Rnordman

Crowds are never a good thing for business unless it’s outside your front door.

How do you stand out in today’s tech drenched smartphone in hand world full of noisy content?

Most of you have a muddled go to market strategy blending/borrowing from competitors, what your exec staff, BOD, marketing & agency geeks thinks, etc., etc.

OMG Where do we Start? >here

Your not shouting fire in crowded theater? Your trying to make a business stand out from the herd.

I want to talk about your brand strategy.

It’s about the Truth. Ignore the “too much information” syndrome.

Huddle the team and have someone write this stuff down.

How does our product make the customer’s life easier.

What are the key attributes of your products or service List everything.

Stuck? Get a customer in the room or on a conf call and ask them why they bought from you.

Who doesn’t love dogs? (other than cats) Use this as a branding strategy.

Be of service to your customers.

Next: How do you Differentiate Your Business?

You need to think about four key metrics.

• What’s unique about your products/services?
• What differentiates you from the herd. (No, no, no, you all have competitors!)
• What’s common in your marketplace (pricing, feature sets, what’s out there on the radar screen)?
• Are you relevant and credible in the market you are targeting.

As you work through these elements try to overlay three functional marketing maxims: core value proposition (why should anyone buy from you), competitive strategy and differentiation (see Michael Porter), the profile persona of your customer.

Three brands to think about in terms of how they positioned themselves: Patagonia (they own: ‘bulletproof” products), Nordstroms (single-handedly created unquestioned customer service) and Target (stuff you can wear shopping at Whole Foods or Safeway with abandon).

Third: Remember Ideas are Cheap and Tactical Execution is Not

Don’t fall in love with all your ideas. Test them with customers, not the husband, BOD members or your staff.

Get out of your own way: remember, you have to scale the business with iteration and crystal clear marketing. Many execs stumble when they fail to listen to others: see: ego.

It’s all about User Experience today: build it right and they will come. Don’t scrimp on any aspect of design that defines your brand: web, images, pictures, logos, infographics.

Growing the business is going to take time, money or some combination of the two. See: it’s noisy out there.

Tie everything back into conversion metrics that drive revenue. Traffic via social media (or any other source) that does not convert is water in the desert. Change your tactics and marketing platforms accordingly.

Don’t forget about building a persona profile: create and image with key bullet-points and hang them around the office. Make this “person” real in the minds of your staff.

Fourth: How do we market this baby and find customers?

• Where are your customers congregating: (“connected consumers”): think communities: real world, social, water cooler, wherever you can leverage one to many marketing.
• The competitiveness of the social platform where you think you need to be? Can you afford to play in this market? Social media marketing is not free.
• Regional, Local or Global focus?
• Where and how are your competitors creating and sharing content.? Do some finite analysis and measurement: Buzz Sumo is a great tool.
• What Digital Metrics are Being Used? You won’t know how you are doing without some formal ROI metrics.

If you read this far then grok this: every brand lives or dies based on the content they create.

Remember, your building a movement not a brand!

Tactical Stuff: Content Pain Points Every Business has to Come to Grips with

What’s the right budget for content development and marketing?

Use 20-30% of your overall marketing budget as a line item for content marketing initiatives and test the back end ROI for all content.

How do you make content that the visitor wants to share? Key attributes: useful, emotion laden, factual, practical, newsjacks (events, moments in time, stuff that relates to your biz).

Is your content distributed and published? A blog is not enough: you gotta do more.

Content created in-house or outsourcing; or some combination of the two. Your probably better off with the latter initially.

What content marketing platforms should you use for syndication?

Where do you find visuals to insert with your content? They are on your web site, embedded in your social channels and/or part of the visual story every employee tells with their profiles across the web.

What’s an SEO strategy and how do we implement one? Start with the basics:. use a keyword in your title and repeat it maybe once or twice on page of 300-700 words. Google understands more than you will ever know BTW.

Don’t bog down in SEO hell – Google is constantly tacking back and forth. Just create stellar content.

A Boring Mundane List is At the Heart of Every Great Content Marketing Inititive

• Your readers have an attention span of a gnat.
• Lists facilitate content re-purposing via other content forms (email, other blog posts, social content). See: the growth of platforms like Evernote.
• Every good blog post starts with a list for many content marketers: those scatter-shot ideas can then be fleshed out into topics or on page content elements.
• Millennials thrive on real time updates and lists are part of the picture and “secret sauce” to reach them according to Twitter and others.
• Brands can be creative with lists: use them as a shorthand way to poll your staff, customers, partners, BOD members and any other stakeholders for company, product, customer wins and content marketing topics.
• See texting as a way of life for many today. These people “live” on lists (stretching the metaphor a bit)- so, map your content accordingly.

It’s a “Visual Age” kinda like the Victorian Age but with Selfies

1. Your building authenticity with your community: visual’s impact drives relevance.
2. As technology “takes over our lives” visual strikes a chord within others. Sensory currency is “real” to the visitor.
3. Visuals drive cultural relevancy that engages the visitor in ways that text cannot equate with.
4. “Archetypes” have been around since the days of ancient cave man paintings and visuals are a powerful storytelling tools that feature “heroines” and “heroes” embedded in brand storytelling.
5. Visuals cut through the clutter and chatter that’s “smartphone” driven for many consumers and professionals.

Condensed Words

The buzzword du jour back in the .com era was all about “dog years” and how everything was compressed with this 7-1 ratio.

Well, it’s probably a term that’s in vogue more today than then.

Your business is fighting headwinds, competing with frothy markets full of billion dollar babies, marketing to distracted prosumers and technology is taking over our lives.

Find a way to passionately serve your customers, create and syndicate content that garners mindshare, measure what’s happening, build for speed and relevance and look up from your phone once and a while and talk to people.

Reach out if we can help you. #livedigital

Deutsche Bank strategist Jim Reid and his team just released a huge 104-page study that focuses on answering one question: Are bonds in a bubble?

The answer: well, probably. 

Reid writes:

It has long been our view that over the last couple of decades the global economy has rolled from bubble to bubble with excesses never fully being allowed to unravel. Instead aggressive policy responses have encouraged them to roll into new bubbles. This has arguably kept the modern financial system as we know it a going concern. Clearly there have always been bubbles formed through history but has there been a period like the last 20 years where the bursting of one bubble has consistently led directly to the formation of the next?

It's an amazing statement — that the modern financial system doesn't just experience bubbles, but in fact needs them. You could say this makes bubbles a feature, not a bug, of the financial system (which is something many people say already).

And the latest bubble appears to have rolled into bonds, with yields tumbling around the world and government debt in Europe currently at half-millennia lows.

What we found was that bonds are where the bubble has migrated to. This is not to say that the bond market bubble is about the burst — far from it — but that it is a necessary condition for maintaining the debt ladened financial system that has been the by-product of major crisis management over the last two decades. The worry is that there is nowhere left for this bubble to go given that it is now in the hands of the lenders of last resort (governments and central banks with regulators ensuring other large captive buyers). Although we think this bubble needs to be maintained to ensure the solvency of the current financial system, the best case scenario is that it slowly pops over time via negative real returns for bondholders. The worst case scenario being future restructuring.

This figure from Deutsche Bank gives a snapshot of government bond yields around the world.

Everything is low.

But looking simply at low yields doesn't provide enough evidence to say whether the current environment is a bubble.

Reid says we also need to look at inflation, because if we're in an environment in which inflation remains, "structurally lower for an extended period it might help justify lower bond yields."

Looking deep into history, Reid examines inflation dynamics dated from both 1210 and then from 1800, and he finds that the modern world has generally seen positive inflation as monetary systems became less tied to precious metals.

Reid writes that "the longer-term investor has evidence that we live in a world with a positive inflation bias and as such must approach the current low levels of bond yields with extreme caution."

Here are the two long-dated charts of inflation.

But whether you think bonds are in a bubble also depends on what you believe the future holds for the world economy.

Reid writes that secular stagnation, the idea popularized last year by Larry Summers that the global economy is facing a new low-growth reality, may support a future of low-inflation, low-growth and consequently, low bond yields.

In his speech at the IMF last year, Summers argued that the economy was showing signs that the natural interest rate, or the rate at which investment and savings result in full employment, may now be negative. Given its recent actions, the ECB appears to be testing this theory.

And while Reid writes that he's a believer in the idea that the economy is experiencing something like secular stagnation, he says bonds have priced in this possibility to a large degree. Additionally, Reid writes that it isn't clear that the long-term consequences of a secular stagnation environment don't include inflation and debt restructuring.

Reid writes: "The longer we live in a weak growth world, the more debt is likely to be built up as fiscal targets are missed and the more difficult it will be to see a way of Governments returning investors’ money back in real adjusted."

So even if we are experiencing secular stagnation, even over the long-term, the risk-reward proposition of buying bonds at current prices might not be worth it. 

Join the conversation about this story »

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, despite contributing to the destruction of the physical bookstore, is a man intensely interested in and passionate about books and reading. 

In the appendix of Brad Stone's new book about Amazon, "The Everything Store," there's a list of books called "Jeff's Reading List," highlighted by Shane Parrish at Farnam Street.

"Books have nurtured Amazon since its creation and shaped its culture and strategy," Stone writes. "Here are a dozen books widely read by executives and employees that are integral to understanding the company." 

The list is not just weighty business tomes, though classics like "The Innovator's Dilemma" are there, but includes novels and biographies as well. They help explain some of Bezos' core management philosophies, like "two pizza teams," the Amazon maxim that no team be larger than the number of people that can share two pizzas. It also includes books that helped inspire the creation of Amazon Web Services, the company's highly lucrative cloud business, and the Kindle.

It's an amazing way to get into the mind of Jeff Bezos. 

We've listed the books here, along with Stone's explanation of why each made the list. 

"The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro

"Jeff Bezos’ favorite novel, about a butler who wistfully recalls his career in service during wartime Great Britain. Bezos has said he learns more from novels than nonfiction," Stone writes.

Find "The Remains of the Day" here.

Source: "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon"

"Sam Walton: Made in America" by Sam Walton

"In his autobiography, Walmart’s founder expounds on the principles of discount retailing and discusses his core values of frugality and a bias for action—a willingness to try a lot of things and make many mistakes. Bezos included both in Amazon’s corporate values," Stone writes.

Find "Made in America" here.

Source: "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon"

"Memos from the Chairman" by Alan Greenberg

"A collection of memos to employees by the chairman of the now defunct investment bank Bear Stearns. In his memos, Greenberg is constantly restating the bank’s core values, especially modesty and frugality. His repetition of wisdom from a fictional philosopher presages Amazon’s annual recycling of its original 1997 letter to shareholders," Stone writes.

Find "Memos from the Chairman" here.

Source: "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon"

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

You'll notice that the most powerful people share several habits that contribute to their success. For instance, they constantly challenge themselves and commit to a strong work ethic.

There are also a few things they never do — which can be just as important to their long-term success.

Here are four of the most important things that powerful people never do:

Blame others.

When things go wrong, powerful people take responsibility for their mistakes and look for solutions instead of trying to place blame elsewhere. By being open about failure, they inspire and elevate others, rather than isolate them, explains Chris Deaver, a HR business partner at Disney, in a recent LinkedIn post. "They're the first to dive in to change things for good, and the last to take credit for it," he says. Shifting the blame won't earn you any respect.

Hide behind a screen.

Powerful people recognize the importance of face-to-face relationships and put in-person interactions ahead of anything that might be happening on their phone or computer screen. "In conversations, they stay engaged and authentic with everyone, knowing that their greatest influence is to be found in listening, sharing, and joining forces to innovate together," Deaver says. Technology might make you feel powerful at times, but real relationships matter most in the end.

Work alone.

Gaining influence isn't a solo effort, so the most powerful people know to welcome feedback, Deaver says. Creating partnerships, embracing criticism, and maintaining genuine honesty will help you climb to the top without knocking others down. Powerful people give their opinions, but also remain open to what others have to say. "They know it's better to get to the top of the mountain and see fellow friends they've helped to become powerful rather than a bunch of people they've forced down on their way to success," Deaver says.

Go with the flow.

Imitation might be the highest form of flattery, but it won't give you an edge. Rather, powerful people constantly look for ways to challenge the status quo. "They innovate life in ways that create a strong demand for their approach and brand," Deaver says. They stick to their ideas, but find ways to accomplish them in new and fearless ways.  

Click here to read the full post. 

Want your business advice featured in Instant MBA? Submit your tips to tipoftheday@businessinsider.com and be sure to include your name, your job title, and a photo of yourself in your email. 

SEE ALSO: 4 Clever Ways To Connect With Powerful People

Join the conversation about this story »

If you’ve been around here before then it can’t have escaped your attention that I’m a great believer in the power of LinkedIn, for both networking and relationship building opportunities, as well as for new business development. A recent report commissioned by LinkedIn caught my attention, mostly because it focused on the small to medium-sized business market and how they’re using the platform.

I know what you’re thinking! It’s such a shocker that LinkedIn’s research reveals they come out on the top of the pile. But based on my experience working with clients, especially those in the B2B space, to help leverage the power of LinkedIn for business growth, this report is validating a lot of what we find to be true, so we thought it made sense to cover it here.

The Priming the Economic Engine report claims that LinkedIn is among the most trusted social sources for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs), especially when it comes to learning about financial products. That only makes sense. Where else are you going to go for trusted information, especially information that in any way relates to financial products (or business growth), but LinkedIn?

LinkedIn’s research, which surveyed nearly 1,000 SMBs in North America, reports that over two-thirds of them are using social media for financial services and for finding “financial content.” This is mainly for keeping up-to-date on current trends or news, gathering information and intelligence, seeking advice and evaluating decisions. What’s telling is that the study indicates many aren’t finding what they need, suggesting a significant opportunity for all of you financial services providers out there.

When it comes to where to go to find information, LinkedIn stood out as the most trusted social source for SMB’s (57%), particularly for “hyper growth” companies (69%), which LinkedIn defines as those that reported significant year over year revenue increases.

It’s not surprising to me to see Google+ in second place, slightly ahead of Facebook and Twitter, with Pinterest not too far behind. It looks like the new kids on the block have had quite an impact in some areas in the relatively short time they’ve been around. More importantly, a takeaway here should be audiences are fragmented, so relying on any one social network as the basis of your integrated marketing/social media strategy is, well, likely a flawed strategy.

How SMBs Are Using LinkedIn to Drive Business

On a broader scale, 81% of SMBs who responded to the LinkedIn survey said that they are current users of social media, a proportion that translates to over 1 million SMBs in this business sector. Another 9% indicated that they plan to use social media in the future meaning, that social is playing an increasingly important role for SMBs. The study also reveals how SMBs are primarily using social media to help drive their businesses:

• Maintaining a company presence and identity
• Delivering content and new information
• Advertising to generate awareness and generate sales
• Finding new customers
• Learning and sharing resources

More Growth, More Social Media Spend (or is it vice-versa?)

Interestingly, the study also shows that 73% of the one in six SMB respondents who say they have had “hyper growth” increased their social media spend. This compares to just 42% of companies with no growth who said the same. These same high performing SMBs found social media to be most effective in achieving key marketing goals in these areas:

There’s really no surprise that the results of the study shows a link between social media marketing and increased business. Also, notice that while branding and WOM are important, content marketing is equally as important. Even better – lead gen is a key area of focus. Using social media platforms solely for brand awareness is so 2010. Strategically using social media to drive business – that’s where it gets to the part of the equation that I love.

Additionally, what I like seeing is that studies like this show that many small and mid-sized businesses are starting to realize the importance of integrating social into their marketing efforts, and hopefully also realizing how that can help level the playing field for them. LinkedIn is, and certainly can be, a powerhouse for businesses and a tool that we find is all too often either overlooked completely by small businesses (and plenty of large ones, too), or not used effectively.

The reality is this: people do one of two things when it comes to products or services they want to buy — they go to search engines and they ask their friends for recommendations and opinions. Integrating smart SEO, developing content designed to serve your customers and prospects and using social media to build networks, make friends and share content is how you help customers know that you can be counted on as a trusted resource. It’s just that simple.

No Doubt About It – Small Business Powers the Economy

I started this post with the disclaimer that I’m a LinkedIn fan girl and regardless of the fact that this is a report based on data compiled by LinkedIn, I think it’s not only great information, but valid information. And from a business standpoint, LinkedIn’s strategy is clear. There’s great, and largely untapped value in the small and medium-sized business customer base, which encompasses companies with annual revenues ranging from $1 million to $49.9 million. Just in case you’re not yet convinced, let’s break that down a tiny bit further:

• SMBs contribute 5.5 trillion in annual revenue
• SMBs are responsible for 7 out of 10 new jobs
• Young firms in growth mode are the largest contributors to job growth

Hello small business market. No wonder LinkedIn has its sights set on helping you maximize social networking, using what is not only the largest business social network, but which is likely also one of the most trusted social networks.

If you’re a small or mid-sized business owner who’s not yet integrated LinkedIn into your marketing strategies, especially with regard to social media, perhaps it’s time to start. And if you’re at all involved in finance, which can be defined as so many different things, start paying attention to the kind of information and resources people say they want to find on social networks in general – and deliver it.

If you want some help figuring out what to do, check out  The LinkedIn Small Business Resource Center, which was created by LinkedIn to provide small businesses with the tools they need to maximize the platform. Or, you can call me.

The complete report from LinkedIn has been laid out in SlideShare format and is available here.

Two new iPhones, a mobile pay system and a smartwatch may not have been enough to convince investors Apple hit a home run with its product launch Tuesday, but it spelled a win for Vancouver’s mobile development and mobile payments companies. “This is huge for developers,” said Chris Hobbs, president of Two Tall Totems, a Vancouver mobile development company that focuses on mobile apps for Apple’s iOS, Android devices and HTML5.

Ever think about how consumer psychology affects buying decisions?

If you think about it at all, you likely think consumers make decisions similar to the ones on the left in this infographic. And, if you’re a marketer, you probably learned consumer psychology that looked something like this (especially for advertising):

Awareness

Interest

Desire

Action

AIDA

Termed AIDA (because marketers love acronyms almost as much as the military), this formula has been taught to marketing students for decades. It’s simple and easy, but also not very insightful. And, in many cases, dead wrong.

AIDA assumes consumers actively seek information about products to make their lives better. And, that may be true in certain situations, but most of the time we’re simply out to have a good time and don’t want to be bombarded with advertising. That’s why we mostly ignore the right hand side of Google search, Facebook’s Newsfeed, and zap through commercials on TV with our TIVOs. We simply don’t want to know about your stuff, so our actual involvement with your brand looks more like the infographic’s right side — we meander aimlessly through our days online and off, not paying much attention to your advertising.

Consumer psychology and social media

That’s why social media, when done right, works so well, especially content marketing. By creating valuable content, you evade consumer defenses against advertising and put your brand right in their newsfeed, search results, and Twitter feed — where consumers are defenseless against your message.

Social media (both owned and earned and some paid) increases consumer exposure to your brand and also creates a great image for your brand, which increases their interest in your products.

Despite increased awareness of your brand through content marketing, slogging through other aspects of consumer psychology, like the consumer decision-making process. create challenges. Overcoming these challenges to consumer psychology potentially explode your ROI.

Consumer psychology challenges

Awareness

Take a look at the infographic’s right side. What you see is a consumer who appears on autopilot and that’s pretty close to the truth. Today’s connected consumer is less focused on your advertising and doesn’t dedicate much effort to processing your message. Instead, they’re using multiple screens — likely watching TV (or their computer monitor via Hulu or Netflix) while checking their Facebook or Flickr feed, chatting with their friends on SnapChat or text message, or checking out their friend’s Pinboards.

Capturing any level of awareness of your brand relies on repeat exposure to your message through an integrated effort combining paid, earned and owned media with traditional advertising.

Look at this integrated marketing infographic embedded within the larger infographic. Not only does it highlight the integration of paid, earned, and owned social media with traditional advertising, it shows how SEO, combines with traditional marketing elements such as market research to understand what consumers want, excellent customer service including product quality, branding, market segmentation and target marketing, as well as using tools of influence, CTA (call to action), and other motivational tools.

Interest

Interest relies heavily on creating valuable content, especially when it generates engagement from networked users connected to the consumer.

Content that’s novel, entertaining, and eye-catching works best to generate interest in your brand. That’s why use of video, infographics, memes, and podcasts dramatically increases interest.

A good example of this comes from Talenti, the premium gelato. They create innovative content, such as their wheel that users can spin to determine which flavor to buy. Combined with guerrilla marketing efforts like delivering samples via bicycle at community events, the company is closing in on big names like Ben and Jerry’s in terms of market share.

Desire

Reaching consumer desire relies heavily on a positive brand image and recommendations from a consumer’s social network. Surprisingly, younger consumers consider the tacit endorsements of mere social media acquaintances more than the recommendations of friends and family according to a study. These younger consumers seek user-generated content and are more likely to follow a brand on social networks than family and friends.

That’s some weird consumer psychology — so brands need to up their game to reach these millenials.

Action

Taking action relies more on logistics than consumer psychology. Factors such as pricing (and financing), availability, and the effort necessary to acquire the product precedence at this stage. Simple improvements across these factors reduce the nearly 68% of abandoned online shopping carts.

Online shopping, especially new Facebook shopping options, make it easier for consumers to take action — buy your brand. Reducing the # of clicks required to make a purchase (ie. Amazon’s one click shopping), reducing registration requirements, using easy payment options like PayPal, and offering in-store pickup and exchange all enhance your close rate.

Consumer psychology and analytics

Making improvements in your marketing and communication based on knowing how consumer psychology affects ROI can have a huge impact on your success.

But, what get’s measured, get’s improved. To make the right improvements requires collecting metrics on the right factors.

Consumer psychology tells us there are a wide number of factors impacting conversion (not to mention repeat purchases and average order size) that affect ROI. That means your analytics must focus on the process — the entire consumer journey, not just the end game (conversion). Enhancing metrics related to sentiment, share of voice, and audience growth, as well as your success in reaching influencers and your target market all contribute to your ROI.

As always, leave your questions or comments below and I’m happy to provide more details on how consumer psychology impacts ROI.

“How do you get your customers to do what you want them to do on your website?”

Optimizers get asked this question all the time. Without realizing it, the businesses who want the secret sauce, the quick fix to more “conversions” are asking the wrong question.

What they really should be asking is, “How do I help my customers achieve their goals on my website while still achieving mine?”

From Customer Personas to Customer Journey Maps

It’s all about understanding what motivates your customers – what their needs are, their hesitations, and concerns. In a previous post, I discussed the importance of developing customer personas to do just that.

But, just knowing who you’re talking to isn’t enough. Being able to align what they want to accomplish when they come to your website is the key. Mapping out their paths from first interaction to the last will show if they are achieving their goals.

Because, we’re finding that the most successful companies are digging deep into the data driven research available to them… giving them a leg up on customer retention and bolstering the bottom line.

The Devil Is In The Data

According to RSR’s 2014 Benchmark report, Retail Analytics Moves to the Frontline, retail winners saw year-over-year sales improvements by not only acknowledging that they must be sensitive to the needs of their customers’ appetite for information about their products and services but also that they must move from an experience/intuition model of decision making to one that relies more heavily on data.

Those companies having the best results across the board incorporated data driven research with “gut-based decision making.”

This lack of focus on using data to understand the customer and retain business is neither a recent occurrence nor confined to traditional retailers. A CMO Council study conducted from 2007 to 2008, “Business Gain From How You Retain,” found that:

“Over 50% of global marketers report that they have fair, little, or no knowledge of the customer demographic, behavioral, psychographic and transactional data. Just 6% say they have excellent knowledge of the customer.”

In 2014, amazingly nearly 8 in 10 marketers of global companies are continuing to rely on customer acquisition strategies when they agree it’s cheaper to simply retain their customers. E-Consultancy’s Cross Channel Marketing Report 2014, reports that only 2 in 5 responding companies “‘understand customer journeys and adapt the channel mix accordingly’.”

Image Source – Marketing Charts

Mapping The Customer Journey… The Next Step

By now if you haven’t realized the importance of putting customer data driven research to work for your business, take a look at my persona post.

All of them refer to more statistics, studies, and reports that make it clear much of businesses outpacing their competitors has to do with pulling together the right data about their customers and using it effectively.

But, what now?

The next step involves organizing all this rich data so you can take actionable steps to improve how you manage your customers’ experiences with your business – and more specifically, your website.

The Customer Journey Map Defined

For all intents and purposes, a customer journey map is merely an illustration or diagram of all the places (touchpoints) your customers come into contact with your company online or off.

Kerry Bodine, a customer experience consultant, explains the purpose behind traditional customer journey maps in a recent Whiteboard Friday video on the Moz blog as follows:

“The goal of the customer journey map is really to get a holistic view of what the customer is going through from their point of view and really what it’s like for them on a personal level, that human level.”

Kerry Bodine

No Matter The Approach The End Goal Is The Same

No two journey maps are exactly the same. Depending on the customer experience expert you follow and the business/product/service mapped, the design will be different.

The guys over at Adaptive Path, a UX/digital design agency, talk in terms of “experience maps.” In order to put together a visual representation of how a customer not only moves through each phase of interacting with a company but how he experiences each one, Adaptive Path starts with building a touchpoint inventory after conducting qualitative and quantitative research.

Image Source: Adaptive Path

As you can see above, they start the mapping process by defining the behavioral stages a typical customer will go through then more specifically by each touchpoint.

With that in place, they bring in their customer personas to create a “lens” by which to view the journey. Each persona can yield it’s own map – becoming the reference point by which to base the journey.

In an attempt to help their client, Rail Europe, get a handle on how North American travelers engage with them across all touchpoints – not just booking their tickets – Adaptive Path took this initial diagram and built on it.

Image Source: Adaptive Path

The result is a model that provides both a visual representation and a synthesis of the data gathered. Ideally, it helps to crystallize where customers are getting stuck or frustrated on their path to purchase and beyond.

Making It All About Your Website

Customer journey maps traditionally have been used to show the progression from first interaction to last – no matter where that might be.

But, there’s no reason we can’t modify this tool and use it to make the process of organizing our customer data and optimizing our websites easier.

Joanna Lord over at BigDoor, a company that builds customer loyalty programs for other businesses, has written a terrific post that outlines a simpler approach to creating a map and well worth the read. It provides a nice launching pad for our purposes.

Image Source – BigDoor.com

Step #1: Define The Behavioral Stages

Depending on the business, the stages your customers will go through while navigating your site may be different. After looking through your personas built on your initial qualitative and quantitative research, you’ll have a pretty good idea the process your customers go through from first landing to eventual purchase and subsequent interactions.

Step #2: Align Customer Goals With The Stages

This may well be the most critical (and in some cases most difficult) step. From all the data on how informed companies are about what makes their customers tick, it’s clear that understanding their customers’ goals has not been a priority.

Here’s your opportunity to key in on them. Put some thought into what your customers want to achieve as they move through each phase. Then, you’ll be able to see if you have the necessary places on your website to support those goals.

Types of data to mine to understand what the goals are:

• Survey answers
• User testing feedback
• Interview transcripts
• Customer service emails or support transcripts

Step #3: Plot Out The Touchpoints

Think of the touchpoints as both the places where your customers are engaging with you on your site and where you can be supporting the completion of their goals. These touchpoints will be grouped under the relevant stage in your customer’s journey.

For retailers, a common touchpoint would be a product description page – in a business selling services it could be anything from a pricing page to a contact form.

Find touchpoints on your website by looking at your Google Analytics:

1) Behavior Flow Report

This provides a visual path showing how users move from one page or event to the next. The added benefit is that it will help you understand where your users are struggling to get where they want to go on your site. You can choose the dimension you want to segment by then analyze specific steps in the flow by mousing over them.

Image Source – Google Analytics

2) Goal Flow Report

This report helps you to see whether or not your users are completing a goal of your choosing through a funnel. You’ll be able to determine if users on your site are unexpectedly leaving in the middle of their journey on the path to the goal or if there’s a place where your traffic loops back.

Step #4: Determine If Your Customers Are Achieving Their Goals

This is where you bring the data you’ve collected and measure it against how easily your customers can get done what they need to do.

Ask yourself the following types of questions:

• Where are roadblocks appearing?
• Are people abandoning their purchases on the checkout page in large numbers?
• Are you finding that the people clicking on your opt in download page are not then signing up to get the download?

The reports you’ve mined from your Google Analytics will give you precise points where issues are cropping up. Your qualitative research should help you understand the why behind the problems.

Analyze the actions (or lack thereof) of your customers in terms of how well their needs are being met at each touchpoint and during each phase.

Finally…

Step #5: Recommendations For Change

Start by prioritizing which pages/touchpoints to be addressed first. You can rank your pages by ease and cost effectiveness to implement changes. Then, it’s a matter of determining what to test.

For instance, if your research has shown that your customers are concerned about getting locked into a particular plan once they sign up for your service – then tweaking your copy on the relevant page to alleviate their hesitations makes sense.

Visualizing The Path With A Simple Spreadsheet

Spreadsheets may not be sexy but they’re ideal for organizing data. As I mentioned before, your customer journey map doesn’t need to be complicated. Remember, it’s just a tool to help you get a handle on how users are interacting with your site, where they’re getting stuck, and hypotheses on how to improve trouble spots.

Above is an example I put together to represent the journey a customer may go through when dealing with a company selling software as a service. Each stage has a corresponding customer goal along with touchpoints.

Keep track of the reports and surveys you reference along with what stages they illuminate.

Go as granular as you like. Add annotations where you’re finding customers seem to be missing steps or looping back. Then, plug in your analysis of the journey under “Key Findings” and hypotheses to test under “Recommendations.”

How Improving Steps Along The Customer Journey Lifts More Than Just The Bottom Line – A Real World Example

The guys at TrackDuck, a SaaS company with an interactive website tool for feedback and bug tracking, gleaned insights from customer comments in order to improve registrations.

Image Source – InsideIntercom.io

Responding to the difficulties users were having simply registering, they changed the 10-step registration form to a 4-step process – increasing registration completions by 120%.

TrackDuck realized that by taking advantage of their qualitative data they could improve revenue and set their customers up for success at the same time.

“If you are working on an app for developers, be ready for a high bounce rate at the user registration stage. Converting a visitor into a customer is really difficult. To achieve this it’s essential that the visitor figures out how your app works in the first 3-5 minutes.”

Eddy Balcikonis – CEO of Track Duck

This is a good example that not only shows what the customer goal is (to become a user) but also where a roadblock to success was occurring and how it got fixed. Tackling these kinds of frustrating user issues helps to reduce churn and the mitigates the emphasis on new acquisitions.

Final Thoughts On The Customer Journey

How your customers interact with your website or your brand isn’t a linear process – no matter how much you might like it to be. Getting people to move from point A to point B without jumping ship or missing a step in between doesn’t always happen.

But, taking the time to understand as much as you can about what your customers’ goals are along with how they already move through your website can go a long way towards keeping them happy… and growing your business.

What has been your process for tracking your customers’ journey through your website or with your brand?

Many of today’s hottest technology companies, both large and small, are increasingly using the concept of the minimum viable product (MVP) as way to iteratively learn about their customers and develop their product ideas. This two-part series, looks into the product design process of Dropbox’s Carousel.

Part 1¹ covered the core user, their needs and Dropbox’s business needs, and broke down existing photo and video apps. This second part is about Carousel’s primary requirements, the end product, its performance and key learnings since the launch.

Primary User Requirements

In a Wired article² covering Carousel’s launch, Gentry Underwood, CEO and cofounder of Mailbox (which was acquired by Dropbox) and lead designer of Carousel, detailed some of the key requirements that his team prioritized.

Below is a list of some of them, as well as some requirements highlighted in media coverage of Carousel’s launch³ and from our evaluation of existing products and design patterns in part 1.

Back up all photos and videos

The app has to save not only the photos that users want to see in the gallery, but also ones they don’t want to see yet but might want to at a later date. Not to mention, this takes up more storage, which is ideal for Dropbox’s business. Most photo apps allow you only to delete photos, not hide them. “It’s a 100% destructive thing,” Underwood says. And the permanence of deleting photos requires a heavy two-step process of hitting the trash button and confirming the action. Underwood claims that this leads to users not deleting media and, ultimately, to sloppy media galleries with misfires, blurry selfies and many imperfect versions of the same shot.

Display all photos and videos

According to Underwood, another big problem with media gallery apps is that they seem to start from the last time you bought a smartphone. This is especially true for stock apps like Apple’s Photos. However, even with photo stream and other apps that sync a portion of your photos locally while saving the rest in the cloud, users can never see their entire media history — they have to go to their computer or the web for that.

Show the best photos and videos

The most obvious solution for this is to make it easy to manually hide undesired media, presumably with some quick swiping action. However, the app could also surface media that users would most likely want to see, like ones with faces or, more importantly, smiling faces. Beyond finding the best media, the app could also highlight one or more thumbnails of media that seem most interesting.

Enable quick navigation

Media should be automatically sorted in events based on common attributes such as time and location. The groupings should also show just a sample of the photos from that event in order to save space while navigating through a long list. Finally, users should have multiple ways to scroll through media (for example, slowly or quickly).

Feel native

Making it seem like everything is stored locally would set this application apart from the competition. After all, that snappy feeling is what makes Apple’s Photos more appealing than Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Dropbox and the like. Among other things, fine-tuning the caching and other back-end tricks could help dramatically. But some clever perceptual tricks could also be done. For example, multiple thumbnails of each media file could be saved at various resolutions and be dynamically deployed based on how fast the user is scrolling through the gallery. Faster scrolling would trigger lower-resolution thumbnails so that they load instantly and make the app feel native. Moreover, adding, moving, changing and deleting media files from Carousel or Dropbox should happen lightning-fast.

Enable public and private sharing

Users should be able to share videos and photos with others easily without having to use platforms with storage limitations, such as email. Also, they should be able to easily select between public sharing (i.e. on social networks) and private sharing through email, SMS and private in-app chat. “Carousel’s sharing tools can be utilized through any email address or phone number, whether the recipient has a Dropbox account or not,” says Underwood.

Enable public and private discussion

Although in-app discussion is an option when media is shared privately, as mentioned above, it’s not necessary. However, allowing for focused discussion on a set of photos — particularly after an event, when users want to congregate and compare photos — can be valuable. As an alternative to Facebook Messenger, SMS and email, where many other conversations go on, offering a dedicated set of chat threads for users’ personal media and nothing else would be beneficial. It would also be a great way to acquire new users for Dropbox.

What Do Users Get?

Basically, users get a camera roll for Dropbox. As Federico Viticci from MacStories eloquently puts it⁴, the app is a clean and imaginative “alternative Camera Roll and Photo Stream based on Dropbox storage with built-in sharing for individual or group conversations.”

Carousel’s MVP is effectively two things for most users: a Dropbox uploader for backing up local photos and videos, and an enhanced version of Apple’s native Photos app, with improved viewing, sharing and discussion functionality. The app doesn’t let users take, edit or manage photos, other than hiding them (or deleting them, if they can find that feature), or view in anything other than chronological order.

For now, if users want to take and edit photos, then their mobile camera, Instagram or Camera+ are great options. To organize photos into folders, they’ll need to use Dropbox directly. And to view them in anything other than chronological order, they would sync Dropbox with a more advanced media gallery such as iPhoto, Picasa or Unbound. You will understand Carousel’s MVP much more easily by testing it out than by listening to me explain it ad nauseam. Below are four screenshots of what you can expect. To help you along, MacStories thoughtfully runs through⁵ what you can expect in your first experience.

⁶

Results And Learning

Mills Baker, a product design analyst at Mokriya, paints a rather dismal picture of Carousel in “Designer Duds: Losing Our Seat at the Table⁸”:

It’s honestly hard to determine what should be interesting about it, even in theory; it takes mostly standard approaches to organization, display, and sharing, and seems to do little to distinguish itself from the default iOS Photos app + iCloud Photo Sharing, let alone apps and services like Instagram, VSCO Cam, Snapchat, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, and so on.

To get an idea of why Mills feels so strongly about Carousel’s shortcomings, let’s look at the results since its launch.

Rankings

Since topping the charts on and around launch day, Carousel has steadily lost attention, now ranking 456th in the “Photo and Video” category of Apple’s App Store and falling off in the overall rankings across all categories. It has basically been buried in the crowded photo and video app market, and Dropbox will need to make some non-trivial changes in subsequent iterations to make it bounce back to the top.

⁹

Upon launching in April 2014, the app certainly didn’t increase downloads of Dropbox’s main app, suggesting that Carousel’s main impact was on revenue or engagement, if anything.

¹²

Downloads

As of 16 July 2014, Carousel appears to have been downloaded 174,000 times¹⁵ globally. If Dropbox currently has 300 million users¹⁶, then it has managed to get a paltry .06% of its total customer base to adopt Carousel. Clearly, it needs to make some improvements to increase adoption.

¹⁷

Ratings

If we look at reviews in Apple’s App Store, non-target users almost unanimously consider Carousel to be a failure. “Not what I wanted,” “MASSIVE oversight” and “Completely useless” smatter the reviews section — all valid complaints if people are using it professionally. Meanwhile, average consumers like Owen and Nora have mixed reviews, ranging from “Amazing app!!!! This app is the best way to back up and privately share my photos on iOS!!!” to “Bring back Loom! Complete downgrade from Loom… Sad.”

While it wasn’t a runaway success upon launch, Carousel drew user reviews in the US and internationally that at least skew favorably. In fact, the reviews are as good as the ones for Dropbox and even Mailbox, both excellent standards for any productivity app.

²⁰

While these reviews make it difficult to dispute Baker about the lackluster adoption of Carousel upon launch, 174,000 downloads is more than enough to learn about how people use Carousel, what needs to be improved and how well various features help Dropbox achieve its business goals.

In-App Purchases

While these statistics are highly coveted and, thus, kept very private, you can at least generalize that Carousel is achieving its primary objective of upselling existing users to premium accounts. However, many details suggest that Dropbox will need to make some major improvements to scale downloads and usage for new and existing users.

With Dropbox charging roughly ten times the price of Google’s popular cloud storage alternative, Drive, it will be interesting to see how much price has stunted adoption of and engagement with Carousel. If we’re being realistic, anyone who wasn’t born yesterday would know that Carousel requires Dropbox’s Pro Plan²³ to work reliably. Dropbox will certainly have to address this as companies continue to compete on price in building up their cloud-based apps on top of virtually free cloud storage.

²⁴

Looking Forward To The Next Iteration

As expected, this MVP is far from being a full photo and video manager. It lacks some features that hold users back from adopting it, including:

• better meta data and a better organizational structure for navigating photos,
• more granular syncing options to reduce clutter,
• a web viewer for making sharing easier,
• lower pricing.

However, if you look closely at everything Dropbox has done with Carousel, it has been extremely disciplined in prioritizing many of the most important features for its business and its users. It has drawn from the best relevant design patterns that I could find, many of which are not to be found in the closest alternatives, including Apple’s Photos and Instagram Direct. And while most mobile photos galleries aren’t that complex, Dropbox has managed to edit out features that are less important, such as a camera, editing features, heavy organization options, chat outside of sharing, and friend lists.

It still has a ton of work to do on the web and mobile. Considering how much people wish Loom was still around, many of its features will probably be included. Additionally, well-designed and robust apps such as Picturelife offer a great deal of inspiration for a dramatically simplified alternative to Carousel.

And while Dropbox might have done better to wait for what Rand Fishkin, cofounder of Moz, calls an EVP²⁷ — an exceptional viable product — Carousel has a promising future. Dropbox just needs to tweak what it’s got to get more people to download and use the app.

(al, ml)

Footnotes

1. 1 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/08/26/dropbox-carousel-design-deconstructed-part-1/
2. 2 http://www.wired.com/2014/04/3-ingenious-design-details-in-carousel-dropboxs-new-photo-app/
3. 3 http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/09/dropbox-debuts-carousel-aiming-to-be-the-go-to-storage-app-for-your-entire-photo-archive/
4. 4 http://www.macstories.net/reviews/thoughts-on-dropbox-carousel/
5. 5 http://www.macstories.net/reviews/thoughts-on-dropbox-carousel/
6. 6 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/02-carousel-app-opt.jpg
7. 7 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/02-carousel-app-opt.jpg
8. 8 https://mokriya.quora.com/Designer-Duds-Losing-Our-Seat-at-the-Table?srid=h1hP&share=1
9. 9 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/03-carousel-ranking-opt.jpg
10. 10 http://www.Appannie.com
11. 11 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/03-carousel-ranking-opt.jpg
12. 12 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/04-carousel-ranking-opt.jpg
13. 13 http://www.Appannie.com
14. 14 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/04-carousel-ranking-opt.jpg
15. 15 http://de.xyo.net/iphone-app/carousel-by-dropbox-mEYaRL4/
16. 16 http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/05/29/dropbox-reaches-300m-users-adding-100m-users-just-six-months/
17. 17 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/05-carousel-downloads-opt.jpg
18. 18 http://xyo.net/iphone-app/carousel-by-dropbox-mEYaRL4/
19. 19 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/05-carousel-downloads-opt.jpg
20. 20 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/06-carousel-ranking-opt.jpg
21. 21 http://www.Appannie.com
22. 22 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/06-carousel-ranking-opt.jpg
23. 23 http://www.technologyreview.com/news/526606/review-dropboxs-carousel-photo-sharing-app/
24. 24 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/07-carousel-dropbox-apps-opt.jpg
25. 25 http://www.Appannie.com
26. 26 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/07-carousel-dropbox-apps-opt.jpg
27. 27 http://moz.com/rand/7-unlikely-recommendations-for-startups-entrepreneurs/

The post Dropbox’s Carousel Design Deconstructed (Part 2) appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

SMACK. POW. Right where it counts!

Nope, not on your kisser but, even worse, in your wallet. Agencies, PR and marketing professionals, bloggers and anyone doing social media (who doesn’t?) are unwittingly putting themselves at risk. The lesson can be expensive, with lawsuit costs and fines stacking up in a horrifying way.

What am I talking about? Copyright infringement.*

It doesn’t feel like you’re breaking the law when you save a funny cartoon or quote you like, so you can post it to Facebook later. Or when you scan then post your honor roll student’s school photo on Instagram. (You bought the big reprints package, so it isn’t stealing!) And… at work, when you use a photograph of Angelina Jolie in a blog post on breast cancer. (It wouldn’t be on Google if it weren’t okay to use!)

Or, even more common, when you use client-provided photography in a brochure you are creating for them, with the client then promptly posting a PDF of that brochure on their website. (You paid the photographer AND agency, after all, so it belongs to you!)

Then there’s this one – so rampant in the agency world – you post screenshots of a client’s customized Facebook page and Twitter background in your online portfolio. (After all, it’s your design work, right?) And since you’re dabbling in website edits, you might as well upload those Burrells Luce clips of editorial placements. (Don’t they send a PDF for that reason?)

These might seem innocuous enough, but they’re legal violations that can be prosecuted. Even if it doesn’t go to court, fines can be in the tens of thousands of dollars.

#886836-001 / gettyimages.com

When it comes to using images on social media or blog posts, the only way to 100% guarantee you aren’t stepping into a potential lawsuit for copyright infringement is to create your own.

Even then, it’s with the caveat that you’ve obtained an appropriate model release from any person(s) in the image, that your image doesn’t include “a substantial part of a literary or artistic work” and that you didn’t pay someone to create the image for you.

Did that last point grab you? It’s worth notice.

If you pay an agency, freelancer, photographer or other party to create the image for you, THEY own the copyright unless your contract specifically assigns copyright over to you.

LEGALESE, SCHMEAGLESE

This month celebrates the two-year anniversary of #PRprochat, my Twitter chat for public relations professionals on First Thursday’s at 3pm EST.

Our special guest happened to be Ruth Carter – a red-Converse-wearing, improv-spouting, gun-toting (LOL – just kidding!), utterly fabulous Arizona attorney who specializes in intellectual property, copyright, internet, social media, flash mob and contract law.

She can be an agency or marketing departments best friend.

I thought I would share a few tweets of Ruth’s wisdom.

1. STATE-SPECIFIC LAWS APPLY

https://twitter.com/rbcarter/status/507605846629421056

Many, MANY people who can’t or won’t hire an attorney use Google for legal advice, sleuthing out answers to their questions, sample contracts and more. But one thing they often don’t know is that many laws are state-specific. Not only can they be absorbing bad advice, but it might not even apply to them or leave out critical legalese, rendering the contract useless! If an attorney licensed to practice law in Colorado shares a contract template, for example, it might be applicable to Colorado law, but incorrect for someone in Arizona.

In an alternate scenario, a friend’s referral to a fantastic social media attorney in Arizona might not be a good fit for an Arizona agency whose client contract specifies that all disputes and legal actions be maintained under the laws of New York.

2. ATTRIBUTION DOESN’T SAVE YOU

https://twitter.com/rbcarter/status/507605979836329985

It’s a common misunderstanding that is perpetuated, at least in part, by the fact that many creative commons images only require attribution of the images source to be used in a public or even commercial manner. Mentioning the photographer of a photograph, for example, and giving a link to their website DOES NOT give you the right to use that image.

If you are using Creative Commons, Flickr or Google Search to find an image, you must still look for a “rights usage” or restrictions statement for that specific image that details conditions of use. It might be attribution of the original creator, it might be disclosing the actual license number, or something else entirely.

For works in the public domain, I highly recommend printing or saving a screen capture of those rights. Online sources are easily changed or removed, and saving a copy of it FROM THE DATE OF YOUR DOWNLOAD can protect you later on.

If you want to be 100%, take one step further by reaching out to the owner of the image, asking for written permission. Their contact information is often readily available as part of the attribution request.

3. DON’T ASSUME ATTRIBUTIONS ARE CORRECT

https://twitter.com/rbcarter/status/507606075189649408

It’s tempting to save an image you love that has seemingly correct attribution already embedded in the image… but what if that attribution is incorrect or the person sharing that image didn’t know it was a rights-protected photograph and THEY were wrong to use it in the first place? By sharing the image or using it in your blog, you could be violating copyright of the original creator without even realizing it.

Just because “you didn’t know” isn’t a defense that will protect you in court.

https://twitter.com/morgancarrie/status/507606394627846145

As a blogger, I tend to do one of three things:

1. I create my own image – either by taking a photograph or drawing it.
2. I purchase royalty-free stock photography.
3. I use correctly embedded images from Getty Images.
4. I use public domain images with scrupulously correct attribution.

4. PROTECT YOURSELF IN CONTRACTS

According to Ruth, contracts should clearly state who owns the content you are creating, and who is responsible for paying any legal fees if the client is sued because of something you wrote. Additionally, if you don’t own the copyright but you want to include certain works on your website or online portfolio, the contract must give you permission to use content as a work sample.

Did you know that? I didn’t. It’s in my contracts now, though!!

https://twitter.com/LoisMarketing/status/507608575875637248

5. EASY ACCESS IS NOT PERMISSION

There are so many great tweets to share that this post could easily be twice as long, so I’ll wrap it up with one last thought. The internet has drastically changed how we access news, content and images – and it has changed how accessible they are.

Just because you read a fantastic blog post that you love and want to share, and it’s easy to copy/paste into your own WordPress blog DOES NOT mean it is okay to do. Content theft is rampant and it’s important to understand what you can and can’t do.

If you work at an agency, for example, and plagiarize content from another online source, the client and agency can wind up in a lawsuit and you could lose your job. Not good.

I submit take-down requests of stolen content on a regular basis. When I ask them to remove the unauthorized post, the most common reply is “but I thought you’d be flattered to have more people see your content!” I’m not.

I’d be delighted if they used a statement or two then linked over to my original post, but using the entire thing is theft. It’s not flattering and it’s not legal. Since it’s my own sweat equity, I’d rather have traffic and readers on my website than somewhere else.

In hopes of minimizing theft, I even put up a “Fair Use of My Content” page to answer questions.

There is a law called “Fair Use” that basically allows portions of content to be used to make a point or identify a story. Not the entire post, of course – but a small portion of it. (Read about this on the FTC website here, or the Stanford University Library here.)

Exactly how much isn’t defined, in terms of word or character count, but I generally go by the rule of thumb that a sentence or two is acceptable, along with a link over to the original source.

https://twitter.com/rbcarter/status/507614116135960576

Wrapping This Up

It takes time to learn the legal stuff, and so many PR and marketing pros don’t bother. but client’s rely on our expertise. Protect them AND protect yourself by learning about laws that pertain to your job. It can save you a major headache later and clients will be more loyal to the ones who provide uber value.

To read the full Storify transcript of September’s #PRprochat with Attorney Ruth Carter, click here.

* Any mistakes are purely my own. I’m not a lawyer and this post is just information, NOT legal advice. Ruth is a lauyer, but this isn’t her advice, either. Her intelligent ideas, yes, but not her legal advice. To get those kind of goodies, you have to hire her.

The World Economic Forum has released its annual report of the globe's most competitive economies.

The report ranks these economies on the "12 pillars of competitiveness": institutions, infrastructure, macroeconomic environment, health and primary education, higher education and training, goods market efficiency, labor market efficiency, financial market development, technological readiness, market size, business sophistication, and innovation.

"Smart investment in skills and innovation is key to enhanced productivity and competitiveness," the report said. "It also supports more inclusive growth by allowing everyone to contribute to and benefit from higher levels of prosperity. Economies that consistently rank high in the competitiveness rankings are those that are able to develop, attract and retain talent, and constantly introduce new and higher value-added products and services into the market."

The report adds that "while all of the pillars described above will matter to a certain extent for all economies, it is clear that they will affect different economies in different ways: the best way for Cambodia to improve its competitiveness is not the same as the best way for France to do so" because the two countries are in different stages of development.

The WEF ranked 144 economies.

27. Israel

Israel ranks 3rd in innovation, 15th in technological readiness, and 26th in business sophistication.

The Gaza War has discouraged tourists from visiting and "dented" consumer spending. Israel's economy is "already losing momentum," and now there are fears that the conflict will cause the economy to contract.

Source: World Economic Forum

26. South Korea

South Korea ranked 14th on infrastructure, 7th on macroeconomic environment, and 11th on market size.

South Korea's August exports missed market expectations — they are down 0.1% over the year. Additionally, analysts believe that South Korean export volatility could continue until there is an economic recovery in China.

Source: World Economic Forum

25. Ireland

Ireland ranks 8th on health and primary education, 10th on goods market efficiency, and 12th on technological readiness.

The Irish central bank recently "increased its growth outlook for the country" and analysts said that "faster-than-expected economic growth will allow the government to soften the next round of budget cuts for 2015," according to The Wall Street Journal.

Source: World Economic Forum

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Customer data forms the beating heart of your database – it’s the lifeblood that keeps your company’s cash flow, well, flowing. As a marketing director, you want that database to grow over time – not only by calling on data providers to expand it, but by growing it organically too.

The question is – what are the best techniques for drawing in freshcustomer data without incurring huge costs? We offer you a guide to customer data management.

1. Incentivise to Mobilise

Sometimes it takes something as simple as an offer to encourage a customer to divulge their data. Deploying relevant surveys/polls and offering genuine, uncynical incentives will encourage your prospects to engage with you. Not only will they be comfortable passing on their customer data to you –but the results of the surveys and polls will be of genuine use to your business plans and persona creation strategies.

Competitions are also a highly effective format for pulling in fresh customer data. Part of the competition process should always feature a mandatory customer detail form (with a relevant opt-out check box). While the initial outlay for competition prizes can be costly, the amount of customer data generated by the competition will more than offset the initial investment.

Incentives needn’t be costly – and you may already have great incentives at your disposal. These can include discounts, vouchers, free consultations, eBooks and White Papers – to mention a few. If the incentive offers value – while helping the customer address their business pain – they will be willing to provide you with their information.

2. Go Social

Attract customers via your social media channels, using relevant content that encourages them to join your database. If you offer them rich, value-added content, they will be happy to make the trade-off and opt into your sales funnel.

A simple but effective technique for ensuring that this process gains traction is to embed a subscription form on your social media channel. This allows your prospects to enter their details impulsively and in a fuss-free format.

Use web form builders to create an optimised form that is simple and clear – this will encourage customers to fill the form out. You should test how long it takes to fill in the form – one that takes over a minute could result in the prospect losing interest.

3. Send to a Friend!

Offer incentives to existing customers to share your messaging with their friends and colleagues. After all, a recommendation from a peer will be taken far more seriously than one that comes directly from you. Always embed a ‘Send to a Friend’ link alongside your social media buttons in any email campaign, also offering an option for the sender to add a personal note provides that perfect personalised touch.

4. Promote, Promote, Promote

Wherever your customers make contact with you, ensure that there is always an opportunity for them to opt-in to your database. This can be achieved through a physical leaflet, a business card or an online campaign.

Don’t Get Too Personal

Be wary of how much information you ask from customers – you may have garnered their attention but if you ask for personal information such as marital status and home phone number, your prospects may feel intruded and could baulk at signing-in,

5. Keep it Clean!

Maintaining your database is essential to effective data capture – it is imperative that all new data is consistent with your existing database entries, i.e. email address, telephone number and so forth. If not, you’ll end up with unmanageable entries on your database, creating extra work and potential confusion further down the line. Running a de-duplication programme on a regular basis ensures that customers’ data isn’t being multiplied on your database.

If you’re not sure how to proceed with your customer database management programme, call in a reputable data provider to do the heavy lifting for you. For more information on how to keep your database in tiptop condition, read ‘The missing link – how data cleansing can get you more, higher quality leads’ and you’ll be on your way to a gleaming marketing database!

This article was first published on the Marketscan blog. 

In this article I'll ride into the dusty, obfuscated world of marketing phrases, acronyms and buzzwords and try to make sense of it all in the clearest language possible.

Which means I should probably stop using words like ‘obfuscated’.

Following on from yesterday’s guide to single customer view, let’s take a look at customer lifetime value (CLV).

Customer lifetime value

Quite simply, CLV is the total worth of a customer to a business over the entirety of their relationship.

So for instance, the CLV of my relationship with Amazon since I began using it in the late nineties is... well, I wouldn’t like to say. The same goes for Rough Trade, or Threadless, or any number of cake shops on my way to work.

Figures that are impossible or difficult to work out, not just because of my own personal shame, but also because the data doesn’t necessarily exist. Also who can possibly say when the final total will be tallied up?

When I finally reject all my material possessions and spend the rest of my life wandering around the Alaskan wilderness? Or when... uh... that other thing happens... that I don’t like to think about?

According to our own report 'Building Loyalty and Driving Revenue in the Digital Age', executives universally agree that growing CLV is essential to the health of their organisation and a key measurement of success. 

Apparently CLV is also a distinct metric from the similar sounding ‘customer loyalty’ because it can be tangibly linked to revenue, rather than just intangibly linked to a warm cosy feeling of promised fidelity.

Which brings me to my next question...

How do you measure CLV?

The old adage that it costs less to retain existing customers than it does to acquire new ones is certainly still true for most marketers.

According to Marketing Metrics, the probability of selling to a new prospective customer is 5%-20% whereas the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60%–70%. 

Yet marketers are still more focused on acquisition than retention. According to our own Cross Channel Marketing Report, only 15% of companies surveyed are ‘more focused on retention’. 

Also, just 42% of companies are able to even measure customer lifetime value. There are many reasons given by our respondents as to why measurement is a challenge: the heavily segregated nature of teams within their organisation, poor systems, lack of coherent marketing and lack of integration. 

Measuring CLV can be boiled down to a simple formula: customer revenue minus the cost to acquire and serve the customer. Again this is a simplified view, and there are many other variables that can come into play based on your sector.

The key thing to remember is that customer segments should be identified by value and targeted in the most effective, cost-efficient way. Measuring the customer’s actual CLV can then be used to forecast predicted CLV.

The following segment I’m going to take directly from our downloadable Customer Lifetime Value Report which has been invaluable in writing this article. 

Here we have summarised other approaches to measuring customer lifetime value.

Measuring actual CLV:

1. Identify moments where value is created.
2. Bring customer records together to create a view of their journey.
3. Measure profit at each point.
4. Add together over the lifetime.

Measuring predicted CLV:

1. Identify moments where value is created.
2. What is that value a function of? (Does it vary from customer to segment? If so, identify why.)
3. Identify why the customer moved from one moment to the next.

A simple model like this is useful in the case of multiple, frequent purchases of a similar type of product, where data on past purchases data is easily available. 

These customer journeys, patterns of behaviour, frequency of visits and engagement figures can then be used to predict future customer lifetime value.

Benefits of CLV

If you can’t measure CLV, you can’t see the benefits of it, and therefore you won’t build it into your business strategy.

Having a clear idea of CLV will help provide meaningful insights into how you can plan future marketing campaigns and improve future customer interactions. 

It can help you decide how much your company should invest in retaining existing customers and how you should divide budget between retention and acquisition.

Ultimately CLV can give you a strong indication of your company’s health in the long-term. Is your current acquisition and retention strategy built for making quick wins in the short term or is it helping achieve sustainable growth?

Further reading for beginners...

During my first year at Econsultancy I’ve been making a point of writing beginner’s guides to any new terms or phrases I find particularly baffling, or that I might suspect other people may find baffling too. 

The following related articles should help clear up a few things:

• Single customer view (SCV)
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Social CRM

by Eric Nitschke, Managing Director

Let’s face it: we’ve all ordered the value meal at our favorite fast food joint. They’re often cheap, fast, and easy.

But consumers are shying away from these menus, with “healthy menu options” becoming a priority for 58% of respondents in a recent survey. It seems many people are in search of more fulfilling and satisfying options that help them achieve their goal of a healthier lifestyle.

Channel-marketing organizations have their own version of the value meal: the campaign-in-a-box. You know how it works:

• Product Marketing creates a campaign based on the features and benefits of the product of the quarter
• Channel Marketing posts it on the partner portal for partner downloads
• Partners launch the campaign to varying degrees of success

However, are these “channel value meals” really fulfilling a partner’s version of a healthy lifestyle? Are they feeding the pipeline, trimming the fat, and leading to better numbers at the bottom line?

SiriusDecisions estimates that more than $10 billion in marketing development funds (MDF) are wasted each year in the channel. And partners regularly report that their supplier partners’ campaigns contribute only a small amount to their total pipeline and revenue.

SiriusDecisions also notes that less than 20% of partners actively participate in channel-marketing programs because they don’t see the value of campaigns that fail to hit the mark.

The right recipe for the campaign value meal

The overriding problem in channel marketing is that most channel-campaign assets are product focused, so they don’t always address the key challenges customers may be facing. And, they rarely provide insights into the unknown, unseen, or under-appreciated exposures customers may not even be aware of.

Here are a few ideas on how to up-level your campaign-in-a-box assets to get greater return on your channel marketing investments.

1. Avoid the competitive bake-off. Channel-marketing assets that focus on your product only prepare partners to compete against another solution. That’s certainly helpful in later-stage buying cycles, but it doesn’t combat the “no decision” challenge. More than 60% of opportunities registered in CRM systems end in “no decision,” which means that the prospect decided that what they’re doing today is good enough. All the product-focused campaign assets in the world won’t help if a customer doesn’t see why they have to change at all.
2. Address why a customer should change from the status quo. Marketers and sales operations teams regularly quote research that customers are 60% through their buying journey before they engage a supplier. However, they often reach those conclusions in a vacuum, without insights into external market factors, competitive benchmarks, or other meaningful factors. That’s where a channel-marketing organization can make the most impact in their campaign assets.
3. Integrate strategy and messaging across marketing and seller-enablement assets. Instead of using your product as the “design point” for your channel-marketing and enablement materials, use the customer as the focus. Start providing your target customer with insight and opportunities that would make a big difference in their business. Then define the resolution of those issues in terms that lead them down the solution path that only you can offer. With that content in mind, you can create insightful channel content that helps partners tell the “why change” story, instead of just pitching product.

A healthier option to the value meal campaign-in-a-box

Fast food companies are responding to consumer demands by offering lighter, healthier options that answer the need for lower carbs, fat and calories, but are still budget-conscious.

Channel organizations can follow suit by creating campaign-in-a-box assets that help partner conversations better align with the needs of customers in today’s evolving business climate.

It’s a cliché to say that the world is more uncertain than ever before, but few realize just how much uncertainty has increased over the past 50 years. To illustrate this, consider that patent applications in the U.S. have increased by 6x (from 100k to 600k annually) and, worldwide, start-ups have increased from 10 million to almost 100 million per year.  That means new technologies and new competitors are hitting the market at an unprecedented rate.  Although uncertainty is accelerating, it isn’t affecting all industries the same way. That’s because there are two primary types of uncertainty — demand uncertainty (will customers buy your product?) and technological uncertainty (can we make a desirable solution?) — and how much uncertainty your industry faces depends on the interaction of the two.

Demand uncertainty arises from the unknowns associated with solving any problem, such as hidden customer preferences. The more unknowns there are about customer preferences, the greater the demand uncertainty. For example, when Rent the Runway founder Jenn Hyman came up with the idea to rent designer dresses over the internet, demand uncertainty was high because no one else was offering this type of service.  In contrast, when Samsung and Sony were deciding whether to launch LED TVs, which offered better picture quality than plasma TVs at a slightly higher price, there was lower uncertainty about demand because customers were already buying TVs.

Technological uncertainty results from unknowns regarding the technologies that might emerge or be combined to create a new solution. For example, a wide variety of clean technologies (including wind, solar, and hydrogen) are vying to power vehicles and cities at the same time that a wide variety of medical technologies (chemical, biotechnological, genomic, and robotic) are being developed to treat diseases. As the overall rate of invention across industries increases, so does technological uncertainty.

Consider the 2×2 matrix below. The horizontal axis plots each industry based on technological uncertainty, measured as the average R&D expenditures as a percentage of sales in the industry over the past ten years. The vertical axis plots each industry’s demand uncertainty, measured as an equal weighting of industry revenue volatility, or change, over the past 10 years and percentage of firms in the industry that entered or exited during that same time period. Although these are imperfect measures, they identify the industries facing the highest, and lowest baseline levels of uncertainty.

The table below ranks industries into the top 10 and bottom 10.

Where does your industry sit?

If your industry is in the lower left quadrant, or in the bottom 10 in the above table, you face relatively low baseline uncertainty for both demand and technology. Examples of industries here include providers of personal services, such as hair styling and dry cleaning, who have used similar technologies to provide solutions for well-known demands. By contrast, if you’re in the lower-right quadrant, you can generally predict demand but the challenge you face is technological uncertainty. For example, insurance companies face technological uncertainty that comes from how big data and analytics investments will drive revenue; whereas demand is based on highly predictable demographics.

If you’re in the upper-left quadrant, you are with industries that face high demand uncertainty but low technological uncertainty. For example, restaurants and hotels often have difficulty predicting demand for their services, because many factors influence whether, when, and where people eat out or travel. However, the technologies used to offer food or lodging have not changed dramatically over the years.  Finally, industries in the upper-right quadrant — such as software, pharmaceuticals, and medical equipment — face high uncertainty in both demand and technology. For example, who would have predicted that medical robots would perform surgeries? When Intuitive Surgical launched the Da Vinci System medical robot — which allows surgeons to operate using 3-D visualization and four robotic arms — the company faced significant technical as well as demand uncertainty.

If you’re in the upper right quadrant — or in the top 10 most uncertain industries as shown in the Table — you require greater innovation management skills than industries in the other quadrants or in the bottom 10. In fact, among the top 10 companies of the Forbes Most Innovative Companies list (since 2011 when we started the list), more than 80% of the most innovative companies compete in industries in the top right quadrant.  In other words, if you are in a high uncertainty industry, you must excel at innovation…or die.

A new set of tools and perspectives — such as, for example, design thinking, lean start-up, agile development — are emerging in many disparate fields and revolutionizing the way managers in established companies successfully create, refine, and bring new ideas to market in conditions of high uncertainty.  In our new book, The Innovator’s Method, we show how managers can adapt these tools, in an end-to-end process, for managing innovation.

For example, companies that excel at resolving demand uncertainty become experts at design thinking and validating concepts through rapid experimentation with customers.  Successful software companies like Google, Intuit, and Salesforce.com churn out their “beta” or “labs” products that effectively test demand for new products. When Google software engineer Paul Bucheit had ideas for Gmail and AdSense (the system that placed advertisements based on keywords in your Gmail messages, search, or website) he found he was often fighting against the opinions of leaders.  But fortunately, experiments with customers trump opinions at Google. Following the advice of then CEO Eric Schmidt to “get 100 happy users inside Google,” Bucheit prototyped solutions that eventually proved demand and won the day. Today, AdSense generates $10 billion in annual revenue for Google.

Companies that excel at resolving technological uncertainty often develop a broader technology palette. For example, to help start-up teams generate a broad list of solutions, Intuit identified and hired experts in technologies related to mobile devices, social media, user interaction, collaboration, data, and the like. These experts are valuable for broadening solution searches, and they help teams identify what is technologically feasible. At biotech Regeneron, the company pioneered a new experimentation platform — “humanized” mice that allowed them to test drug effects more rapidly and reliably — that dramatically increased their ability to test various technology solutions to problems.

The bottom line is that success requires an understanding of how much uncertainty you face and the ability to manage those uncertainties in new ways.

How much uncertainty does your industry face?  Ask yourself the following questions:

• Have new technologies or startups started to threaten my company or my industry?
• Over the past five years have new competitors entered the market and captured 10% share by targeting our customers with a different value proposition than what we offer?
• Over the past five years have we begun to see customer preferences change, resulting in a different mix of products and services being demanded?
• Have you recently started offering (or are planning to offer) a product or service that has never been offered before?

If you answered “yes” to the first two questions, you’re likely sitting in a business with high technological uncertainty; if “yes” to the last two questions, you’re probably dealing with high demand uncertainty.

Fear of terrible content

I bet you’d be lying if you said you weren’t afraid of the repercussions of bad blog content. Major brands constantly make the news for social media posts and content marketing gone horribly awry. While 71% of marketers may be increasing their content, the smart ones are being selective about the quality and quantity they publish.

Whether you’re looking to bring on the right freelance blog writers or considering adding a full-time staffer to your marketing squad, here are some ways to determine just who’s qualified to represent your organization to the outside world:

1. Writing Samples

We’re not saying your potential writer needs to have samples of their work published in places like Forbes or the New York Times, but you should be very hesitant if a writer can’t provide samples of their work. In addition to having a solid grasp of spelling and grammar, your writer’s samples should:

• Cite high-quality resources
• Write in an engaging and interesting voice
• Provide some evergreen or actionable value

2. SEO Knowledge

A writer who claims to understand SEO isn’t always what you want. SEO best practices continue to change drastically, which is why it’s most important to hire someone who’s committed to keeping up with the pulse of search engines.

3. Compelling Storytellers

Former journalists and aspiring fiction writers are often powerful candidates for blog writers, especially in boring industries. If your content is struggling to gain notice, hiring someone with a knack for turning boring facts into a compelling narrative could be just the ticket you need.

For more information on why stories matter more in the age of the internet, check out Why Storytelling Matters: A Data-Driven Explanation.

4. They’re Avid Readers

If you ask an industry insider what their favorite blogs and educational resources are, you should never hear stony silence. In fact, that’s a terribly dangerous sign. As Nico Lang points out, writers need to read, a lot, in order to get any better at their craft. Many of the world’s most talented blog writers are insatiably curious. That same curiosity is what’s driven thought leaders like Ann Handley to such great heights.

5. Research Skills

If a prospective freelance writer is an ineffective researcher, your content will suffer. They’ll fail to incorporate the newest data and case studies, and they’ll be far slower than they need to be. The resulting product’s probably not going to be especially authoritative, either.

Today’s writers for the web need the ability to harness the right resources, quickly. Fact-checking and a passion for accuracy in their words are also crucial.

6. A Social Following

Writers should amass a following. There’s plenty of talented people penning great stuff in secret, but they’re hardly content marketers. Your blog writers should know how to write blogs, eBooks, and whitepapers that are easy to promote, which is why a strong social following is an excellent sign.

7. A Thick Skin

Everyone – and I mean everyone – makes mistakes from time to time. it happens. However, your writer’s going to need to be accepting of criticism in order to improve. Besides, people on the internet can be cruel. Make sure your writer is open to constructive criticism, and ready to ignore any destructive haters.

8. Healthy Respect for Deadlines

Your freelance writers should never be too flaky or easily distracted to hit the dates on your content calendar. Your content marketing strategy will quickly plummet if you accidentally hire someone who always fails to deliver on time. Make sure your potential writers are prepared to deliver consistently, and don’t hesitate to make your feelings about deadlines known.

9. Some Graphic Design Skills

Really excellent blog writers are also proficient graphic designers in basic tools like Canva or Skitch. Hiring someone who can deliver quality visual content will be a huge bonus to your business!

10. Industry Experience

Is it possible for blog writers to create content for industries they know nothing about? Likely, but it’s a lot more difficult. Hiring a freelancer who already has in-depth knowledge of trends, issues, and opportunities in your industry can mean your training efforts will be a lot simpler and more streamlined.

Last month in my round-up of how seven ecommerce brands use highly persuasive copywriting I covered one of my all time favourite examples.

Moosejaw is a US-based retailer and ecommerce store specialising in outdoor recreation apparel and equipment.

What separates Moosejaw from its competitors is its consistently hilarious and quirky tone of voice that runs through all of its website copy, advertising and customer service channels.

I talked to Moosejaw’s CEO Eoin Comerford and customer service director Chad Caudhill about the importance of brand tone of voice, how it effects the company culture, its perception in the wider ecommerce world and the benefits of being an engaging, off-the-wall brand with bucket load of acerbic charm.

Here are a few examples of the copy that drew me to Moosejaw in the first place...

The carousel on the homepage currently contains the following attention grabbing statement. I immediately feel right at home here.

There's also this inspired piece of stupidity. Which subtly downplays the fact that this is an inspired way of laying out information and navigation clearly.

Everywhere you look on the homepage there’s a chucklesome piece of navigation or product ad, that immediately makes you want to find out more.

It doesn’t just stop at the homepage. The product pages have brilliant little touches.

And here's some highlights from my chat with Comerford...

How was the decision made when it came to adopting your particular tone of voice?

For Moosejaw the decision on a brand tone of voice didn’t even have to be made. It was inherent from the first day of the company.

Our founder Robert Wolf is a naturally quirky, funny guy. In 1992 Moosejaw operated a single retail unit. He had to engage with customers personally to keep the business running.

Three years later in 1995 the Moosejaw website was founded, and the personality of the founder spread to the site. That level of brand consistency is part of the mantra. 

That’s something engrained in what we are. Every touch-point is part of the branding – the packaging, the website, our emails, even the back of the delivery truck which says, “the driver carries $50 and is fully naked.” It’s a quirky, engaging, off-beat brand voice. 

How do you maintain a coherent tone across so many different teams?

The key thing is that it does start at the top. As a CEO one of my primary objectives is consistency - it’s our most critical aspect. As Robert stepped out of the business, we established a set of core values that stemmed from one vision.

The vision was to aim to be the most fun outdoor seller on the planet. Not the biggest, or the most profitable.

Our core values are as follows: 

1. Be notable, do things people will tell people will tell 10 friends about. 
2. Be engaging - not just broadcasting. We have a friendly tone. Within customer services, we don’t talk about average call length or similar cold metrics. In some cases, the longer we talk to people on the phone, the better. Which leads us to the next value...
3. Make our customers love us. This is about not letting a customer get off the phone until they love us. 
4. Only do what’s cool. We have an acid test for this. It’s called ‘The hottie in the coffee shop test’ - if we wouldn’t wear it in a coffee shop to impress a hottie in a coffee shop then we don’t sell it. If we wouldn’t use a piece of gear, or pretend that we used a piece of gear, we don’t sell it.

This also affects our hiring policy. Within our stores, we’ll hire someone who is engaging and fun ahead of someone with actual retail experience. Same is true in customer service.

Our culture is not for everyone admittedly. There’s music, ping-pong, animals running around an open plan office. The point is that we as company need to have fun to project fun. 

Do you test your copy?

Sometimes on the site, but more so on email subject lines to see what works. You can’t offer madness all of the time.

If you’re too obtuse, there is too much confusion. When the founder started doing this, there was no plan. We knew we would offend some people and we were totally fine by that. 

Do you find that your tone of voice limits your audience? 

Yes, but that’s fine. In order to create a brand people love, some people are going to hate it. Some think our voice is over the top. They’d rather someone who is serious about climbing gear.

To be a strong brand, you have to have your own evangelists. There are lots of companies that sell the same brands as you, even at the same price, but it’s through our tone that we’ve been able to differentiate.

We’ve had customers who pay more at Moosejaw for the same product just because they wanted to buy it from us.

In my previous article I mentioned your live chat service, which is a great mixture of self-effacement and flattery. Why did you decide to install live chat?

We’re early adopters of tech, we were one of the first ecommerce stores to use responsive design, and the the second we heard about live chat, we wanted to be involved.

We launched the service 10 years ago using the LivePerson platform. We wanted to be able to respond immediately to customers, as emails just weren’t cutting it.

It’s a better experience overall as we can give a response immediately. We have five people to 25 people on live chat, compared to 20 to 80 staff on telephone. However our live chat agents can handle up to four chats at a time.

The brand tone of voice is carried over to live chat, as we make sure we hire the right people and we also don’t track conversion. We are purely there for support. The goal is to be there to help.

As for mobile, 40% of our traffic comes from mobile devices and provides 30% of our revenue, so we also offer a separate mobile specific live chat service.

For more on the blog about copywriting, check out these five evocative examples of ecommerce copywriting.

Our Festival of Marketing event in November is a two day celebration of the modern marketing industry, featuring speakers from brands including LEGO, Tesco, Barclays, FT.com and more.

With the proper planning and strategic thinking, a competitive advantage is something that your company can definitely create in today’s dynamic and fast moving marketplace of business niches.

Furthermore, your business can become particularly competitive in capturing those magical areas of competitive advantage if you can learn how to really understand your consumer market and the desires of your customers. Luckily, this can be done through the application of a more modern approach to strategic planning as we’re about to cover now.

The rewards of going through the strategic planning steps we’re about to cover cannot be understated. By learning to truly understand your customers and use that knowledge for planning your business strategy, you’ll be able to outpace your competitors, improve your brand image and develop client loyalty in a dramatic way that improves your bottom line.

Fortunately, for those who are really interested in this kind of consumer centric planning strategy, there is a detailed and highly informative new ebook I ran across from the people at Insights In Marketing which is packed with practical advice. Here is an overview of that advice.

Strategic Planning in a Nutshell

In essential terms, strategic planning involves taking advantage of expansive customer and market research to gain insights on your overall market, your competition and, most importantly, your actual customers. With this information, you can then build a thoroughly fleshed out strategy for staying ahead of the curve in terms of delivering the right products to its best possible customer as often as possible.

Strategic planning involves asking yourself some probing questions about where your business is headed, how you think it should get there and then using the answers to these questions for achieving the goals you really want to see come to fruition.

The Value of Serious Customer Research

The core of truly effective strategic planning lies in researching your customers in deep detail and really getting to know them. As the strategic planning ebook explains, there are many aspects of the research your company is going to have to do if it wants to really make an effective competitive advantage come to the fore.

The most crucial part of this data gathering will mean finding out as much of the key information about your customers as you possibly can and then using it for product development, better customer service and improved brand development. You need to find your customers drives, desires and real passions as they relate to your niche in the marketplace.

This process really starts off with something called a consumer insights audit, which helps you understand the following essentials about your consumers:

• Their general habits
• Their most often used media and communications tools
• Their awareness of ads and their habits for viewing them
• General buying and browsing habits
• Where they consume content most often on the web
• Their use of your particular brand and how aware they are of you
• The perception your brand and product offering creates

Finding the Ideal Offer for the Ideal Customer

Through the kind of deeply targeted research of your customers that we just listed, and by applying its insights to your existing business and consumer market, what you can really hope to achieve is the holy grail of effective business promotion. This holy grail consists of finding your ideal, “perfect” customer and delivering to them the offer they absolutely perceive themselves to need for solving their problems and doing this better than any of your competitors is capable of achieving.

If you can pull this feat off, you have the effective equivalent of a secret weapon working for you. Why? Because customers who really feel like you understand them and are serving their needs will be extremely loyal to your brand for the long run and for any new offers you develop.

Furthermore, these kinds of customers will spread the word on your behalf to others who are in the same situation as them. This is the kind of marketing and promotion that’s worth a lot more than any paid advertisements and it goes a long way towards making you immune to competitors.

Developing the kind of consumer insights culture that deep research of both needs and customer psychology applied regularly will help you outpace your competitors. You don’t want to be in a race to the bottom with your competitors. Instead, you want to beat them by knowing your customers and winning their loyalty through that knowledge.

For a more in-depth look at this topic, you can check out the details in this ebook by Insights in Marketing.

It’s no surprise that simplicity sells. Too many options can overload short-term memory, inhibiting the ability to process information, creating cognitive overload. In addition, excessive options can spark feelings of remorse after transactions as customers continue to wonder if they had made the right choice.

But creating “decision simplicity” presents only part of the brand simplicity picture. Sephora, Carrefour, and Amazon are examples of successful simple brands, despite providing a vast range of options to their customers.

Simplicity should be built into the very core of the brand, beginning with the product or service itself and extending through the interactions at each touch point and in all brand communications.

Achieving simplicity at this level is not easy, but the returns can be well worth the effort. The Siegel+Gale Global Brand Simplicity Index, an annual global study of 10,000 consumers (both customers and familiar nonusers) found that three out of four people are more likely to recommend a brand that provides simpler overall experiences and communications, and that people are even willing to pay more for a simpler brand’s product or service. In addition, brands that are perceived as being simple in their “products, services, interactions, and communications” outperformed indices on the stock market by as much as 100%.

So how can a brand achieve this form of simplicity? A look at the 2013 rebranding of the nonprofit Rotary can supply some clues.

Rotary is a highly complex organization, steeped in tradition, with 1.2 million members in 34,000 autonomously run clubs in 530 districts across the globe. Navigating its extensive and varied programming was difficult for members and the public alike, making it hard for the organization to stay relevant. Rotary also discovered, through an internal survey, that members had difficulty explaining the nonprofit’s role in the world.

Working with Siegel+Gale, they conducted two additional worldwide studies. The first one assessed a donor’s motivation to give money or time by comparing the nonprofit to 12 international peers and two local charities in each of four global regions to see how people perceived Rotary, as well as the respondent’s “brand preferences” among these organizations. This survey found that while some nonprofits were positioned clearly in people’s minds, Rotary wasn’t. The second study revealed that neither their members nor their staff could consistently answer the question, “What is Rotary?”

While the results were certainly disappointing, these surveys found two recurring and motivating themes: People join and stay with Rotary because of the connections they make with others and the positive feelings they get by giving back to their communities. Seeing the potential in these themes, Rotary adopted “community and connections” as their brand essence — the core benefit, promise, or purpose of a product, service, or organization.

Rotary organized all of their activities into three core areas at aligned with this brand essence: 1) “join leaders” for their club meetings; 2) “exchange ideas” for their work finding solutions to community problems; and, 3) “take action” for their work to create positive change in their local communities and in the world. As a result, Rotary was able to imply the benefits of getting involved with the organization, as well as explain how to do it, through one simple structure.

Finally, Rotary turned their attention to their website. Prior to the rebranding, this site was focused on internal operations, making it nearly incomprehensible to the general public. But with the new brand essence and architecture in place, they were able to simplify their messaging by using the three core areas as part of their navigation. They found they needed two websites: one for the public, helping them to understand Rotary’s role, and another for their members, where they could conduct their business. In addition, they updated their logo and imagery to underscore an experience centered on community and connections.

According to Rotary’s General Secretary, John Hewko, this simplification effort is showing positive results.

Based on Rotary’s experience, here are four key action steps to keep in mind for simplifying your brand:

• Find your brand essence. Understanding what your brand stands for is not only essential for helping you focus your products and services, it is the key for helping you simplify your communications. A brand essence can be used as the screen for judging the appropriateness of everything from a group’s product and service offerings to their brand experience and communications. But be careful not to go too narrow with your essence. Focusing on one idea alone will be too limiting and handcuff your brand without providing the vibrancy needed for today’s world.

• Hide your complexities. Many of the brands that rank high on the Siegel+Gale Brand Simplicity Index, such as Amazon and Google, have truly complex underpinnings, while providing a simple experience. Likewise, Rotary remains highly complex with its vast number of initiatives and programs. But the brand refresh simplified the experience into their three-item menu of “join leaders,” “exchange ideas,” and “take action,” making it easier for both members and non-members to get and stay involved.

• Simplify your communications. Organizations that make their communications too complicated, have inconsistencies between their message and experience, or employ the use of fine print raise transparency questions and force consumers to work to align the promise with the reality. What consumers want is a clear presentation of the value a brand provides.

• Realign your metrics. Measurements you once thought were helpful might not tell the entire story after your simplification process. When Rotary launched their new websites, they found that less time was spent on the site and there were fewer page views. But upon a further look, they learned that the change was because readers were now able to find their needed information more quickly — a key benefit of simplicity.

Taking these steps just might spark added recommendations and referrals, the ability to charge a premium, and greater brand value.

We live in a world of social media. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google+ (yes, Google+). It’s used to share information, provide advice, and disseminate breaking news from around the world. It is, in short, changing the world on an almost daily basis.

And so many people are doing it wrong.

This isn’t going to be an extensive piece on how to use social media – hire my agency if you want that. It is, however, going to be a piece on one item of social media that drives me absolutely bat-shit crazy – the abuse, and misuse, of the Hashtag.

The Hashtag

Hashtags serve several purposes, but the easiest way to think of them is as a way to categorize your social media posts. Through the use of the Hashtag you can allow other users interested in that particular topic to read your, and other, posts, even if they don’t follow you.

So what’s the right and wrong way to do this?

The Right Way

Hashtags is something of a misnomer when it comes to posts. It should really be Hashtag. Singular. The point of the Hashtag is to categorize your social media post, which means that it should, in theory, fall into one, two at the outside, category.

If, for instance, I was posting a Tweet from my wine blog about Virginia wine (which happens quite often), the Hashtag I would use would be #VAWine – one that’s accepted on various social media channels for those posting about, or interested in, Virginia wine.

Events often have designated Hashtags, making it easy for those attending, and those not, to follow along with events. Television shows have embraced this, with a designated Hashtag for the program almost omnipresent in every show we watch today, allowing viewers and non-viewers alike to follow along with the experience others are having watching one specific show.

This is the right way to use Hashtags.

The Wrong Way

If there’s a right way to do something there must, inherently, be a wrong way to do it. Perhaps in no case has that so evident to me in recent years than with the Hashtag, because man are there a lot of people doing it wrong.

Your social media posts should accomplish one of several things – information, customer service, sales (all of which I promise to talk about in a future piece), but to do that they have to contain actual content, and not be overwhelmed with Hashtags just trying to get people to click on them when they come up in a search.

I may not be explaining this in the best way, but fortunately the internet is rife with examples of Hashtag abuse. Check this one out.

See how his Hashtags take up more space than the actual post he published? See how it distracts from what he’s actually trying to say and turning the whole thing into a post without value?

Of course you do, because you’re smart.

So What Do It the Right Way?

Well the easiest and perhaps most obvious reason to use Hashtags the right way is to stop hurting the Internet. Seriously – she’s fragile and frequently abused.

More importantly is that using Hashtags correctly benefits your users, which in turn benefits you. So take my advice and use discretion, restraint, and a little common sense when it comes to the application of the Hashtag. The Internet, and more importantly your users, will thank you for it.

Back in August of ’13, Contently co-founder Shane Snow wrote the following in a LinkedIn Influencer post:

“Every few minutes, a new buzzword rips through the business world, skids, gets a few books written on it, and ends up in a pile of tired terms next to ‘synergy.’ Today, one of the biggest corporate buzzwords is ‘storytelling.’ Marketers are obsessed with storytelling and conference panels on the subject have fewer empty seats than a Bieber concert.

Funny thing is, storytelling has been the buzzword off and on since advertising became a thing. It’s always coming out of the buzzword pile because, at the end of the day, storytelling is a skill. Stories have been an essential driver of change throughout human history. For good and for ill.”

About a year has passed since Shane penned this insightful passage, and the buzz surrounding both storytelling and Biebs has only intensified. One continues to be lauded for its meaningful contribution to society, and the other, well…

In his Content Marketing World presentation this morning, Shane offered a compelling case for storytelling via, what else, stories. Here are three of the many outstanding stories Shane shared, along with a quick content marketing takeaway from each story. Hopefully my effort to explain Shane’s stories concisely does not dilute the message.

“I want to die on Mars”

This is how Elon Musk described his motivation for making space travel available to the public. Shane put it best by saying this statement made people “care violently,” certainly more so than if Musk would have instead promoted the potential ROI of public space travel. Musk’s statement tapped into the curiosity and dreams of billionaires, helping him garner enough backing for three trial launches.

All three launches failed, with the “final” launch exploding in spectacular fashion. Everyone was dejected. But Musk carried on, more determined than ever. Ultimately it was Musk’s singleness of purpose and his ability to convey his purpose – he told his dejected backers that this was his dream and he’d never give up – that inspired the funding for a fourth launch. Not only did the next launch succeed, but Musk’s rocket was able to perform capabilities, like landing vertically, that NASA has yet to achieve.

The takeaway: Storytelling is how content marketers get audiences to “care violently” about an organization’s purpose and values. An underlying, powerful story is the backbone that supports a brand’s overarching message. It aligns your organization’s purpose with the motivations of your audience.

Which beggar would you give your dollar to?

Sign 1: Homeless, I need help.

Sign 2: Mom told us to wait here. That was ten years ago.

I’ll admit, I guessed the second sign would be more effective. I was wrong. Shane’s research showed the majority of people would rather give their dollar to the beggar holding the first sign.

The takeaway: Not any story will do. Humans are built to discern stories. The second sign offered an intriguing story. The first one passed the sniff test, and that’s why it ultimately won out.

A content marketing revolution

Ernesto was a thoughtful young man from Argentina who became a doctor because he wanted to change the world. You probably know Ernesto by his more familiar name: Che Guevara. Fast forward a few years (and probably past some essential details) and Che is in Cuba, aspiring to start a people’s revolution with Fidel Castro. The first attempt to revolutionize Cuba is done with brute force. It fails miserably, with Che and Fidel among the dozen of the 80-ish attackers who managed to escape with their lives.

Fast forward again, and now Che and Fidel are using a different strategy to spark their revolution: pirate radio. At first, the radio broadcasts were largely ineffective. They had listeners, but most listened solely for entertainment value.

So Che and Fidel tried something new. They started teaching peasants how they could become more successful, largely with farming tips. Their ranks went from a couple hundred to a couple thousand almost overnight. This helpful “content” allowed Cuba’s citizens to identify with the revolutionary message. Meanwhile, Cuba’s dictator was issuing propaganda that no longer passed the sniff test for many of the citizens. Che and Fidel’s underlying story of aspiration served to build relationships with the peasants of Cuba. They called their target audience to action again, this time with more success.

The takeaway: It is better to tell the truth, even if it is small, rather than an embellished lie. Content marketers can rally audiences by using stories that speak to the truth behind their aspirations.

Big thanks to Shane Snow for the amazing session, and apologies for not giving his stories the full detail they deserve. I look forward to reading Shane’s new book, Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success.

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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2014. | Three Stories That Will Help Content Marketers Win With Storytelling | http://www.toprankblog.com

CRM is typically all about customer behavior: you track customers’ behavior in terms of where, when and in what context they interacted with your company. But the increasing ease with which you can track behavior and the ability to build and maintain extensive behavioral databases has encouraged many marketers to de-emphasize the collection and interpretation of “soft” attitudinal information: that is, data around customer satisfaction, attitudes towards brands, products, and sales persons, and purchase intentions.

The argument is that in-depth behavioral data already encapsulates underlying attitudes, and because decision makers are mainly concerned with customer behavior, there is not much need (any more) to worry about underlying attitudes. There’s a similar assumption underlying much of the discussion around how to measure the return on marketing investment, where it seems to be tacitly accepted that attitudinal insights are insufficient at senior decision-making levels, and behavioral insights represent today’s benchmarks.

But downplaying attitudinal data seems rather too convenient. After all, it’s hard work to capture attitudes. Purchases, customer inquiries, or mailing contacts are collected by firms continuously for all customers through CRM software systems, but attitudinal information rests in the hearts and minds of customers, who have to be explicitly prompted and polled for that information through customer surveys and textual analysis of customer reviews and online chatter. What’s more, some customers might not want to give that information, even if firms wanted to collect it.

Bottom line, you can maybe hope to get strong attitudinal information about a few customers, but it is unrealistic that you can get it about a lot of them — and you certainly can’t be polling everyone all that often just to get information from a possibly unrepresentative subset. Much easier, therefore, to pretend that attitudes are just not that important.

This is actually a cop-out. In fact, respectable analytic techniques exist that allow to you impute attitudes from a small group about which you have complete information (attitudes, behavior, demographics) to a larger group where the attitudinal information is missing, and then test whether the imputation of those attitudes produces better predictions of the larger group’s subsequent behavior (which you are tracking all the time).

Basically, what you do is analyze the relationships between attitudes, behavior, and demographics for customers in the small group so that you can express attitude as a derivative of the other observable factors: a male customer who is X years old and does Y will have Z attitude. You assign customers in the larger group with the attitudes that their behavior and demographics imply, using the relationships derived from the small group analysis. You then make predictions about their future behavior, which you can compare to the predictions you make on the basis of demographics and past behavior only.

We tested the approach with a company in the pharma industry. Our large dataset included the prescription history of more than six thousand physicians for a leading cardiovascular drug over 45 contiguous months. Physicians were surveyed on their attitudes toward the main drugs in the relevant therapeutic category, as well as their attitudes towards the firm’s salespeople. The survey asked the doctors, for example, to rate the product’s performance and to assess to what level they agreed or disagreed with statements made by the firm’s salespeople during sales calls in light of their experience with the drug. Our goal was to explore how the pharmaceutical firm’s customer lifetime value (CLV), customer retention, and sales were affected by the physicians’ experience of the drug coupled with their attitude regarding the salespeoples’ credibility and knowledge.

The results were startling. We found that for this company, a $1 million investment in collecting customer attitudes would deliver projected annual returns of more than 300% from providing more accurate behavioral predictions. It also revealed that attitude information for mid-tier customers (in terms of future profit potential) would produce the highest relative benefit. In other words, incorporating attitudes provides a forward-looking measure that helps to discriminate between the customers that will likely contribute to increasing profitability and those whose profitability will likely decline. In this case, it appeared that the firm was overspending on top-tier customers with regard to their CRM campaigns and that it could improve the ROI from CRM by rebalancing resources across top-tier and mid-tier customers.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the inclusion of customer attitude information in predictive CRM modeling will always yield returns. But our findings do make a very strong case that firms should explore avenues for tracking customer attitudes and to assess their predictive potential in order to adjust CRM strategies accordingly.

“Buyers believe buyers first, the seller second and the business third.” This is a direct quote from a technology entrepreneur I coach and he is right. Testimonials have amazing persuasive powers. They touch on both the facts and emotions that drive people to make decisions. They reaffirm that your claims are credible and that your […]

Many marketing gurus and job ads mention pivot tables as a 'must have' skill.  

But guides on how to use them are usually too general. Here's a specific example of how - and why - a digital marketer would use pivot tables.

As a digital marketer you are often faced with the task of making sense of log files. But log files are a blessing and a curse.

A blessing in the sense that they capture everything, but a curse in the sense that we are then expected to turn hard-to-read data into organized reports.

One type of log file which we often find ourselves converting is the campaign data from a social media platform. 

Typically, these are a organized with each row being a single date - and all of the campaign data as columns.

But that is often not the way you want to see things. It is much easier to read the report when the campaign is the left-most column and the dates are on the top. Then we can easily see how our data has changed daily for a particular campaign.

Of course this is possible with some fancy transposing with Excel, but thankfully there is another, simpler way to do it.  And that is precisely what pivot tables are for.

What I'm using

To make this tutorial clear, I'll stick to using the following: 

• Log file: The file I'm working with is from the Facebook ad campaign report - which you can find at Ads Manager / Reports. Any daily ad report will work, though.
• Data: I'm only going to use dates, campaigns, ad impressions, and click-through rates (CTRs) - so those will be the only columns.
• Spreadsheet: I'm using Excel, but you could equally use the excellent - and free - LibreOffice.

Getting started

First off, export your data from Facebook and load it into a spreadsheet.

Now when you're about to work with your data, it's good to strip it down to just what you need. You can always go back to the source later and add more.

Okay, so your data should be in the format date, campaign, impressions, and CTRs - and it's helpful to put headers on the columns.

What we're going to do

We are going to:  

1. Change dates from being all in one column to being all the columns.
2. Change campaign name from being all in one column to being one campaign per row.
3. Move impression numbers to the corresponding date column and campaign row.

 And here is what will happen to our data:

1. The dates will become columns. 
2. The campaigns will become rows.
3. The impressions will correspond to the date they are under and campaign row they are in.

That is the essence of the 'pivot' - and all you need to know for this tutorial.

How to do it

Select the whole table of data you are going to work with

And then select 'Insert/Pivot Table'.

Choose a new worksheet as it will be clearer when we do the manipulation.

Now you should be presented with a somewhat confusing page which tells you to build a report. If you don't see Excel as below, then make sure you're on the right tab.

Luckily we already have the model that we need to follow - and it is almost as simple as just following the instructions:

1. Click on 'Date' (the word, not tickbox) and drag it into COLUMNS. You now have all the dates in your table as columns.

2. Click on 'Campaign' and drag it into ROWS. There we go - our campaigns are now the rows.

3. And finally drag 'Impressions' into VALUES.  

  

Voilà - you can now see your campaigns lined up on the left and see the impression values as columns. Much nicer than sorting by campaign and then by date, right? 

And so...

Pivot tables offer you a great way to change long and hard-to-read log files into a nice report suitable for managment consumption. Of course there are many other things you can do with the pivot table - including interactive graphs - but we'll leave that for a future post.

In the meantime, please let me know if you have any other insights in the comments - any other typical uses, or tips and tricks. 

And finally, pivot tables are an incredibly useful tool for performance marketing - so, like it or not, they are here to stay!

If you're looking to improve your analytics skills, book yourself onto Econsultancy's Web Measurement & Analytics Training Course.

I’ll be the first to say that rules are meant to be broken. However, when it comes to Demand Generation Strategy there are a few rules that if not followed, will lead to poor results, wasted money and effort, and a frustrated marketer.

1. Do Your Homework

Do the research. Learn your market, your customers and your competition. Don’t build a strategy around a tactic. Build it around what you’ve learned is missing in the marketplace and how your product or solution can fill a void in your audience’s lives. Too many marketers think they already know everything about their market. Get out there. Talk to customers. Talk to prospects. Talk to your own sales people who speak with prospects and customers on a daily basis.

Take your time doing your homework. It’s better to have the right strategy then to meet an arbitrary deadline with a poor strategy.

2. Allow Strategy to Drive Technology

Not the other way around. With so many marketing technology tools out there today, it’s easy for marketers to build a strategy around what a tool’s capabilities are. It’s also easy for marketers to shy away from a strategic idea because they think their marketing tool can do it. You know how it’s not a party until a glass is broken? Well, it’s not a marketing strategy until you stump the marketing automation platform. Design your marketing strategy around what’s right for your business – your buyers, their buying process, your content, your qualification model and your revenue goals – not the tool.

3. Think from a Buyer’s Perspective

Almost every company I’ve worked with makes the mistake of primarily thinking inwardly. This is why the bulk of content created today is focused on products – ultimately expensive “selfies” instead of what your buyer really wants to learn about. If you want to build a successful marketing strategy, build it so that it speaks to your buyers’ needs. Create it so that your content is can be easily found where they do their own research and craft it so that your messages resonate. The research you conducted in #1 above will help you tremendously in this endeavor.

4. Track Results

Do I really need to say this? Hopefully not, but just as a reminder……what’s the point in building a long-term strategy if you don’t set clear goals and track results against them? Yet I’m surprised how many marketers let metrics be almost an after-thought.

Another point that should go without saying is that simply pulling numbers into a dashboard isn’t tracking results. Are those numbers vital? Yes. But what those numbers mean is even more important. Don’t just set up your business intelligence tool and call it a day. Establish a process whereby you evaluate the numbers on a regular basis and determine what they mean and what tweaks to your strategy are needed to foster improvements in your results. There’s always going to be room for improvement.

5. Accept that You’ll Make Mistakes

No matter how much of #1 through #4 you do, you’ll still make mistakes. Accept that. It’s okay. It’s what makes marketing fun. We’re always learning. So run your analysis, determine what it means, and then be willing to make adjustments. The only thing wrong with your mistakes is if you choose to do nothing about them.

Author: Jennifer Harmel @JenniferHarmel2 is Vice President, Strategy for ANNUITAS

Content Marketing World 2014 – the biggest, baddest content marketing conference in the world – has come to a highly climactic end. After three days of sessions, breakouts, panels, and networking, closing keynote speaker Kevin Spacey (!!!) brought the house down with one of the funniest, most profanity-laced speeches ever heard at a marketing conference. (He also made my dreams come true by quoting his own House of Cards character, Frank Underwood, with a Southern accent.)

A tornado warning here in Cleveland left many of the 2,500 attendees tucked away in their hotel rooms on Wednesday night — myself included — so I took the chance to jot down a few insights from the last 48 hours. Here’s my field report on what’s hot in content marketing — what content marketers are thinking about, arguing about, and gushing about this year:

1) Just do it better.

All of us marketers know the story by now — we live in a world of information abundance, which means our buyers hear more marketing messages than ever, and are therefore more likely to ignore marketing messages than ever. But LinkedIn’s Jason Miller reminded me that the space is only crowded if you can’t differentiate your brand. “If you’re worried about adding noise to a crowded space,” he told his audience, “just do it better.” Important note: better is different than louder. At Marketo, when we talk about “better,” we mean more relevant, more personalized, more innovative, and better timed — if you can be better than your competitors in that way, you lift yourself above the noise.

2) You don’t have to be good at everything.

In a panel with marketing geniuses from TrackMaven, Lincoln Electric, DemandBase, and AHA Media Group, it was widely agreed that content marketing isn’t just about creativity and art — it’s also about cold, hard metrics. But as Chris Golec of DemandBase pointed out, that doesn’t mean that every content marketer has to be both an artist and a mathematician…which is good news for those of us struggling to calculate the tip at dinner. Chris noted that content is becoming so integral to marketing strategies that many companies now have multiple content positions, and that often one member of the team will be on the more creative side, while another will be more metrics-driven.

3) Content marketing is still in early days.

At the same panel, an audience member asked what the most important quality in a content marketer is, and TrackMaven’s Allen Gannett was quick to say that today, it’s crucial for content marketers to have “change management skills” — simply because so many organizations are still hesitant to adopt content marketing.

Because content marketing is such a big part of Marketo’s own marketing strategy, I tend to forget that some marketers are still struggling to demonstrate content’s importance. Reports like these ones, and ebooks like this one can help with that struggle! Ahava Leibtag of AHA also gave some excellent advice for marketers in this position: simply put, think like a marketer. Market the idea of content marketing internally to your team. Get case studies. Present data. Help them see your vision. Find someone in your competitive set who is successful with content marketing, and show that to your VP.

4) “Influencers” aren’t always influential.

That is, they aren’t always influential in the specific way you want them to be. TopRank’s Lee Odden (a pretty impressive influencer in his own right) delivered an excellent presentation about leveraging influencers, in which he pointed out that it isn’t just about identifying influential people in your space — it’s also about qualifying them for your marketing needs. He suggested checking out an influencer’s sway using multiple sources and tools, and vetting their own content’s quality, frequency, and engagement.

5) Voice is just as important as story.

In Doug Kessler’s session on mastering tone of voice, Doug walked a packed room through his 10-step process for creating a crisp, clear tone of voice. We’re all sold on the importance of storytelling, but your tone of voice is the way you tell your story. As Doug explained, marketers are “obsessed with the explicit, which is the story, instead of the voice — which is how we actually say it.” So how do you master your company’s tone of voice? Here are some of my favorite among his 10 steps:

• Once you’ve established your brand’s tone of voice, manage it. Treat it like the strategic weapon it is. Make it someone’s job to coach your team’s voice — not police it. You should train (or get buy-in from) everyone in your company on this voice — your new hires, your writers, your editors, and your approvers.
• Capture your voice in a tone of voice guide — like a style guide, but way beyond. Write the guide IN your tone of voice, and be sure to include lots and lots of examples — examples of what you do want to do, and what you don’t.
• Embrace good jargon. Marketers are afraid of using jargon, but good jargon actually helps you sound precise. It signals to your audeience that you’re an insider, and it makes them feel like insiders too. Bad jargon is jargon that makes it difficult to understand what you mean — it’s lazy, and it makes it seem like you have something to hide.

Obviously these tips are just that — the tip of the iceberg. It would probably take me 100 blog posts to put everything I learned at CMW into words…and I’ve got content to write. Until next time, Cleveland!

For the glory it gets, the internet isn’t omniscient. Information on it isn’t entirely accurate. In fact, the answers that you’re looking for aren’t always on Google. Cases where this happens to serve as a cautionary tale to users.

But then again, it’s not really about the internet is it? It’s really about the limits of where you can go for accessible information. Software leads are just another form of information bundled up for the benefit of your salespeople. You can access this through your own lead generation strategies, outsourced appointment setters, and other mainstream lead sources.

But do these software leads grant omniscience? No.

Remember, your leads are useless unless there’s a good chance of a sale. Much like the basics of testing accurate information on the internet, there are basics to follow when testing a lead’s accuracy. These depend on:

• Name – No, not just the name of your prospect nor the name of their company. It also includes their overall reputation. Are they a good company to work with? Do they pay their providers? Do they have a history of abusive tech policies?
• Budget – Does the specific decision maker have the necessary budget? That’s always a basic question. Although, it also has long-term applications. You can’t easily tell if your business model is actually enabling that budget in part or in whole.
• Needs – How sure are you that they have the need to really make the close? Are they desperate for a solution or just browsing for vendors? They may have the budget but not necessarily the commitment to change their current system.

You can already tell that even the basics don’t tell you everything you need to know to accurately predict a positive sales outcome. That’s why you still need sales reps.

It doesn’t help for your salespeople to be too skeptical of the leads. Instead, they need to remember that the task of probing deeper and understanding more complex buying problems is their job. What you won’t learn from Google and LinkedIn, you might learn from just having a brief phone call conversation. When you want secrets, don’t keep your digging to a search engine. Go out. Network. Ask questions. Stay sharp and mindful. The internet is just one among the many answers to the oldest question: What are you looking for?

There is one month left in Q3. This is the time of year leaders begin to plan for 2015. As you look back on 2014, did your marketing team accomplish their goals? Did your team provide enough leads for your sales leader? As you review your performance, and contemplate next year, you have two choices.

Marketing automation software has been a big part of my business, and I’ve found it supports a great marketing strategy as well as a great sales strategy. In fact, the companies that do it best have marketing and sales that coordinate well with each other.

Here’s a great infographic from Salesforce, with some surprising stats…

Stats You Should Tweet

If you don’t have a good picture of how many leads you need to meet your sales quota, that leaves your marketing team not knowing what numbers they should hit. If you don’t have a picture of your sales pipeline, how do you know if you can expect your sales team to meet their quota?

Slideshare is a great way to share visual content, presentations, or even videos. By condensing your other content like ebooks or blog posts into slides, you can create a more visual piece of content to promote.

The presentation sharing site has been around since 2006 and was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012. There are more than 15 million presentations on the site about a variety of topics.

The number one topic on SlideShare is Business and Management with the top three most searched keywords being “marketing” “social media” and “Facebook.” This indicates a lot of potential for B2B marketers to post and promote content on the presentation sharing site.

I’ve pulled out a few recent presentations that do a great job explaining various topics to B2B marketers.

Crap. The Content Marketing Deluge. by Velocity Partners

This presentation by Velocity discusses the increasing amount of content being produced and how to avoid being added to the pile of sub par content. The slides begin by explaining how the “content is king” attitude is leading to incredible amounts of content being created – both good and bad.

Many companies are creating bad content with a catchy title, causing readers to be unhappy with the time they put into consuming the content. To avoid upsetting your readers, you need to be creating useful, engaging content that provides them some sort of solution or benefit.

Here’s one of my favorite points made in the presentation – “Pull out that pocket compact you have in your handbag or bottom drawer. Flip it open and look in the mirror. Now ask yourself, ‘Am I building a Great Content Brand or am I just building an efficient content machine?’ If the little round face in the mirror says,‘The latter’, close the compact and go revisit your strategy.”

The Fundamentals of Blogging by HubSpot

This presentation published by HubSpot is actually part of their Inbound Certification classes. The Fundamentals of Blogging covers how a blog will help your business, the logistics of crafting useful blog content, and how to promote your blog.

Past the simple “you need a blog” speech, HubSpot’s presentation goes deeper into best practices, and the “why’s” and “how’s” of blogging. Browse through the entire presentation to see SEO tips, how to write titles, and call to action ideas.

Here’s a great line from the slides – “Know your audience. If the content on your blog doesn’t appeal to your target audience – your buyer personas – you’re never going to convert all of that traffic into leads and customers for your business.”

10 Marketing Tips That Will Increase Your ROI In 30 Days by Nicole Elmore

This all encompassing SlideShare covers a slew of topics at their very basics. Nicole’s presentation features tips about blogging valuable content on a regular basis, incorporating social media into your marketing campaigns, and using effective on-page SEO to be better found in search.

My favorite takeaway from this presentation – at the minimum, add at least one lead generating form to your website. Then, follow up with these leads by providing valuable content that will interest them and answer their questions. The presentation offers this stat from MarketingSherpa: “Only 27% of B2B leads are sales-ready when first generated. This makes lead nurturing essential for capitalizing on the other 73%.”

A Dr. Seuss-Inspired Guide to Twitter by Hootsuite

This fun presentation put out by Hootsuite puts a Dr. Seuss twist on Twitter tips. The Slideshare goes over running a Twitter page from a basic level. The rhyming lines cover everything from how often you should tweet to how to mention someone in a tweet. It’s also a great example of how you can use SlideShare to upload a PDF.

My favorite line from the presentation:
“See Twitter is a great place to share and to chat
About what you’re doing, sure, but so much more than that.
Curate great content from other providers,
Be they bloggers, or clients or business insiders.”

5 Reasons Why Your B2B Marketing Needs To Use SlideShare by Square 2 Marketing

This slightly “meta” presentation (a SlideShare about SlideShare) explains how Slideshare is the perfect compilation of social media and content marketing for B2B companies. The presentation covers a few reasons that SlideShare is essential for B2B marketing: SEO, multimedia narrative, no-risk content, and easy to share content.

My favorite tip from the presentation is about lead generation with Slideshare. The presentation recommends including links to your site and landing pages through your slides, and encouraging conversions by keeping the characteristics of a SlideShare user in mind. Here’s the type of person the presentation recommends writing for:

• Interested in more visual content
• Social media savvy – especially for business
• Looking for short, easily digestible content
• Searching for quick solutions or guidance

The Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn: The Webinar by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

LinkedIn created this presentation for a webinar on integrating LinkedIn into your marketing campaign. The presentation goes over the different ways to engage your audience on the social site: company pages, sponsored updates, and LinkedIn groups.

The presentation also delves into some best practices for posting on LinkedIn and some great examples of companies who are rocking on the site. LinkedIn suggests a bunch of different ways to repurpose your premium content for sharing with professionals on the social site.

My favorite part of the presentation is their “Sponsored Update Content Best Practices Cheat Sheet” which covers how to optimize content, manage updates, and optimize visuals for your sponsored updates. Here’s what they have to say about optimizing content:

• Always ask, ‘why would my audience read this?’
• Use concise and compelling intros and headlines
• Ask compelling questions to involve the target audience
• Include a clear call to action, regardless of the objective
• Test to see what works with your audience and then refine

How to Tell Your Story in 2014 (The Right Way) by Gary Vaynerchuk

This compelling presentation covers the changing scope of storytelling to consumers. Gary explains how you need to know your audience and convey your value proposition in a way that connects with the consumer.

Here’s a great line from the presentation – “Most marketers treat social media as a distribution channel…They are missing the fact that social networks are the first platforms ever that are actually a two-way conversation.”

Aside from the engaging message in the presentation, this is also a great example of a well-executed SlideShare. The slides do a great job telling a story, without needing audio from a webinar to understand the message or examples.