Rnordman

After the top notch article on migrating to Universal Analytics using Google Tag Manager, we got some feedback from you that some background on what tags and tag management are would be helpful. We heard you and we’re here to demystify site tags and how to keep them in order.

What is a “Tag” Anyway?

There are hundreds of services for tracking, advertising, site customization, and generally souping up your ability to measure, reach, and convert your visitors. The vast majority of them rely on javascript to track the activity of visitors on your website and report on or respond to their behaviors.

When people talk about “tags” they’re talking about the snippets of javascript provided by 3rd party services like Google Analytics, DoubleClick, AdRoll, Adobe SiteCatalyst, etc. Every 3rd party tool like these you bring to your site to improve your ability to reach & serve customers means adding a new piece of javascript – aka a tag – to your site.

The tracking code you get from Google Analytics? That’s a tag.

And all that is assuming you can even get them implemented! Since every new tool means a new piece of javascript has to be put onto your website, either site-wide or in very rule-specific places, it means you have to turn to IT and get them to prioritize your tagging needs. Even once you’ve gotten everything put into place, every change or troubleshooting session means another turn in the IT queue, which could cost you hours, days, or weeks of data.

Managing tags in this way quickly becomes a mess that drives teams apart. You aren’t happy because your tools don’t work. They aren’t happy because they have to reorganize their schedules to implement them. It leads to awkward team building exercises, and nobody wants those. (Especially when Dave from HR accidentally gets decaf box ‘o joe at your retreat, causing an unexpected but not really very positive bonding experience between Marketing and IT as they vow to fill his car with shaving cream, right after they figure out who is going to sneak out and get real coffee.)

All that sounds incredibly grim, and preventing these issues is exactly why tag managers exist.

What is a Tag Manager?

Tag managers are tools designed to accomplish two main things:

• Minimize code deployed on websites and in apps
• Allow many pieces of code to be managed from a single area without editing the site or app

Example of Google Tag Manager inserted into HTML5 Boilerplate

A tag manager is comprised of two main components, the management platform and the code that is deployed in your website or app. The code, like the example shown above, is a single piece of javascript that gets inserted into your site or app, typically near the top so it can load and execute early.

The management platform is typically a menu-driven interface that allows you to create tags in an adlib fashion, where you choose from a set of common tracking and application tags and insert your account details, unique IDs, criteria for data capture, etc.

Example of Google Tag Manager’s tag creation interface & menus.

How Do Tag Managers Improve Your Ability to Get Conversions?

Site Load Times Improve

The short version is: if your site loads for shit because you overloaded it with tracking codes, you’re going to lose valuable time for first impressions, and your rankings may suffer too. It literally costs you money to have a slow site.

Consider the following stats from an article from Peep about improving site speed:

• 47% of people expect pages to load in 2 seconds or less.
• 57% abandon pages taking 3 seconds or more to load.
• 8% of people report slow page load as a reason for purchase abandonment.

Not only can it impact your visitors on site, but sluggish site load speeds can impact your ability to show up in searches that drive customers to your site in the first place! Since 2010, Google has cautioned webmasters that sluggish page loads, particularly on mobile, could and would be used as part of the algorithm for ranking.

The more calls to outside resources you add to your pages, the more likely you are to experience slowdowns in page load. Tag managers use one snippet of javascript to control your tags, drastically reducing the number of requests to outside sources when your pages load. That snippet also loads asynchronously, which means that it loads separately from the rest of your site files, outside of a strict loading order.

Many individual tags may load asynchronously, but they will have to be individually read and executed. That execution often entails requesting information from the page, which could still be loading. Tag managers resolve this by reducing the number of code calls the visitor’s browser has to make down to one. All calculations on how and when to fire tags can then happen while the rest of the page loads uninterrupted.

It’s also common for a tag manager to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN), meaning that you don’t have to rely on a single server to respond to get tags to work correctly; instead of one server, the CDN will identify the most optimal server to pull your tags from, and the fastest server(s) will be the one to load your tags.

Another way to save speed is by consolidating data shared by multiple tags into one area that feeds all of the tags, known as a data layer. For example, if you report details of purchases on your site as conversions to Google Analytics eCommerce, AdWords, and Marin Software, deploying each individually would require requesting purchase information three times, in the specific setup of each tag. Tag managers leverage this “data layer” to set a single point of reference that all three can pull the necessary data from.

Avoid Or Rapidly Fix Site Errors

It’s all well and good to want your site to load faster, but imagine a scenario in which one of your tags was experiencing an error that caused your site, or key functionality driven by tags to fail completely?

Anecdotally, I recall at least two instances of 3rd party tag providers (one javascript-loaded trust logo, and one tracking service) that had downtime on their servers, and the placement of that code caused massive increases in page load times on the sites they were on, and in at least one instance caused entire pages to fail at loading.

Two words: Hot. Mess. This is the kind of thing that ruins entire days.

The only way to address that issue at the time was for Marketing and IT to coordinate to audit the entire site and pull the tag from every place it was on, while an exec was pulled in to calls with the service provider talk to someone about receiving compensation for site downtime. It was an utter disaster.

Not only do slow downs and page load failures due to javascript errors turn away customers in droves during the time it’s at it’s worst, but if they bounce to a competitor because you’ve lost your window for a good first impression to a major failure, you may lose them (and their potential referral business) forever.

Tag managers solve this by providing you, an intrepid marketer, a single interface that allows you to activate and deactivate tags, and set rules to manage when and how tags fire.

Take this example from Google Tag Manager:

Choose the offending tag from the list of tags.

Select the “Delete this tag” option.

You’ll be prompted to confirm your choice to delete.

Once you’ve deleted the broken tag, use Create Version to save a copy of your current tag configuration, then click Publish to make the changes live. Your site immediately stops using the broken tag.

This method of emergency management in Google Tag Manager relies on key feature: versions. You can create a version of your sets of tags and switch between them. Like this:

Choose a previously saved version of your tag setup that doesn’t contain the broken/offending tag and roll back by clicking publish on that version. This versioning aspect also allows you to delete and create tags as needed, with the ability to publish different versions as needed with minimal effort.

This takes a potential crisis that could grind your day to a halt, especially for IT and Marketing, and turns it into something that one person can solve within minutes. Log in, deactivate the offending tag, and save the changes. The tag will be deactivated, your site will resume regular loading, and you’re free to focus on following up with the vendor on how to make up for lost data or functionality.

Save Yourself (And Your Co-Workers) Time & Effort

Deploying tags one at a time requires edits to your site every time. That means researching how to deploy a tag, getting that tag and instructions to IT, waiting for deployment, testing the tag, and then making sure everything actually went as planned when it’s finally live.

Source: ScrumReferenceCard.com

Marketers or solo entrepreneurs who manage sites on their own may end up getting hung up on technical complexities of tag deployment. This means spending time researching the best way to plug your tags into your site, experimenting with unfamiliar code, breaking things, swearing, getting that ill-advised 8th cup of coffee, and worst of all possibly scrapping potentially valuable tools due to deployment difficulties.

Tag managers, at their simplest, require the deployment of a single line of code onto your sites. One line of code means one trip through the development cycle. After that, anyone confident enough with a menu-driven interface can deploy new tags to the site at any time, no lines, no waiting. Although there are risks that come with that kind of freedom, it does enable marketers and data jockeys fast means to deploy key data gathering and leveraging tools. Additional tag manager features like rules and macros can be used to fine tune tag behavior by setting conditions for tag use or data elements without writing new code.

The main caveat to this seemingly miraculous scenario of One Line Of Code To Rule Them All is: certain things, such as eCommerce tracking, require some IT involvement because it involves setting up what’s called a “data layer” that contains dynamic content associated with fixed variables, e.g. product name, price, quantity. Once established, a data layer can then feed this type of data to any tag that needs the data, removing the need to repeat the process.

Google published a few case studies from companies using Google Tag Manager that feature a number of operational and functionality improvements. In one report, Airbnb was able to shorten days long tag deployment to a matter of a couple hours. Ensighten, a paid tag management service, has a testimonial boasting 600 hours of development time saved, and another from a company who took tag deployment from 6 weeks to one.

What Are My Options For Tag Managers?

The go-to for many people is Google Tag Manager. As with most popular Google products, it’s free. It has full implementation templates for Google Analytics, AdWords, DoubleClick, and a few other popular measurement and advertising tools. It’s got a lot of powerful options and tools, like the versioning aspect mentioned above, and a number of highly powerful functions outlined in a recent ConversionXL article by Yehoshua Coren.

The major downside of Google’s Tag Manager however is that, outside basic template-driven deployment, it can become complicated quickly. ECommerce implementation requires the previously mentioned data layer, that requires research and deployment. Things like Events require research to understand how to properly implement.

Because it’s a free service, it means researching solutions for all those things on your own. However, because it’s a popular Google product, there is documentation, a set of dedicated forums, and of course many articles from users who have reached solutions.

Filament.io – Filament.io has a suite what they refer to as “apps” which you can install, like Google Analytics, social sharing tools, and MailChimp email forms. The bulk of your tags will be managed through an app they call CodeDrop, which allows any type of custom tag to be added to your site.

They say they’re a UX and Design company and it shows! Very friendly interface with lots of the little touches like success messages, first-use hints, etc. that make it very easy to pick up and go. It’s got a WYSIWYG editor that lets you drag and drop code chunks of all kinds onto your site. It has WordPress integration through a plugin, and some additional filter options that are specific to WordPress.

The downside is they don’t have many tags implemented as apps yet, so most of your deployment will take place via CodeDrop. In the case of eCommerce tracking, it may mean some IT (or at least code savvy) involvement. There also doesn’t appear to be a CDN to speed up tag delivery.

This is a free service with a Pro upgrade option that gives you access to one on one help.

Tealium is a paid tag management service. Because tag management is their bread and butter, they do not play around with features. They have what they refer to as “turnkey integrations” with over 600 different vendors that utilize site tags, meaning that there’s a menu or template-driven method to set up and deploy your tags from those vendors.

They have tools that allow marketers and IT pros to check on the placement and performance of deployed tags, ensuring that they’re placed on the right pages and behaving as expected. Tealium boasts the use of no fewer than three major CDN providers to improve tag speed. A browser plugin is available to assist in data and tag auditing, among other perks.

They have a number of case studies and white papers, with one client citing a 49% improvement in page load speed through checkout.

Because they’re positioned as an enterprise solution, their plans start at $149 a month and go up from there. But they’re also #57 on the Forbes list of America’s Most Promising Companies.

Ensighten is another premium service; they also purchased TagMan, a pioneer in the tag management space, in March of this year. They have an entire suite of digital marketing tools available, with the tag management aspect falling under the Ensighten Manage™ umbrella.

On their facts page, they boast 40% page load improvement. They use a proprietary method called the Ensighten Tag Delivery Network™ in a manner similar to the CDNs used by other services to expedite and smooth out how tags are loaded alongside web page content.

Their pricing is volume based, so you will have to contact them to get a sense for pricing. Just last month they were honored by Inc. Magazine, earning spot #147 on their renowned Inc. 500|5000 list, positioning them as a company with a strong base.

Speaking of well-established companies, Adobe also offers a tag management solution. This digital giant is also rather tight-lipped about their pricing structure, but like other enterprise level solutions, they offer a suite of services for online marketers, and dedicated service. They also lack some of the case study data and feature descriptions that make other options appealing. However, if you’re involved with Adobe for other aspects of your online marketing, it may be worth your time to investigate this option for tag magement.

Conclusion

If you’re currently deploying all of your javascript in independent code snippets, stop.

There’s a ton of performance optimization that can come from using a Tag Manager that isn’t as obvious as a call to action or landing page design. This can also make a huge difference in the way internal teams collaborate and execute on work that actually makes a difference.

There may come a time when you'll decide to quit your job. And when you do, it's imperative that you choose your words wisely.

"Whether you are quitting on good terms or bad terms, you don't want to burn bridges," says Dana Manciagli, a career expert and author of "Cut the Crap, Get a Job!" "The words you use when you inform your boss of your decision to leave can determine whether they'll support you going forward. And you definitely want their support."

She says people commonly regret what they say during their resignation because they are angry, nervous, or unaware of the consequences.

"There are two different scenarios that trigger a poor selection of words. One, the employee is quitting because they found another job," Manciagli explains. "Many say disparaging things because they are going to 'teach their prior company a lesson.' Their ego is inflated and they are going to crap all over the company on their way out." And two, the employee is quitting because their situation is bad, but they have no other job waiting. "These employees feel like the victim and are going to blame others, including their boss," she says.

But the best "quitters" go out saying positive words, as painful as it may be, and talk about what they learned and what they will carry forward in their career. "And they use words that will get them hired back by the same boss at a later point in time, if needed," she says. 

To avoid burning bridges, Lynn Taylor, a national workplace expert and the author of "Tame Your Terrible Office Tyrant: How to Manage Childish Boss Behavior and Thrive in Your Job," suggests you take the time to write out your thoughts beforehand, "as your words will be remembered." Highlight the positive aspects of working for your boss and the company, and why your move has to do with your career aspirations. "Pointing fingers or being negative about the reasons you're leaving have no redeeming value."

She says the moment you announce your resignation, your manager may feel a sense of shock or denial. "But that quickly turns into defensiveness and the onus is on you to counter that with the utmost diplomacy," Taylor explains. "You can only benefit by keeping emotion out of the process, as no one has ever benefitted by burning bridges — or being anything less than humble when calling it quits." 

Here are 19 things you should never say when you're resigning from a job:

"I'm leaving…today." 

Never quit without offering ample time for the company to complete the transition. "If you can offer more than two weeks, that reflects well on you, even though your company many not need it," Taylor says. "Also find out during your conversation how and when your boss wants you to communicate your departure with fellow employees."

"This is the worst company I have ever worked for."

"You're basically nailing the coffin shut on any opportunity to return to that company, or have the company be a positive reference," Manciagli says. "There is no upside to bashing the company you are exiting. None."

Instead you could say, "I believe I will be a better fit at another company."

"You don't know how to manage people." 

First, insults will get you nowhere. Second, it takes two people to be a great manager-employee team, Manciagli says.

You could say, "Although we both tried, our manager-subordinate relationship wasn't where it could have been." But best is to leave this out of the dialogue completely, she says.

"No one is happy here." 

Don't try to suggest the ship is going down with you. "Even if it's true, your coworkers won't appreciate it, and you're not their spokesperson," Taylor says. "If they're about to jump ship, that will be their task."

"Other people are getting promoted, and I'm going nowhere, so I'm leaving."

"It's sad that the person who says this has not yet learned that their progress through the corporate ladder has virtually nothing to do with peers," Manciagli says. "This is a person clearly not self-aware. They are taking no responsibility for their areas for improvement."

"The product is not up to par."

That won't win you any points, even if you feel you are being constructive. "Once you're parting ways, you're already perceived as a turncoat, so you don't want to suggest that you'll be badmouthing their product or service in the marketplace," says Taylor.

"I wasn't compensated fairly." / "This company's pay is not market-competitive." 

Don't make it about money. "A statement about your compensation, even though it may be true, will be perceived as a negative slam against the company in your future career endeavors," Taylor explains. "This is a situation where you have to look at what you have to gain or, more specifically, lose by openly disparaging the employer's choices, even if they led to your dissatisfaction."

Manciagli agrees. "Unless you have done a statistically-sound market study, then you do not know if your pay was market-competitive." 

If you feel strongly about mentioning your salary, you could try: "I was fortunate enough to find a position that gives my family and I some more breathing room, financially."

"I'm concerned about the company's future."

"Your vote of no confidence before you leave is like a block to the head before you smile and walk out," says Taylor. You're better off not sharing your misgivings and instead talking about the fact that you were seeking a different opportunity.

"He always blocked my progress on projects, and she was always rude and kept me out of the loop." 

Now is not the time to reveal issues you had with your coworkers, Manciagli says. "It's too late. You are resigning." This approach makes you look weak and blameful. "Just don't do it. Talk about yourself only," she suggests.

"I didn't have enough to do." / "I was always so bored."

This statement shows a lack of initiative, and you'll just be labeling yourself in their eyes as unmotivated. "Any blame placed on coworkers or your boss at this stage of the game is water under the bridge," Taylor says. "Your best strategy is to be concise, professional, and show gratitude for the opportunity."

"I kept my head down, did my job, and wasn't rewarded in any way."

News flash: Your paycheck and employment is your reward.

Manciagli says if you want more attention from your boss, such as thank-you emails or pats on the back, you should have communicated that. "Plus, excellence in our jobs is more than keeping our heads down. As a matter of fact, that strategy can backfire."

"I already told my cube mates, so now I'm ready to tell you…"

No matter how bad your relationship is with your boss, you need to respect their position and tell them about your plan to leave the company before you share that information with anyone else in the office. "And you need them to support you at some level," Manciagli explains. "There is never a good outcome from telling others before the boss. There is no such thing as a secret!"

Make your decision in private, with your family and non-work friends in confidence. Then, make an appointment directly with your boss, she says.

"I have a much better offer from a way cooler company."

The last thing your soon to be ex-employer wants to hear now is how great your new employer will be. "Your best option is not to mention the company by name or discuss very much about them, other than the fact that they're a better fit for xyz reason," Taylor says. 

"I couldn't find you, so I'm leaving you a voice mail/email to let you know…"

Make every effort to meet in person when resigning. Something this important should not be left to an impersonal form of communication unless there's no other option. After you've met in person, Taylor recommends sending your boss a polite and positive formal letter of resignation. 

"Here's what's wrong with this job."

Don't offer unsolicited advice; it will appear haughty. "This is your opportunity to thank your employer for the training and opportunity," Taylor says.

"I am definitely/definitely not open to hearing your counteroffer." 

First of all, don't assume your employer will counter. And second, don't announce your decision about whether you're interested in hearing and considering it before they even initiate that conversation.

While experts tend to advise against accepting a counteroffer, it's usually worth at least some consideration.

"Good luck. This is a sinking ship."

This is a terrible thing to say. Manciagli says you should take the opposite approach, and leave off with something like, "I wish you and the company all the success going forward."

Taylor says it can be challenging to refrain from saying these things and to stick to a script when parting ways with a boss. "Resignation is often the culmination of weeks, months, or years of pent-up frustration, and so it's only natural that something will slip out that isn't politically correct." But if you remember to plan ahead, stay calm and dignified, and focus on preventing self-sabotage, it's possible to avoid these phrases.  

SEE ALSO: 4 Ways To Get Ahead At Work Without Sucking Up

Join the conversation about this story »

Author: Stephanie Yung

First, the facts: marketing experts, analysts, and hands-on practitioners have now embraced marketing automation across industries. The benefits are innumerable, and as technology continues to evolve, these benefits are constantly multiplying – leaving non-adopters in the dust. But as an Account Executive at Marketo, I work closely with our Customer Success and Support teams, where I’ve seen firsthand how marketers are sometimes hesitant to up-level their game.

To be clear, this isn’t because they don’t understand what marketing automation can do for their companies, and it isn’t because they’re afraid to try something new. Often, marketers simply (and reasonably) want a game plan before they get started. They want to know how the first few weeks with marketing automation will look for their company, and they want a proven strategy for getting the most from the gate.

So if you’re considering marketing automation, but aren’t sure how you’ll get started, or you’re a new user who’s ready to take your marketing automation for a spin, this blog post is for you. Here are the first five “moves” I recommend to new marketing automation users:

1) Launch an Awake the Dead Campaign

An “Awake the Dead Campaign” is often the first campaign marketers send using marketing automation. We all know the importance of a squeaky clean database, but even the best databases are prone to collecting dust. Marketing automation is great at managing preferences and unsubscribes, but first you’ve got to find out where you stand. An “Awake the Dead Campaign” is an easy way to set up tracking on the people who do want to engage with your brand, and clean out the people who want to unsubscribe.

Start out with establishing a broad message you’re comfortable sending to everyone in your database. This might be a company newsletter, an invitation to an upcoming event, or an announcement. Next, sit back and let the data stream in. Every response (or lack of thereof) to your database will give you valuable information. Your marketing automation can now start tracking the names you’ve sent to, unsubscribe anyone who asks to be removed, and report back on bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, and conversion rates.

2) Personalize Your Use Case

When your company originally considered marketing automation, what were the main reasons? Which processes were you trying to simplify? Which campaigns did you hope to expand or improve? With a consultant, walk through a scenario you commonly encounter in your marketing, and review how marketing automation would address it.

I recommend marketers start with a campaign that they already run. This is a low-risk way to get started, and get familiar with your platform in the process. For example, if you attend the same tradeshow every year, set that campaign up first – your emails and follow-ups, your advertising, your social promotions, etc. If your vendor allows you to “clone” entire programs, you’ll be able to re-use your work next year.

3) Get Stakeholders Involved

Marketing automation isn’t just about empowering marketers – by doing so, the technology aims to improve your entire organization. Getting aligned with the sales team is vital to marketing’s credibility, and it’s also vital to marketing automation success.

To make sure you’re setting up campaigns that will help the sales team win deals, get aligned as soon as you start using marketing automation. Come to an agreement about lead qualification and scoring, decide which buyer activities should be alerted to sales, and consider leveraging a Sales Development Team.

4) Become the Teacher’s Pet

You want to make the most of your marketing automation, and that means there are no stupid questions. Take advantage of any consulting hours your vendor offers, and get the information you need. Marketo offers unlimited “office hours” – set times during which you can dial in, ask an expert your question, and discuss their response with your peers. Even if you don’t have a specific question, you can still dial in to listen to other Marketo users ask questions – sometimes, the best questions are the ones you haven’t thought of yet.

The other part of being a teacher’s pet, of course, is doing your homework. Ideally, your vendor can provide you with a library of resources to read (or skim, if that’s more your style). I always recommend our own Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation as a place to get started – it covers everything from common features to deep-dive ROI. Once you’ve got that one down, check out The Essential 8: Top Reports Every Marketer Needs, or our Engaging Email Marketing Success Kit. We’ve also got cheat sheets, infographics, and worksheets for the “hands-on” learners out there.

5) Find Your Community

Plenty of other people adopted marketing automation before you, and that means there are plenty of people who were once in your shoes. Many vendors can provide you with a platform to connect with other users, and help you find similar companies to consult along the way. As valuable as consultants are, talking to your peers about their marketing automation is a whole different game.

The Marketo Community, which currently connects over 40,000 marketers, gives our users 24/7 access to help articles, documentation, training, and (most importantly) one another. I especially encourage new users to spend time with their peers, join groups, read up on best practices, and submit ideas to the Marketo product management team. New users can also hugely benefit from our mentor/mentee program, in which we connect new Marketo users to experienced pros.

So those are my recommended “first moves” with marketing automation – if you’re a seasoned user, what would you recommend? Have any questions? Something you wish I’d covered? Let me know in the comments section below!

New to Marketing Automation? Your First 5 Moves was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Face-to-face marketing better than digital

Business tends to fall into one of two main camps – you either sell something straight away, or you generate a lead to which you sell something later. Lead generation is really important.

Research consistently shows that the number one way of lead generation is referrals. Getting other people to recommend you is essential. This is because it provides “social proof”, a significant psychological factor in persuading people to do something. If you want people to want to buy from you, then generating social proof through referrals is a great start. The latest annual survey of lead generation in the business-to-business sector confirms the value of referrals demonstrating that this kind of marketing is more than five times better than social media activity.

Indeed, rather like other studies this research shows that real world, face-to-face marketing activities are superior to most digital marketing.

However, as you can see from the chart there are two digital marketing activities which are clearly much more beneficial than other activities. The study suggests that you can relegate search engine marketing and social media marketing to the “nice to have” category. But the study confirms two areas of online marketing that are the best things you can do.

Email marketing still tops the list

In spite of the fact that we all now receive several hundred emails per day, email marketing remains the top digital method of generating sales leads. If you are not using email marketing you are clearly losing out. Email marketing consistently comes out on top in a wide range of studies. It is the out front winner in terms of getting business. Yet, many firms appear to believe that search engine marketing and optimisation is where they should focus their activity. Whilst search is useful, it is six times LESS effective than email marketing, according to this research.

Write Reports

The second most valuable digital marketing activity is the production of white papers and reports which can be downloaded. This taps into another psychological feature of persuasion which is “authority”. People buy from companies they perceive as the “experts”. You can establish your level of expertise with regular reports and downloadable documents, but make sure you use lead generation devices within them, such as clickable links to detailed information about your products and services.

Indeed, if you demonstrate your expertise through reports, live events and email newsletters, you will be at the “top of the tree” in terms of lead generation. Sure, you can also generate leads from social media or search engines. But this latest study confirms the findings of dozens of other surveys; such things are a useful part of your marketing mix, but they are not the essential parts.

If you want to generate sales leads, it is time to relegate search and social media to “also rans”.

Helping prospective customers learn about solutions that fit their needs and ultimately your solution involves a lot of moving pieces.

Targeted social media updates, blog posts, email campaigns and even video marketing efforts all play an important role in building a relationship with a customer.

Today we’d like to talk about another important part of an effective content marketing strategy: white paper lead generation.

White papers fall into the content category of educational resources. They help prospective customers learn more about different products or services that they might consider, and they help frame the purchase decision in your company’s favor.

They also help position your company to guide the conversation and become a trustworthy resource along the buyer’s journey.

That said, some marketers think white papers are a content cure-all, when that’s simply not the case.

Here’s a look at what educational resources do and don’t do when it comes to helping customers along in the buying process.

What Downloadable Educational Resources Don’t Do

While premium content assets like white papers can do a lot for your lead generation efforts, there’s a number of things they won’t do:

• White papers won’t make a sale. When someone downloads a white paper from your website, they are just doing research. it might be early-stage research or perhaps they are putting together a case for presentation to a larger group of decision makers. White papers are just one step in the customer buying cycle. These content opportunities can do a lot of things, but they usually don’t close a sale for you independently.
• White papers won’t brainwash a client. You can’t expect your buyer to turn on a dime with a single white paper. The goal of white paper lead generation is not to change a prospective customer’s mind but to be a tool of growth for that customer to consider all sides of a product or service.
• White papers won’t replace blog posts. All words are not equal, and all words do not serve the same purpose. The words of a premium content download are designed to educate, inform, and position your brand. They will not replace the words of a blog post designed to bring in search engine traffic or build an ongoing relationship with a customer.

White paper lead generation provides your business with an opportunity to share your unique perspective and skills as a customer researches an upcoming purchase. Create your white papers with a confident understanding of what they will and will not do for your business and they’ll be a valuable tool in your lead generation arsenal.

What Downloadable Educational Resources Actually Do

The above limitations aside, white papers can have a powerful effect on the ROI of your marketing strategy. Here’s what they can do for you:

• White papers educate. First and foremost, white paper lead generation provides you with direct access to your customer’s ear. When a customer enters the educational stage, everything he reads impacts his decision. If you make your case in a reasonable way, sans sales pitch, then your voice will matter in the decision, too.
• White papers identify and speak to your customer’s interests. White papers give you a spotlight opportunity to show prospective customers what you have in common. When someone downloads a white paper, it indicates their level of interest and the actionability of your services. Both are strong indicators that you can use to inform and tweak your sales and marketing process.
• White papers guide people through the buyer’s journey. Where blog posts build the relationship and draw people in, white paper lead generation turns curiosity into action. White papers signify a strong push on the buyer’s journey and can help you guide that journey to the final destination: a sale.
• White papers fill your lead pipeline with warm leads. You won’t generate more leads with a blog alone. Pair a detailed, objective white paper with a blog to increase lead flow and deliver more sale opportunities. Don’t like cold calling? People are willing to give their name and contact information to download helpful information, and your sales team will have warm leads to follow up on.
• White papers are sharable. B2B purchase decisions don’t happen in a vacuum. Sharing educational resources can help get a stakeholder group up to speed and shorten the sales cycle.
• White papers will establish a relationship of trust. Perhaps most important of all, premium content indicates expertise, thought leadership, and trustworthiness. Especially when that white paper is cited by other sources or downloaded independently of your website.

Want to learn more about how to use downloadable content like white papers to deliver more sales opportunities from your website? Download the guide below to learn more.

photo credit

COPENHAGEN – Danish toy maker Lego says revenue soared 11 per cent in the first six months of 2014, mostly because of the success of the “Lego Movie.”

The privately owned company’s chief financial officer said Thursday they were thrilled by the success.

John Goodwin said: “Lego Movie products provided a significant boost to our sales during the first half of 2014.” He said that support could continue in the second half of the year, when Lego Movie will be launched on DVD.

Net profit in the period was up 14 per cent compared with the first half of 2013, at 2.7 billion kroner ($480 million), on sales of 11.5 billion kroner.

Lego, which is not publicly listed, releases only half-year figures.

The post Danish toymaker’s first-half sales, profits soar: It’s all about the Lego Movie appeared first on Canadian Business.

I see dead people. No, I see zombies. They walk aimlessly down the street and swerve into my lane on the highway. They’re not under the spell of a witch or voodoo overlord; they’re controlled by their smartphones.

I See Zombies Everywhere

Zombies have taken over planet Earth. As I walk past a gym, zombies (in workout clothes) exit. Arm extended, phone in palm, shoulders hunched forward. Forget about making eye contact. These zombies are focused on the latest text, tweet or email. They can’t be bothered by humans.

When a car swerves briefly into my lane, or when a driver is going 35 MPH in a 70 MPH zone, it’s invariably driven by a zombie: one hand on the wheel, the other holding a phone.

Eyes pointed straight down. Talented zombies use two phones, while steering the car with the backs of their hands.

Visit a restaurant these days and you’ll see zombies seated at the bar, eating a meal by themselves. Fork in one hand, phone in the other. It’s difficult to tell which they enjoy more (food or phone). Forget about talking to the bartender or to other patrons. The phone rules.

Oh, and have you seen the deranged zombies? Their Bluetooth earpiece is neatly hidden. As you approach them, they’re talking really loud. It’s just the two of you on the street, so you say, “What?” The zombie pays you no attention, walks on by and continues his conversation.

Technology and The Human Condition

Call me an old timer, but I’m concerned about technology’s impact on the human condition. I remember the B.C. era (“Before Cellphone”). We made eye contact, we made conversation. We talked to strangers. We talked to friends.

Today? We make more eye contact with our phone’s camera lens (selfies!), while human-to-human conversation is at historic lows. We’re so concerned about the email that arrived two minutes ago that we may not see the car that’s swerving onto the sidewalk.

Let’s consider how we got here.

Why We’re Victims of Technology

Hyperconnectedness

It all started with the BlackBerry. Early generations of the device looked like extra-large pagers.

But these pagers were electronic handcuffs. Now, your inbox followed you wherever you went.

To the gym, to the beach or to sleep, the BlackBerry would buzz on each new email.

And the world would never be the same.

Now, you could email the VP Sales for a pricing request and she’d reply one minute later. You could invite a friend for dinner and know that he’d reply in an hour or less. You could lie on the beach for the afternoon, but still keep tabs on your inbox.

It’s Our Primary Channel of Communication

The phone was a fabulous piece of technology. We could speak to one another across large distances. Today, smartphone users under 20 may not know about the “phone” in their smartphone. Adults have followed suit.

We speak to each other far less than before. Instead, we text, email and chat. For important life moments, we no longer call family members. Instead, we’ll post to Instagram or Facebook and let them learn about it there.

FOMO becomes FOMU

Our “fear of missing out” has become a “fear of missing (the most recent) update.” I’m guilty of this for sure: I’m quick to check for the latest email and the most recent Twitter mention or Facebook Like.

Technology has created this constant anxiety of “staying on top of things,” as if there’s value in seeing an email minutes after it arrives. That’s why some people sleep with their phone by their side, and invite it to buzz on each new message. When you disrupt sleep, you disrupt the human condition.

Why I’m Concerned

Health and Safety

Scientists have studied links between cell phone use and cancer risk (see this fact sheet from the National Cancer Institute and this CNN article about a World Health Organization study). My gut tells me that prolonged use of cell phones can have harmful, long term effects on the body.

There are more direct hazards, too. One afternoon, I left my office to grab lunch. I was checking email as I walked to my car. Because I wasn’t fully aware of my surrounding environment, I nearly walked into an oncoming car.

A Forbes article notes that “texting distractions may have been a contributing factor in the 4,280 pedestrian traffic fatalities recorded during 2010,” according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Technology Will Continue to Develop and Evolve

Consider Google Glass.

On the one hand, technology gets more seamlessly integrated (e.g. check email via Glass).

On the other hand, it makes it even easier to disengage from more meaningful human connection (e.g. check email on Glass while your friend is trying to talk to you).

When they visit my house, I say hi to the friendly delivery staff from FedEx, UPS and the US Postal Service. Those conversations will take a different form when those deliveries are performed by drones.

I’m concerned about the evolution of the human species. With continued advances in technology, will we lose the ability to talk to one another?

What We Can Do About It

Let the Phone Wait

I used to have a rule where I’d come home from work and put away the phone. It would sit in a drawer until after dinner’s been eaten and the dishes washed. Later that evening, I’d open the phone to check for calls, texts and emails. Sadly, that rule fell by the wayside.

But I ought to return to it.

We need to seize control back from the phones who rule us. Aside from emergencies, let the phone wait! The email you received a minute ago can wait an hour. Heck, it’s not the end of the world if you reply to that email tomorrow.

The key is to condition yourself. Maybe you need a habit like mine (though I hope you do a better job sticking to it). We’ll live healthier lives if we arrange for periods where we “make the phone wait.”

Alternatively, you could go to a summer camp like the one described in this New York Times article.

Go Out and Meet New People

Technology has a way of hardening our shell or keeping us within a bubble.

When you’re immersed in your email, checking your Twitter stream or responding to a text, you’re not “available” to those around you.

Technology makes it too easy to be in a room full of people, but really be alone to ourselves. So make it a point to meet five new people each week. Beyond getting their names, get to know their stories, their interests and their passions.

If you’ve developed online relationships (e.g. via Twitter), arrange to meet in person. The human connection is unique and special.

Learn to Enjoy and Appreciate Your Surroundings

In the Bay Area, my average weather day is 70 degrees and sun. Depending on where I am, I can get views of the Bay, giant Sequoia trees or the Golden Gate Bridge. But I can be blind to it all if my face is planted in my phone.

When we immerse ourselves in technology, it makes us take things for granted. We must find occasions to leave the world of our inbox and explore the larger world around us. This is a behavior that must be learned and reinforced.

Now when I grab lunch at work, I’ll leave the phone in my pocket and enjoy the afternoon weather. But I can feel the phone calling out to me and I’ll sometimes suffer a relapse. I’ll pull out the phone and check email. Meanwhile, another car is pulling out of its parking spot.

Share Your Thoughts

What do you think? Are you comfortable with where technology is heading? Are you concerned about the future of human-to-human connection and interaction?

Let’s continue the conversation below. And if I ever bump into you on the street, please call me out if my face is stuck in my phone. I may have been zombie-fied!

Note: This post was originally published at It’s All Virtual.

At one point social shopping was hailed as the future of ecommerce.

Online shopping was supposed to be moving towards becoming a more social and collective experience, whereby users could share their shopping journeys, mimicking the sort of interaction that occurs in physical stores.

However, despite all of these predictions, true social commerce has failed to really gain traction with consumers or retailers.

Whilst social elements, such as sharing buttons, have been integrated into retail websites, the overall vision of social shopping has not yet come to fruition.

This failure to take off hasn't been for lack of trying. Second Life was briefly seen as the beginning of a true virtual retail environment, a digital space where users could visit and purchase from virtual reality stores.

Major brands including Adidas and Dell built Second Life presences, only for the phenomenon to fade as fast as it rose.

More recently, Facebook has made multiple attempts to create F-commerce options.

Facebook Gifts was a short-lived attempt to enable people to buy digital gifts and send them to friends within Facebook, whilst Facebook Credits attempted to incorporate ecommerce into the social network via a virtual currency.

Used mostly to purchase virtual goods within Facebook games, the company discontinued this feature in 2012.  

2014: the year of social commerce?

Despite this limited success to date, social shopping is making signs of a comeback. With global ecommerce sales set to hit $1.5 trillion this year, social networks are as keen as ever to break into this lucrative sector, attempting to move from pure engagement and awareness towards actual conversions and sales. 

According to reports, Facebook is currently experimenting with a “Buy” button that will be added to status updates from selected brands.

This feature will enable brands and retailers to post updates about products and, instead of directing customers to the online store to complete the purchase, they will be able to make purchases by simply clicking the “Buy” button.

Credit card details will be kept on file with Facebook’s servers, making transactions easier than ever.  

Meanwhile, Twitter has just announced its acquisition of CardSpring to enable "in the moment" commerce from within user’s Twitter feeds. This has the potential to turn social recommendations into purchasing opportunities.

Anything retailers currently post with the intention of getting a like or retweet will become an avenue to increase sales. 

Another new social shopping initiative comes from Amazon. In early May the online retail giant announced a joint initiative with Twitter called #AmazonBasket (#AmazonCart in the US).

With this hashtag, users can now add items to their Amazon carts directly from a tweet, finishing the checkout process on Amazon.com whenever convenient.

Whilst initial figures are yet to be released, there have already been questions about the service. The mechanic in itself doesn’t provide any immediacy to purchasing, as users still have to log in to complete the transaction.

There are also questions around whether brands can provide enough collateral in 140 characters to truly influence conversion.

For example, social shopping service Soldsie announced the expansion of its social selling presence. The Soldsie shopping experience begins when a brand or retailer posts a photo of a product with pricing information on Facebook or Instagram.

Shoppers express their purchase intent by commenting with the word 'sold' and can then continue browsing. When they are ready to check out, the item they commented on will be in their cart ready to buy.

Whilst social shopping as a concept holds much promises, it remains to be seen whether it will be widely adopted by consumers.

Users have thus far firmly ignored the opportunity to buy as they socialise online and it’s not yet clear if the latest social shopping approaches will change this retail inertia. This being said, if #AmazonBasket, Facebook’s “Buy” button and Twitter’s “in the moment commerce” do catch the attention of consumers, the potential appears to be significant.

The sheer volume of online social users presents a major retail opportunity and, when combined with the acknowledged power of social recommendation, could create a channel of unprecedented reach and power.

Fight the Big Data Backlash and use Smart Data help you identify purchase intent

Big data is starting to experience some significant backlash. A ‘case in point’ comes from a recent popular article in VentureBeat: ‘Big data’ is dead. What’s next? The backlash is more to do with the buzz than the data but the reason relates to the difficulty of extracting meaningful insights from big data.

Born from the backlash comes another buzzword; smart data, a means of extracting these meaningful insights from big data.

Looking past the marketing hype, smart data is actually the metamorphosis of big data into something actionable. Here we look at recognizing purchase intent as an example of actionable data extraction.

Big data vs Smart data rundown

So let’s start with the basic question of what is big data? Big data refers to massive volumes of structured and unstructured data collected and stored from a range of sources such as social media feeds, web traffic, sales data and other emerging forms of unstructured data feeds like video. Typically, this data set is too large to be analyzed using traditional statistical analysis and can be overwhelming when trying to extract actionable information. Smart data on the other hand is big data with context, where that context is aligned to business needs and objectives. The advantage of smart data is that the barriers of big data analysis are removed and its meaning is not subject to a wide range of interpretations, in other words it is a strong signal. An example of strong signal data is survey data from website visitors who answer a set of focused questions. These questions are specifically designed to reveal important needs-based information such as visitor intent. These data sets are clear, user-led and easy to leverage, providing a straightforward approach to data interpretation and assisting big data sets to become actionable smart data. While quantitative and descriptive data offer valuable insights for marketers, qualitative data offers opportunities for improved customer engagement and understanding.

Big data, strong signals, Smart Insights

There have been a number of advancements in the big data field in terms of collection, storage and clustering. BUT according to IDC, while 22% of digital information was a candidate for analysis, only 5% was actually analyzed! As noted in a recent Fortune article, a lot of data still sits in fragmented systems that don’t “talk” to one another, which renders the information almost useless.

The big opportunity for big data is how to extract a ‘strong signal’ from the noise. Collecting big data and mining it mercilessly is not the opportunity. The opportunity is leveraging ‘a strong signal’ data set and integrating it to label big data, thus making it immediately usable. This is where an information rich contextual data set can inform big data and turn it into smart data.

Let’s take a real example: Say you were trying to identify and target website visitors who intend to purchase. If you were to rely only on mining your web analytics data for this information you would have to sort through the entire data set looking for the behavioral traits of purchase intenders. This not only is difficult but could be wildly inaccurate. You would think that focusing on the shopping cart is all you would have to do to get a stronger signal of purchase intent, but there is more to the story. Data shows that for a typical e-commerce site only 44% of visitors that enter the cart actually have the intent to purchase while the remaining 56% represent all other intent types such as researchers.

By labeling your data set with a ‘strong signal’ such as visitors who are actually intending to purchase, you can segment and contextualize the web data illuminating the most important aspects of the data set.

Empowering your Big Data

Collecting visitor stated intent, or in other words the way someone describes their intention for visiting a website, provides a much stronger signal because it is the visitor who describes their intention.

iPerceptions research shows that a visitor who states that they intend to ‘purchase’ is 15 to 20 times more likely to do so than someone who describes their intent to ‘research’.  This powerful qualitative intent data paired with quantitative and descriptive data creates contextualized data sets, transforming your big data into smart data.

By proactively identifying a visitor with the intent to purchase but who is in distress also, a company can intervene in the current session to aid this user with their purchase. Tactical intervention can not only increase sales but improve loyalty towards the brand and mitigate further follow-up through alternative channels like a call to customer service. Labelling your big data with a ‘strong signal’ and turning it into smart data is great but it is still just data. To go beyond ‘just data’ and allow it to have an impact on your customer experience and your bottom line you need to take action on it. Here we’ve given only one example of an action that can come from your smart data that is specific to electronic commerce, but the potential for actionable advice is huge if you can contextualize your quantitative and descriptive datasets through the voice of your customer.

Putting it all together – Big and Smart Data

Big data is complex and vast but many of the benefits cannot be truly realized without adding contextual information. If these data sources are combined not only can you transform big data into smart data, but you can also provide enormous windfalls for consumers and companies alike improving the customer experience and the company’s ability to meet the needs of its customers. However having the right type of data is only half the story. To make personalization a reality and directly impact the customer experience, a real-time approach to leveraging this information must be taken so that the quickly eroding opportunities can be recognized and acted upon.

Thanks to Duff Anderson for sharing his thoughts and opinions in this blog post. A visionary in digital voice of customer research, Duff has been providing expert advice on how to gain a competitive advantage across the digital customer for over 15 years. Duff is a founding member of iPerceptions and is a featured speaker and contributor on the subjects of digital analytics, marketing technologies and customer experience management. iPerceptions is a leading digital customer research company that enriches marketing technologies with the Voice of the Customer. Recently, iPerceptions launched Active Recognition™ a game changing technology that recognizes the intent of anonymous website visitors in real-time to provide personalized experiences.  You can connect via LinkedIn or Twitter.

SPONSORED POST

This sponsored post is produced by Gigya.

For several years now, a connectivity revolution has been slowly brewing all around us; everyday objects like recycling bins, dishwashers, and smoke alarms are going online one by one, adding to the fabric of the Internet that connects us all.

As we connect more and more items to this Internet of Things (IoT), the relationship between consumers who use the objects and the brands that manufacture them will invariably change. Staying relevant in the era of IoT will require important changes from businesses as they learn to manage and leverage this new dynamic.

This white paper delves into three ways these brand-consumer relationships are already changing, as well as how businesses are adapting to the IoT.

1. The IoT creates direct brand-consumer channels: In order to nurture deeper customer engagement, brands must be readily equipped to offer a seamless authentication experience.
2. Data streams offer ways to improve the brand-consumer relationship: The real value of the IoT for businesses and consumers alike is the continuous stream of data that will be created from connected objects; and the businesses that effectively use this data equip themselves to form closer relationships with their consumers.
3. Security and privacy necessitates trust-based consumer-brand relationships: The IoT poses security concerns for consumers as they open themselves up to the risks of data breaches, and it’s up to businesses to take actionable steps to guarantee infrastructural security and data privacy while communicating these measures clearly to users.

Remaining Relevant in the IoT

If building customer relationships was hard before, the IoT promises to make the task an even more difficult proposition. However, failing to to do so in a world where even the simplest of objects will be directly connected to our lives guarantees irrelevance.

For a deeper look at how to navigate the IoT, download the free resource, “A Marketer’s Guide to Navigating the Internet of Things.”

Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

In an outstanding post, Why Sales People Need To Create Value, Not Just Communicate, Bob Apollo cites a data point from Forrester: “Prospects say only 1 in 8 conversations with sales people are useful!”

It’s a staggering number! 87.5% of the conversations customers are having with sales people are a waste of time!

Think of the massive losses in productivity and costs that are incurred both on the part of customers and within our own sales organizations. Collectively, it’s $100′s of millions if not billions.

It’s no wonder that customers put huge barriers to sales–screening calls, avoiding calls, putting gatekeepers in place. It’s no wonder, customers are looking to other sources for information and learning if 87.5% of the time, sales people will be wasting their time.

The Customer Perspective:

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. The phone rings. From the ID (or lack of ID) you know it’s a sales person. You know it’s almost 9 chances in 10 that sales person is going to waste your time. You know, you’ll lose not only the few minutes you might spend on the phone, but also the time spent in recovering from the interruption–finding where you left off on the work you were doing, recovering you thought process, getting going again (As well as muttering under your breath about “Damn sales people!”).

Are you going to pick up the phone and answer the call with those odds?

No sane person would! (Hopefully our customers are mostly rational people.)

The odds get worse, the more the customer knows who you are—”That’s Jim, he always wastes my time, I’ll never pick up a call from him!”

Imagine what would happen if you created value in every customer interaction, if you were the one sales person in eight that used your customers’ time well. What would that do in terms of accessibility? What would that do in positioning you to be the trusted advisor? What would that do to your competitive positioning? If the customer is investing time with you–because you never waste their time, minimizing time with your competitors, are you going to be more likely to win? If you do this in every engagement with the customer, would you be more likely to develop both a loyal customer relationship, but a strong advocate, “Talk to Dave, he never wastes your time, you always learn something new!”

Look at it from your customers’ organizational points of view. They know for every 8 hours their people spend with sales people 7 of those hours are lost? You can start doing the math–What’s the fully burdened cost of an hour of a person’s time, how many hours do sales people spend with your people each week? Pretty soon the costs are astronomical. As a business owner, I’d put a “No Soliciting” sign in the reception area, I’d program phones, “If you are a sales person, hit 9″–which is pre-programmed to hang up. I couldn’t afford the lost productivity from my people.

The Sales Manager’s/Executive’s Perspective:

Imagine you have a team of 8 sales people. 7 of those sales people are wasting their customers’ time. Their ability to achieve their goals will be very limited. But the impact is greater–it makes it tougher for that 1 sales person who isn’t wasting their customers’ time. They have to overcome the negative reputation being produced by the others. So it makes it harder for them to sell.

Now imagine the cost of selling dilemma, if I had a team of 8 sales people, fully burdened costing me $100K each, so roughly $700K of my spending is wasted money. Now imagine going to get funding for more people, more tools, more sales programs. What’s management going to respond?

Fun With Numbers:

OK, I’m playing some games with numbers, just to simplify things a little. Not every call 7 out of 8 sales people make is a waste of time. And if we knew those 7 people, we’d get rid of them. But this is, in effect, what’s happening. Yes, it’s spread across a large number of people, but the effect is the same–7 out of 8 FTE’s are wasting customers’ time with every interaction. While they are producing some business, they are no where near as productive and impactful as the could be. When you start aggregating the costs of lost productivity from both the customers’ and sales organizations’ points of view, the costs are massive–and unforgivable.

The Simple Solution:

There’s a simple solution, all of us know, too few execute. It’s called the Sales Call Plan. It’s the process of spending a few minutes researching, thinking, planning before making that call (in person or by the phone or through email or whatever channel). It’s thinking about, What is the customer concerned about? What can I do that can help the customer address those concerns? Is what I plan to talk about going to help the customer move through their buying process? Do I have the right people participating? What do they want to accomplish in the meeting? What are the outcomes we should agree upon at the conclusion of the meeting?

We might go further, agreeing on an agenda before the meeting–making sure both the customer and we are aligned and prepared to accomplish something.

Finally, after developing the Sales Call Plan, it means challenging yourself, “What value will I create for the customer in this call/meeting?” If you don’t know the answer, you aren’t ready and should postpone the call.

It’s so simple to stand out from every other sales person, all you have to do is create value in every customer interaction.

Have you ever considered handing over the job of content marketing to your customers? Believe it or not, we think you should.

Obviously, you shouldn’t fire your whole marketing team and crowdsource your entire content strategy. However, the occasional user-generated content marketing campaign allows participants to create their own corner in your brand strategy, often with highly desirable results for participants and companies alike.

But Wait – Does Anyone Actually Participate in These Campaigns?

Some marketing commentators claim user-generated content marketing is “dead.” In their view, audiences can’t be prevailed upon to create videos, images, or other materials, simply to hand them over to a company for its own use in a marketing campaign. The content participants submit (according to these marketing commentators) isn’t worth using anyway – so why bother?

These opinions are often based on a faulty premise, which is that the companies carrying out the campaigns went about it in a manner conducive to favorable results. While user-generated content campaigns have the potential to become extremely successful, those implementing them must understand what motivates people to participate, such as:

• Incentive. Audiences are happy to expend some effort, as long as the potential rewards are compelling. A free t-shirt or $20 gift card is not going to cut it. An all-expenses-paid vacation, a chance to appear on television, or a year’s supply of your product might.

• Inspiration. We get it. Not every company has a “cool” or “sexy” product, and it can be difficult to imagine how your own content could make it seem that way – much less someone else’s! However, user-generated content campaigns don’t have to focus directly on ball bearings manufacturing or HVAC servicing. Instead, think of a concept, like “relaxation” or “innovation,” and let participants run with it.

• Visibility. Although high-value prizes are an attractive component of user-generated content campaigns, participants also want to know their creations will get attention. Communicate early on which websites and social media outlets will feature user-generated entries – and then follow through on your promise.

What Does an Effective User-Generated Content Campaign Accomplish?

When companies call on customers to create and upload original content on social media sites, it achieves a wide range of objectives, the most compelling of which include:

1. They get customers to interact with brands on a deeper level. To understand what a company wants in an entry, participants must often conduct research into a brand, product, or industry. This not only increases traffic to business websites, it also imbues participants with a greater depth of knowledge about the company.

Furthermore, the relationship goes both ways. Participants’ finished products give brands a greater understanding of what “gets them going” on a creative and intellectual level. Companies can then pour that insight back into their future outreach efforts.

2. They generate a diverse array of quality content. Of course, not every user-generated entry is going to be a winner (that’s why the goal is to glean as many entrants as possible). However, they won’t all be losers, either. Brands will then have continued access to the quality creations, which are theirs to populate websites, social media, and television advertisements.

3. They cultivate a sense of ownership among participants. One of the most rewarding components of a user-generated content campaign is giving the creative reins to your target audience. When people pour their ideas and work into something, it becomes “theirs,” even if a brand has the “legal rights” to it. Participants in these campaigns often consider themselves stakeholders in a brand, strengthening their interest in seeing it thrive and grow in popularity.

Companies Leveraging User-Generated Content to Their Advantage

The number of business entities achieving success with user-generated content campaigns demonstrates that the practice is alive and doing quite well. From our favorite caffeinated beverages to the hippest chanteurs, examples of brands collaborating with audiences on their content include:

• Starbucks White Cup Contest. In April, the ubiquitous espresso-slinging chain launched its White Cup Contest, challenging participants to upload photos of their best works of art. The “blank slate” they provided? The iconic white Starbucks cup, of course!

The talented entrants shared photos of their creations on the Starbucks Pinterest page. The winning entry will form the template for a run of customized reusable plastic cups, designed to resemble the classic paper containers.

Starbucks owes the success of this campaign to its inspiration: the tendency of their customers to doodle on cups. By taking an activity people already enjoy and coupling it with something else they enjoy (sharing photos on Pinterest), the brand demonstrates it’s “in the know” regarding its customers habits and pleasures.

• Coca-Cola’s “This is AHH”. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to appear on TV? Okay, not everyone would, but a significant number of people are more than ready to experience their fifteen minutes of fame. So when Coca-Cola encouraged consumers to submit videos interpreting the “Ahh!” feeling they get when partaking in the fizzy beverage, audiences didn’t disappoint:

The hilarious resulting 30-second ad has gained over 600 thousand views on YouTube, as well as made the rounds on network television. Although it took time and resources to edit and finish the final product, it cost significantly less than if Coca-Cola’s producers had filmed the commercial themselves. Such is the beauty of user-generated content.

• Beck’s “Song Reader” album. A slightly more sophisticated and subtle example of effective content marketing is Beck’s recent “Song Reader” project. The musician did something even more innovative than usual with this album, releasing it in sheet music form only and encouraging fans to share their interpretations online.

Here is one user-generated iteration of Beck’s composition “Sorry:”

Beck’s approach is bold in its simple and magnanimous nature. Fellow musicians appreciate being included in his creation, while listeners benefit from countless renditions of these songs. For authenticity and absence of cynicism, it would be difficult for any content marketer to surpass “Song Reader.”

Should you wish to emulate one of these user-generated content campaigns, achieving similar levels of success presents no mystery. Let your audience guide your vision and the results will fascinate and amaze.

Have you enlisted your customers to inspire and inform your content marketing strategy?

Many of you have heard the chatter by the water cooler. Something is causing a rumble and changing the way companies market themselves. Producing great content has been proven to be an effective marketing tool, and businesses across all industries have started to take notice.

But in order to start tracking the success of content (and guide future efforts) you need a content marketing strategy with specific objectives. By implementing objectives or goals, you’ll be able to determine what makes great content within your industry. Your team can then make the necessary adjustments along the way to improve an effective formula.

To start, let’s highlight some broad goals that should be used as a starting point for any business. Successful content should:

• Improve your brand awareness
• Attract more traffic to your site
• Generate new customer leads and/or sales
• Develop your online reputation
• Boost Audience Engagement
• Encourage natural links and optimize search engine ranking
• Benefit your competitive advantage

Moving forward, when you produce any single content piece, it should accomplish one or more of these goals, and your entire content portfolio should accomplish all of them.

Reaching Goals with Great Content

With any marketing strategy, accurately measuring and tracking efforts against targets and goals is essential in proving ROI. Content marketing is no different. When specific goals are set in place, the measurement of different metrics will be easier to track – making your content marketing strategy more effective.

Though there are many different tools available to measure the value of your content; most website owners utilize Google Analytics to effectively measure their content’s success. This tool offers a huge amount of useful data, but it can be difficult to choose which metrics to track.

Measuring Traffic and Time on Page

Every company wants more traffic to their site, but traffic alone is not a great indicator of content marketing success. If it’s coupled with other metrics, however, it can be particularly insightful.

Companies new to content marketing want their content (or brand) to show up in the search results. The problem is that they limit the measurable objectives for their content by focusing on traffic alone. Getting a lot of traffic doesn’t mean obtaining leads or loyal customers. Yes, you want users to visit your site, but there is much more to be measured that can improve your content marketing strategy.

In order to use traffic volume as a way to measure content marketing success, be sure to compare pages of similar content to each other, as all website pages are not created equal. For example, the home page of most websites will probably be one of the most visited pages on the site — but this isn’t always due to the content found there; basic SEO and promotional strategies can usually be credited with high traffic to the homepage.

Another metric to consider is the Time on Page. When the average time on a particular page is much higher than your site-wide average, it suggests that this page is grabbing and keeping visitors’ attention more than other pages, indicating that the content there is worth analyzing to see what additional insights it might provide.

This can tell you a lot about what type of topics your followers are interested in, or what type of content they might be searching for. That information can be extremely valuable in the future when producing new quality content for your audience. Take this knowledge and use it to create content that will establish your brand as a thought leader in the industry. Build trust and turn that into prospective leads and new customers.

How to Measure Referral Traffic

So what is referral traffic and how is it different from “regular” traffic?

Referral traffic is a bit more specific; this metric shows the visits to your website or content that originally came from an outside source. In other words, if a visitor clicks on a link from Facebook or Twitter and it leads to your website, that is considered a referral traffic or a referred visit.

Measuring referral traffic in Google Analytics can be done by selecting it as a Traffic Source:

Photo by Marketing Web Today

With any content marketing strategy, you should have some content promotion and/or distribution in place to get that awe-inspiring content in front of your targeted audience. If the content is valuable, people will share, like, or tweet your content on their own. As you create better content, it gets shared more often and will likely result in more referral traffic.

Referral traffic can be a sign of promotional and distributional effectiveness because it provides insight on which sites are referring the most traffic and the timing of the traffic being referred. Use this information to drill down on which distribution or social network channels you use to promote the content.

Measuring your Content Downloads

A frequent exercise in content marketing is to create downloadable content, such as free guides, whitepapers, mobile apps, or PDF’s. A great idea is to keep these downloadable content pieces behind a gated link — meaning visitors must fill out a contact form in order to gain access to the desired content.

Other times, visitors may not provide any additional information but still be required to download the content (e.g. large PDF documents, extensive resource pages, or even longer videos). In those cases, it is necessary to set up Event Tracking in Google Analytics to capture the incidence of your content being downloaded.

Once event tracking is set up, establish an event goal to track specific downloaded content pieces. When setting up your event goal in Google Analytics, you must set conditions for the goal and then specify a category, action, label, and value. In the case of measuring downloads, the event will be the act of downloading the content piece.

Photo by Koozai

After the event goal is set up, you will be able to find the number of people who are actually downloading your content, without requiring any additional contact information from your visitors. This data can be used in conjunction with other metrics (like page views and time on page) to measure the success of your content.

Defining Your Content Marketing Success

At the beginning steps of any content marketing strategy, it’s absolutely vital to have a defined stance on what success looks like for you and your business. Success in content marketing will always be goal-oriented. As stated earlier, you need to establish clear, measurable objectives and then use various analytics to compare production vs. objective.

• Define what success means for your content and how you will measure it.
• Establish a timetable for measuring and using web analytics to gather data on the activity on your site.
• Use analytic data to adapt future content for optimal performance.

Every goal should include measurable milestones so that you can clearly see whether or not you’ve been successful in your content marketing efforts. This allows you to further articulate your goals so that they are clearly established; make them as specific as possible.

If your goal is to increase traffic to the site, you could specifically set the benchmark “Show a 20% increase in traffic to our ‘Contact Us’ page in 12 months.” This precise goal identifies what area of your site you’ll focus on, provides a firm definition of the traffic increase you’re looking to achieve, and it establishes a deadline at which you will measure to determine the content’s success.

Whatever your goals may be – from measuring overall traffic and time-on-page to conversions, referral traffic and more – Google Analytics provides a robust amount of information that can be used to measure content marketing success. And obviously, tracking your conversion goals will be the most important metric as that shows how much of that traffic or downloads lead to a sale.

Through this measurement, you can focus on the kinds of content that have generally worked for you and your competitors. With these analytics, you have the ability to adapt your content marketing strategy toward success and not waste time producing content that doesn’t have a chance.

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog on the top 10 signs you’ve hired the wrong candidate and it received a great reaction – so today I thought I’d flip the subject around and look at it from a positive perspective. Why? Because while it’s important to know what to look out for in a bad employee, it’s just as important to know what to look out for in a good employee – particularly in those all important first weeks.

With that in mind; here are the top five positive signs that you need to look for in a new employee in their probation period. If they exhibit the majority or all of these signs, I’d say they’re probably worth hanging on to!

1. Meeting and Exceeding Expectations:

It might sound a bit silly to say that if an employee meets your expectations then they’re a good fit, but it’s true. As an employer, particularly if it’s a small business, you’ll probably have really high expectations of what you want from a new employee so if they can step up and meet those expectations in the first week or so, chances are they’re doing a great job. The best thing? If your new employee not only meets your expectations but exceeds them altogether. Why? Because it shows they’re talented, committed and ultimately have the right skills and knowledge for your business.

2. ‘Mucking In’ and Helping Other Members Of The Team:

Another positive sign to watch out for is if your new employee really gets down to work and gets involved in projects, even if it’s not in their job description or part of their immediate remit. This shows they’re a real team player (something which everyone claims to be on their CV!) – and shows they’re willing to ‘muck in’ and do what’s required for the business. OK, so new employees will probably try a bit harder to impress in their first couple of weeks but it’s definitely still a good sign!

3. Arriving Early/Staying Late:

A major clue that your new employee is trying to impress you is if they arrive early and stay late on numerous occasions in the first couple of weeks. Yes, this might be typical ‘suck-up’ behaviour from a new employee – but it does suggest they’re serious about the role and committed to the business overall.

4. Making Visible Improvements Within The First Few Weeks:

Another thing to look out for is if your new employee makes clear progression and improvements with key tasks in their first couple of weeks – this could be something as simple as getting their head around your CMS platform or something more complex such as understanding your database. Improvements show your new employee is listening to advice and feedback which has been given and putting it into action – and they also show your new employee is keen to progress.

5. Making Viable Suggestions To Benefit/Improve The Business Overall:

The last thing you need to be on the lookout for is if your new employee makes viable suggests on how to improve the business or practices within it. Why? Because it shows they can bring real value to the business and suggests they’re keen on making the business as successful as possible – which is something all your employees should be keen to achieve.

So there you go; five simple things which suggest your new employee is indeed the right fit for your business. Think I’ve missed something off or don’t agree with any of my points? Leave me a comment below.

This video is sponsored by OppenheimerFunds.

We're in the fifth year of an income famine. That's what economists call it when the Fed sets interest rates at low levels while investment-grade bonds are yielding less than inflation. That can lead to a budget crisis for anyone on a fixed income.

Krishna Memani, Chief Investment Officer at OppenheimerFunds, says investors can either do nothing — and see their incomes shrink — or pull away from the Fed and decide on a differentiated fixed-income model that takes the right kind of risks. Investors should contact their advisers so they can start a new conversation about growth, income, and protection.* Watch the video above to find out more. 

Learn more at GrowthIncomeProtection.com.

* Protection is positioned as an investment goal. Investing in certain securities may help to hedge against certain risks, but does not imply any guarantee from loss. Mutual funds are subject to market risk and volatility. Shares may gain or lose value.

Fixed income investing entails credit risks and interest rate risks. When interest rates rise, bond prices generally fall. 

Oppenheimer funds are distributed by OppenheimerFunds Distributor, Inc. OppenheimerFunds Distributor, Inc. is not affiliated with Business Insider.

Carefully consider fund investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses. Visit oppenheimerfunds.com, call your advisor or 1.800.225.5677 (CALL OPP) for a prospectus with this and other fund information. Read it carefully before investing. 

© 2014 OppenheimerFunds Distributor, Inc.

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SEE ALSO:  Why We All Need To Start Rethinking How We Invest For Retirement

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When it comes to accepting electronic payments, merchants have a number of pain points. The two biggest ones are paying acceptance fees and fighting chargebacks. 

• Acceptance fees are charged by a number of players in the payments value chain, from payment processors to banks. For credit cards the fees hover around 2-3% of the value of a transaction. The fees have sparked litigation from retailers against the card networks who set the fees. 
• Chargebacks occur when a cardholder successfully disputes a charge. Fighting chargebacks is an expensive process for retailers and many opt to take the loss rather than deal with the hassle. 

Though still nascent, BI Intelligence notes in our Bitcoin report that a Bitcoin-based payments system promises to solve these problems. It's comparatively inexpensive for a merchant to accept Bitcoin payments even if they use a third-party processor like BitPay or Coinbase to process transactions. Bitcoin transactions are also irreversible. Once the transaction is completed the merchant possesses the money. So for businesses that experience lots of "friendly fraud" — when a customer buys something and then claims falsely that they never recieved it — Bitcoin is appealing. 

In the full report from BI Intelligence we give a high level explanation of how Bitcoin works, whether it has the potential to disrupt the legacy payments system, and explain the obstacles Bitcoin will have to overcome to become a force in payments.

Here are some of the key elements from the report: 

• Bitcoin's greatest value is as a global payments network — not as a currency.
• In a nutshell, Bitcoin allows for the simple and secure transfer of value online. There are many players in the Bitcoin ecosystem that help to make this happen, including Bitcoin exchanges, Bitcoin wallets, and miners.
• But the Bitcoin network's daily average transaction volume stands at around $89 million globally compared with $16.5 billion for Visa and $9.8 billion for MasterCard, meaning it has a long way to go to make any real dent in the current payments system.
• Bitcoin also faces other significant threats including fraud and regulation. And right now, much power is concentrated among a small group of miners, which opens Bitcoin up to further vulnerabilities.
• Despite the barriers, we believe the efficiency and low cost of Bitcoin in comparison to legacy payments tools — including credit cards, money transfer services, and letters of credit — will ultimately prove too tempting for merchants, individuals, and business-to-business applications to resist.

In full, the report:

• Examines the problems Bitcoin was created to solve and the elegant solutions it provides that have clear advantages over the current payments system. 
• Gives an insider's view of Bitcoin with exclusive interviews from Bitcoin Investment Trust Founder Barry Silbert and BitPay's Vice President of Marketing Stephanie Wargo.
• Explores the open questions surrounding Bitcoin pertaining to security, volatility, and regulation and provides potential answers to these questions. 
• Analyzes the players in the legacy payments system that Bitcoin has the potential to eliminate if it catches on as a transaction network. 

For full access to all BI Intelligence's payments coverage, including reports, daily briefs, and downloadable charts, sign up for a free trial.

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By Tibor Shanto - tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

Of course not, prospects are liars. No no, that’s not true either. It is less about lying, and more about rationalizing why we lost, take a look at what I mean:

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto 

We've written a lot on email marketing over the past few years, so here's some of the best in one handy post. 

This post covers best practice tips, useful stats, case studies and reports on the subject. 

Enjoy!

Email best practice

I've narrowed our best practice email posts down to about 40 from the last two years. There's plenty more under the email tag on the blog. 

Subject lines

45 words to avoid in your email marketing subject lines

Email marketing subject lines: why best practice matters

Six case studies and an infographic on how to write effective email subject lines

152 killer keywords for email subject lines (and 137 crappy ones)

Writing mobile email subject lines: four key considerations

What you can learn from 1.159bn B2B subject lines

Copywriting, content and design

Great copy from The Natural History Museum: email edition

How to create engaging email content to drive conversion

Eight best practice tips for writing effective email copy

Why you should test the layout of your emails

Examples by sector

How fashion ecommerce brands use email marketing

How the travel industry uses email marketing

Why Manchester City's emails are Premier League quality

Unsubscribes

Managing email unsubscribes: best practice tips

Email marketing: what makes people unsubscribe?

Unsubscribing from email: how top fashion retailers try to persuade you to stay

Gmail offers unsubscribe link and the world of email marketing comes to an end

Six best practice tips for email unsubscribe pages

Frequency

Email frequency: how much is too much?

Why more emails at Christmas almost always means more money

30+ Christmas email marketing tips from the experts

Send more email, make more money?

Basket/cart abandonment emails

Cart abandonment emails: how five retailers retarget lost customers

How you can boost your email re-activation campaign’s response rate

Abandoned basket emails: the good, the bad and the ugly

Top 10 tips for improving basket abandonment emails

General 

A guide to structuring your email marketing program

Five email marketing lessons from 40 online purchases

10 things I love about your emails (and related arts)

10 things you can do to make me love your emails

Four innovations that will shape the future of email marketing

Why Custom Audience targeting proves that email has won the internet

12 useful tips for optimising email deliverability

20 automated emails your customers won't delete

10 emails I have deleted and why

Stats

We have lots of stats on email marketing, including whole compendiums full of them. See the reports section for more. 

How data can be used to take your email marketing up a level

How do marketers manage their mobile email channel effectively?

What is a decent email marketing response rate?

Email marketing benchmarks 2014: how do you stack up?

22% of UK businesses have 'non-existent' mobile email strategy: report

Triggered email open rates are four times higher than newsletters

22% of marketing emails fail to reach the subscriber's inbox: report

Email marketers not making the most of automation: report

Triggered email open rates are four times higher than newsletters

Case studies

Here's a sample from recent blog posts, but we have many more in our new case studies database, accessible to subscribers.  

Three case studies to help improve your email marketing conversion rates

Seven inspirational email marketing case studies from The Digitals

10 case studies that show the power of email segmentation

Responsive email design: five case studies and an infographic on how it improves engagement

How RS Components uses automated email FTW

Reports

We have lots of reports on email, from our comprehensive 200 page best practice guide, to industry stats and template files...

Email Marketing Best Practice Guide

Bridging the Gap in Email Marketing

Email Marketing Industry Census 2014

The Email Marketing Speed Imperative

Email Marketing Platforms Buyer's Guide 2013

Building, Monitoring and Improving Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Email and eCRM Statistics

Training

We have training courses for email marketers too. Check out the links for more information.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing - Advanced

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

When selling professional services, the two biggest sales challenges you'll face are getting the client and keeping the client. Each has its own obstacles and issues, but those two are what determine your business's fate.

In the marketing world, sales copy can make or break your success. Powerful copy can skyrocket conversion rates and get more people engaged with your business.

If you’ve launched a sales page recently, you know how difficult it is to get people excited. With just a few small changes to your sales copy, you might see a dramatic improvement in your conversion rates.

Here are ten secrets of high converting sales pages for you to steal.

Photo via Fotalia.com

1. Your headline has to blow your reader’s mind

The headline is the first thing people see when landing on your website. It’s what convinces your reader to stay on your page, or gives your reader a reason to leave. Your headline is perhaps the most critical element in converting visitors into buyers.

There is no magic formula for a high converting headline. However, there are plenty of headline templates that have been proven to work.

One case study by Soma co-founder, Mike Del Ponte, outlines a 4P approach to headline writing. Using his 4P approach, Mike Del Ponte and his team sold over $100,000 worth of product that hadn’t even been created yet. The four components are simple. When used correctly, you can turn more curious minds into eager buyers just by having a strong headline. Here are the 4P’s to remember when writing your next headline.

1. It must make a promise to your reader about a specific benefit.
2. It must prove what you’re selling and what you have to offer.
3. It must paint a picture of the experience a person has when working with you.
4. It must have some element of a strong pitch that convinces people to take action sooner rather than later.

Incorporating these four critical elements requires a lot of thought and careful consideration. When you find a few headline that include each of these topics, test each one to see what gets people excited to learn more about your offering.

2. Make your call to actions more specific

Numerous tests have shown that a couple extra words on your call-to-action button can have a dramatic impact.

People hate to click on a button without knowing exactly what will happen next. Instead of using ambiguous text, such as “Buy Now” or “Sign Up” for your call to action, get more specific. Tell the reader what will happen when he or she clicks.

For example, if your goal is to have your audience sign up for your email list, explain what will happen when he or she hands over an email address. This is difficult with only a few words to play with, but it’s possible. Instead of saying, “Sign Up”, try saying, “Sign Up for Weekly Tips and Tricks” to show the frequency of your emails and what you will send.

3. Use the word “I” in button copy

Another rule of thumb for writing copy for buttons that gets clicked is to write in the first person. The founder of Copy Hacker, Joanna Wiebe, ran a test on her website. The test experimented with a general call to action and a call to action in the first-person.

The first call to action she tested said, “Try Schedulicity Free.” The second call to action said, “End My Scheduling Hassles.”

After conducting A/B tests on the two calls to action, she found that the one using the word “my” received 24% more clicks than the general call to action. Making your call to action more personal solidifies the specific benefit he or she will get when clicking to work with you.

4. Eliminate choice

You’ve probably heard of “analysis paralysis.” This phenomenon is when buyers have too many options to choose from and get paralyzed in the decision making process. When this happens, the buyer often leaves without making a purchase.

Satisfaction rates decline when people have too much to choose from. A study by Iynegar showed that when a person bought a box of chocolates with multiple varieties, their satisfaction decreased. On the contrary, a box of chocolates with only a few choices increased satisfaction rates.

Limit how many options your visitors have to make when buying from you. The more complex the decision making process is, the least likely your customers will buy.

5. Make it easier to say yes

When a new prospect lands on your sales page, the only thing going through his or her mind is, “what’s in it for me?”

Humans are selfish by nature. Before your customer hands over an email address or opens her wallet, she needs to know exactly what benefits she will get by working with you.

Make it as easy as possible for your customer to say yes by outlining these benefits. Instead of simply showing WHAT your customer gets when she purchases, show WHAT HAPPENS to her after she makes a purchase. For example, if you sell knitting supplies, outline how your knitting supplies will make your buyer’s life a little bit better. That might mean faster knitting times, easier completion of projects, more versatility when knitting and more.

Giving your sales page visitor the core benefits of buying from you makes the decision process easier. It enables your visitor to visualize the experience she will have with your product after she buys.

6. Don’t get too fancy

Sometimes marketers get excited. It’s normal, but it can make sales copy a little bit confusing when the excitement goes overboard.

Don’t get too fancy with your sales copy that you fail to clarify what you offer. Eliminate fluff in your text that could cause confusion and kill conversion rates. Take out any jargon or marketing-speak that could sound overly complex.

To boost conversions, focus on conveying value in the simplest format possible.

7. Don’t overhype your offering

For a customer to buy from you, there has to be a healthy level of trust.

Too much hype kills that trust level. Your customers are left to wonder if you’re sales message matches the actual benefit he or she will receive when buying from you. If your product is good enough to sell, then it has enough value on its own to drive conversions without the sleazy, cringe-worthy hype.

8. Benefits outweigh solutions every time

People land on your sales page looking for a solution to a problem. But what they want isn’t a solution – they’re looking for a direct benefit to improve their life and solve a struggle.

Give your visitor a reason to buy with benefit statements. Don’t offer specific specs of your product. Those could confuse your reader. Worse yet, they might not be able to see how each solution or spec meets a need.

Show the direct benefits to each part of your product as a way to show why a person should buy from you. For example, if you sell grills talk about how fast your grill heats up, how consistently it cooks, and how easy it is to clean. Each of these outlines the benefits of your product, while also addressing the solutions your product solves.

9. Make your sales copy easy to scan

People are busy. They aren’t looking for a sales pitch when they land on your website, they’re looking for a reason to work with you.

You only have a few seconds to capture your visitor’s attention before she makes a snap judgment about what you have to offer. If your sales copy is easy to scan, you’ll be more likely to get across what you need to convey in a shorter period of time. Use bullet points, images, and other tools to make your copy easy to scan over quickly.

10. Test, test, test

There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution to driving conversions. Your audience is as unique as your product. To reach the core group of people you serve, you need to tailor your marketing and sales page to their interests, needs, and passions.

Test your message to find out what resonates and what falls flat. When testing, make small tweaks to your copy so you get a realistic view of what drives better conversions. Over time you will start to see certain patterns making your sales copy more impactful.

What is the best way you’ve found to drive conversions on your website?

As a reporter, one of my biggest frustrations was reading the out-of-control comments on my stories. A particularly controversial topic could generate 100 or more comments, but even the most benign feature story could be brought down by a few thoughtless remarks.

Even a 12-year-old girl who was doing something good for her community could be a target of merciless taunting, and the family would be so upset they’d vow never to talk to the newspaper again.

The business of blogging for businesses is a little different. Now the frustration happens when I realize I’ve just put a lot of time and effort into something that hardly anyone has read, much less commented on.

We all know engagement takes time, but when you’re trying to prove your worth as a content marketer, you can’t wait six months for your content to be discovered. You need more blog subscribers now.

It goes without saying your content has to be relevant to your audience, so it needs to be based on sound research. If you haven’t done the groundwork to discover who your buyers are and what they want, you need to take a few steps back first.

But if you’re producing a variety of quality pieces that speak to your potential buyers at every stage and your blog subscriptions have plateaued, there are a few quick fixes that can make a big difference.

Here are three simple things that could be keeping you from getting more blog subscribers.

Your Calls To Action Need Work

You have a field on your blog where readers can enter their email address to subscribe, right? So, what more can you do?

First, make sure it’s visible and eye-catching. Here are some examples of great blog CTAs (courtesy of Chris Brogan and Onboardly).

Second, make sure it’s simple. If you ask your readers to give you everything from their company title to their mother’s maiden name, they’re going to give up. If all you really need is their email address, just ask for that.

Third, include blog CTAs in a variety of places.

How visible is the blog on your homepage? Do you have a summary of recent posts, or is it just a tab at the top or bottom that says “blog?”

Sometimes companies inadvertently make their blog harder to find by listing it under something else that’s not as clear, such as “resources,” “connect with us” or “latest updates,” which makes it sounds like it’s just a bunch of announcements about their products.

And don’t assume your existing contacts are already following your blog.

If you send out a company newsletter once a month, make sure you include a call to action to subscribe for more great tips, the latest updates or anything else your readers want to see.

Make sure you emphasize it’s news they can use, not just announcements about your products.

No One Knows You Have a Blog

Speaking of that newsletter, when’s the last time you sent one out that specifically called attention to your blog? Yes, it’s a “subscribe to our blog” email, something you’ve probably been advised against doing, but that doesn’t mean it has to look like one.

Rather than sending out an announcement that you have a blog, choose the highest-ranking blog of the past month and create an email around that. Include a teaser to the information, and write the subject line in a way that suggests the recipient has been missing out on important industry updates. It could read something like, “Three key regulatory stories you missed this week.”

Social media is often the gateway to your blog, so make sure your blog is getting plenty of play there as well.

It goes without saying that you should be promoting your posts (and more than just once a week), but you also want to encourage others to share them.

Make sure your blog has share buttons. Try adding a “Tweet this stat” or “Tweet this quote” CTA to make it easy for a reader to quickly share it.

Your Blog Isn’t Visually Appealing

If you want more content that’s easily shared, try mixing it up a little. Think about what people share most often on social media. It’s not words; it’s pictures.

In fact, at least 63 percent of social media is made up of images, and 32 percent is made up of videos.

Think about this as you structure your next blog. Could it be presented as a SlideShare of quick tips instead? An infographic?

At least once a month, I try to look at the blog analytics for each of the accounts I write content for, and it’s always interesting to see what performs best.

In writing for a software company that deals with the serious topic of workplace safety, I had mostly focused on writing about serious subjects: How to prevent falls, how to safeguard equipment, how to better manage safety-related paperwork.

After awhile, I decided to try something new. Now, looking back at the past six months, I’ve noticed the two most popular posts weren’t necessarily the most hard-hitting ones, but the most visual and interactive. One was a SlideShare of inspirational safety quotes; the other was a quiz.

Each of these two posts had nearly double the viewership of the others.

Another way to make your posts easier to share is to promote them with custom-branded images.

Making your blog more visible and visual will attract more attention, and the subscribers will follow.

Don’t let these items hold your blog back any longer. Make your blog appealing and your CTAs strong—and don’t forget to share your efforts with your audience.

What have you done to entice more subscribers to your blog? Share with us in the comments below. 

“Not another interview,” I say to myself.  

I’ve conducted ten interviews in two weeks and they were all duds.  Worst of all was being caught in interviews where I knew within the first ten minutes that the salesperson was not going to be a fit and wasting the next twenty-minutes being polite.

I would catch myself thinking, “Are there no good salespeople out there?”

It’s at this point you feel human cloning can’t come fast enough so you can clone yourself.  That would be so much easier!

This was my experience while trying to build my sales team while working in South Florida.  Maybe you’ve experiencing the same?

Interviewing salespeople can be a frustrating experience… never knowing if you are getting to the truth about their abilities not to mention the pain of being stuck in interviews with the wrong candidates.

I learned a long time ago that pain happens but suffering is a choice.  Here are a few tips on interviewing salespeople that can end some of the suffering of consistently picking mediocre salespeople.

First, the hiring process consists of four stages. The stages build on each other.   Interviewing is one tactic of the screening stage but the output is only as good as the input from the previous stages.

The old computer programmer acumen of “garbage in, garbage out” applies to hiring.

Let’s assume you have a qualified candidate pool and you are not choosing the best of the worst.  Here are some mistakes I’ve made and learned from by interviewing thousands of salespeople over my thirty-five year career:

#1 Not Conducting a Phone Screen:  Not only is a phone screen the quickest way to evaluate someone, it is your opportunity to screen them on their ability to communicate over the phone.  Unless you’re selling by cold calling door-to-door, the phone plays an integral part of the sales process today in terms of connecting with prospects, building rapport, and getting the appointment.   Evaluate how they handle themselves during your phone conversation.

A couple of phone interviewing tips:

1. Schedule an appointment time and have them call you.  You’ll be surprised how many won’t or make an excuse why they didn’t. 
2. Screen just for their industry and income experience.  That is it.  Do they have the specific industry experience you need and have they been compensated similar to or at the level of what your position offers?

#2 Interviewing the Resume:  Keep in mind that resumes are balance sheets with no liabilities listed.  The tendency is to ask questions based on the person’s resume.  Your questions mostly center on quizzing them about their jobs.  While that may work to some degree, what you want to know is whether their job functions in their previous role were similar to what your position requires.

For example, your position requires the salesperson to generate their own leads but in their previous jobs, leads were provided.   Define your key sales behaviors and rank their importance to success in the role.  Build questions around those key success factors.

#3 Mistaking Experience for Accomplishments:  Just because they have work experience does not mean they’ve accomplished anything.  Experience is easy to validate; accomplishments not so much.  Simply ask, “What did you accomplish while you were in the position?  Where is there proof of that?  How specifically did you do that and who helped you?”

#4 Focusing on Results and not Behaviors:  Results are important and at the same time, tough to quantify.  Too often people were in the right place at the right time during the right market conditions.  For example, being a top revenue producer in technology sales was not that difficult in the late nineties due the fact the Y2K scare drove most purchases.  What you want to know is what they did… the behaviors… on a daily basis to get in position to ask for the order.  Behaviors come before revenue.

#5 Assuming Can Do Equals Will Do:  Just because you know something does not mean you will do it.  Just because you can do it does not mean you will.  For example, you know that daily exercise is vital to your overall health – you know that but how often do you do it?  If I ask you how important daily exercise is, you can probably respond pretty convincingly even though you don’t do it.  Ask your candidate to “Please specifically describe why you do what you do.”  It is the why in our lives that drive the things we are willing to do.

#6 Not Having a Scorecard:  Interviews take time, they cover a lot of ground, and they are spaced far apart.  When it comes down to making the decision, are you just relying on your memory?  In most competitions, the person with the best score wins.  Set up a scoring matrix and evaluate candidates based on that.  Having this baseline data gives you an opportunity to determine the effectiveness of your hiring process.  Without it, you are really just relying on your gut and pure luck… both offer no consistency.

How effective are you at hiring sales people?  Download this free resource.

I truly believe in the power of ROI tools to enhance a sales team’s ability to close more deals. (If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be in the business of selling them.) However, not everyone agrees with me.  In fact, inside LinkedIn group discussions, I’ve had sales leaders at some of top global b2b organizations tell me that ROI tools are ineffective.

Below, you’ll find three objections sales operations, sales enablement and sales leaders give for why B2B sales teams should avoid ROI tools. Plus you’ll see why these objections are full of baloney!

Objection #1: Putting an ROI tool on your website assumes that all customers have identical needs.

 It’s true that no two customers are alike. And, yes ROI tools that have hidden assumptions and blind calculations of value do not provide the customization required to move prospects down the funnel.

The thing is, good ROI tools actually account for the fact that no two customers are alike.

A good ROI tool is designed to help a prospect decide if a given solution is a sound economic investment. That means the tool just does nott incorporate industry and benchmark data. It should allow the prospect to modify any data inputs or assumptions to make the calculation reflect their specific economic realities.

Takeaway: Look for an ROI tool that provides the ability to modify the inputs, not one with hidden assumptions and blind calculations of value.

Objection #2: Having an ROI tool on your website provides your prospects with the justification to buy from your competitors.

So, prospects are using your ROI tool to research pricing and then they end up buying from your competitors? If this is the case, I’m not sure your ROI tool is the problem.

When you think about market definitions, you’ve got two ends of the spectrum to consider. On one end, you have sales teams that sell absolute commodities. In this environment, competitors all deliver the same amount of value. In that case, the lowest-cost competitor should always win. Any company that invests in an ROI tool on their website to help prospects evaluate their purchase decision in a commoditized market is wasting money. (After all, you don’t need a calculator to tell you which company offers the lowest price.)

On the other end of the spectrum, you have companies that provide differentiated offerings that deliver more value relative to the competition. In that case, the value calculator or ROI tool only emphasizes why the prospect should buy from you. (Unless you do not, in fact, offer the value you think you do.)

Takeaway: If your offering delivers value differently than your competition, an ROI tool on your website is one of the best ways to communicate that value, generate buyer interest, and capture leads.

Objection #3: ROI tools cause salespeople to make questionable promises to prospects.

This is definitely a  far-reaching! excuse not to use ROI tools.  A well-built value calculator or ROI tool doesn’t make any absolute or fixed assumptions about the value that will be delivered. Instead, it provides the salesperson with a tool to have a discussion with a potential customer about the problems that they are having and how their solution could:

1. Solve those problems,
2. Provide value to their business
3. Justify the investment in the proposed solution.

Takeaway: If your ROI tool causes the salesperson to mislead prospects, then it isn’t an effective tool and should be updated.

Because sales and marketing leaders are falling for these common objections, their sales teams are being blocked from talking to more than 50% of prospective buyers. Recent CEB studies show that 57% of B2B buyers make their purchase decision before they even talk to a supplier. In other words, if you aren’t providing tools to help a customer learn more about your organization and the value your solutions offer, you are likely being eliminated before they even talk to you

Any tool you can put online to help prospects make their buying decision — especially if it helps them to understand why they should purchase your offering — is a good thing. What’s your take on the value of ROI tools in your marketing and sales process? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

The bell has tolled and the era of ‘Inbound Marketing’, or at least the term, is officially upon us.  This fact is proven simply through social observation.  Swing your arm.  How many supposed Inbound Marketing experts did you hit?  We seem to be everywhere.

A Little History

The fact is, though, inbound is an effective, real methodology like white hat SEO.  And like white hat SEO in the early 2000s, the inbound marketing approach is in its early prime.  The team at MOZ, self proclaimed SEO champions (for good reason), have embraced the principles of inbound regardless of which moniker is used to describe the approach.  In the words of Rand Fishkin the principles are as follows:

• Combining the practices of content creation and conversion optimization to earn visitors’ trust and their business
• Jointly leveraging the channels of search, social, blogs, PR, referring links, email and word-of-mouth to promote this content
• Using sophisticated analytics practices like first-touch and multi-touch attribution to better understand the true value of your content and your visitor sources

Based on relatively recent updates by Google, the once prevalent tactics of ‘gaming’ search engines has largely been squashed as the prominent form of increasing valuable, relevant traffic to a site.

What Is The Inbound Approach All About?

Simply put, the Inbound Approach attracts interested prospective customers to a site or landing page because the content on that site is valuable and relevant to the person searching.  It connects content, social media, guest blogging, websites and email marketing into a centralized database-driven app, providing far greater visibility and decision-making tools than we had historically.

Prospects find the content that helps them research products or services whether a blog post or a white paper offer.  That content establishes the business as a thought leader while serving as an indicator of the prospect’s stage in the marketing funnel thus empowering sales to approach prospects with intelligence.  A great deal of the process is automated with intelligent workflows.

The Guys Selling The Apps Are Making Promises

Of course they are!  They are well-trained sales people.  And the app platform really does serve as the backbone of the inbound methodology like an ERP system supports cross-business visibility.

There is no complex, business automation solution that is valuable without human interaction.  At least not yet.  Do not be sold on the promise of a lonely app to solve all of marketing’s challenges.

The All-In Costs Of Inbound Marketing

Let’s assume you plunk down that subscription cost of $xxxx per month.  Now what happens?

1. Content.  Without a continual stream of new, innovative content coming down the pipes, you’ll be hard pressed to make an inbound solution produce results.  Content Marketing is a critical piece of the inbound process and one that deserves its own, focused marketing budget.  Even before writing the first white paper one should consider the holistic content process, how it aligns with the marketing funnel, scheduling and campaigning.

This is an important investment and its cost should be proportional to the volume and quality of leads you expect to produce.  Costs vary dramatically. Talk to an agency specializing in content to explore costs of ghost writers for white papers, bloggers and ebooks as well as infographics and video production.  If you need referrals or assistance with content strategy please call us at Ramp Agency Services.

2. People & Resources.  Now that you have a license for this awesome tool, who will run it?  I once asked my wife which part time staff member manages  the Infusionsoft account at Bent But Not Broken, a non-profit she founded.  Her reply, ‘it takes a full time resource and we don’t have that yet’.  If you are planning on hiring a single inbound expert, plan on spending upwards of $50k in salary.  Also consider the time for industry education and familiarity with the tool both of which impact return on investment greatly.

3. Education.  So you have a quick learner in-house?  You have two options.  Let that person self-educate (potentially very timely) or send them to inbound boot camp.  Ramp provides such a boot camp for businesses nationally.

4. Technology.  It has been implied but it needs to be mentioned explicitly.  The technology is required and its evaluation takes time, resources and dollars. Once the solution is chosen it needs to be implemented and integrated to other systems in house, whether CRM, accounting or stand alone proprietary systems.

5. Return On Investment.  Inbound marketing is a long term strategy to increase brand awareness, develop and increasingly abundant pipeline of qualified leads and close more deals.  And it takes 6-9 months to start seeing results.  There are plenty of businesses using an inbound methodology successfully today and there are plenty that have dropped it altogether because of a lack of understanding and patience.

So I have surely bashed the inbound marketing application vendors enough today.  Vendors like HubSpot, Act-On, Marketo and SharpSpring each develop highly-effective apps to automate the inbound process.

As you embark on your exploration, adoption, management and profit from the inbound marketing methodology, keep your eyes and ears open, ask questions and have fun!

DOWNLOAD THIS WHITE PAPER TODAY!

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are vital to businesses both large and small across multiple industries. A well-chosen and ably used CRM solution can save time, reduce costs and help your sales and customer service teams become more productive – and more effective. But how do CRM users feel about the solutions they’re using currently? Do they find them lacking in critical ways? And what are some of the challenges ahead? Let’s take a look at the results of a recent survey from Software Advice, in the report, “Customer Relationship Management Software UserView 2014” to find out.

It seems like ever since CRM was introduced to the market in the 1990s, it’s been continually changing the game, making it possible for businesses to drive engagement, increase revenue, and deliver superior service. Indeed, according to the Software Advice survey, CRM users are generally satisfied with the solution they’re using. Most users (74%) said their CRM system offered improved access to customer data, and 64% said that it delivered improved relationship management.

So far, so good. But what does the future hold for CRM users?

A key finding from this report indicates an interesting trend for CRM implementations: The two most commonly cited areas for increased CRM technology investment are customer service, at 47%, and marketing automation, with 42% indicating they plan to increase spending on these solutions.

Clearly, improving the help desk experience – and ensuring better customer service – is extremely important to developing strong customer relationships, and investing in technology solutions to improve these business areas can deliver a significant competitive advantage. But marketing automation is next on the list of importance for a good reason. For all CRM’s many strengths, no CRM system offers what today’s marketer needs in order to develop lasting customer loyalty and also support overall business goals. It’s no wonder CRM users plan to invest in marketing automation, especially when you consider the many benefits of the kind of synergy they can create.

Focus on Customers

Integrating CRM with the marketing automation makes it possible to develop new levels of engagement with customers and prospects throughout the entire marketing and sales journey. Using the two solutions together, marketers can create and produce more targeted email marketing, lead generation, and lead nurturing campaigns without the need for additional specialized resources.

The integration of marketing automation and CRM results in a whole that is mare than the sum of its parts. Businesses can build closer relationships with leads without risking exponential growth in time and money invested. Lead management programs can help make strategic use of assets, delivering them when – and where – customers expect to find them. Automated programs make it possible to replicate every successful campaign and run them at scale, giving reach over time and volume with less effort – and more precision.

Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing, put it this way:

“In a nutshell, the only thing CRM systems do is organize your information. They don’t actually do anything. They keep track of your sales, but they don’t engage your prospects. That’s still up to you. They capture your sales process, but they don’t execute it. A good marketing automation system, on the other hand, proactively helps you. If set up and managed well, you can sit back and do nothing and the system will drop interested prospects in your lap … I don’t actually recommend someone choose one or the other. World-class sales and marketing organizations need both to succeed and scale.”

With the right combination of marketing automation and CRM, marketing teams can:

• Create, automate, and measure lead nurturing and marketing campaigns
• Track website visits and understand potential buyer interest
• Score leads based on specific activities, profiles and special events
• Automatically manage, recycle, and reassign sales leads based on specific behaviors

And sales teams can:

• Better define and manage lead qualification and lead hand-off timing
• See exactly why a lead has been qualified and assigned to them
• Fully understand, prioritize, and interact with only the hot prospects.
• Gain intelligence about a prospect’s interests and activities
• Be prepared for a call with a talk track drawn from the lead’s demonstrated interests
• Collaborate on the amount, type and timing of content to prospects

Nurturing leads often results in not only a higher percentage of closed leads, but also bigger deal sizes. The buyer is better-educated, and the relationships are stronger and more personal. In short, marketing automation, combined with CRM, provides a significant business advantage.

Ensuring Integration

Another interesting finding from the Software Advice report is an overview of the challenges organizations say they have with their current CRM system. System customization was the biggest pain point, with 56% saying it is a major or moderate challenge; 49% of respondents citing integration as a more than minor challenge.

Customization’s lead in this category is unsurprising. Every customization is by definition a one-off, providing the opportunity for problems no one has ever seen before. Often a third party is in the mix to plan or execute the implementation. If communications aren’t thorough and precise, it’s easy for misunderstandings and mistakes to slow progress. The most common surprise is the unforeseen escalation of budget, or the schedule that’s been overshot. Or (usually) both.

Integration is also an issue since, as we saw previously, many organizations are looking to extend the functionality of their CRM with customer service options, marketing automation technologies, social media tools, and many other features necessary in today’s business environment.
But the more disparate systems you bolt to a platform, the more unwieldy the platform can become. Data starts existing in silos. Marketers can become spreadsheet jockeys, downloading data here, changing the fields, uploading data there, changing fields again. It takes longer to get the insights you need to take action – which was the whole point of adding on solutions in the first place. It’s no wonder that for marketers and sales teams, the need for seamless integration of CRM with a variety of other systems is critical, provided that the data can flow together so it can be analyzed and used as one body of knowledge.

What other challenges and opportunities are CRM users experiencing? Read the Software Advice UserView: CRM Software Report to find out.

And be sure to read Act-On’s new eBook to learn more about the benefits of combining marketing automation and CRM.

According to the recent Marketscan Marketing Campaign Planning Survey, a third of marketers spend 3 months planning their campaigns. This guide looks at how B2B marketers can spend that time effectively and profitably and produce explosive results.

3 months to lift-off

The first stage of your campaign is to ensure that you know who your campaign is going to be targeted at and that you have the data you need to help you plan your campaign for maximum effect:

• Identify your best customer profiles. Who are you going to target with your campaign? Which customer groups present the greatest opportunity for success?
• Clean your B2B data. Your business to business data needs to be accurate, or you are wasting time and resources. Arrange to have your existing data ‘cleaned’ to ensure accuracy.

“Among the organisations studied, those deemed as being stronger than average displayed smaller amounts of [customer] database errors (10%). Typical organisations scored 25% for the volume of unhealthy data.” – SiriusDecisions.

2 months to lift-off

Having knocked your business to business data into shape, the next month should be spent putting it to work:

• Beat your marketing data into shape. Does your marketing data currently match your best customer profiles? Less than 15% of data does.
• Strengthen your B2B data. Make sure you have enough qualified leads that match your best customer profiles. Consider purchasing and importing additional contact lists.

1 month to lift-off

Now you know that your B2B data is usable, and who you want to target, you need to begin crafting the campaign specifics:

• Build your message. What are you going to say to your customers? And is it relevant to their business pains?
• Test your message. Make sure that you have everything in place and ready to go when the campaign launches. Are your staff fully trained? Does your messaging system work properly?
• Make changes. Quickly! If you do come across any problems, this is your last chance to fix them before making an embarrassing mistake, or having to delay your campaign.

“The typical email has a 5% open rate, but you can get that as high as 95% if the message is relevant enough.” – Pratik Dholakiya – eConsultancy.

Lift off!

The big day has arrived, and you can launch the campaign. The previous three months of preparation mean that everything should go smoothly. Better still, your investment in targeting should result in a much higher success rate.

The three steps you need to complete for greater marketing campaign success are:

• Get your B2B data in shape.
• Identify your best prospects and ensure your message is tailored towards them.
• Build and test your messages before launch date.

Next steps

Now you know the timescale, don’t let anything else get in the way of your perfect marketing campaign. Read Conquer your marketing campaign challenges to learn more.

This article was first published on the Marketscan blog.

How should content be measured and analyzed? Let us count the ways (or at least begin to).