Rnordman

Great teams don't just happen. Those teams that fit together like puzzle pieces are the result of hard work and thoughtful leadership. But what exactly are the things you need to look for when putting together a highly effective team?

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You have to have a certain level of zeal—a certain eagerness to get things done, to take charge of your own life and your own business—in order to succeed as an entrepreneur. Many entrepreneurs jump at any opportunity they receive to take their business to the next level, boosting its visibility and its reach. Content marketing, then, is something that has caught on with entrepreneurs just as much—if not more—than it has among more traditional business professionals: Startups and brand new companies often lead the pack when it comes to utilizing cutting-edge social and inbound marketing techniques to cultivate brand authority and consumer loyalty.

Before jumping into content marketing, however, it is important to pause and reflect—to set the right goals, parameters, and methodologies for your content marketing endeavor. Entrepreneurs may begin this process by thinking through these five questions.

What do you expect to get out of content marketing?

Before launching any content marketing efforts, make sure you have a reasonable goal set. There are many goals that you might set—increased consumer trust, brand exposure, or brand authority—but it’s important to be clear in determining what your expectation is. Also understand that content marketing, though highly effective when done right, does not generate overnight success in most cases; it’s more about long-term relationship.

Where do you start with content marketing?

The answer to this question will hinge on your answer to #1. Basically, entrepreneurs working on tight marketing budgets will need to prioritize which channels and platforms they wish to adopt. You’ll almost surely want a company blog, but beyond that, your decisions about Facebook and Google+ versus Twitter and Pinterest will depend on what you’re trying to accomplish. Make sure to study up on each platform and understand their relative pros and cons.

What does your brand stand for?

Even a startup company has a culture, an identity beyond the products you’re selling. Is your company a lifestyle brand? Do you focus on affordability? Sustainability? Technical prowess? Your brand’s identity will shape the content you develop.

Who are you trying to reach?

Who’s your target demographic? What are their values, and the problems they need to have addressed? What would a buyer persona look like for your targeted/ideal clients?

Should you do content marketing yourself, or outsource it?

Finally, think through the practical dimensions of content marketing. Content marketing is typically the kind of important yet repeatable task that is best farmed out to a professional, rather than left on the plate of the business owner—leaving you to focus on the things that only you can do to add value to your company.

How Not to Sell Your Drill is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

Your pitch might explain how your drill is different, the different results it produces and why you chose to design your drill the way you did. But it won’t be enough to sell your drill.

How Your Drill Is Different

Your drill might be faster than your competitor’s drill. It might be smaller and lighter. It might have more power. It might last longer than any other drill on the market. It might work in climates where other drills fail. Your drill might use less power, and it might be easier to operate.

Your drill might be a one-of-a-kind marvel of modern engineering and design.

How Your Drill Produces Different Results

Your drill might produce more holes of different sizes than any other drill. It might produce holes that are so finely crafted that the holes from other drills simply cannot compare. And maybe the drill you sell can punch holes through substances that other drills just can’t penetrate.

Your drill might produce dramatically different holes.

Why You Make the Best Drill Ever

The owner of your company may have struggled with other drills and decided to build a better one to help other people make better holes. His father may have been a carpenter, and he may have always dreamed of easing his father’s burden at work. It may be your company’s mission to elevate the craft of woodworking by creating the finest tools on Earth.

The reason you make such a fine drill might speak to the highest values. But none of this is enough to sell your fabulous drill.

Why Does Your Client Need Holes

Your drill has no value unless someone needs holes. In your case, your drill has no value unless someone needs holes of the highest quality. None of the features, benefits, or values above matter otherwise.

Your first job is to find someone who really needs holes, or to teach someone why one of their greatest strategic needs is holes.

GUEST POST

Above: Don't let the slide showing your advisory board look this crowded.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

It’s common practice for early stage startups to recruit an “advisory board” to expand their capabilities without adding more employees to their team. This is all well and good, but usually in early stage startups, the amount of people in the advisory board outnumber the amount of employees.

If not properly presented, this slide can slow down the flow of a pitch without providing any value.

The “Loaded Team” Slide

Usually founders include a slide in the beginning of their pitch decks describing “The Team.” This makes sense, since in early stage startups, team quality is the most important criteria for investors.

However, given that this slide comes before all the rest, you can begin to lose investor’s attention when you discuss the advisors’ backgrounds in too much depth.

Furthermore, when there are too many advisors, investors may look at this slide with skepticism. If it’s not clear how involved the advisors are, this can look like a weak bandage covering up an incomplete team.

Make it Concrete

Don’t waste too much time talking about your advisory board without context. It’s enough in the team slide to talk about the founding team, and to mention you are “supported by multi-disciplinary advisors that complement your team with XXX domain expertise.”

Beyond mentioning that, in specific slides you can speak about areas that domain experts on your advisory board are helping you with, and you can include their pictures and mention how they are helping you. This makes the flow more concrete and natural.

Another format is to list the “critical success factors” of the business, and then show how the team and advisory board members match up to these. The way VCs look at an advisory board is as a checklist that helps to fill the core team’s gaps, so this format visualizes that.

This may sound picky, but given that your “team” slide is the most important for early stage investors, it’s worthwhile considering how to present your advisory board in an optimal format.

Jonathan Friedman is a partner at LionBird, Israel and Chicago’s most active Digital Health investor, and blogs about the Venture Capital Point of View at VCPOV.com.

It is essential that all frontline sales professionals fully understand both the value and importance of rigorous objective qualification, not just at the front end but right the way through the sales cycle. Qualification is a process not a single event and everyone  should be fully skilled in asking a small number of basic questions regarding precise requirements, time scales, budget, competition etc. before they are prepared to reveal their price and delivery.

As the value of the product, service or solution increases, the depth of the qualification should increase proportionally.

External salespeople have the opportunity to meet with prospective customers and it is far easier to extract information face to face than it is via the telephone or conference call however, it is vital that some initial answers are elicited prior the that first exploratory meeting in order to ensure that the meeting will be worthwhile to both parties. With sales costs spiralling upwards and sales time becoming limited, considerable prudence is required on the part of the salesperson.

During that first meeting, a considerable amount of detail can and should be uncovered e.g. background and history of the company, the key individuals, the composition of the DMU (Decision Making Unit) if there is one, timescales, budget, competition, current suppliers, buying criteria etc. Only by rigorous questioning will the salesperson be able to answer the following questions when they get back to the office:

Is there a requirement/need that my company can satisfy?

Is it winnable?

Do I want it?

The very best sales professionals will not pursue the opportunity – after proper objective analysis – if the answer to any of those questions is “No”. They will rather invest their precious selling time seeking out and closing opportunities that will provide a profitable return on that investment.

At the very highest selling levels i.e. strategic “big-ticket” selling and marketing, clearly the sales cycle is much more protracted, complex, and typically moves through four stages i.e.

Rigorous opportunity assessment
Develop a strategy
Present the solution and re-assess the opportunity
Gain formal commitment, sign the order and develop

Having a tilt at every windmill that presents itself is neither practical nor profitable.

Qualification is a core competency that every professional salesperson should take on board as quickly as possible. Working to the maxim that “All business is good business” is unrealistic and totally erroneous.It takes just as long to work an unprofitable opportunity through the pipeline only to lose it at the death, as it does a profitable one – the ability to determine which is which, can have a huge impact on your ultimate success in a front-line sales role.

Latest News: This week’s Top Sales Magazine is out today: Leading social selling pioneer and evangelist, Barb Giamanco is in the interview hot-seat, and Linda Richardson provides the lead article – “Finding Your Creativity in Unlikely Places” Plus we have great contributions from Tamara Schenk, Jeffrey Gitomer, Kevin Eikenberry and Jeff Perkins.

As usual, we announce this week’s Top Sales Blog Post and Top Sales Article, and in my editorial, I ask “Are you about to be commoditized or will you survive?” Not subscribed? You can register for free here – http://bit.ly/14I6umn

Today’s consumer is bombarded with thousands of marketing messages every single day.

In order to stand apart from the noise, many brands are shifting their marketing budgets out of paid advertising (that we all ignore at staggering rates) and into content programs.

These branded content marketing hubs are creating owned media properties that deliver value to brands over time vs. the short-term blips from a Superbowl ad or any short-term campaign.

What are the best practices for standing out in today’s attention-starved world?

First, brands need to take a step back and document their content marketing objectives.

For some brands that may include common marketing objectives like brand awareness and lead generation. For others, it might mean higher-level goals, such as GE and their approach to publishing stories on today’s leading innovations that improve lives. There’s also RedBull and their content about extreme adventures and sports.

But whatever the goals are, too often brands fail simply because they don’t document these goals. Despite the fact that every business is producing content, too few brands have a documented strategy. And most feel they are not getting the results they should from content marketing.

I can’t seem to be able to say this enough: It all starts with the goals. Breaking through the noise then becomes simply a part of the measure of success.

The 3 Vs of Content Marketing Help You Break Through The Noise

Once a business has documented their content marketing goals, success comes down to things like the volume of posts, the variety of the content, and the value it provides your audience. Volume. Variety. Value.

Start With The Value You Provide Your Audience

Let’s start with value. One of the biggest mistakes content marketers make is they make the topic of the content too much about their brand, the products they sell or why they are better.

And while this content has a place, most businesses have too much of it. And your audience tunes this out. In order to break through the noise, a brand has to create content that is 100 percent for the audience.

Take the brand out of the story.

Make the customer the hero.

And your audience will pay attention. Value is not negotiable in today’s hyper-competitive information landscape.

Today’s Consumer Is Always On. Is Your Brand Part Of The Conversation?

The next challenge to consider is volume. In today’s digital, social, mobile world, we are always-on and always connected.

We don’t wait for news or interesting stories. We filter out what is not relevant to us and we tune in to the sources that provide a consistent experience, in the channels we use, with the formats we like, with content we want to read and share.

My advice to brands is to start with a volume goal, such as “publish one piece of content every day for each major topic.”

And then figure out how to achieve that goal in a quality way and with the budget you have.

And look for technology that can help with workflow approvals and editorial guidelines.

Variety Is The Spice of Life And The Lifeblood of Content Marketing

The other piece of the puzzle is variety. Once you have determined how to produce valuable content on a consistent basis, it’s time to start mixing it up.

Text-based articles are the foundation of almost every content marketing program. Your audience is looking for information. And your brand can be the source of it.

But we are seeing an explosion of visual content. Videos on YouTube. Presentations on slideshare. Infographics. And images, images everywhere on Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and more.

In order to break through the noise, the successful content marketing program will have a plan for creating visual and longer form content. And some adventurous brands are even moving beyond informational content into entertainment and comedy to add variety and drive loyalty with their audience.

Even Great Content Needs A Little Push

Once a business has considered the volume, variety and value of the content it publishes, paid media can be deployed on the best content that people want to read and share vs. the ads that no one wants.

And your brand can begin the process of breaking through the noise on a consistent basis.

What do you think?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Image Credit: HackNY.org

The traditionally secretive culture of old-school venture capital may be changing. These investing firms have increasingly been hiring community managers to help foster a network within their portfolios. And what started with a few spreadsheets is now evolving into new technological platforms and tools to connect these companies. What’s more, VCs are starting to share information with each other in order to provide their portfolio networks with aggregated data on what other startups are doing to succeed.

Keiretsu reinvented

Though the VC community manager position is relatively new, the concept of portfolio networks has been around a long time. Many VCs embraced the idea of “keiretsu” in the ’90s, during the first dot-com era. Keiretsu is a Japanese business practice that’s been around since the 17th century. It refers to the cultivation of a strategic network of businesses that work symbiotically. During the first dot-com wave, a number of VC firms, including big players like Kleiner Perkins, cultivated these sorts of relationships among their portfolio companies. Some even called them “families” of companies.

A lot of the ideology surrounding keiretsu practices faded with the dot-com crash, but some elements stuck around. Boundary-pushing VCs with tons of capital, like First Round Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, are champions of internal networking, matching their companies to needed resources, and to each other, for support. That’s helped these firms differentiate themselves from older VC firms that have a less aggressive approach to portfolio networking.

Community managers and tools

But in the last few years, an increasing number of firms have hired community managers to oversee portfolio company needs and relationships. “Before, it was way more partner-centric,” says Danya Cheskis-Gold director of community at Spark Capital. She explains how Spark used to do a CEO summit, which brought together all of the chief execs within the portfolio plus the VC partners. Now, it’s her job to be heart of things, connecting Spark’s portfolio companies and creating opportunities for them.

In the last year Cheskis-Gold has covered a lot of ground. To leverage big data and help get the largely early-stage companies that comprise her portfolio up and running, she’s opted Spark’s companies into a GlassDoor-like database — as yet unnamed — that collects information about startups. It gives them access to insights on how other startups are handling their business — for example, what kind of salaries they’re offering.

New York-based Union Square Ventures participates also in the database. “If there’s a gap in our data, we can connect [our companies] to other firms that consult or provide the resources that they need,” says Brittany Laughlin, the general manager at USV. Laughlin’s firm has developed tools in-house, including a system that companies can use to shares vendor reviews. They also use Yammer, though not in the traditional manner. USV has morphed the Microsoft-owned corporate social networking tool into a medium for topical group conversations among its portfolio companies. So, for example, all the IT departments from USV’s companies can ask questions and otherwise share knowledge with each other.

But it’s the firm’s participation in the national database that signals the new trend. A growing number of VCs seem to be more open about information they used to guard very tightly. Traditionally, VCs keep a lid on details about their companies. They don’t want to divulge proprietary information, and they want to maintain any competitive advantage when it comes to information about new startups. This means data anonymization is an important component of information sharing between VCs. “Collective knowledge is really powerful, but we’re trying to make sure that information is providing value for our companies and that no one feels like they’re giving up trade secrets,” says Laughlin.

Sharing and caring? Maybe … maybe not

The added value of participating in this kind of database may seem obvious, as being able to answer portfolio companies’ questions may be the difference between signing a deal and not. But individual company information must be private. So for VCs the ratio of risk to benefit has to be favorable if they’re going to contribute to a crowdsourced data pool.

“No one is going to participate in a community if it’s not of value,” says Dan Spinks, CEO of CMX, which hosts the CMX Summit. Spinks recently did a study on the rise of community managers at VCs. It notes that big firms with lots of resources, like Y Combinator and First Round Capital, tend to hire their own developers to build internal networking platforms. YC has an email list, for example, that connects its current companies with 1,400 alums. With that many sources of data on an internal network, there’s no real benefit to joining a national database.

But small VCs are already making do with technology hacks and the few available internal networking platforms like GroupTie and Dashboard. For this reason, they may be more inclined to participate in a national database. “There’s definitely been a shift towards sharing,” Spinks notes. “They’ve all seen a lot of value in the collaborative aspect.” When I spoke to community and platform managers at FirstMark Capital, RRE, and Lerer Hippeau Ventures, they echoed the importance of providing startups with broad sets of data. At the very least, community managers and the networks they preside over are forcing venture capital firms to reconsider what constitutes value — and how they can best deliver that to startups.

Union Square Ventures is a venture capital firm based in New York City. The company is a small collegial partnership that manages $450,000,000 across three funds.... read more »

Spark Capital is a venture fund based in Boston, Massachusetts. Our investment focus is on the conflux of the media, entertainment and technology industries. Spark Capital invests in companies that it believes will benefit from the rap... read more »

My favorite day of the week is Wednesday.

That’s the day we #brandchat. That’s when I learn more from the BRANDidos (a term of endearment for those who participate in brandchat) that I do any other resource.

During one of our chats we discussed brandjacking. It can happen to a business brand and have a devastating effect on the conglomeration of personal brands that support that business.

First, what is a brandjacking? During the chat, we defined it in three ways:

• Every time someone unofficial represents themselves as speaking for a company or,
• To hijack a brand to deceive or divert attention; often used in abusive or fraudulent activities devised for gain at the expense of the goodwill, brand equity and customer trust of actual brand owners or,
• A brandjacking by a consumer refers to how the consumer perceives or uses your product or service. A smart company will learn rather than fight this positive reaction.

What went wrong?

Here’s some excerpts from the chat recap:

shotgunconcepts: Brands MUST plan for an online crisis response in the same way they’d plan for a traditional crisis. Q1 #brandchat

karenswim: Q1: This underscores why it’s so important to have clear internal communication policy before going public #brandchat

techguerilla: @brandchat Without moderation risk can never be eliminated. Everyone, whether individual or big corp. is vulnerable to it #brandchat

What can your personal brand learn from this?

John Antonios said it best, “when personal branding goes wrong – they let “personal” get in the way of professional.”

Having a human voice in your online interactions does not mean that it’s not a professional human voice. Exuding your personal brand doesn’t mean to “just let it all hang out”. It does mean be authentic, be real and true to your brand attributes and be as professional and engaging as you would be if we were standing across from each other in conversation at a networking event.

While some want to point to social media being the problem, it isn’t. The core of the problem is having ill equipped communication practices and neither the company culture nor system provided to effectively train the person(s) manning the keyboard.

Although not every company sees this. I still see companies who will shut down a social site or turn off commenting in hopes of silencing the issue, concerns or opinions.

You cannot shut down the voices and comments of a community. You can address it. Engage it. Be human about it as if they were connecting with you face-to-face. And, to listen, discuss and value their community’s voice will provide a strong foundation to create an engaged and loyal community.

To bury your head in the sand and pretend you can “just have a do over” is not real. To evolve your brand is real.

For personal brands in the employ of companies, if you’re in the front line of public relations:

1. Have an escalation policy
2. Know how to handle a crisis and be well trained or offer suggestions on what possible scenarios can be. An airplane never hopes for a crash landing, yet their personnel is prepared for one (one board and on the ground).
3. Prepare way in advance by putting all the tools and resources in place.
4. Pay attention to customer needs.
5. Respond to customer needs –personally AND professionally.

Communication is faster and we have to be smarter.

And, personal brands, if you don’t have these things in place then ask for them. It will not only protect your company’s brand – it will protect your brand. Your reputation is still, in many respects, built by association.

If you’re a personal brand doing it alone in the social space, be sure to:

1. Have a plan as to what you hope to do, experience or gain from being involved with any social network.
2. Be able to make a focused commitment to that network (if you’re not going to be involved with the community or effectively use a communication tool then don’t use it at all).
3. Have a definite “friend”ing, following or fanning policy. Put direction in your connection. For example, if your personal profile is your personal profile on Facebook – then keep it that way. Know that you won’t be connecting with anyone that you meet at a conference or some random people who happen to be in your same geographic area. Know what you will say when people ask to connect with you socially. Will you send them to LinkedIn? Twitter? Or, have a Facebook business page profile set up yourself as an individual professional? Know before you go.

When is the last time you actually read any of the mouse print that flashes on your screen during a television commercial? In many instances, you may not have willingly ignored the disclosure; it is more likely that it was impossible to read. Many commentators and regulators have questioned the value of this kind of […]

Author information

Kyle-Beth Hilfer

This monthly Social Media and the Law column is contributed by Kyle-Beth Hilfer. Kyle-Beth is a New York attorney with over 25 years experience in advertising, marketing, and intellectual property law. Kyle-Beth helps clients leverage traditional media, social media platforms, and mobile technology while minimizing legal risk and preserving intellectual properties. Kyle-Beth understands the business and legal issues involved in launching on social media, including influencer marketer management, user-generated content, and privacy issues. She regularly advises on specific marketing techniques, including sweepstakes, contests, premiums, rebates, and loyalty programs. Ms. Hilfer graduated with honors from Yale College and Harvard Law School. She maintains her own practice and is Of Counsel to Collen IP.

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Operation Full Disclosure: Why It Matters to Social Media Marketers by Kyle-Beth Hilfer -Maximize Social Business

Insight Selling: Essential Skills for Shaping and Creating Sales Opportunities

Opportunities to grow your business with a major account come in three different modes: Respond, Shape, and Create.

When you respond to an opportunity, the customer has already identified the issue, the solution, and the expected outcomes. Now, a provider is sought. This is the most reactive style of account development. The scope and budget are usually already set. Pressures on both price and competition are often high. By no means should you ignore such opportunities. Flexibility is a key element of business. You have to be able to respond as well as initiate. But, responding is not the best way to develop and grow a business relationship.

High-performing sales professionals tend to focus more on shaping opportunities. This is where you help the customer in defining the issue, the most likely outcomes, and even possible unintended consequences. This is a much more proactive style of account management — one where you may be able to preempt the competition. And even though some opportunities might initially appear to be “respond” situations, if you have a different opinion or broader view, you might be able to shape a respond opportunity in new ways.

The third selling mode is the most ambitious and creative. Here you create an opportunity. You bring forward insights to challenging issues that are not even on the customer’s radar but will likely have an impact sometime soon. This is the most proactive style of account development, and it is the most difficult because you are teaching the customer something new and are creating both the need and an opportunity. This allows you to become actively involved in defining the scope and budget. You may even be able to shut out the competition and forestall or lessen price pressure.

So, how do you identify or create opportunities from insights?

• Tie the insight to a challenging issue. Where do you find those issues? Marketing should provide you with a list of issues that your client’s industry is facing — or, do the research yourself. Then, you select the challenging issues that will resonate the most with your client.
• When positioning the risk of the typical approach, choosing your success stories, or describing the impact that your company can have on the issue, use numbers to grab the client’s attention and enhance credibility.
• Asking questions to understand the client’s situation, goals, objectives, initiatives, success factors, and thoughts is important. However, when it comes to positioning insights, you need to communicate a point of view. Clients need and expect you to have a perspective. This is what elevates you to a Trusted Advisor position. Your point of view should be concise, easy to understand, and defensible.
• Presenting both sides of the issue shows that you’ve given thought on all aspects of the issue upon which you’ve based your point of view and conclusions.
• The risks you are highlighting are linked to a current approach, which the client may be taking. Don’t exaggerate these risks, and if possible, quantify the negative consequences.
• Word choice is so important, as the client may be feeling pain or resistance around a particular issue. Avoid directive language, such as, “You should …” and instead, make suggestions with phrases, such as, “Imagine if …” and “You have several options. For instance …”

Clients do not usually just come up with great ideas all by themselves. They rely on others for ideas. Those that consistently provide good ideas establish credibility over time and become a part of their inner circle. They have the opportunity to develop into a Trusted Advisor. It is important to understand that an idea does not always need to be fully developed. Instead, providing an idea or point of view provides a starting point from which a discourse begins and a collaborative discussion can take place. It is through this collaborative process that clients can refine their thinking, establish their own point of view, and determine their course of action.

When you don’t present a point of view, what are the risks to your personal brand? Proactively sharing a point of view is perceived as valuable by a client. The opposite is also true. When you consistently don’t present a point of view, you risk the perceived value of your brand being diminished. This limits your ability to elevate your relationship into being a Trusted Advisor, and over time, you risk becoming irrelevant to your client. This opens the door for competitors to fill the void, and if they are able to consistently provide insight and ideas, they will ultimately win the business, and you will be replaced.

Selling modes are important because they affect where you enter the customer’s buying cycle. The earlier you enter the buying cycle, the better.

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Help your Sales Team Sell More Effectively by Selling with Insights 

Click the following to learn more about Richardson’s Selling With Insights sales training program.

The post Insight Selling: Essential Skills for Shaping and Creating Sales Opportunities appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

I get it. No, really. I do.

We’ve all been at that point where you work super hard at putting out each and every blog post … but even when it goes live, you don’t see any real results from it. So you look over your blog post once again, looking for mistakes you think you might have missed in the first rounds of editing.

But there are none to be found … or so you think. The simple truth is that each and every piece of writing – no matter the quality, length, or current success – can be made better. There is always room for improvement. The sooner you realize that, the better.

To help you maximize that potential for growth, here are 4 must-know writing tips you should definitely add to your arsenal.

1. Don’t Be Afraid To Break “Conventional” Writing Rules

The neat thing about blogging is that it’s all about innovation and creativity. The very idea of a “web-log” is, when you think about it, revolutionary. It only came about because of outside-the-box thinking.

You’ll never be a great blogger if you’re always trying to conform to all the different rules that have been thought up. True – there is a set of simple best practices of which some are good to adhere to, but creativity should definitely take preeminence in your posts.

2. Write More Authoritatively

If you’re a typically timid person, then this mistake will be harder to pick up for you (particularly if you’ve written before for print publications that demanded more objective, “crowd-pleasing” writing with no real voice). Authoritative writing beats lethargic, weak writing any and every day.

Whenever you state what you believe to be a fact, state it strongly. State everything strongly. You’re the expert in your niche, which is why people are reading your blog. So start acting, writing, and talking like an expert! Be ready and willing to stand by everything you say.

Write succinctly, use statistics, facts, and figures wherever they will add most value to the post, and write in a self-assured manner.

3. Stay True To Your Audience’s Reading Level

One of the biggest mistakes in writing is using language that doesn’t fit the reading level of your target audience. Under one set of circumstances, that could mean using language that’s simply too high for your audience. Anybody who reads your blog post has to labor through ten dollar words and five syllable jumbo-terms.

In another case, that could also mean using language that is too babyish for your average reader. Particularly if your blog is meant to appeal to a more professional audience (e.g. one that has been college-educated and is on its way to getting a Ph.D.), then you have to make sure that your blog post reads right for them.

Research shows that the typical blog should target a writing level suited to a 7th-8th grade educated audience. Again, much of this will depend on your particular blog and the niche it’s in, but if you’re unsure what you should be aiming for, 7th-8th grade is the norm.

4. Edit A Day Later

We’ve all heard of this tip before, but I doubt that most of us really take advantage of it.

After you write your first draft of a blog post, try setting it aside for a day and then coming back to it the next day with fresh eyes and a red pen, ready to edit it into a masterpiece.

If you choose the alternate route and edit your blog post right after you finish writing it, bad things can happen (not that they always do happen, but they can).

When you’ve just written the first draft of something, your mind is probably still spinning from everything you’ve just put down on that paper. And since everything is still so fresh in your mind, you won’t be able to pick out the minor mistakes and intricate inaccuracies that you would if you came back to it a day later.

A lot of preparation goes into sponsoring a marketing event. In the weeks prior, every working minute should be dedicated to preparing your booth, perfecting your messaging, and communicating internally to make sure everyone on your team is 100-percent ready for the big day…right?

Wrong.

If you want people to visit your booth, you need to let attendees know you’re going to be there — ahead of time. Giving your prospects and clients a heads up is an important part of event preparation — heck, finding out that they’ll be able to speak with a representative of your company face-to-face could be the entire reason they choose to attend the event. In addition to notifying them of your presence at the event, you’ll want to let them know:

• where they can find you (including your booth number, if you have one)
• how their attendance could benefit them (include a strong value proposition)
• any other pertinent details, such as exciting giveaways or prizes for attendees.

Let’s take a look at three ways marketing automation can get your message where it needs to go.

Email Prospects & Clients in the Area

One efficient way to notify clients and prospects of your event is through targeted email messages sent during the months and weeks leading up to the event. Marketing automation can allow you to segment your lists to reach attendees (and potential attendees) in a number of ways.

For instance, trade shows normally take place in big cities. Send out an email to a list of prospects who live near the site of the trade show so that they know your company will be in the area. Position the email as a friendly reminder that you’re stopping by, and include a note that you’d love to see them at the conference. If you have the bandwidth, offer to meet up one-on-one with any prospects who can’t make it to the trade show, but who are still interested in speaking with you.

Email Prospects Using Complementary Products

Are some of your prospects already users of other products that integrate with your own? Send these prospects an email to tell them how your product can complement their current setup, and let them know that you’ll be present at the trade show if they want to come see your product in action. For example, if you have a product that integrates with specific CRM systems, you could use your marketing automation system to send a targeted email blast to prospects who are already using those particular CRMs.

Schedule Social Postings

As always, social media is an effective method for reaching your audience in a way that’s cost-free and requires minimal effort. In the months prior to the event, take a few minutes to schedule out messages using your marketing automation platform’s social posting feature. Target the event hashtag (hey, you never know who might be checking out the hashtag in advance), and look for other events or discussions that pertain to your event topic, using these hashtags to expand your reach to new audiences that might be interested.

What are some other ways to use marketing automation to communicate with event attendees before the big day (or week)? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section!

Looking for more best practices information? Pardot’s free guide, 9 Ways to Leverage Marketing Automation at Events, will walk you through the event marketing process, the benefits of using automation at events, and a few tips and tricks for getting the most out of your tool (and your event investment!).

Image credit: http://cdn.business2community.com/

The introduction of SMAC has a multitude of impact in growing digital businesses. The combination of social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) technology offers an opportunity for marketers to expand their market opportunities. Digital marketers view SMAC as a business paradigm that renders small business more capable of becoming competitive in their industry by integrating four marketing models to enhance business productivity and efficiency.

The SMAC business model fueling business startups

Startup businesses see the opportunity of using the SMAC business model to become highly competitive in the field of marketing. The model pulls the ingenuity of social marketing, mobile marketing, data analytics and cloud technology. These four elements are the future areas of enterprise marketing that can help small businesses grow their ability to embrace a more holistic digital marketing model to optimize their sales and enhance the return of income (ROI) for their business.

In todays digital marketplace, customer loyalty is not solely influenced by a brand’s popularity, but rather more on how a business is responsive to the needs of the consumers. Buyers are getting clever when choosing the best products and services to pay for by relying on information such as reviews, product information and practical demonstrations. The consumers give more weight on the opinion of fellow consumers and does not solely rely on the marketing pitch made by businesses about their products and services.

Thus, the thrust in digital marketing these days is the trend of making their enterprise more responsive to their customers by delivering to them their needs and preferences and cultivate customer loyalty through social and mobile marketing. The word of recommendation from real people takes the limelight in the modern digital marketplace and small marketers are given the equal opportunity to improve and grow their competitiveness by using data and social analytics and cloud technology to strengthen their marketing performance. By using social, mobile, analytics and cloud business models, startup businesses enhance their customer base, business performance and responsiveness and build their brand value within the digital marketplace.

The SMAC platforms and tools used to grow startup businesses

Image credit: http://dwbassociates.com/

By using the SMAC platform, small business capabilities expand to reach a wider customer base marketing using different marketing strategies, tools and technology. The integration of the social, mobile, analytics and cloud solutions provides business startups more room to explore their marketing strategies.

The Social Platform

The social platform allows small business to gain better customer insights by engaging them to share their ideas and opinion about products and services. Marketers can utilize the information to understand the demands of their customers and identifying their likes, shopping preferences, spending habits and purchasing behavior. Small businesses have the opportunity to build a connection between their products and their customers, thus giving them more room to identify a specific target area for marketing. The social platform allows a business to gain customer views that they can leverage in tailoring their marketing services and product improvement.

Social tools are used to enhance the ability of a business to accommodate their customer feedback, insights and suggestions. The social media networks provide a wide latitude for customers to share product information, reviews, opinion and recommendations. It can also be used by small businesses to encourage social marketing to promote their brands by leveraging on social shares and recommendations that can help spread a good word about their business in the social media community.

The Mobile Platform

The mobile technology transformed the lives of people by offering them a convenient channel to use for gathering information, shopping, communicating and even make business transactions like online marketing and internet banking. Mobile communications enhance small businesses because it provides them a cost effective way of marketing their business and at the same time overcome the geographical boundaries to market their products and services. Businesses experience no boundaries in terms of marketing their business and it becomes an essential means of enhancing the customer shopping experience.

The mobile platform becomes a lucrative digital marketplace, especially for business startups. Only smaller capital is required for maintaining an online shop where to reach global customers. Moreover, with the flourishing numbers of mobile users and devices like smartphones and tablets, the majority of consumers is making more purchases from online businesses with the preference of shopping convenience. This is a market opportunity that marketers cannot ignore. Mobile tools allow small businesses to connect with their target customers and personalize their shopping experience and consequently build customer loyalty using mobile apps.

The analytics technology

The analytics platform in digital marketing offers business startups the opportunity to leverage on discovering customer values, shopping patterns and behavior and search engine optimization. The biggest impact of analytics in business startups is the enhancement of their business relationship with their customers. Using the analytics technology, marketers can obtain data that will help them identify shopping patterns and preferences of their customers. With the immense data available, small businesses can exploit potential areas for marketing opportunities, identify areas to leverage in order to build customer loyalty and make their business more responsive in delivering products and services tailored according to their customer preferences.

By using analytic segmentation tools, small businesses can integrate data analytics to their social and mobile marketing strategies. This can essentially optimize customer experience and shopping experience. Designing mobile apps become easier by knowing how to personalize the shopping experience of their target customers. This makes small startup businesses highly competitive and at par with their larger enterprise competitors.

The Cloud Technology

Using cloud technology enhances the small business agility and competitiveness in terms of enhancing business productivity and ROI. The cloud enhances the collaborative efforts of marketers to grow their productivity and business responsiveness to customer demands and needs. Small businesses become globally competitive and able to grow their business productivity and management process. By sharing and exchange of information by the clouds, optimal business activities are enhanced and marketers becomes more responsive in making real time business decisions based on the data analytics gathered through the cloud platform.

GUEST POST

Image Credit: via Universal / Illustration by Tom Cheredar

You’re sitting in your office late on a Friday, alone. Hot wet tears are streaming down your cheeks. Your mobile phone rings constantly. Your CTO, shareholders, and everyone else is calling to learn how the meeting went. The COO who joined you on the conference call has already left and is taking Monday off.

And, of course, now there’s a dilemma.

After months of prep, tech and business development meetings, megabytes of pre-due diligence material, an ambitious joint business case, synergies, frank and open discussions about feelings and lifelong goals, dinner with the proposed acquirer’s leadership team, and a process that seemed to be going so smoothly, you have just hung up on the buyer’s VP of corporate development. They are excited about your joining the family, fantastic opportunity, etc. and they are happy to offer you precisely 40 percent of what you were sure your company was worth.

How do you explain this to your shareholders? Your co-founders? Who is to blame for this life altering disappointment? Why you? Why now?

Fear is a powerful negotiating tactic

There are a few important things to be learned from this scenario. First, Bovee’s law of mergers and acquisitions: if there is going to be bad news it always comes late on Friday afternoon, just as you are making plans for the weekend. You receive a call from the chairman of the board at 4:53 p.m., and you know, immediately, from the tone of her voice what she is going to say. It always happens on Friday.

Second, driving value in an acquisition has nothing to do with all that stuff you were working so hard on the last few months. Value in an acquisition is driven by fear. Period. What is going to motivate a CEO to spend top dollar for an acquisition? Feelings? Synergies? A really, really good imaginary business case? No. The threat of being heckled on stage at her keynote because she publicly lost a perceived major advantage to a competitor at the last moment. I’m not going to name names, but I just saw this happen a few weeks ago, and it sucked.

Let’s go quickly back through the list I gave you in “The Exit” part 2: you have an ambitious global expansion plan, a data room, protected your IP, cleaned up your cap table, and made sure key people are happy. You have been practicing the pitch and the story relentlessly, obsessively with your co-founders, and have set up your internal corp dev team and “wargamed” all the scenarios and negotiating points. You were ready for this. You were so ready, but now it looks like it will be impossible to close a 60 percent gap. The buyer is willing to issue a term sheet, and wants 30 days exclusivity, but the only alternative seems to be to back away from the table. And the disappointment is going to hit your team hard.

Everything that you did is important, but the key piece is to manage the acquisition so that you can create significant and true leverage. And the best leverage is to have other acquirers sitting eagerly at adjoining tables.

Timing is everything

Timing your discussions with competitive bidders is absolutely essential, and it is by far the hardest part. This is where investors and board members come into play. In certain cases, you might even want to consider retaining an M&A professional, because this piece requires full-time dedication. In the early stages, you, as a founder, shouldn’t be too aggressive, and if you are the CEO, and particularly if you are also heavily involved in sales for your company, you may want to hand off the early M&A outreach to someone else. You’ll get involved soon enough.

This part of the process is very much like enterprise sales, except the beginning is much easier. And the middle is much, much harder. You need to open a big pipeline of potential acquirers, and reach out to them all systematically. There are a few factors that are working against you here, and which make acquisitions rare (and which make timing an acquisition to maximize your leverage not only rare, but nearly impossible): there are probably only one or two dozen companies who are realistic acquirers for your company, but among this set there is a high probability that the subset having both budget and having earmarked companies in your sector as strategic targets for that year is zero. That funnel gets so narrow so quickly that you really need to put energy into the early stage.

Making the initial calls is easy. Many people, battle-hardened from years of enterprise software sales, will be familiar with negotiating access to decision makers. That doesn’t happen so much in M&A. Get your chairman of the board or one of your VCs to call their CEO. ‘This is about a potential acquisition…’ There, that stage is done. You have negotiated access to the power person.

I get a lot of questions from founders about trying to quantify the early M&A process: what is Google buying this year? How much did they spend on companies in our sector? What about Apple? And you can quantify these things to a certain extent, but they don’t help much beyond building the initial pipeline. M&A is particular for each company, and is tightly wound with company culture. It’s a real black box, in many cases. For instance, Google does spend lots of money acquiring early stage companies. And they do lots of deals, but they are also quite well known for acquiring talent. In general, the deals are not often big. And if you are talking to a large acquirer like a Cisco or Yahoo!, they have often developed their shopping list for that budget period long before your conversation started. You will have limited visibility or influence. I’m sure your technology/team/market is amazing. The VP of corp dev probably doesn’t care.

Sorry, no intermission for M&A

For similar reasons, the middle part of your M&A pipeline development gets hard. This is where you should be personally involved, or someone who pitches your company really, really well. In the best case, the acquiring CEO will delegate representatives from corp dev, the CTO team, business development/strategy and possibly product in early meetings to assess the opportunity. In the worst case scenario, you will find yourself talking to a corp dev associate who was an investment banker two years ago. In this latter case, it probably isn’t a deal. You found yourself outside the core acquisition bucket for that budget year, and they kicked it to an associate. It’s not a priority, or your first pitch was really poor.

When you find yourself on track with the right teams, schedule your time very carefully so that you can bring them up to speed in tandem. If you need to slow things down, don’t delay responses or deliverables: make sure you appear totally on the ball, and have your material prepped. Respond to data requests within 24 hours. But push meetings out if you need to. You are very busy. Your schedule doesn’t open up for 2.5 weeks.

If this process works out well, you might find yourself in acquisition discussions with 2 or more competitors, and this is the ideal situation. If you have a growth scenario (fundraising and maybe an IPO somewhere down the road) that is nice, too, but the threat of a competitive acquisition drives the strongest leverage. But you do also need to handle these discussions diplomatically. Don’t be too aggressive. Figure out ways to signal, discreetly, and as early as possible, that you are in discussions with other buyers. But don’t throw it in anyone’s face. They will back off quickly. If you can signal this well it should help you avoid the ‘disappointing initial offer’ scenario as much as possible. It can save you some tears and a ruined Friday night.

What to do about a disappointing offer

If you do receive a disappointing offer you can back off graciously. And often a clearly worded email restating the positive sides of the acquisition, the synergies (technical and cultural) the palpable excitement among your founding team, and the significant upside in the joint business case, can work late-stage miracles in pre-term sheet discussions, particularly (and often only) if coupled with some serious competitive leverage. If you have the guts to walk away the buyer will sense it, and you can quickly qualify or repair the deal.

But also be aware that there are limits. I’m sure you have done your homework as part of the development of your M&A pipeline, but look carefully at annual M&A spend and deal sizes of your potential acquirer. You have already agreed on an internal strike price. Reality check it, and if it looks like you could be headed for disappointment, get together with your team immediately and explore alternative scenarios.

At this stage, all the elements should be in place to start with a reasonable offer. There will be some verbal back-and-forth, standard negotiating, and you will probably spend a week or two arriving at what both parties consider a fair price and high-level terms. This is when the buyer will issue a term sheet.

Term sheet time

The term sheet is often surprisingly light after all of the process you have been through. It comprises an outline of the deal, is usually non-binding, and gets you ready for the final purchase agreement which is where the real fun begins.

Things to pay attention to in the term sheet: the buyer will almost always ask for a ‘no shop’ period, during which you can’t talk to other acquirers while the term sheet is negotiated. Obviously, push to keep this as short as possible. If you can get two weeks, that is awesome.

The term sheet should also include the purchase price, deal structure, escrow and ‘hold backs’, if any; there might be some HR stuff, termination, governing law and a few other points. You will spend the ‘no shop’ period negotiating all this. One important consideration: make sure that the terms are crystal clear, and do NOT under any circumstances, assume that you can change agreed terms simply because the document is non-binding. Attempting to do this gives a very bad signal to the buyer.

The buyer’s perception of risk will rise considerably in later stages of negotiation over the purchase agreement, and screwing up early communication and then attempting to backtrack during later, expensive legal wrangling can kill deals. Fast.

***

So, in a perfect world, you have managed a competitive acquisition process, it is Friday afternoon, and you just got off the phone with the acquiring VP of corp dev. The offer was only 17% off the strike price you had agreed with your internal corp dev team, and there is every certainty you can close the gap. And, in case you can’t, Acme SaaS and Widgets want to schedule a corp dev call next week. You give your COO a big hug and you both stroll off into the night to have a drink and plan your weekends.

This is part three of a four-part series on start up exits by SpeedInvest partner Erik Bovee. For more from Bovee, check out part one, and part two.

Erik is a founder and general partner in SpeedInvest, an early stage venture fund.  Previously he was VP of Business Development at Wikidocs, acquired by Atlassian, head of mobile enterprise messaging at VeriSign and European General Manager for eMeta Corp., acquired by Macrovision.  Erik holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford.’

Technology-based businesses, with a few notable exceptions, have an unfortunate and self-limiting habit of selling on specification - and of believing that positioning their product or service as faster, cheaper or better is the key to making customers want to buy.

Whilst there are visible examples of that strategy working in rapid replacement cycle consumer markets like smartphones, there are three obvious problems with that line of thinking in high-value considered-purchase business-to-business situations.

Three problems with a "best product" positioning strategy

The first is that in a lame attempt to differentiate, vendors end up claiming that their offering is “better” in an artificial or irrelevant dimension that is of no interest to the prospect and has no positive impact on their buying behaviour.

The second is that in a technology feature-function arms race in a competitive market, no one vendor is likely to be able to sustain “better” indefinitely as each generation of product leapfrogs the previous one.

The third and most important is that intelligent buyers recognise that on any rational analysis every vendor can’t possibly have the superior offering, so they are inclined to discount all these “better” claims for what they are: irrelevant and unsustainable puffery.

Standing out from the crowd

Basing your positioning on claiming to be better usually results in lazy and ineffective marketing. So how should serious business-to-business vendors aim to stand out from the crowd?

The clue lies in the word “differentiation”: if you are selling to an intelligent audience, your prospects are smart enough to either ignore or devalue messages that sound similar - and that’s why bleating out “better” won’t grab their attention.

Differentiation = acting and behaving different

What they are listening for is something that sounds different - for memorable messages that stand out from the crowd and which intrigue them enough to want to learn more. That’s why any successful attempt to differentiate must focus on the things that are truly different about you.

Given the rapid evolution of technology, differentiation based on specific product features is hard to sustain and in any case much less relevant when your buyer is thoughtfully evaluating a long-term investment rather than a one-off transaction.

Under these circumstances, any claims of current-generation product superiority are much less relevant than your prospect’s confidence in your long-term approach - and that’s where true sustainable differentiation must be established.

If you are to set yourself apart from your competition in a sustainable way, you need to convince your prospects that you have a demonstrably different and provably superior approach to addressing their most important issues.

Your attitude - and their experience

This is less a function of visible product functionality than it is of your company’s attitude, approach, architecture and philosophy. It’s about the lasting experience the prospect can expect if they choose to do business with you.

While short-sighted product-centric companies are focusing on what they do, their smarter competitors are explaining why they choose to do what they do, and how their approach delivers a superior experience.

It’s an approach that Apple has absolutely nailed in consumer markets, and it’s a philosophy that was convincingly communicated in Simon Sinek’s memorable TED video, “Start With Why”.

Different = superior experiences and outcomes

If you really want to stand out from the crowd, you need to start by showing how and why you are different, and only when you have established this then go on to explain how this drives superior long-term experiences and outcomes for your customers.

In the long run, having a sustainable and provably differentiated approach will always out perform short term positioning based on shiny baubles and spurious claims of product superiority. And curiously enough, it seems to drive superior results in the here-and-now as well.

There’s now more data collected about our every interaction in the digital world than ever before. According to a Washington Post story, “brokers use ‘billions’ of data points to profile Americans”. Marketers with access and an understanding of how to use that data can create a distinct, competitive advantage in their ability to provide relevant offers to the right buyers at the right time.

Dealing with data beyond spreadsheets and reporting to actionable insight about customers that enables everything from predictive analytics to truly automated marketing automation are some of the promises of what’s next in content marketing for B2B companies. What used to seem like science fiction is now becoming a reality (as shown by the Future of B2B Marketing eBook we created for MarketingProfs).

For more insights into the role of data in the B2B Marketing mix, here are insights and predictions from 3 B2B smarties from some of the top business marketing brands on the web: Marketo, Silverpop (an IBM company) and Lattice Engines.

Predictive Analytics: Right Time & Place

Loren McDonald  @LorenMcDonald
Vice President, Industry Relations at Silverpop, an IBM Company

The future of B2B marketing will combine a prospect’s social graph, online behavior, content interactions, demographic and firmagraphic information with scoring, predictive analytics and marketing, content and salesforce automation.

In the future, explicit and implicit data will be fed into a predictive analytics engine to score prospects based on authority, influence, vendors used, interactions and relationships.

When a prospect signs up for a white paper or Webinar, for example, explicit and implicit data will be fed into a predictive analytics engine that will score the prospect on authority, influence, vendors used, content they’ve interacted with, relationships with your company, etc.

The analytics engine then will feed the content and marketing automation engine that delivers each content type in the channel the prospect is most likely to engage.

Complete B2B Predictability

Amanda Maksymiw  @amandamaks
Content Marketing Manager at Lattice Engines

Predictability is what is next in the world of B2B marketing.

Marketers are already able to use sophisticated machine learning and data science techniques to identify which customers are most likely to churn, which prospects are most likely to buy and which products to pitch to existing customers.

With time, this will expand to all aspects of marketing and marketers will be able to predict which content will perform best, which channels will convert the most, and which campaigns will be the most successful.

Big Data: Future of Marketing Automation

Jon Miller  @jonmiller
VP of Marketing and Co-founder at Marketo

Marketing automation today is primarily about tracking email and website behaviors, and then running email campaigns based on that behavior (e.g., lead nurturing).

In the future, marketing automation will use big data and analytics to predict the right action to take at any time.

In the future, marketing automation will get (big) data from numerous sources, including mobile/location, social streams, and connected devices.  It will use analytics to predict the right action to take at any time.

And it will let companies interact with customers and prospects over various channels including email, but also mobile push, ad retargeting, personalized websites, custom social audiences, and more.

Thank you Loren, Amanda and Jon!  I can’t wait to see their presentations at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston later this week.  Don’t worry, if you aren’t able to make it to #MPB2B, you can see what you missed with on-demand access here.

For more futuristic B2B Marketing insights, there’s a handy eBook for that: Future of B2B Marketing eBook. Inside you’ll find a mix of B2B marketing predictions that range from the practical to those that are so far out there, they’re literally science fiction.

How are you incorporating big data into your B2B marketing programs?

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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2014. | The Role of Big Data in the Future of B2B Marketing | http://www.toprankblog.com

Fast fact: Practicing inbound marketing results in 54% more leads than outbound marketing, according to HubSpot. But what exactly is inbound marketing, and how does it differ from the way most small businesses market themselves?

If you’ve ever been to one of those networking events where small business owners mingle and make contacts, you’ll probably know this guy: the “pusher.” The pusher shoves his business card in your hand, makes idle small talk that somehow revolves entirely about him, and disappears only when he detects a new victim he can push his card to.

Luckily, this type of event also happens to be the natural habitat of the “puller,” the one who earns your attention by taking an actual interest in your business. She offers tips and advice to overcome your challenges, and volunteers to send you some useful info if you give her your email address.

Those two characters, ladies and gentlemen, are the best examples of outbound marketing and inbound marketing. The first refers to traditional marketing that’s based on pushing and “interrupting” consumers via cold calling, flyers, and emails (as well as billboards and TV/radio spots for big companies). Problem is, studies show that consumers are becoming more and more resilient to that type of marketing: They throw away flyers, ignore mails, and even worse, don’t even see banners anymore, let alone click them.

So what does affect consumers these days? Well, according to a study published last year, 81% of customers go online and read before they make purchases. That’s where inbound marketing comes into play.

Inbound is all about pulling (instead of pushing) current and prospective customers with valuable online content they are already on the lookout for. This content could be text-based like a blog post, or visual like a video or infographic. The basic goals you’ll want to keep in mind are providing quality info to the consumer and finding the right way to connect to your product through that content.

For example, when you think about marketing ideas for restaurants, coupons and print ads usually come to mind. But why not use the best types of content these businesses can offer? For instance, recipes are some of the most popular online attractions, so it’s only natural for a restaurant owner to open a blog with unique recipes—and then use that blog to encourage readers to visit their restaurant. A beauty salon owner, on the other hand, can easily create helpful videos that teach viewers how to create certain hairstyles. That way, when a potential customer searches online for a specific look, they are more likely to discover the video star’s beauty salon—especially if the video is particularly popular.

Of course, if you have a mobile app, inbound marketing is a great way to get people to download it. When consumers read your useful content and then want to stay in touch, it can help to suggest that they download your app to access even more quality content. You can also add content channels like a newsfeed, Facebook, and Instagram to practice inbound marketing within your app.

Now that you understand the value and meaning of inbound marketing, here are eight simple steps you can take to start off on the right foot:

DEFINE
As many successful entrepreneurs will tell you, the key to success in life starts with defining what you want to achieve. Answer the following questions:

• “What is my goal? Do I want to raise sales, get more app downloads, or get more reviews?”
• “Who is my target audience? What are their age, gender, and hobbies?”
• “What types of content are they looking for online? What content will bring them actual value?”
• “What sort of content can I provide to offer that information to them? Should I write a guide, shoot a short video, or publish a blog post?”

Have a pen handy? Go ahead and write your answers to all those questions now!

CREATE
Once you’ve defined your goals, your audience, and the topics they’ll be interested in, you can start producing valuable content! A great way to start is by creating your own blog, as blogs are often considered to be at the heart of inbound marketing. You may want to use WordPress, a free do-it-yourself tool that allows you to create a blog, embed it in your existing website, and even get stats and data about your blog readers. If you don’t feel you have the skills to pull off strong written content, consider alternatives that show your expertise, such as instructional videos and product reviews.

SHOW
If you choose blogging as a core part of your inbound strategy, keep in mind that too much text could become tiresome for the average consumer. Use interesting and relevant images to spice up your post and make it much more attractive. If you’re a good photographer, you can use images you took yourself, but you can also use free images from sites like Wikimedia Commons (just remember to give credit where needed).

CONNECT
One of the biggest challenges businesses face is not creating the inbound content itself, but figuring out how to convert readers into paying customers. The key is offering an effective call to action (CTA)—that short sentence that directs your readers to click, sign up, purchase, or otherwise act on the content they’ve just read. To make your CTA successful, keep these two factors in mind:

• Style: Your CTA should be actionable and answer the consumer’s eternal question: “What’s in it for me?” For instance, if you’re writing a product review and your goal is to increase your app downloads, you could end with a message like, “For more professional product reviews that save you time and money, click and download our app,” followed by a hyperlink.

• Position: Your CTA should be placed in a logical place within your content. For example, let’s take a health food shop owner who set out to increase orders through his website. He decides to write a post about the best types of food for energy throughout the day, including relevant products from his shop. At the end of the post, after reviewing the products, it’s only natural for him to close with, “For all the products listed here and many more that’ll give you an energy boost, click here.”

SPREAD
Now that you’ve created your content, your major mission is to spread it to your customers. Remember your social media channels? Now is the perfect time to post your content on Facebook and Twitter. Not only will you reach your fans directly, but you’ll also supply them with valuable information they long for, the stuff social media marketing gold is made off. Make sure to ask your fans to share the content posted in your updates and tweets.

Got a newsletter or a mailing list? Take this opportunity to grab your customers’ interest by offering them useful content in their inboxes!

NURTURE
Inbound marketing is a lot like parenting: It takes time, care, and learning from mistakes to make the best of it. Just like a parent wouldn’t expect their child to start running in their first month, you shouldn’t expect to see significant results immediately. Sure, some of the customers will click your CTA, but most customers will come, read, and go—and that’s OK. Inbound marketing is about creating long-term relationships. Even if they haven’t bought your product on their first visit, if they now know you supply quality content, ultimately they will be more inclined to read your next piece. Provide useful content, and you are bound to see the results on your platform’s statistics page.

PERSIST
Instead of getting discouraged if the statistics say certain types of content do not click with your customers, take it as a learning experience and continue to experiment. Choose a different topic, place the images in another location, or make subtle changes in the CTA. In the end, you’ll find the perfect formula that suits your clients.

COMBINE
Inbound marketing is an amazing tool, but that doesn’t mean you should rely solely on it. Instead, combine outbound and inbound techniques to create a killer strategy that customers won’t be able to resist. For instance, send an email with a free how-to blog post and a promotional discount to help drive sales. The key is to always offer actual value and then top it off with a tempting promotion.

If the past couple of years are any indication (and I think they are), inbound is only going to become a more powerful force in online marketing—increasing profits, boosting app downloads, and creating customer relationships. For those businesses still living in the outbound-dominated past, now is the time to start using inbound techniques to better reach customers.

What are your inbound marketing tips? Share them—or any questions—in the comments below.

Let’s face it. It is easy for marketing and sales teams to get caught up and excited about generating leads. Unfortunately, over time these leads build up, and we can neglect to clean out the sales funnel.

The truth is – cleaning out your sales funnel ultimately results in higher ROI by focusing your resources on those leads that will move through your sales cycle quickly and ultimately become the loyal customers you love.  Not only will cleaning out your sales funnel do this, but you will also find holes in your conversion paths and identify opportunities to improve your sales funnel. Because many inbound marketers are already utilizing the technology and strategies necessary, they can be extremely helpful in cleaning out your sales funnel and adding to the bottom-line.

5 Ways Marketing Can Help Clean Up The Sales Funnel

1. Attract the Right Prospects: One of the best ways to clean up your sales funnel is to be proactive and attract the right prospects to your sales funnel. First, inbound marketers have spent time developing marketing personas to use in creating targeted content. This ensures that the traffic coming through your door aren’t bogging down your sales funnel.

2. Closed-Loop Reporting: Many companies have began to adopt marketing analytics tools and CRMs that allow them to have more technologically advanced reporting, but many have failed to integrate the two to get the metrics that really matter. With a closed-loop reporting tool like HubSpot, marketers are able to identify the channels, conversion paths, touch points, and timing that leads to ROI, which allows you to clear up your sales funnel.

3. Lead Segmentation/Qualifying: Marketers who understand the importance of targeted campaigns are already segmenting their lead database by needs, demographics and behavior.  This information easily allows you to easily qualify any leads who don’t fall into your target market.

4. Email Marketing: One of the quickest ways to clean out a sales funnel is to rid of those who simply don’t engage with your company anymore.  Marketers send out email campaigns, track the performance and can then use this data to remove any leads from your sales funnel who gone cold.

5. Creating Loyal Customers: Did you know that loyal customers generate an average of 80% of total company revenue?   While leadership, sales and other people or aspects of your company contribute to loyal customers, marketing has a pivotal role in keeping customers engaged. Since your sales funnel can be filled with new prospects and existing customers, it is important to keep both audiences engaged.  Marketing can help to create content that serves the needs of customers, which are usually different than the needs of prospects or leads in your sales funnel. This will ultimately keep your sales funnel full of loyal customers who bring you more revenue.

When is the last time you cleaned your sales funnel? Is it time to do a detox, but you don’t think you have the internal marketing resources to do the job?I Use the team at SmartBug as an extension of your team. Request a marketing assessment today!

With so many companies turning to visual marketing you need to create compelling infographics if you want to engage your audience and convert them into leads or sales. Infographics work extremely well, and this has lead to an overflow of infographics being created and spread throughout the web. Infographics tend to receive more social shares, which leads to more brand awareness as well as link earning.

With their immense popularity, your business should be using infographics, and aince everyone is using them these days you have to make sure that yours stands out if you want it to be successful. Not all of them will gain momentum and go viral, and today most infographics remain in the dark and don’t receive the kind of attention originally anticipated.

We have put together a list of 10 points to make sure tat you address when creating your infographic. Following this simple checklist will help you create an infographic that will be highly engaging and get your business the attention that you desire.

1. Start with a topic that is going to interest your audience

The infographic process begins with selecting a topic, and this is the most important part. You could have the best design, but if your audience isn’t interested in your topic the infographic will be a failure. The key to creating a compelling infographic is to come up with a timely topic that will really capture the interest of your audience. They need to want to engage with it immediately after seeing the topic.

There is always going to be new and exciting topics to describe in a visual manner throughout every industry. Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. What will they find interesting? What will they immediately want to engage with? A compelling topic will increase the chance of it going viral throughout social media.

2. Perform extensive research

Spend some time to really uncover interesting data for your infographic. Again, you could have the most beautiful design, but without amazing data and content your infographic will fall flat on its face. Make sure that the data you mine is highly relevant and interesting. Make sure that all of the data, from the beginning to end is compelling. You want to make sure that individuals that are interacting with it read the entire piece of content.

3. Simplistic designs allow you to present your message

Many businesses will assume that they have to create a wild mind blowing design in order to gain traction for their infographic. This is not the case at all. If you take a look at some of the most successful and viral infographics throughout the past couple of years you will see that they all feature a very simple design.

The goal of an infographic is to present complex data in a way that is easy to digest and understand. An overly busy design will make it harder for your audience to get the full message. Focus on a simple design that presents the data in a manner that is easy to understand.

4. Color selection is key

Use colors that work well together and match the topic of your infographic. Select a few colors and stick with that throughout the entire infographic. Random colors throughout will break the flow. You can use two or three main colors and then different shades of those colors. This goes back to what we just discussed above about keeping the infographic design simple.

5. Keep your fonts simple and uniform

When you create a blog post you maintain simple to read font and some structure with headings, correct? The same approach should be taken when outlining the text of your infographic. Avoid using hard to read small fonts. Remember, the goal is to attract eyes to your infographic, so make sure that the major points are easy to identify. Also, avoid using several different font styles – instead, use one or two and use different sizes to keep it uniform. When making a point use larger font size and colors.

6. Use standard infographic dimensions

There are two ways to go when designing an infographic, and that is vertical or horizontal. You want people to share and publish your infographic on other websites in order to earn links, so stick to the standard vertical dimensions. Not only are they easier to read, but they also fit perfectly into blog posts and can be read on mobile devices easier than a bulky horizontal infographic.

7. Make sure you keep a consistent flow throughout the entire infographic

An infographic tells a story, and if a story contains information that doesn’t flow correctly or isn’t consistent the reader will lose interest. Just like a blog post, it starts with a headline and then works down, with new points being highlighted. When putting your content and data together just remember that you are telling a story, so make sure that the flow doesn’t break.

8. Reference your data sources

When you are collecting the data for your infographic it is important that you note the source of the information, and cite that source on your infographic. If you look at some of the most popular infographics you will see that some will give credit in the design and some will list all of the URL’s where they obtained the data at the very bottom. Do whatever works best for your design; just don’t forget to cite your data sources.

9. Brand your infographic

If an infographic goes viral it can be a wonderful branding tool for your business. Make sure that you include your company’s logo as well as URL and other contact information at the bottom of the infographic. Make sure there is a call-to-action that signals your brand was the creator. Something like “infographic brought to you by” or “infographic created by” will work just fine.

10. Make sure your infographic is easy to share

In order for your infographic to gain traction it needs to easily be shareable. Include a social sharing tool that easily allows people to share it on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. Also, you will want to include HTML code at the bottom that allows website owners to simply copy/paste the code and display your infographic on their blog. This is a great way to earn high quality industry related links, so make it as simple as possible for others to publish your infographic.

Companies are investing more and more resources in creating great content, meaning the bar to creating great content is continually rising and that distributing said content is growing increasingly more difficult as well.

Looking to help as many marketers as possible become more agile and increase their team’s performance, we at Proof HQ decided to track our own content marketing efforts to see what was working best for us, as well as others, and pull together the best of what we’ve seen. Here are 13 of our favorite content amplification tactics:

1. Mention Companies & Influencers Where Relevant

Rand Fishkin suggests that everyone should ask, ‘Who will share this and why?’ before they even think of publishing a post. If you cannot come up with a clear answer, then your content likely needs to be reworked.

While the reasons people share content varies quite a bit, the likelihood of someone sharing an article from an author they genuinely admire is very high. So, sometimes it’s best to start with giving credit to companies and influencers where it’s earned.

2. Ask Influencers to Contribute

While earning a guest posting spot or convincing an influencer within your niche to contribute to your blog can be a difficult task, asking them to make a small contribution by way of a blurb or tip is not too much to ask and it allows you to include the brightest minds in your industry in your content.

For example, Vero executed this perfectly when they asked 15 email marketing experts to share their best email tip. Instead of starting from scratch, they now have quality content sourced from 15 individuals, several of whom have a large following and are recognized as very credible sources.

3. Give Influencers Something of Real Value

At ProofHQ, we’re huge fans of Ann Handley, so we knew she was releasing her book titled Everybody Writes months in advance.

Instead of just retweeting a post or two about her book a week before it released and then hoping that’d be enough value to deliver, we decided to conduct a podcast interview where we bought five copies of Everybody Writes and gave them away to people who left insightful comments on the blog.

In addition, we’ve been promoting that podcast and have been advocating Ann’s book to everyone involved in creating and promoting content.

The bottom line: do much more than is expected while delivering real value, and influencers will be much more likely to take you seriously.

4. Extract Shareable Pieces From Your Content

Very few companies actually take advantage of all of what their content has to offer. A blog post is worth so much more when you can share tweetable snippets (and allow your readers to share via click to tweet links)

Onboardly, a content marketing and digital PR shop for startups, created an amazing list of tweetable startup quotes in which they successfully combined several proven content distribution strategies into one awesome post. Over a year later, people are still referencing this post.

5. The Skyscraper Technique

What if we were to tell you that content distribution actually begins before the content is even created. Brian Dean from Backlinko is a content marketing and SEO mastermind. One of his most reliable strategies works so well because he’s willing to put in the work and focus on big content when others are simply looking for small, short-term traffic gains or give up on content marketing altogether.

In short, The Skyscraper Technique is a method in which you see what content created by your competitors and other people in your industry has been doing well by using tools such as Buzzsumo, SEMRush and Topsy. Then, take the best performing and most relevant piece, make it much better through more in-depth content and better design for example, and distribute like crazy by using the aforementioned tools to see who linked to and shared the content you improved in terms of content, design and depth.

If you want to use the Skyscraper Technique for yourself, read these two articles for more detail:

• How I Increased My Traffic by 110% in 14 Days
• The ‘Skyscraper Technique’ May Actually Improve Your Content Marketing

6. Engage With Niche Communities

While traditional and digital PR are still immensely powerful promotion outlets, genuinely engaging and providing value to relevant niche communities can be extremely rewarding. Plus, if your content is well-received, there’s always a chance that other blogs and media publications will syndicate your content.

For instance, if your core audience is digital marketers, then you should be active on:

• Inbound.org
• GrowthHackers
• LinkedIn Groups: Digital Marketing, Inbound, Marketing Leaders of America

If you’re targeting small business owners in general, take a look at these communities:

• BizSugar
• Yahoo Small Business Advisor
• Business2Community

7. Turn Your Content Into A Guide

Chances are good you already have a blog with lots of great content around a consistent theme. In an effort to repurpose and redistirbute the content you’ve already created, leverage a site like Guides.co to turn it into a guide for additional brand awareness and as a lead generation asset.

Frontleaf, a Customer Success Management Platform, took \content they created for their blog, which focuses entirely on Customer Success and how companies can implement CS strategies, and repurposed it into a guide on Guides.co, which exposes their content to a completely new audience, generating hundreds of additional sign ups without any paid promotion.

8. Natively Promote Your Content

Native advertising is a term that gets thrown around quite a bit, and many of us have our doubts about what exactly qualifies as native advertising. The good news is that when content actually entertains and informs people, without coming off as too ‘advertise-ey’, it usually performs much better than a traditional banner ad.

In short, native advertising is a paid placement of content that fits in with the layout of the site it’s on, usually without a clear call to action.

Thrillist, a men’s lifestyle publication, leverages native advertising to create compelling content that works for their business model, the advertisers’ goals and their readers.

Other ways to promote natively include:

• Facebook Dark Posts
• Promoted.com
• NamoMedia (mobile)

9. Focus On Creating Big Content

As mentioned, thinking about your content promotion strategy should come before you create content. To illustrate this point, WordStream put together a great visual showing that four percent of their content generates 85 percent of their shares and five percent generates 95 percent of their high-quality links.

As stated by Larry Kim, focus 20 percent of your time on creating fewer high-quality pieces of content and the other 80 percent on promoting that content.

Mackenzie Fogelson from Web Mack Solutions wrote a great piece explaining how they previously relied solely on blog posts, infographics and so forth until they turned to a big content piece and created a 147 -page guide book on building communities, which lead to significant earned media and credibility for their agency.

10. Buy a Niche Media Property

Buy an entire site? To be clear, this strategy does work best for larger businesses that have a clear proposition on who their ideal audience is, but buying a niche blog doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg.

Joseph Pulizzi from Content Marketing Institute has been a vocal advocate of this strategy, and I can’t say I disagree with him.

Owning a media property allows you to directly engage with your audience through content and establish your brand as a thought leader. It’s a strategy that should be taken with caution, however, as you don’t want to bombard this audience with advertisements, but rather see it as a platform to help your audience at scale.

11. Use Twitter Lead Gen Cards To Target Events

Jordan Skole, Director of Marketing at Ambassador recently released an article on generating high quality Twitter leads where he shared some great insights on targeting relevant events because:

• Conference attendees clearly have a budget
• Events are focused on a certain topic
• Participants are active on social media & searching for a specific hashtag
• Follow a predictable schedule

It’s best to distribute a guide, eBook, case study or something of value in exchange for an email address for this strategy to work best.

12. Reserve Additional Content Only For Visitors Who Share

Andrew Chen, a popular tech blogger known for popularizing the term ‘growth hacker,’ regularly writes about viral marketing, analytics and growth in Silicon Valley. As an investor and advisor in AppSumo, he wrote a free eBook titled Rational Growth which he put out for free on AppSumo that required visitors to share to one of their social networks to download, resulting in over fifteen-thousand downloads.

13. Use Snip.ly When Curating Content

Just like you want people to share your content, it’s always good to share others’ content (as long as it’s worthy of sharing). Curating others’ content doesn’t mean that you can’t bring additional value to your readers and benefit from the process as well.

Snip.ly allows you to create a banner that goes on the bottom of the content you share, in which you can then share a relevant piece of content that you wrote that will resonate with the same audience that the artice you’re sharing does.

If done right, you’ll bring your readers more value, help out the author of the article you shared, and generate more traffic to your content.

While creating great content is always a must, thinking about content distribution even before you create content is often an overlooked step and thus huge missed opportunity. Remember to always ask yourself, “Who will share this and why?” and have a clear answer before you hit publish.

What other content distribution strategies are you using effectively?

When it comes to marketing automation, content is key to attracting new prospects and nurturing them through the sales process. A white paper is one of the primary building blocks of your marketing automation strategy. Here’s how white papers fit into marketing automation, and how to build one:

Attract New Prospects

Marketing automation uses online forms to capture information about the leads that are visiting your website via search engines, online ads, and social media properties. However, most people don’t just offer up their name and email address online without getting something in return.

Offering a white paper on your website creates a give/get scenario. You can give your audience a great white paper that will educate them on an challenge and it’s solution. In return, they’ll give up their credentials, like name, email address, title, company size and other information. You get a new lead.

Nurture Prospects

Leads generated through inbound marketing are extremely valuable. By downloading your resource, they’ve raised their hand and said, “Hey, I’ve got a problem you can help me with!”

Once you’ve collected information about a contact through an online form submission for a white paper you’ve offered on your site, you have a fresh new lead.

The worst thing to do would be to let that lead sit on the sidelines, waiting for them to come back to your site on their own, or putting them on your generic email blast list.

Instead, marketing automation nurtures these leads with relevant content until they are ready to make a purchasing decision. With a white paper as a resource, you have a foundation of content for fueling marketing automation’s nurturing process.

You’ve already put a significant amount of content in your white paper, and have it well organized. To get more milage out of it for the nurturing process you can extrapolate on the main ideas to create blog posts, infographics, guides, checklists, slideshares, and other types of content to fuel a hyper-relevant email campaign to follow the download.

How to Build a Whitepaper

So what does a good white paper look like?

GOAL: The goal of a white paper is to be informative, educational and solution-oriented. It’s not meant to be a hard sell. Providing long-form information in an easily digested format is a doorway to building brand awareness among your audience and building trust in your brand.

In addition, while you want to educate and provide value to your audience, you don’t need to write a text-book or dissertation. Make it simple for your reader to understand the problem and the solution.

BRANDING: A white paper can demonstrate your thought leadership on a topic, and is a great opportunity to showcase your brand. The tone, look, and feel should match your branding and value proposition. For instance, at Hatchbuck, we provide simple marketing automation software to small businesses. It wouldn’t make sense for us to publish a complex white paper using overly-technical jargon. We keep our resources in line with our brand, not only following our visual brand guidelines, but also echoing our value proposition of simplicity by using simple language and organization to help small business owners be more effective at marketing.

ORGANIZATION:

Topic: choose a pain-point your audience has that you can address.

Problem: empathize with your audience by outlining the problem.

Solution: add value to your audience by outlining a course of action they can take to solve their problem.

Awareness: reinforce your authority on the topic and introduce your audience to your business.

A white paper is a cornerstone to your marketing automation strategy. Hit on an obstacle your audience is facing, and serve up a solution to drive new leads, and nurture them with relevant follow-up content until they convert.

Deciding how to market a business used to be simple. Your choices were direct mail, television, magazine, radio or billboard advertising. Now, choosing how to spread your brand can feel something like entering a vibrant street marketplace that’s teeming with colors and sounds and fascinating new things to try.

It does seem as if there’s always some bright and shiny new tool to attract our attention as marketers. But far too often we experience mixed results. Some businesses shine on Pinterest, for example, while others see pallid results. Some companies still funnel leads from Facebook, where others are floundering.

But amid the din, one tool has emerged as a channel that consistently brings excellent results: email. Carefully planned and skillfully executed, an email marketing campaign can garner a steady supply of qualified leads.

Why Email Still Works So Well for So Many

• Email is relatively non-invasive. Assuming you have not employed any unsavory tactics when building your list, the individuals on that list have given you permission to appear in their in-box (in the form of an email, of course.) This places you in a privileged position. Take care to use it wisely and you can steadily build a relationship with the subscriber—a relationship in which you become to your readers a trusted authority in your field.
• Email gives you the advantage of familiarity. When subscribers regularly see your company name in their inbox—even if they don’t open every email you send—they become acquainted with you and your company on a more personal level that cannot be attained with other forms of marketing. Since your subscribers have opted in, giving you permission to market to them, your message may not be as easily overlooked or disregarded as a banner ad, for example. But if their eyes do happen to land on one of your banner ads…well, there’s that familiarity again.
• An email campaign affords multiple opportunities. You can up-sell by suggesting products or services you believe your customers will appreciate. You can ask for referrals, which your subscribers can be confident in giving, knowing as they do the value that your company provides.

Keys to Email Empowerment

Every business is different, of course, and your email campaign will be unique to your value proposition. There are, however some universal guidelines that you can apply and use to build a successful email marketing campaign.

Establishing a list and blasting out a spate of emails will not necessary get the results that you’re hoping for. To keep a list engaged, businesses must provide value always, rather than simply promote their products and services.

While you definitely want to tell subscribers and customers about all the benefits of doing business with your company, you also need make it your mission to provide free knowledge and assistance at every opportunity.

This involves identifying every step, and each touch point that goes into developing a business relationship. And it requires diligent analysis to get into the mind of the prospect at each particular stage.

Once you’ve identified the natural touch points and opportunities, start creating your emails. You might begin with an email that is relevant to the situation; perhaps a welcome note, or a thank you for signing up instructions on what to do next.

Where appropriate, conclude your emails with a call to action and a brief statement that re-iterates, in a friendly manner, the value the subscriber will receive by taking such action. Vary the wording of your call to action. If  you create a tagline that is exactly the same, it will “disappear” to the reader who views the exact same line at the end of every email you send.

Be sure to regularly offer value. This can come in many forms; white papers, expert tips, free services or special discounts. Also be alert to opportunities for an up-sell, but always maintain a friendly and helpful manner, avoiding a hard sell.

Pulling It All Together

The most successful marketers integrate their email and telemarketing campaigns. If your initial contact with a lead is over the phone, send a follow-up email thanking them for their time. You can use this email to re-cap the benefits of working with your company, and invite the prospect to take the next step. If your first contact was via email, ask for a phone appointment. You can even use email as a friendly follow-up to your voice mail message.

Your copywriters should work closely with sales and marketing managers to analyze what works and make adjustments as needed. Carefully analyze the steps that led the individual to the place they happen to be in the sales cycle at each juncture. The team can then use these findings to determine exactly what information or motivation will take your prospect to the next step.

Creating an effective email campaign is a dynamic process that requires continual testing and tweaking. If a certain email in a series is getting little response, go back and add some sparkle to the subject line or infuse impetus into your call to action. For example, after reviewing the results of a particular campaign, you might go back and re-work the subject lines to capture more attention, or add a personalized post-script from the sales rep, inviting the prospect to contact them by phone or email.

Sharing is the first step of collaboration, receiving is a natural follow-up. Collaboration leads to receiving more than the sum of the given pieces. Across industries, peer-to-peer networks, communities and the sharing economy are based on this collaborative principle – you have to give to get.

For us at the MHI Research Institute, giving begins with sharing the highlights from our 2014 MHI Global Sales Best Practices Study. The year before, our research identified three attributes of World-Class Sales Organizations, each corresponding to a cultural component that drives the behaviors and attitudes of the organization. Building on the three organizational attributes – Customer Core, Collaborative Culture and Calibrated Success – as defined in the 2013 study, the analysis of the 2014 data identifies three categories of sales behaviors that define World-Class Sales Performance – Provide Perspective, Conscious Collaboration and Performance Accountability. Connecting those individual behaviors with the attributes of World-Class Sales Organizations creates a framework for a performance-oriented sales culture. A culture that knows how to connect and engage with customers, how to work together and what to measure, recognize and reward.

Provide Perspective is the next level of connecting and engaging with prospects and customers. The engagement and messaging principle is a pure customer core approach. It’s based on the customers’ situational context and the different concepts of each impacted stakeholder. Then, it takes into account that especially in complex buying environments, every customer makes every decision differently. This specific decision dynamic has to be well understood, before the sales team can map all these findings to the own portfolio of capabilities, products and services. Configuring a solution through the lens of the customer’s context, their concepts and their specific decision dynamic is the prerequisite to come up with a specific, customized solution that enables the customer to achieve their desired results and wins.

Conscious Collaboration begins with the customers. The purpose of collaboration is to achieve better results in a shorter amount of time. It allows individuals with different areas of expertise and roles to work together through a common language and strategic frameworks. Collaboration connects teams, organizations and companies. Collaboration frameworks are an approach to multiply individual contributions. Collaboration objectives are different for a strategic account environment compared to an inside sales team. Therefore, collaboration has to be defined specifically and that’s a sales leadership task. Sales leaders must establish guiding principles for different collaboration situations to create the foundation for conscious collaboration.

Performance Accountability is the metric that separates world class from all others. World-class sales performers hold themselves accountable for their customers’ success. They know that the customers’ success is the foundation of their own success. World-class sales performers hold themselves accountable along the entire customer’s journey. There is no walking away after a deal is closed. Instead, performance accountability means to identify even more possibilities to create add-on value for customers. Performance accountability means also to be accountable to the standards and expectations set by the front line sales managers.

From giving to receiving – this is where we ask you for your help!

The 2015 MHI Sales Best Practices Study is now open until the end of November. We kindly ask you to take some time to take our survey. The Sales Best Practices Study is the world’s largest survey for complex B2B sales, covering all regions, different industries and different roles in sales – now conducted in the 12th year.

What you can expect from the study as a participant:

• Timely business intelligence—exclusive, first access to the full study results when they’re published in Q1 2015
• A complimentary report from the MHI Research Institute, Perspectives on Productivity: The Next Level of Transparency
• Entry into a drawing for a World-Class Sales Performance Gap Analysis—an opportunity to take advantage of a service provided by the Institute’s research analysts that compares the participant’s organizational behaviors to those of World-Class Sales Performers as identified in this study

Click here to get to the study – it’s open through Nov 30, 2014.

Content marketers may not have cause to shout, “Lights, camera, action,” but in a way, we do work in an entertainment industry, of sorts. As Academy Award-winner and raconteur Kevin Spacey said in his keynote presentation at Content Marketing World 2014, “We’re all struggling to meet the same goal — to make a connection with the audience.”

So do you think about your content marketing job like someone in the entertainment business thinks about producing their next show? Spacey and several Content Marketing World presenters think that perhaps you should.

Have any doubts? Just look at the recent announcement from Marriott that it is creating its own global creative and entertainment studio with the goal of becoming the largest producer of travel content. Of note is that Marriott hired a former Disney-ABC television executive and producer to lead its initiative.

While most B2B, B2C, and nonprofit brands can’t make the level of investment Marriott has, all content marketers can improve their programs by recognizing how the job of a content marketer resembles the work done at a Hollywood studio. 

ACT 1: Cast the roles

Even before the movie starts, the screen flashes the names of the leads — i.e., the stars, producers, and directors. At Content Marketing World, Brian Clark and Jerod Morris of Copyblogger Media shared their thoughts on how those roles need to be cast and delineated for a successful content marketing show. (Note: They replace the “stars” with writers.) They say that by looking at content marketers’ roles through the prism of a Hollywood moviemaking machine, you can create clear objectives and understanding, and better shape the vision for your own content production:

• Producers are the strategists, who view content marketing as a big production that must support the business underneath it. A CEO at the movie company wants producers to create movies that audiences will want to pay to see. Similarly, B2B, B2C, or nonprofit CEOs want producers to create content marketing initiatives that align with the business’ goals.

Producers should not handle the actual content creation responsibilities; rather, they are charged with marrying the content marketing vision to the business’ overarching vision for success. “Don’t mix up the roles,” Clark and Morris advise.

• Directors give the content marketing production its context, then communicate, count, and coordinate it. Fundamentally, directors must break the content concept down into manageable steps. Then, they must share the actionable plan with their team so everybody understands the big picture — and what role each plays in making the big picture come to life. Directors oversee the creation and know that its results will be measured and evaluated by executives to determine if further content creation is viable.

• Writers or, to use a more all-encompassing word, creatives, bring to life the story that the audience will read, watch, and engage in.

When the credits roll on your production, who will be your writer, your producer, and your director? Ensure each role (as well as the supporting ones) is delineated and assigned well before your production begins.

ACT 2: Craft the story

For some insight on crafting the story, we turn back to the words of Kevin Spacey. “Good content marketing is not a crap shoot. It’s always been a good story,” he says. “The story is everything… it’s our job to tell better stories.”

Stories tap into the audience’s unfulfilled desires — the desire to be better versions of ourselves, personally or professionally. That’s the central thread of the human experience, Spacey says. When content speaks to that experience, the audience is engaged.

He offered his movie characters as examples, such as Lester Burnham in American Beauty, who threw off the conventions of suburban life. The audience stayed on the journey because they wanted to know what he would do with this newfound freedom. In the advertising arena, it’s the Nike Just Do It campaign, which speaks to the inner voice of people (often as they are sitting on the couch) who want to be stronger, healthier, or faster.

The critical element to any successful story, whether it’s a movie, a YouTube video, or a company blog, is to be authentic. Spacey explains that at least some part of the story must ring true with the audience, or be something that the audience members wish their own lives could be. “We live in a shiny world of spin-manufactured experiences,” Spacey relates. “It’s genuine experiences… [stories should] embody a certain honesty.”

Kevin Spacey at CMW 2014. Photo by Fallon Corporate Photo

Spacey also related a story of how Volkswagen (through U.S. advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach — now more commonly known as DDB) turned authenticity into a selling advantage. The German manufacturer brought the Beetle to the United States in 1959. The tiny, low-powered car ran in stark contrast to what U.S. manufacturers were selling and the American audience was buying at the time: large cars with high tailfins and wide lines.

DDB took a small budget and created a successful, black-and-white campaign, Think Small. As Spacey says, the agency fed into the audience’s expectations and didn’t try to make the Beetle something it wasn’t. Americans responded, and the Beetle became one of the most iconic cars of the 1960s and ’70s. (In 1999, AdvertisingAge named Volkswagen’s Think Small as the No. 1 campaign of all time.)

Netflix also didn’t try to turn its tent pole original series, House of Cards, into something it wasn’t. Spacey, who portrays Congressman Frank Underwood on the show, says the entertainment distributor was the only one who didn’t demand that they film a pilot in order to convince them to distribute the show. For an in-depth creative work like House of Cards, the arbitrary format of a pilot requires the diverse cast of characters to all be introduced with a cliffhanger at the end of 45 minutes. That formula can strangulate the show’s story, creating an inauthentic experience for the audience. “Netflix gave us enough runway for the characters to develop — we were not forced to compromise or water down,” Spacey says.

Retailer Gary Vaynerchuk was given similar leeway in marketing his family’s liquor store. At CMW, Copyblogger’s Clark and Morris shared the story of the creator of Wine Library TV. In 2006, Vaynerchuk began producing daily video blogs that, rather than focusing on his own store, instead discussed topics that might be of interest to his customers — from what wines pair with cereals to a conversation with hockey great Wayne Gretzky. Before he retired the show after its 1,000th episode, he had transformed his family’s business from a small liquor store with $3 million in sales a year into a Wine Library empire, with more than $40 million in sales. “That’s serious money,” Clark and Morris said.

“It’s media instead of marketing,” the duo continues. “Give people what they want instead of what they don’t want, and even try to fill a void.”

Or, as Spacey says, paraphrasing Frank Underwood: “There is but one rule: Hunt or be hunted.”

Couldn’t make it to Content Marketing World this year? You can still catch up on the biggest issues, ideas, and innovations in Content Marketing. Check out our Video on Demand portal for more info.  

Cover image by delphinmedia via pixabay.com

The post How the Entertainment Industry Can Influence Your Content Marketing Job appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Just a couple weeks ago, Offerpop, a market research group with a special knack for holiday marketing data, released a new infographic that’s packed with some must-know facts regarding social ad buying for this coming holiday season. Holiday Social Marketing Trends 2014 is shared in its entirety at the bottom of this post. We’ve touched on a few highlights – with commentary – you can’t miss out on below.

Who can marketers reach?

A lot of the $650 billion that’s expected to flood the market in the form of holiday spending this year comes from Facebook’s 1.32 billion users, Twitter’s 271 million users, and Instagram’s 150 million users. If you’re planning on social ad buying, you’ve easily got the audience. But how will you reach them? The infographic shares the collected opinions of 120 marketing professionals…

What should your social media management team’s goal be?

• 62% of marketers’ primary goal for social this holiday season is driving sales and extending brand reach.
• 19%… generate qualified leads.
• 13%… drive traffic to their website.

Where should you spend your money?

92% of marketers are saying the majority of their social spending will be on Facebook. Our question is, “Why?” In the same breath, Offerpop reports that 73% of marketers believe Instagram to be the year’s breakout social network. Yet fewer than 4% plan to focus their spending on the channel. (Yes, for now, you can’t buy ad space on Instagram unless you’re invited. Still, that doesn’t prevent you from investing dollars in this channel.)

For our team at BuzzPlant, ad buying isn’t just about the ease of the user interface and analytics (which Facebook has in spades). Ad buying has a lot to do with engagement. We’ve spent many blog posts this year talking about Twitter and Instagram’s higher engagement rates in comparison to Facebook. While we will be buying plenty of Facebook ads for our clients’ holiday marketing, we will also be looking at Instagram and Twitter opportunities. And we encourage you to do the same. Learn more about…

• Facebook engagement rates (based on 2.4 million posts)
• Instagram v. Facebook click-through rates

For more ad buying and holiday marketing discussion, check out the infographic below. What stands out to you? How will this data impact your social media management for Q4 2014?

*Infographic provided by offerpop.com.

When Paul DeJoe founded Ecquire, a startup specializing in sales productivity, in 2008, he didn't want to resign himself to settling in the Bay Area and losing large chunks of his day commuting.

He wanted to be able to travel the world — and create an organizational structure that would allow his team to roam, too. 

That's why Ecquire, which has brought in $475,000 in funding and grown to attract more than 580 paying enterprise customers, is set up so that team members can be anywhere and get their work done. 

"We create an environment with people who love the idea of living wherever they want," DeJoe tells Business Insider. "We can attract A-list talent if they don't have to commute to Silicon Valley. We can pay them $75,000 and compete with $150,000 talent."

To do so, Ecquire's biggest workplace innovation is removing the workplace itself. This drives down costs in several ways, he says — no office to pay for, no distractions to retreat into headphones from, and no commute to wade through. DeJoe says the company is profitable and growing.

"We're saving our customers time, so they don't have to be bogged down in their workflow," he says. It only makes sense for Ecquire to do the same for its team. Staying strictly remote removes both the "hassle of coming into the office," he says, and "the hassle of trying to fit into a structure from the Industrial Revolution." 

To make the remote work actually work, DeJoe starts with keeping the team small. DeJoe says he's "very picky" with hiring, and at just five people on staff, there aren't too many logistics to deal with. 

And even though his team is dispersed across North America, its members are able to work closely together through the popular task managers Trello and Flow. DeJoe likes Trello for the way it not only tracks the tasks the team is tackling, but it also provides an aggregate analysis of all the jobs the team is working through. 

When an issue does come up, the team talks it through on a weekly phone call. Every Tuesday morning, team members have a 30-minute call to discuss any obstacles they're facing and how to remove them.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, DeJoe brings everyone together in person every few months. The company foots the bill for employees to travel to some beautiful part of the world to code, bond, hike, and plan. 

So far, these weeklong retreats have happened in places like Tofino, British Columbia; Tucson, Arizona; and Sonoma, California, which was their most recent destination.

"For us, it's like fishing with your friends that happen to be intellectuals that are concerned about the same things as you," DeJoe says. "Being in the same room for the week really builds the relationships."

Not only that, the cabin retreats act like weeklong hackathons. 

"We talk through how a new product would work technically," he says. "We design it, scope it out, and build the minimum viable product in the same room." 

Then they all go back to their corners of the world, with a two-second commute from the bedroom to the keyboard.

SEE ALSO: 11 Books By CEOs That Will Teach You How To Run The World

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Like countless college students before them, the class of 2014 has little idea what to expect when they enter the working world.

"Whether you know exactly where you're heading or feel a bit lost," writes Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in "Lean In For Graduates," the latest edition of her popular book, "everyone has this in common: you're all in for big surprises." 

College graduates will leave the safe, structured world of higher education and enter a fiercely competitive job market, instantly going from the top of the food chain to the bottom. When they land a job, they enter a strange new world of office politics, power jockeying, and hidden agendas.  

To give young people a head start, Business Insider polled some of the world's most successful people to find out what they wish they had known before they graduated.  

A few common themes: Take risks, stay focused, don't underestimate the power of relationships, and expect the unexpected.  

Arianna Huffington, president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group and author of "Thrive":

"In college, just before I embarked on a career as a writer, I wish I had known that there would be no trade-off between living a well-rounded life and my ability to do good work.  

"I wish I could go back and tell myself, in my thick Greek accent: 'Arianna, your performance will actually improve if you can commit to not only working hard, but also unplugging, recharging, and renewing yourself.' That would have saved me a lot of unnecessary stress, burnout, and exhaustion." 

Scott Adams, creator of syndicated comic Dilbert and author of "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big": 

"I would tell my young self to keep open as many options as possible because the future is wildly unpredictable. The best way to improve your options is to continually learn as much as you can in fields that are complementary to your main interests. It also helps your odds if you stay networked with as many influential people as you can."

Kay Krill, president and CEO of ANN Inc.:

"The advice I would have given to my college self and any young person entering the workforce today would be to always be authentic and true to yourself and your beliefs. Do not get sidetracked with advice from others that your gut tells you is wrong. By doing this, you will have the clarity of mind to always do the right thing for the business and for yourself."

Mark Cuban, billionaire entrepreneur and investor:

"I wish that I had known it was just a job and not a mission to make my employer money. I thought I could truly impact the profits of the company — that my ideas were as good on my first day as the most senior executive. I should have been patient and tried to fit in and develop a possible career. 

"But I didn't. I was a horrible employee. As it turns out, being bored and deciding to leave after nine months wasn't a bad decision. So I guess the real response is that I'm glad I didn't know it even though I should have. If I had known that, I might still be there…"

Denise Morrison, president and CEO of Campbell Soup Company:

"If I could give my younger self career advice, it would be this: Don't wait for doors to open. Open them yourself by being persistent and thinking strategically about your career. Plan your career destination, develop a personal mission statement, and build relationships with sponsors and mentors. 

"And above all, network, because networking is working. Your ability will only take you so far. Your relationships will take you the rest of the way."

Tim Ferriss, host of "The Tim Ferriss Experiment" and author of "The 4-Hour Workweek":

"I wish I'd read Warren Buffett's early annual letters. There are so many gems that apply broadly to business and life. I'll paraphrase my favorites:

• Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.
• To be successful, you can get a lot of things wrong, as long as you get a few critical things right. 
• Invest [your time and money] as though you have a single card with only five to 10 hole punches allowed.

Whether you're playing on Wall Street or Main Street, I think his wisdom is an incredible asset." 

Teresa Taylor, former COO of Qwest Communications and author of "The Balance Myth":

"When I was in college, I wish I would have known that you need to be more flexible with work life. You will have situations, bosses, and decisions that you cannot predict, and nothing turns out the way you thought it would. That's OK! Let things happen, and open yourself to new opportunities."

Dan Schawbel, managing partner of Millennial Branding and author of "Promote Yourself":

"As a college student, I never knew that entrepreneurship was a career solution to employment, nor did I consider an entrepreneurial approach to career management. Like most students, I thought that the ideal career path was to work your way up at a big company and then retire, and boy was I wrong. 

"Through the years, I realized that the only way you can truly get ahead is by being accountable, networking constantly, and putting yourself out there. I realized that you need to think of a career as a collection of experiences along a journey and leverage everything you can to propel yourself forward."

Kat Cole, president of Cinnabon:

"What I wish I would have known is that everything will change and eventually work out in your career when you follow your purpose and passion. Don't get too caught up in the 'plan' that you have. 

"As a mentor once shared with me, especially when you are young, each career move and choice you make won't be your last, and you can always course correct, so don't waste too much time overanalyzing the next few steps. Take a risk, be the best at the job that you can be, help others along the way, and the next right thing will present itself."

SEE ALSO: The 50 Best Employers In America

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Microsoft unveiled its newest version of Windows last week. While the company was more than happy to tell us abouta bunch of new features , naturally they left a few out. Here are some of the best things we found while poking around with the new OS.

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