instead, focus on the benefits you’re bringing them.
4. Be authentic.
According to generational expert and keynote speaker Seth Mattison (a millennial himself), authenticity matters most: “No matter what channel you choose to engage with millennial buyers, your communication has to be authentic. Here’s why: Gen Y is the most advertised-to generation in history. They’re immune to quick pitches. Add in all that they’ve witnessed in the past decade — the economic meltdown, domestic surveillance programs, etc. — and you get a complete erosion of trust. Millennials are skeptical and tech-savvy. They will fact-check every claim that comes out of your mouth. They might even do it when you’re standing in front of them.”
Salespeople are on the front lines dealing with that lack of trust. Seth’s advice is to keep it real: “The worst thing you can do is get defensive or try to sneak anything by a Gen Y buyer. Lead with authenticity. Be more human. Be quick to empathize. Follow these rules whether your communication is digital or face-to-face.”
When you’re communicating with any client, you should default to the communication style, method and schedule that makes them most comfortable. How do you know how your customer prefers to communicate?
Ask.
To connect with Gen Y customers (or customers of any age, really), we have to stop interrupting and start communicating differently. In this video, Seth and I talk about this communication revolution and share practical advice for “meeting people where they are, without losing who you are.”
5. Find your meaning.
Why do you sell what you sell? If you’re in it just for the money, that might prove to be a problem. For millennials, meaning matters.
According to generational expert and writer Samantha Massaglia, this generation wants to live their lives with purpose: “Research indicates this sentiment is shared by millennials everywhere. For example, in 2011, a report was commissioned by the Career Advisory Board. It found that what millennials most want from their career is a sense of meaning, which the study defined as ‘the degree to which we feel our lives have purpose, value and impact.’
“This is a significant change from studies several years ago. At that time, millennials listed happiness as their top priority. Since then, as a result of events like the Great Recession, they’ve decided that they are more interested in building an equitable world.
“Sociologists say that prioritizing meaning over happiness is significant, because happiness is self-oriented, while meaning is other-oriented. So, millennials deciding to focus their energy on meaning instead of happiness means the biggest generation in history has decided to dedicate itself to helping others.”
If you’re selling to millennials, it’s important to understand your own sense of purpose. Stop thinking about the transaction and focus, instead, on helping your customer. Demonstrate why it matters. That goes a long way toward building a partnership.
I’d also recommend listening carefully to customers and learning from their behavior. If customers aren’t connecting with your product or the experience you offer, consider why and what you can do differently.
For example, recently McDonald’s Global Chief Brand Officer Steve Easterbrook said in an interview, “the millennial generation has a wider range of choices than any generation before them,” and added, “millennials are promiscuous in their brand loyalty. It makes it harder work for all of us to earn the loyalty of the millennial generation.”
Perhaps. Or more likely, this generation simply expects more. McDonald’s has a Millennial problem, reported The Wall Street Journal earlier this year, saying millennials “are defecting to competitors, in particular so-called fast-casual restaurants like Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. and gourmet-burger chain Five Guys Holdings LLC. Increasingly, younger diners are seeking out fresher, healthier food and chains that offer customizable menu options for little more than the price of a combo meal.”
The bottom line: Your customer is changing. Keeping up is hard work, but that’s exactly where the opportunity exists. If you want to remain relevant in 2020, you’ll need to understand how customers are changing, anticipate their future needs and deliver an experience customers value.
No one likes cold calling, well most don’t, so you can stop writing that e-mail telling me that you’re the exception that proves the rule. I don’t like it, I know it is god’s punishment to sales people, but it works, and I have made the connection between successful cold calls, a robust pipeline and the kids eating. I don’t know about you, but my kids get cranky when they don’t eat. But just because I don’t like it, I don’t tell myself it does not work, like many, I also figured out that if I don’t do it, for sure it will not work. So instead, I try to figure out how to do it better, so I have to do less of it, in the process have come to learn some things that stink a call out, literally like bad morning breath for the phone, and given that the people I am calling are not my lovers, they will not tolerate morning breath. So here three ways to avoid Bad Phone Breath.
Speak To them not At them
This one gets me every time, if you are going to interrupt someone during their busy day, make it worth their time, which means leading with and focusing on one of the oldest truths in sales, What’s In It For Them. Sure everyone knows this until the prospect answers the phone, and then they forget and bam, garlic breath. They start by talking about their company, “we’re a leading…”, or other things that mean nothing to the listener. What they want to know is how you can improve their lot, and specifically the outcomes you have delivered which they can relate to and would have an interest in. Start with that, grab their interest, save the rest for the meeting.
Soft In the Middle
I hate it when reps call me and say “I was wondering if we can meet?” I usually respond, “give me a call when you figured it out”; or “I was hoping we can meet” to which I say, “please call me when you get past hoping, and want to.” I know you are trying to be courteous, don’t want to come across pushy, but you need to make up for the fact that you are on the phone, and need to compensate for the lack of body language. People will follow a person with confidence who has a clear message that shows them what’s in it for them. Be clear, direct, and assertive, “I am calling to set a time to meet to share with you….”
Stop Telling Them There is No Reason to Talk to You
No getting away from the fact that if you are cold calling, you are talking to more voice mails than humans. So stop leaving code in your message that there is no need to call you, and they should go ahead and delete the message now. So here is the code buyers look for to hit 76 and flush your message: “Please call me back at your earliest convenience”, delivered in the Soft way described above. Sure, here is an empty message from a dude selling something I already have, because they didn’t tell me what’s in it for me, just what they do. So let me clear my calendar and set aside things I need to get done, so I can call you. Hmm, whose convenience is that for again?
There are other things you can do to improve the odor of a call, but this is start, get these down, call me and we share more.
It seems that these days you can find a million free tools online that will make the process of on-page analysis incredibly simple. Not so long ago, most of this work would of had to have been done manually and with a fine tuned approach so as not to miss anything.
We may have all of these tools but, in the massively competitive and ever-changing world of SEO, it is vital to know and understand what on-page SEO is and what these tools are actually doing to make your site more search-friendly.
Meta Tags
Meta tags have lost the value that they once commanded, thanks to ‘black hat’ SEO strategies and meta tag spamming, but that is not to say that they no longer have any place on our websites. Essentially, meta tags allow search engine crawlers, the algorithms that scan the world wide web for new content, to survey our site and have an instant understanding of what our pages are about.
They may not make us a search engine favourite alone, but they are a fundamental part of making your web pages accessible.
Landing Pages
Whether your search engine traffic is or isn’t converting to sales, you need to know what keywords are sending traffic to which page. As you begin to understand what makes your audience click through and, perhaps more importantly, what creates a desire to make a purchase, you can begin to experiment with new landing pages to optimise the results you’re getting from searches.
H1 & H2 Tags
H1 and H2 tags are what tells those search crawlers what they should expect on the page. HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the coding language that we use to create content on web pages, is essentially a way of telling computers which parts of your page are what. For example, humans can tell which part of a document is the title because it will usually be at the top, have capitals at the start of each word, or perhaps be underlined.
However, computers need a more concrete way of identifying titles, paragraphs, sub-headings and so on. In HTML, we define our page’s main title with a H1 tag. Be sure use only one of these tags, otherwise search engine crawlers will be unsure which H1 tag is the real title, and therefore what the page is about. H2 tags are used for the sub headings and you can use these multiple times to split up your page.
We definitely recommend brushing up on what the basic HTML tags are and what they mean. For example, there are other H tags aside from H1 and H2, and they basically form a hierarchical structure to your page and its headings. Essentially, each sub-heading you mark with a H2 tag has to be of equal importance to the page, and the same with H3, but H3 tags are less important than H2 tags – they will be used for your sub-sub-headings, of sorts.
robots.txt
The Robots Exclusion Protocol is a way of making those search engine crawlers overlook certain webpages or even your whole website. What would you want to do that? Surely you want your website on search engines, right?
robots.txt are files that you upload onto your website, or particular pages, that contain commands for crawlers. These can be very useful when you’re building up your website or testing it so that search engines don’t start listing your unfinished site. You definitely don’t want to suffer penalisation because you accidentally asked Google to index a broken site or a broken set of pages.
So whilst you don’t want any of these files present on your website when you want everything to go live and be indexed, you can be tactical with their usage in order to avoid penalties whilst running tests.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps tell the search engine crawlers how many pages there are on the website, as well as its structure, and they also point out how often the website is getting updated. By structuring your site with a sitemap, you’re clearly illustrating the hierarchy of your website and the importance certain pages hold over other pages and therefore prioritising them to search engines.
Favicon
Although pretty minor to most people, in the world of search optimisation minor actions add up to sums greater than their parts when it comes to the ranking factor of websites. Search engines, at their core, are trying to ensure users are directed to websites that offer the best experiences for any particular search.
Favicons, those little icons that appear in your browser tabs or next to web addresses in your bookmarks, put the final touches to a website and add to that experience.
Broken Links
Sometimes, articles or pages get deleted, either on your site or on external sites, and any link you have to those pages will be ‘broken’. Few things frustrate users more than clicking on a link that doesn’t work or that leads to a 404 page. Search engines don’t like this either so it’s important to keep on top of any broken links on your website.
Google Analytics
The treasure chest of information, data and tracking that is Google Analytics. You’ll be surprised how many websites don’t have it installed correctly or simply don’t use it properly. Analytics is vital to ensuring your website is functioning properly as well as understanding what pages are attracting traffic and why. This is too important to overlook – make sure it is working perfectly.
IMG Alt Tags
It’s estimated that around 10% of Google’s 2 trillion+ searches are for images. Therefore, every image that you upload to your site provides an opportunity to be found via that huge number of image searches.
In order to be found, you need to ensure all of your images have an alternative name attached to them, just in case the file is broken or cannot load, so that the crawlers and your audience can still get an idea of what it is they would have been looking at.
Here’s an example:
Old HTML (HTML4)
We’re moving into the world of HTML5 – the new standard of code. This is a great time for the web as we see more and more possibilities for online content but it can also provide a headache for our existing sites as we may be using old code.
This isn’t a huge problem, right now, but it can cause issues with future updates to apps, code and anything else associated with the internal workings of the website. Keep on top of the latest standards and make your site future proof – that is until the next era of code comes around…
HTML Page Size & Compression
If you right click on a webpage and view the source, you’ll see a bunch of code in front of you. In most cases, the code presented to you is actually pretty minimal, even if it may seem like you’ve intercepted an alien transmission. However, some sites that haven’t been updated to new coding standards will, generally, have whole sections code that is either unnecessary or just overly complex for the job it is doing.
This can lead to lots of data we don’t need and, as a result, slower webpages. With a little knowledge on coding, you’ll soon be able to see what is bogging down the code of your page and allow you to then trim the fat – keep your page slick and loading quickly.
Page Cache
Another way make your page loading times quicker is through page caching. It allows your page to be remembered by users’ computers, to enable them to recall your page faster and it will also lead to search engines favouring your website over your slower rivals.
Again, this is all in favour of the experience your website offers, so put yourself in your users’ shoes. There are plenty of ways to measure your site’s speediness with online tools, so check to see what impact your changes are making to page loading times.
JS & CSS
Javascript and CSS code can be hundreds, if not thousands, of lines long and in some cases this may add to the loading speed of your website. This is best done with an online tool for accuracy, but simply looking at the source code will give you an idea if it needs to be done.
Minifying Javascript and CSS just involves taking out spaces, removing unneeded code that may be dormant and generally just cleaning everything up. However, these coding languages are a whole other ball game to HTML and can take some time to understand.
URL Canonical
Sometimes there might be be duplicate content, either on your website or other websites that you may be guest posting for. Use a canonical tag, for example , tell’s the search engine crawlers which is the original piece of content and will pass the authority over to them.
Mobile
If your website doesn’t respond well whilst being viewed on a mobile device then it’s very likely you are losing a key source of traffic. Facebook users alone spend 68% of their time on the platform through their mobile device – we’re not talking a small minority of users anymore.
Generally, if you have to do any scrolling from side to side on the screen with your mobile device that means the site isn’t optimised for a mobile experience. Look into making your site responsive to ensure smooth transitions through different screen sizes to smartphones.
Social Media & Content
In order to be a prominent part of the social media space, you have to have a conversation through social platforms and through your website as much as possible – blogging is the best way to do this.
By creating original content on a regular basis, one of the search engines’ favourite things, you’ll also be able to draw in traffic from social media by sharing that content. Always keep tabs on the number of shares, conversations and links your content spawns to optimise your output – both the content itself as well as how you are sharing. A blog and a social media presence is a necessity for your business in the Web 2.0 era.
Bill Gates once famously said that a time will come when commerce will mainly be done online and that businesses that do not evolve to use the internet will be kicked out.
This is happening already, strongly than ever in 2014; notable examples of businesses proving what Bill Gates said decades ago are Apple, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc. Whether you want to buy a computer, a mobile phone, or even a physical book you want to read, the stronghold the internet already has on commerce cannot be understated.
In fact, recent data has shown that worldwide B2C e-commerce sales alone amounted to $1.2 trillion in 2013; this doesn’t take into consideration other forms of e-commerce such as B2C, C2C, etc.
One thing remains true: commerce is thriving online and businesses, small and great, realizing this are moving en masse online, trying to get their own piece of the market.
However, most businesses online today are making serious mistakes; deadly mistakes, and surprisingly too! Some businesses are making these mistakes because they find it too difficult to leave their old school offline approach and adapt to something working online, or because they are too new to learn what is working.
It doesn’t matter, the businesses making the following mistakes in 2014 will surely suffer:
1. Not Having a Blog
Telling people to blog today probably already sounds cliché. After all, this is what most people advocate; including those people who do not really know how blogging works.
Having a blog isn’t important for online businesses today, it is CRITICAL.
Yes, you definitely need to have a blog in 2014; in fact, I find it surprisingly unbelievable that so many companies do not have a blog already, or that many companies have blogs that they have abandoned. It’s all the same.
This isn’t just “what this or that expert says”. It is about what works, and there is data to do the talking.
Here are some key statistics on the state of blogging as it is today, according to data from Ignitespot:
Small businesses with blogs generate 126% more leads
Interesting content is one of the top reasons people follow brands
81% of US consumers trust advice and information from blogs
Companies that blog have 97% more inbound links
61% of US consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post
If you take a look at the above stats and are not already blogging, you’ll realize that blogging has more influence than you probably realized.
Of course, starting a blog can be very complicated if you are new to the internet but, thankfully, here is a handy guide to blogging that you can follow.
2. Not Effectively Leveraging Content Marketing
Now, blogging is a form of content marketing but blogging alone does not mean you are fully utilizing content marketing.
The only way to get real results online is by effectively leveraging content both offsite and onsite; this comes in the form of your own blog, guest blogging on other websites, doing content partnerships with other websites, leveraging various forms of multimedia, etc.
While your company blog or website might only have a measly 1,000 active visitors, there are sites with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions of visitors online; effectively leveraging their existing audience to grow yours is basically how content marketing works.
3. Not Utilizing Multimedia in their Marketing Communications
According to data from Altwitter, infographics shared on Twitter get 832% more retweets than images or text.
Top presentation website Slideshare, called the “sleeping giant of content marketing”, currently averages 50 million visits and 3 billion views, every month.
After Google and Facebook, Youtube is currently the third most visited website in the world according to Alexa.
While the above are all interesting stats, it is not really surprising considering the fact that it has been said that our brain processes images at about 60,000 times faster than test.
In terms of the resultant virality, conversion, or even getting your message across, your company will be dumb not to be making effective use of multimedia in its marketing campaigns.
This doesn’t have to be expensive either; there are lot of good quality options for creating multimedia content like Visme.
4. Ignoring SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Google is currently the biggest website in the world today, and it is a search engine; it isn’t the only search engine in the world as well.
There are hundreds of millions of websites online, and people just have to find information somehow; even if you were to be given the link, keeping track of all the websites online is completely impossible; this is where Google comes in.
The more websites there are, and millions of websites are being created every day, the more useful Google becomes. Web users have realized this, and as a result majority of them rely on Google for finding useful resources online.
According to the Google Economic Impact report, “Last year, Google’s tools helped provide $111 billion of economic activity for 1.5 million businesses, website publishers and non-profits.”
So partnering with Google is definitely a smart move for any online business; and you can either keep paying by using their advertising services, or you can benefit from SEO that doesn’t really have to cost you anything.
5. Still Using Outdated “SEO” Methods
Following up with the point on not ignoring SEO, another deadly mistake companies make is having the misconception that they are doing SEO, when they really aren’t.
Ask most companies what their SEO plan is and they will be saying things like “directory submissions”, “article marketing”, “web 2.0 sites”, etc. In 2014?!
The reality of link building in 2014 is that most forms of link building have become obsolete, and with the release of Google’s latest Panda 4.1 update, you can be assured that a lot of things are not the way they used to be.
What really works for SEO in 2014 is effective content marketing; focus on building quality content on your own site, and then offer quality content to other relevant websites as a way to promote yourself. Doing this alone will give you significantly more results than the outdated techniques most online businesses are using today.
Reading and answering emails can take up lots of time, time being a currency you don’t just waste if you’re managing a business. Emails, however, can’t be ignored forever, particularly if you rely on them for internal and external communication. And whether you like it or not, despite all those talk about email nearing the end of its useful life or that social media is soon to replace email, stats show that email is here to stay.
Apart from the best Email marketing software, there is Gmail, one of the best and most widely used free email services out there, here are Gmail-ready add-ons to bump up your email productivity:
The Internet has made many things possible – easier communication, faster transactions, research at your fingertips, you name it. But ready access to the Internet isn’t everywhere, not yet, at least. You may need to be on the field, in the basement of an office building, or somewhere where there simply is no way to access the Internet. How then will you manage your emails?
Gmail Offline answers that need. Once installed, it downloads your emails for you, making them accessible even while you’re offline. Emails can then be read, archived, searched and responded to, and once you get back online, everything will automatically be synced.
Remember that time you hastily sent a reply due to excitement and realized, after hitting Send, you’ve just sent a potential big client an email that’s riddled with typos and grammatical errors?
Thankfully, Undo Send can take back whatever it is you regret having sent. From the Settings pane in Gmail, select Undo Send from the Labs tab, and then click the Enable button. Save the changes, and you now have 10 seconds to change your mind after sending an email. To adjust the default cancellation time window to 30 seconds, go to the General tab under Settings, look for Undo Send and select 30 seconds from the drop-down menu.
CloudMagic is an email management app that supports various email platforms like Gmail, Office 365, Exchange, Google Apps, iCloud, Yahoo, Outlook and IMAP, allowing you to manage multiple email accounts from one unified inbox. It can also readily integrate with work tools like Salesforce.com, Pocket, Evernote, Zendesk, OneNote, Asana, Trello, Todoist and MailChimp to further boost your productivity. The app utilizes as little resources as possible and reliably sends push notifications for all email accounts.
Especially created for sales professionals looking to close as many deals as possible, business developers, professional networkers, project and account managers, or anybody who want to increase their email productivity, Sidekick by HubSpot is an extension that tracks email opens, schedules emails to be sent at a later time, and organizes contact profiles that include the person’s title, company, social profiles, and their most recent tweets.
Aside from Gmail, Sidekick by HubSpot works with Outlook, Outlook.com and OWA (Outlook Web App), Apple Mail, Salesforce and HubSpot.
Streak for Gmail is an app that allows you to directly manage clients or customers inside Gmail, without switching on and off between platforms. Streak is a CRM tool packed into your email inbox, allowing you to organize, sort and group emails into “pipelines” and “boxes.” Threads, leads and categories can be created and pooled into a “box” (a client’s name, for example), which you can share with your team to keep everyone apprised of important updates, notes, details and statuses.
Optimized for sales teams, Tout assists sales professionals with leads monitoring, conversions and transactions. It’s also equipped with customizable email templates so you don’t always have to start your emails from scratch, analytics (e.g., email and attachment tracking) to measure email effectiveness, CRM integration and meeting scheduler.
Any.do is a task management app that allows users to manage their to-dos by letting them add reminders by time or location, attach notes, files or sub-tasks, and search through notes, tasks and sub-tasks fast. Any.do also keeps your lists in sync across various devices. Its clean and easy-to-use interface ensures you’re focused on your to-dos instead of application usage intricacies.
If too much email is clouding your inbox and taking your focus away from essential conversations, Unroll.me can be a lifesaver. After signing up, a list of all your email subscriptions will show up, and with just a few clicks, you can unsubscribe from those you don’t want to receive any more updates from – no more manually unsubscribing one by one. Later, you can combine all your subscriptions into a digest called the Rollup, which appears in your inbox at the time you specify, every day.
OK, OK…this might be a tacky headline that brings to mind Pappa Smurf but it represents exactly what I want to say:
YOU CAN’T BUILD A 2015 MARKETING PLAN WITHOUT THE 2015 SALES PLAN.
In my September 11th post called “How To Get 2015 Budget Approval” I presented a Table of Contents (provided by a client) for a plan that not only got acceptance but also received the requested 24 percent increase in budget over the prior year. Why? Two simple reasons. First, this plan was a business case for what, how, why marketing could move the number. Second, it fully baked in how to work with sales. Let’s take a closer look.
Elements of a “Smarketing” Plan:
Marketing uses key initiatives from sales as input to build key programs. Let me give you an example of how this can go wrong. A few years ago I was consulting with a global company and marketing’s rallying cry was to get as many net new logos as possible. This was an important element of growth for the company so they built programs to focus on this objective. However, analysis of lead conversion from MQL to close was abysmal and represented a huge waste of time, money and effort in marketing. What happened? This was NOT a key initiative for sales nor was any compensation aligned to new new logos for the sales team. Sales reps in this company made as much money on renewing existing customers as they did trying to close new customers…so where did they spend their time? You bet it was on the many, many renewals they worked.
2. Marketing and Sales use the same numbers for forecasting/creating business cases. Marketing needs to take a key initiative from sales and create a vibrant business case through programs they can build, execute, and measure. Let’s say a key initiative of sales is to launch and sell a LOT of a new product/solution. In getting to the top line revenue numbers, they assume a certain close rate of opportunities, let’s say it’s 31 percent for a current client (this would be an up-sell). As a marketer, when you go to create your business case for programs you will not only focus on programs for current customers, but you should also use the same opportunity to close rate (31 percent) to calculate opportunity to close for MQLs created by marketing. IF you disagree with this close rate, you need to state why. AND, if sales uses a different closing rate for new customers, you need to use that calculation as well. This calculation helps you also if you have a goal of contributing a certain portion of the pipeline and closed business from marketing leads.
3. Marketing and Sales have an enabling org structure and compensation plan. One company I worked with did a beautiful job of aligning sales and marketing around a structure and a comp plan. Patty Foley-Reid at IronMountain made a conscious effort to do this every year. She called it “mirroring” the sales organization and whatever plans they had for the year, she aligned her marketing team both from an organizational structure and a comp structure. Patty also had the same quota number as the sales team..talk about alignment!
These are just a few ways you can create your 2015 Smarketing plan…what else have you done? I’d love to hear about it!
*Editors Note: Guest post by Andrew Fogg, co-founder and Chief Data Officer of Import.io. Import.io a free tool that allows you to transform the web into a table of data or an API quickly and easily without having to write any code. This blog post is based on a presentation he gave at HustleCon on August 1st 2014. Slides are embedded below.
What is a lead?
Ok, let’s start with the basics. Leads represent the first stage of the sales process. In its simplest form a lead is any “person or entity that has an interest and authority to purchase your product or service”. Or in other words: someone you can sell to.
Sounds good. So, what information do you need about that person or entity for it to be an actionable lead? A good rule of thumb is to look for the information that you would find on a business card, i.e. a name, associated company and contact details.
Where do leads come from?
The most traditional way to get leads is by buying databases of telephone numbers, email addresses or mailing addresses. As you can imagine, these lists are immense, which gives you a high quantity of leads, but the quality is notoriously very poor.
Alternatively, you can attend trade shows and other industry events and collect business cards the old fashioned way. Or you can stalk people on social media and try to get in touch with them that way, through channels like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Leads generated in this way usually have great quality, but come with a high time-cost which limits the quantity that you will be able to generate.
But wait, there’s another way!
I want to share with you a new approach to lead-generation that will deliver both quantity and quality – it is based on web data. This approach was developed by some of our earliest users, and it is both ingenious and simple:
Find a website where your ideal user can be found
Build an API to that website (using Import.io naturally) and extract as much data about each lead as you can
Pull that data into a spreadsheet
That’s it. Three simple steps and it takes about 10 minutes, after which you will have thousands of quality leads to work with.
Show me that again!
Right, let’s look at each of those steps in a bit more detail. To help you visualize how this can work for your business, I’m going to step through an example. Let’s imagine that I’m in commercial real estate and want to talk to real estate brokers.
Step 1: Find your ideal user
The first step will require a little bit of imagination and thinking on your part. Where your ideal user can be found of course depends on who that person is. You’ll probably need to spend sometime getting to know your user and looking around the web to see where they hang out. Is it a forum? A professional association? Are they on social media?
The key here is to be as specific as possible when defining your ideal user (lead). The more specific you are the more targeted your messaging can be. In our real estate example, I am going to use this real estate listing site in NYC. If I click through to one of those properties I can see the broker’s name, email (as a link from his name) and phone number – that’s the data I’m after!
Step 2 & 3: Extract the data and get it in a spreadsheet
I’ve combined steps 2 and 3 together here, because they are closely tied to the same process.
To get this data I could use a number of different options. The simplest way to do this is to build a Crawler, which will then go to each part of the site and pull data from all the pages that match the ones I train it on. This means I will end up with a big list of names and contact information which I can export into Excel, CSV or Google Sheets.
That’s great, but Crawlers only create static data sets, which means that to get new data from this site I would have to re-crawl the whole site – and that would take a while. Instead, I can do something a tad more complicated by building an Extractor to one page. Then I use the URL pattern of that page to generate all the other URLs for that site and use this batch search Google Sheet to pass all of those URLs through the Extractor. This has the benefit of being able to quickly refresh whenever I need to.
A quick note about getting the email addresses. You’ll notice, if you visit the page, that the email address is displayed as a link to the estate agent’s name. When I map this data, I need to make sure I map it as a link. It may look like I’ve only mapped his name, but when I export the data into Excel or Google Sheets, I will get one column with his name and another column with the text of the link – in this case his email address.
In this particular example, I would also need to do a bit of data cleansing, because many of the properties are being sold by the same estate agent so I am likely to end up with a lot of duplicates. This is easily done in either Excel/Google Sheets or most mass e-mailing software like MailChimp.
Contact those leads
Use the data you collected to create a conversational, extremely personalized message to send to each lead. Seriously. Make it freaking personal. I CANNOT emphasize this enough. Something like this should give you an idea of how to begin:
Hi [first name], I was browsing [website name] and I came accross your profile. I noticed that you mentioned [profile keyword], and I thought you would be interested in what we do….
Then start sending out your messages. Be creative about the channels that you use – email isn’t the only way to contact people – try other channels like Twitter, text message, et cetera.
It’s fine to automate your messages, but don’t send out too many at once – you want to avoid appearing spammy. And remember that you are starting a conversation with a real person and you need to be able to respond and engage as people start replying to you. If you send out 1,000 messages and you get 1,000 responses you will be swamped. 10 messages a day is a good start and go from there.
Eat your own dog food
At import.io, we actually followed these exact steps to bring in new users. We’ve created a platform that allows anyone to turn a website into data without the need to write any code. A key group who benefit from our platform are developers, they can save a lot of time and effort using Import.io instead of writing code to get web data.
There are lots of developers on oDesk, so we built an Extractor to all 13,000 who mention “scraping” as one of the services that they provide. We pulled this list of users into a spreadsheet. Then, we created a personalized message template inviting them to apply for a real job on oDesk that requires the use of import.io. The message also quickly outlined the benefits of using our platform over traditional methods and included a link to our website.
Quick tip: use Google URL Builder to send out your link so that you can track how well each different campaign is doing. You can also shorten the link using the Google URL Shortener. If you are using Google Apps for Business you can use your own domain name, which makes it look less spammy.
Next, we built a connector to oDesk, this time to the messaging system. The API logs in to oDesk, navigates to an individual user’s profile and sends them the personalized message. Every time a user follows the link to our site, we can follow them all the way through to account creation on our platform in our own analytics.
Using this method we have begun experimenting with getting 1,000s of quality leads to our site.
Credit where credit’s due
Props to Matt Ellsworth from Storefront who pioneered a lot of these methods for lead generation. If you want more information on how to use his methods for your business, you can take his Udemy course or come take his workshop at the upcoming San Francisco Sales Hacker Conference and Workshop.
Content marketing continues to be red hot, and the reason is simple – it works.
However, there’s a problem with it. The problem is a lot of people mean a lot of different things when they use the term content marketing. The result is that the term is overly broad, and that leads to discussion in which we’re all using the same words but those words have different meanings. And that causes problems.
We need to apply some rigor to defining content marketing. Otherwise, everything can be considered content marketing – everyone who ever put together an ad campaign will surely tell you that it is made up of “content.” And if everything is content marketing, then nothing is.
Earlier this year I inflamed plenty of folks with my post These Things Are Not Content Marketing. The premise was that not all content is content marketing.
So, how do we define content marketing? Better yet, how does the industry define it? Here are seven definitions, starting with the folks that should know best, the Content Marketing Institute.
They define content marketing as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience—and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
I think this is way too broad. I suspect CMI’s intention is to build as big a tent as possible, but in my opinion we’re past that. Content marketing has too many bandwagon hoppers, and this invites them all aboard. Don Draper could’ve looked at this definition in 1963 and said “yup, that’s what I do.” And, to me, that makes it just good old marketing. I’m looking for more precision in my definition of content marketing.
That’s good. Really concise, which is always good. Unless it’s too concise, and therefore open to a little too much interpretation? I’m probably quibbling.
“Content Marketing means creating and sharing valuable free content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content you share is closely related to what you sell; in other words, you’re educating people so that they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you.”
I like this a lot. Copyblogger is always so plainspoken with everything they write. They use simple language to convey big ideas. This definition implies that content curation is part of content marketing, and that’s a good twist.
“Custom publishing marries the marketing ambitions of a company with the information needs of its target audience. This occurs through the delivery of editorial content – via print, Internet, and other media – so intrinsically valuable that it moves the recipient’s behavior in a desired direction.”
This is a good definition. “Editorial content” implies non-promotional, although perhaps not overtly enough for my tastes. “Intrinsically valuable” is a crucial element to great content marketing.
“Content marketing differs from advertising in two fundamental ways. First, content resides on owned or earned media. If there’s a media buy involved, it’s advertising, not content marketing. Second, content marketing is a pull, rather than a push, strategy. Content doesn’t interrupt, it attracts.”
Rebecca has literally written a book called “Content Marketing” so she certainly knows what she’s talking about. This definition is a couple years old; I wonder if she’d still draw such a stark line between content marketing and paid advertising, given the rise of native advertising. More recently, she wrote about content marketing’s role in native advertising.
“The creation and distribution of journalistic, audience-focused content that helps people do their jobs or live their lives.”
That’s what we think. The word journalistic raises the bar on quality by implying a more rigorous approach to content creation, based upon research and interviews. Audience-focused takes out the self-promotional content that some other definitions include – again, to us, that’s just marketing as it’s always been.
Agree? Disagree? Tweet at us @ScribewisePro with your thoughts.
99% of the time, the written word is the chosen medium for companies doing inbound marketing. However, as I’m sure you know, not all writing is created equal. I’m certain you’ve encountered bad content online that isn’t doing anyone any favors. Content marketing is an investment, and you definitely deserve to see a return!
When you want to increase the profitability of your business, you can’t just email out a newsletter or post funny memes to your Facebook. You need to engage in strategic content marketing, with a goal of spreading the right messages to the right people. You need to draw potential customers to your website, and intrigue them with your brilliant words.
We are going to break down exactly how to craft content which will help you generate leads and customers. Making sales and acquiring new revenue is the purpose of marketing, right? After reading this blog, you’ll know how to create content that converts (or how to hire amazing writers to do it for you).
Give Them The Meaning: The Substance of Content
Writing is more than haphazardly throwing words up on your computer screen. Creating content isn’t about finding just the right mix of keywords and outbound links. In fact, sloppy SEO practices may attract a bit more traffic to your website, but not the kind of traffic that can lead to sales!
Remember, website traffic can be a vanity metric. Pure site visits don’t always equal sales. Even if your content is being read, you’ve also got to gauge your success by measuring your new leads and customers. The following list covers some key quality factors you should know and understand:
1. Be Relevant
You’re an expert at what you do, right? That’s not always a good thing when it comes to creating content your customers will value. The most important thing to understand when it comes to relevance is what matters to your customers.
Your content should always provide value to your target persona. What triggers your customers to come searching for your products? What are their priorities? Think of the problems that they face, and use your blog to present solutions to these issues.
2. Lose the Fluff
Adding a bunch of fluff to your blogs will only bore or annoy your readers. What do I mean by fluff? It can often manifest itself in the following forms:
Terrible jokes or references to irrelevant insider information.
Using your blog to publish “common sense” or low-value information.
Content that isn’t plausible or credible because it lacks resources.
Incredibly general information that’s not directly applicable to your audience.
If you’re struggling to find a few hundred words to say on a topic, the idea might not be worth publishing in the first place. Your audience is likely very busy, so indicate that you value their time by committing to only publishing high-value information.
Finally, be ruthless about editing your blogs to remove any hidden fluff from your content!
3. Remember to Sell
This is such a simple piece of advice, but so often bloggers forget they’re ultimately trying to generate leads and make sales. If your readers weren’t considering purchasing your products, they wouldn’t be researching your company in the first place.
Your blogs should never be an overt sales pitch. Your readers are most likely trying to perform research, not make an immediate purchase. However, it’s crucial that you take the time to write an enticing call-to-action at the end of your articles. These could include requests for ‘sharing the post,’ ‘subscribing to the blog,’ or ‘downloading your eBook.”
4. The Devil’s in the Details: Mind Presentation
The success of your writing is often only isn’t only about the main ideas and themes you choose to include. As much of 75% of your performance is related to how you treat small details. People notice mistakes, and small issues can detract from your company’s credibility.
You can lose subscribers, leads, and sales if you’re not careful enough. Here are some of the most commonly overlooked aspects of content marketing:
Spelling, grammar, and word usage.
Ensuring your links are working.
Citations and remembering to include resources.
Correctly-sourced images to engage readers.
5. Check Once, Check Twice, and Check Again
In an amusing and horrific story, Vox Media stated that the U.S. government lost $38.4 million, which wasn’t true. This statement was caused by a misplaced comma. Even more frightening, the BBC estimates that online businesses lose millions of dollars in sales due to spelling and grammar mistakes.
Grammar and spelling mistakes can be a major problem for business owners trying to create online content. Taking the time to remove 100% of your errors is difficult if you’re trying to edit your own work. Also, many business owners don’t have a bunch of time, money and energy to invest in sniffing out mistakes.
Editing can feel unnecessary and like a complete waste of time if you’re too busy. If your business is growing quickly and you’re struggling to fill orders, does it matter if your content includes a typo or two? Well, it actually does.
Don’t forget, but bad grammar and spelling can literally change the meaning of a piece of content. A blogger recently gave an example where they discussed a “cleaver marketing campaign” when she actually meant to use the word “clever”. No matter how small the mistake, it can result in a breakdown of communication with your reader.
What can you do to solve this issue if you’re tight on time and resources?
Outsource your editing to a grammar and spelling-savvy professional
Never edit your work immediately. Step away from the content so you can return with fresh eyes.
Always have at least one person read over your content before publication, if possible.
6. Use Smaller Paragraphs
In any Journalism 101 class, students learn that short paragraphs are crucial for readable copy. Humans have limited attention spans. Even the most avid readers can get tripped up on long sentences and paragraphs. Write with the understanding that your content will be skimmed, not read-in-depth by most of your audience.
Make paragraphs around two to four sentence long, so that you don’t lose the attention of potential customers.
Avoid extraneous details that just aren’t relevant to what your readers really need to know.
Avoid “walls of text” by using bullet-pointed or numbered lists to convey important information.
7. Be Consistent
Adding new, unique and compelling content can help draw traffic to a website. It also informs visitors that your business is alive and well, and can respond to their questions and concerns.
Do you feel confident about a company when their social media or blogs haven’t had a fresh post in months or even years? Absolutely not, and neither do most other people. Here are some ways to establish consistency among your marketing practices:
Decide realistically how often you can post on your site and your social platforms.
Stick to your schedule. Publishing occasionally is far better than stagnating or letting your blog go entirely quiet!
8. Be Resourceful
Adding high-quality resources to your work will enhance your credibility to readers and search engines. By citing your sources and research, it indicates expertise and that you’ve put some serious time into your content.
While adding resources may feel time consuming, it can only be to your advantage as a marketer. People today are often quite wary of organizations that over-promise and under-deliver. Using studies, statistics and news stories will add credibility to your claims about your product and its benefits.
TLDR?
Before you start marketing your business you may think that content marketing is easy. I mean, how hard can it be? You just throw some words on a page, and bam, see increased traffic to your site.
It may easy to write a blog or social media post, but it is not easy to do so in such a way that makes sales. If one is willing to put in the work to follow these quality content guidelines, you can make your website or blog a success:
Be Relevant
Lose the Fluff
Remember to Sell
The Devil’s in the Details: Be Careful About Presentation
Check Once, Check Twice, and Check Again
Use Smaller Paragraphs
Be Consistent
Be Resourceful
It’s a lot of extra work, but you’ll find the benefits are entirely worth it.
How do you increase the quality and success of your content marketing efforts? Share your tips in the comments!
The Internet of Things is on track to be an absolutely huge market. 
One of the many challenges small businesses face today is integrating and managing Millennial employees with other generations of their workforce. Millennials are the newest generation of workers, and when they enter the job market they have specific expectations that your other staff may not. It’s important to remember that the Millennial generation is the future of your company, so now’s the time to learn how to manage this generation effectively to keep them performing at the highest levels within your company.
Encouraging referrals is the best way to grow your business. However, as a new entrepreneur, to obtain referrals you have to have clients. Getting that first client can be one of the biggest challenges in getting your business off the ground. Fortunately, there are things you can do to entice new clients into hiring you.
What do your customers look like today? Have you considered what they might look like in 2020?
Content marketing continues to be red hot, and the reason is simple – it works.
