Rnordman

This is the first part of ReadWrite's four-part series on the future of messaging.

I was a teenage early adopter.

To me, it seemed like everyone else in my 8th grade class already had a cell phone when I got my first one a decade ago. But back then, only a third of American teens had sent a text message, according to the Pew Research Center. Three out of four teens, however, used instant messaging on their computers.

Fast forward a decade, and that percentage has neatly flipped. By 2012, 75% of American teens were texting, most of them daily, while only 22% used desktop-oriented instant messaging services on a daily basis. 

In that same time frame, social networks have become ubiquitous, and to some oppressive. Broadcasting our daily activities to a hungry audience of casual online acquaintances isn't something most people care to do. For them, messaging is a retreat to a safer, more intimate way of communicating.

Now texting is exploding—and fragmenting. Where we'll end up a decade from now is just as hard to predict as the massive leap we took from 2004 to 2014.

Controlling the way we communicate is a valuable prize, as Facebook and Twitter's large valuations reveal. If social networks, which fostered the idea of broadcasting our status, give way to more private tools like messaging apps, the very shape of the Internet landscape will be transformed beyond recognition.

Beyond Texting

I’m pretty sure my first text was “I finally got a cell phone.” When I got my megatrendy Nokia 3310 candybar-style phone with a Superman case, texting meant you have a cell phone, and having a cell phone meant you could text. 

Messages are more than text, and more than phones. We now send messages using apps that add photos, videos, and other forms of communication while bypassing cell-phone companies' networks. 

And messaging has become a high-stakes business, with billions of dollars at play.

In the last few years, a handful of massively successful messaging applications—and even more copycats—have launched. They all aim to provide a better way to communicate privately, one that's superior to both traditional text messaging and to older social networks like Facebook and Twitter. And they are made possible by the rise of smartphones and fast, cheap data networks around the world.

See Also: The 10 Most Popular Mobile Messaging Apps In The World

The most notable one is WhatsApp, a company that Facebook is in the process of acquiring for $19 billion, which now has more than 500 million users. WeChat, a messaging service developed by Chinese Internet giant Tencent, is closing in on WhatsApp with 438 million users. There are other contenders including Kik, a messaging and gaming app; Line, which filed for an IPO in July; Viber, acquired by Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten for $900 million; and the disappearing-message startup Snapchat, which Facebook has now tried to copy twice.

The Text To End All Texts?

All of them face the most formidable competition not in each other but in the Short Message Service protocol, or SMS—the standard for text messages used by cell-phone companies around the world.

The first text message was sent in 1992. Neil Papworth, a software engineer for the Sema Group in the United Kingdom, sat down and tapped out “Merry Christmas.”

In the United States, where wireless carriers were late to offer standardized text messaging, teens drove adoption. But in the rest of the world, texting was a way of avoiding wallet-draining phone calls. (In Europe and Asia, wireless customers typically pay by the minute rather than buying monthly buckets of minutes or unlimited plans, as we do in the States.)

In 1995 people were sending only 5 messages a year on average, through a limited set of wireless carriers. That number has skyrocketed. In 2012, people around the world sent 2 trillion text messages. That's 333 for each person with a phone on the planet. Those messages cost almost nothing for carriers to transmit, but the senders typically pay a few pennies for each one, making it a lucrative business—one that messaging apps are eager to take a piece of. 

Why Texting Isn’t Enough

Messaging is more than a business opportunity. It has deep meaning in our daily lives.

What makes messaging special—and drives us away from social media—is that messaging apps let us talk one on one, or with a small group. They give us a direct line of communication to people we care about. We can send a note that won't get buried among a hundred other people's updates in a news feed or timeline.

But how will we send those notes? That's the critical question.

The inexorable rise of Facebook, and the concomitant decline of Myspace and Friendster, has led some to think that any app with social features is playing in a winner-take-all market. But that doesn't seem to be happening in messaging.

Despite Facebook's dominance, we've grown accustomed to using different social networks to manage our online identities—Facebook for friends, LinkedIn for work, and Twitter for news and information. That digital fragmentation will apply to private communications, too.

It's easier than ever to build a messaging app, which can simply pull from our phone's address books to populate a list of people to talk to. It's not hard to keep up with multiple inboxes on a modern smartphone, where notifications tell us when we've got a new message.

Traditional SMS text messages won't go away anytime soon. But what SMS lacks is precisely what gives messaging apps opportunities to grow. For many, texting still costs quite a bit of money. And it is restricted to 160 characters; you can send pictures and video on some services, but carriers haven't worked out all of the kinks, and they're aiming to charge even more for those extra. Texting may be the original mobile messaging service, but its shortcomings are painfully acute. 

“Most of [these messaging apps] started as a cheaper alternative to SMS and other messaging formats,” said Forrester analyst Thomas Husson, author of the report Messaging Apps: Mobile Becomes The New Face Of Social. “They were created in the last two, three, four years and they leverage app platforms, like iOS or Android, successfully reach out to hundreds of millions of customers worldwide.”

Why Multiple Messaging Apps Will Thrive

I still use SMS, but not as frequently as I did when I was younger.

There are six main messaging applications in the “social” bucket on my iPhone. For the most part, I use Apple's iMessage, which essentially hijacks the built-in texting service of your phone to send free messages over your data plan. I have two friends who only ever message me on Snapchat. Another prefers Google Hangouts. I rarely open Facebook Messenger—mostly when I forget how Facebook now pushes you into its standalone Messenger app when you’re on your phone. I find Twitter’s direct-message feature, which is in desperate need of a rumored upgrade, helpful for staying connected to people I only know tangentially through the Internet. I used to use Skype for work, though we dropped it for Slack, a service that's designed to help teams communicate.

Because all these messaging apps require both the sender and recipient to have the same service installed, what ends up happening is that we all have different friends on different applications. Figuring out which messaging app to use is like moving to a new city and figuring out which neighborhood to hang out in. If you want to see all your friends, you'll have to roam around.

My friends are not all alike. Some like sharing selfies from work that disappear after I’ve viewed them. Others prefer to send cute digital stickers, or voice-only messages which make me feel like a kid using walkie-talkies in the backyard.

Facebook Won't Own Messaging The Way It Owns Social Networking

The shift from one-to-many communication, like Twitter and Facebok, to one-to-few, like WhatsApp and WeChat, is forcing startups and social giants alike to rethink their strategy. 

Messaging apps are trying to take the basic human need for chatting with friends and family and turn it into something at once unique enough to draw interest, yet simple enough for the masses to adopt.

“Look at Facebook in particular and how they’re reacting to this WhatsApp acquisition, and the decision to not necessarily integrate that service into one single digital platform, but ... create a constellation of apps,” Husson said. “More and more services are integrated into it—not like the one-size-fits-all social media app that Facebook used to be.”

The rise of Snapchat prompted Facebook to create a copycat called Poke that swiftly failed. Then it decided it might be better to buy than to build, snapping up WhatsApp, the world’s largest messaging app, for $19 billion. 

It’s still gambling on building a disappearing-message service to rival Snapchat’s popularity, but its latest attempt, Slingshot, has slumped to No. 444 in the App Store for photo and video apps. Facebook's disappearing-message app is what's really disappearing.

Facebook is making many bets on messaging, though, from its own Facebook Messenger app to Instagram Direct, a tool for sending photos to a small group of people within the photo-sharing service, which normally broadcasts photos to the public like Twitter. On Android, Facebook Messenger takes over your regular texts, much like iMessage does on iPhones.

Before Facebook offered private messaging, users posted messages on each other's profiles in an attempt to communicate. It's clear that messaging is a crucial part of the Facebook experience. It's just not clear that Facebook, even with WhatsApp in its arsenal, will own all of messaging.

The Fight Has Only Just Begun

Just like we use different social networks for different purposes, messaging apps will fill distinct needs.

What people want in a messaging app is the same thing we’ve wanted since we texted our first “Hello": a way to privately connect with friends and family. Yo, a much-ridiculed app which lets you send just one word of acknowledgement to your friends, boils down that desire for connection to its purest essence.

There’s a lot riding on controlling how we talk to friends—just look at the billions companies are paying for messaging services. 

But thanks to the pervasiveness of smartphones, and humans’ desire to connect with each other one on one or in small groups, messaging will only grow. And unlike in the world of social networks, where there's unquestionable value in centralizing our activity, nothing will drive people to use just one app.

For the foreseeable future, we'll live in a world where Snapchat lives alongside WhatsApp, where one-tap apps like Yo persist next to complex platforms for gaming and socializing like Line. Juggling multiple apps may be a mild aggravation for users like us. But if it means that no one company will control our most intimate communications, that seems like a tradeoff worth making.

Lead image by Anne Worner, illustrations by Nigel Sussman for ReadWrite

Would you like to take the conversations your sales and channel teams are having with prospects and customers to a higher level, so they address the issues and concerns your buyers really care about?

Creating and delivering suitable content for sales conversations across the customer buying cycle is a problem in many B2B companies, however it is essential to improving the performance of the core group of salespeople.

As we near the middle of Q3, now is a good time to chart your progress, evaluate what has changed in the past eight months, and resolve how you can end this year with a bang.

At the start of the year, gyro predicted trends and must-haves for B2B marketers to advance their brands. What we did not predict was how two of those must-haves – “producing powerful experiences,” which drives the need for emotion in business, and “keeping up with the engines,” which reveals the requirement for quality information – would meld together as both trends gained steam.

Emotion Produces Powerful Experiences

B2B, it would seem, is inherently left-brained, with logical elements dominating companies’ messaging strategies. Yet, according to recent research, the right-brained, emotional components should not be overlooked.

As the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) and Google recently discovered, B2B customers’ personal values outweigh business considerations when it comes to making business purchases, with a greater proportion of B2B buyers more emotionally attached to the brands they purchase from than B2C consumers are.

However, emotion doesn’t play a factor only in the purchasing moment. Research has found that consumers make future purchasing decisions based on how they remember experiences and not on how they actually experienced them. A company that is able to produce a powerful, customer-centric experience that focuses on the moments that matter most to the buyer is likely to gain repeat business.

But how do businesses create memorable and relevant experiences that stick in buyers’ minds? And how does all of this relate to search engines?

Quality Revs Engines

The Google Panda algorithm change in 2011 was the first blow to keywords, aimed at lowering the search rankings of low-quality sites or sites with thin content. In October 2013, Google acted again, launching its Hummingbird search algorithm intended to deliver more relevant content to the consumer. This transformation marked a major turning point in companies’ communication strategies, requiring them to adopt an outside-in perspective and focus on the consumers’ needs over their own when developing content.

With more emphasis being placed on content marketing, businesses now find themselves in a content arms race. More content competition means companies must invest in creating even higher-quality content than before in order for potential buyers to notice. This shift has resulted in businesses making huge investments in production and quality storytelling supported by strong strategy designed to deliver a highly targeted and memorable customer experience.

It’s All in the Experience

Good customer experience drives loyalty with business customers. Customers have raised their expectations in their B2B relationships, and those companies that can deliver authentic, personalized service are the ones likely to attract and keep buyers’ attention.

Taking advantage of today’s new technology, brands now have an opportunity to deliver their stories in innovative ways. New formats for video are emerging that enable dynamic, customized content to be displayed using geo-targeting and service-provider data that provides product information, relevant prices, promotions and more within the video.

In addition, interactive advertisements containing games, surveys or social-sharing capabilities continue to grow in use, as companies strive to find unique ways to engage with their customers and prospects.

Understand the Person Behind the Customer

At the core of creating quality content is understanding how your customer thinks, acts and feels. Human relevance and emotionally driven messaging have never been more important in B2B. It’s easy to jump on a trend, but those companies that figure out how to transform it into something valuable for their customers are the ones that are going to come out on top.

The post A Complete Guide to Crawling Inside Your Customer’s Head With Empathy Maps appeared first on Copyblogger.

If you’re like every other business owner with a content marketing strategy, you’re publishing all of those pieces to boost your bottom line.  You’ve heard the drool-worthy statistics — like businesses that bother to blog once or twice a month get 70% more leads, and that 82% of consumers feel more positive

about a company after reading custom content — and you want to get in on the success.

However, there’s also a lot of misinformation floating around out there.  Buy into any of these 3 content marketing myths, and you’ll actually torpedo your bottom line!

1.  “You can set it and forget it.”

This line may work well on those late-night infomercials, but if you apply it to your content marketing strategy, you’re never going to see the results you want!  If you think you can put your content efforts on autopilot, you’re dead wrong.

That’s because truly great content strategies are ongoing.  They’re designed to prove that the people behind them are truly dedicated to informing their readers.  Your target audience is always going to have questions and problems.  If you’re genuinely interested in giving them answers and solutions they need, you’ll never run out of topics to write about.

On the other hand, if you have a blog that hasn’t been updated in weeks and an email list that hasn’t heard from you in a few months, it’s proof that you’re not committed to keeping your readers informed.  Even worse, all of that stale information that’s sitting on your blog tells people that your company is outdated!

2.  “Don’t write with any kind of personality.”

A lot of business owners follow the “Research Paper Format” — meaning they think they’ll look more professional if they write very formally.

The only problem?  Readers hate that kind of writing!  Think about it — were any of those research papers you wrote in high school genuine page-turners?  Wouldn’t that paper on underwater exploration have been a whole lot more interesting if you had included a brief mention of the awesome coral reef you saw when you went scuba diving on vacation?

I doesn’t matter which demographics make up your target audience.  At the end of the day, you’re talking to REAL people, and they’re going to respond best to other REAL people.  So, channel your inner-rapper and keep it real.  Your readers will thank you for it.  And by “thank”, I mean they’ll be more inclined to buy your products, connect with you on social media, and tell their friends about you.

3.  “The goal of every piece is to get people to buy something.”

This is only quasi-accurate.  Yes, a great content marketing strategy will lead to more sales.  However, that doesn’t mean that every single piece you publish needs to include a hard sell.  In fact, if all you’re doing is trying to shill your products/services — instead of providing genuinely helpful information — readers are going to think you’re obnoxious, sleazy, and a bunch of other words that aren’t fit to print.

Truly great web content will sell your products/services in a more roundabout way.  Specifically, it will convince readers that you’re a legitimate expert who knows how to answer their questions and solve their problems.  It will also show your readers that you’re committed to building a genuine relationship with them, rather than just making a quick buck off of them.

I tell my clients that great articles, blog posts, videos, and email newsletters are a “pre-sell” of their products/services.  Use them to grab people’s attention and establish your expertise.  Then, once you’ve convinced them that you’re someone that’s worth their hard-earned money, they’ll head to the other pages on your website — where they’ll be expecting to see a hard sell.

If you try to skip this step — and try to sneak a bunch of sales pitches into content that’s supposed to be purely informative — you’re not going to make more money.  Instead, you’ll send readers running into the arms of your competitors!

If you have a team of outbound prospecting reps, spare a minute to give them some love, attention and empathy. After all, they have perhaps the toughest job in your organization: making cold calls to hit aggressive dial targets day after day can be a grueling experience that weighs on even the most motivated and productive prospecting reps.

At the same time, both you and them know how important their role to the organization is. Without them, your sales pipeline – and subsequently, your bookings results – would be substantially smaller. What can you, as their manager, do to ease the painful monotony of their day-to-day job responsibilities?

Provide them with the structure they need to really do their jobs well.

Fighting the temptation of “more!”

Sales managers typically have one way of managing outbound prospecting reps – demand more! “We need MORE leads!” “You guys have to make MORE dials!” When faced with this type of “more” pressure, reps will adopt a mentality of boiling the ocean, as they pursue more leads by any means necessary. However, when reps have a strong and varied structure to their day, they can fight the temptation of “more.”

• Structure breaks down the day into specific and palatable chunks, with a goal that is unique to each of these time periods.

• Reps who fall behind early in the day won’t feel the pressure to make more dials at the end of the day in an effort to make up the gulf on their daily activity goals. The worst thing your reps can do is make calls just for the sake of making calls to hit a quota.

• Structure helps your reps avoid going on “autopilot,” where they just make calls without actual prospecting or planning.

Not sure how to provide your reps with that structure? Here is a sample day-in-the-life of one of the outbound prospecting reps at InsightSquared.

A typical prospecting day:

8:00 a.m. – If you fail to plan (your day), you plan to fail (your day). You want to get in the right frame of mind for the whole day, instead of just dialing immediately upon your arrival to the office. Ask yourself, “Who am I calling today?” and then set up your lists appropriately.

8:30 a.m. – Time for that first prolonged call blast of the day. Here’s where planning comes into effect. Who’s most likely to be at their desk right now? Prospects on the East Coast and in Europe will be, so start with those numbers first. Now’s also a good time to set small, reachable goals. Need to hit 100 dials in a day? Shoot for 30 now.

10:00 a.m. – Call blasts should be followed by breaks, so your reps can stay refreshed with a clear mind. Going for a walk to get some coffee or taking a break to play a game of ping pong with a fellow prospecting rep is a good way to get the blood flowing after sitting down for so long.

10:30 a.m. – Time for another call blast. You should be in a pretty good groove now, so make sure this is your biggest and most productive call blast period of the day. You can also hit a variety of different time zones across the United States, so plan your prospect list accordingly. Forty dials is a solid target to aim for here.

12:30 p.m. – Time to refuel with some lunch. Don’t eat at your desk, though; it’s important to physically unplug and think about something else other than prospecting.

1:00 p.m. – After lunch is one of the worst times for a call blast – you’re in a food coma, and the people you’re calling might be in one too. You can do other productive activities here… such as prospecting! After lunch is a perfect time to do some lead generation and start backfilling your lists for the rest of the day or week. You could also build out an organization chart (allowing you to reach more decision-makers on each account that you call) or research new prospecting email templates to experiment with.

There are plenty of productive prospecting activities to do, so much so that your reps should not be in the mindset of strictly making calls. Getting out of that mindset will help them plan their days better and be more productive overall.

3:00 p.m. – It’s been a productive day, so allow yourself another break. Get a snack to make sure you’re properly fueled to finish the day strong.

3:15 p.m. – Time to finish out the day and hit those goals! You’ve done 70 calls today, which means you have 30 more to do. Target those West Coast prospects, as well as those Australians just waking up on the other side of the world.

Don’t just stop at 30 though. If you’re ahead of the pace and there’s still time at the end of the day, shoot for 110 or 115 dials. These extra efforts will not go unnoticed.

Adding structure to your outbound prospecting reps’ days will see them be more refreshed, more motivated, more focused and ultimately, more productive. You should also give them the autonomy to structure their day in a way that works best for them. Offer plenty of flexibility to schedule in sales coaching exercises or to shadow senior reps – there is always room for improvement.

A more structured schedule for your prospecting reps will result in a more robust sales pipeline. Implement that structure and you will see immediate dividends.

You have probably heard that there are 1.15 billion people on Facebook.  You may even have read that inbound (Social Media) marketing costs 62% less per lead than traditional marketing or that 54% more leads are generated by inbound than by outbound marketing.

Statistics are fine.  But results are what matter.  Check out the infographic below to see the real world results for one company that outlined it goals and then had a social media manager develop a strategy to meet those goals.

The final result: More website visits because of improved SEO from blogs and social signals; over double the Facebook “likes” in four months AND a 13% increase in sales in just two months.

Social Media is a powerful tool. The strategy should never be high pressure sales tactics (which wouldn’t work anyway). However, the bottom line is that if the time, money and effort involved in running a social media campaign does not in some way improve a company’s bottom line, why do it?

When B2B marketing awards are announced, they get a lot of play in the press, and in the marketing interwebs. Award-winning marketing organizations can be intimidating to watch, and induce a lot of jealousy in everyone else. When you see their killer websites, chock-a-block resources libraries, and see their leaders speak on stage, you’re left stunned.

“There’s gotta be a HUGE gap between us and where they are!” you might think.

Look more closely at what they’re doing, and you’ll see that you’re not so far away from that award-winning state. In fact, you’ll probably figure out their secret pretty quickly: they focus on a small set of lead management activities, do them consistently, and do them well. That’s it.

By focusing on a smaller set of lead management activities, you’ll accelerate your performance as well, and increase your sales output to the same (or even better) level as those award-winners. Let’s take a look at three of these lead management best practices that you can focus on too.

1. Develop a complete lead management process

By focusing on a complete, lead management process that spans both Marketing AND Sales, you’ll improve your content consistency, and really focus in on what matters to your prospects. Your lead conversion rates will increase because you’re better at leading them down the sales cycle path with your content.

2. Dedicate resources to marketing content

That means hiring enough marketing directors, managers, and copywriters to keep up with your content plan. Most award-winning brands have already done this, and are constantly able to keep their marketing channels stocked with well- conceived and -written content that attracts and engages leads.

3. Understand the relationship between marketing and overall company profit

Employees who understand how their work affects the company’s bottom line tend to produce higher quality work. Marketing and Sales employees who understand how their lead management activities affect the company’s profit line produce at an even higher level. According to a study from Aberdeen, 81% of the best marketers can identify their most and least profitable marketing programs—almost twice the industry average.

Your Turn

Have you started using any lead management best practices from your industry-leading marketers? If so, which ones? Hit the comments and let me know, I’m curious to hear your stories.

In the five years since B.C. increased the height limit for wood-frame buildings, new structures have been popping up all over the province. Now lumber’s biggest advocates are predicting they can build higher than they ever expected. Since 2009, when the province raised the height limit for wood-frame buildings to six storeys from four, 202 new five- and six-storey buildings have been approved, including 58 that are already complete.

I created the Lean Canvas back in 2009 as a way to more effectively document my most critical business model assumptions for my products which were predominantly SaaS software products at the time.

Lean Canvas is now taught at over 200 universities (including high schools), close to 100 startup accelerators, and used at hundreds of businesses (including large enterprises). We just crossed the 125K users and 175K canvases mark with our online Lean Canvas tool.

I’m not sharing these numbers to show off our vanity metrics but rather to acknowledge that both the scope of usage and audience has broadened well beyond my prototypical early adopter. Just the other day I got a Lean Canvas question from a salmon fisher in Chile!

But with expansion comes challenge.

In this case, one of adapting and refining the framework beyond it’s original reference model. I’ve mostly been addressing these challenges in my private workshops and bootcamps and noticed that I haven’t posted any of this publicly.

This was brought to a head for me recently after reading a post by Benjamin Kampmann titled: The Lean Canvas: Wrong Tool for the Job where he recounts several issues he faced when modeling his tech-ventures with the canvas.

First, I’d like to thank Ben for posting his experiences publicly. I’ll attempt to address his concerns along with others I’ve collected along the way in this post and follow-on posts.

The core issue Ben raised stemmed from a characterization that the Lean Canvas was too focused on profit as the main goal of any venture. He further argues that this profit seeking focus derails ventures that fall outside the direct (user = customer) reference business model such as in multi-sided models and not-for-profit models.

While I don’t like to think of money solely as the goal of a business, I liken money to oxygen.

We don’t live for oxygen, but we need oxygen to live.

That said, there is a difference between money and profit. And I don’t consider profit the universal goal of every business or product.

The Universal Goal of Any Business

The universal goal of every business is to make happy customers.

Happy customers get you paid and doing this repeatedly and sustainably is the goal of every business.

This is true whether you are building a product business or a services business,software or hardware, low tech or high tech, and even if you are building a for profit or a non-profit business.

This, by the way, is also the central theme of my next book, not co-incidentally, titled: “The Customer Factory”.

I am not going to dive into the details of the Customer Factory in this post, but rather use this central idea to show you how you can use it to model any type of business with the Lean Canvas.

My guess is that this profit-seeking characterization is rooted in the presence of a prominent Revenue Streams box on the canvas which poses problems when thinking about some of these non-direct models.

What to Put Under Revenue Streams?

First, the happy customer goal isn’t a cop out for not being specific on your revenue streams which is a problem I see generally across all canvases I review – even direct, for-profit models.

“There is no business in your business model without revenue streams.”

For that reason, I want to kick off with the simplest (not necessarily easiest) direct, for-profit, business model and then build up from there in subsequent posts.

By specific, I don’t just mean citing your revenue stream sources but getting down to actual pricing and projected lifetime numbers.

For example, $50/mo with 2 yr lifetime.

You need these numbers to ballpark the opportunity or “problem worth solving” both for yourself and for your external stakeholders. If you don’t have a “big enough” problem worth solving (that’s not even plausible on paper) then why expend any effort on it.

I’ll cover the simple math for ballparking your business model next time.

The biggest objections I hear against being this specific are:

a. How do I price a product when my solution is still uncertain?

Customers care about their problems and not your solution.

So you should price against their problems (using value based pricing) and not what it’s going to cost you to build and deliver your solution (that’s a Cost Structure concern). You do this by anchoring against their Existing Alternatives where you should ideally be able to point to some evidence of monetizable pain.

The best evidence of monetizable pain is a check being written but there are other proxies.

b. How do I estimate my customer lifetime?

This one is a bit harder to model but it’s still an important input assumption to document. While we would all like to keep our customers forever, every business has non-zero churn or some finite customer lifetime – sometimes because they hate your product so much that they leave, and sometimes because they love your product so much that they use it to solve their problem and then move on.

One way to guess at the customer lifetime is through the nature of the problem you are solving. Is it a single occurrence problem or something recurring? If recurring, how frequently would the user need to solve the problem and for how long. From there you might be able to guess when they would outgrow your solution.

Studying other analogs in your vertical or domain can also be an effective way for estimating your average customer lifetime. If all else fails, pick a conservative estimate for now. You’ll get an opportunity to understand the impact of this number in the ballparking exercise that I’ll cover next time.

c. What if I have multiple customer segments?

Keeping your pricing model as simple as possible, especially at the earlier stages, not only helps with ballparking but also with faster validation of your business model.

I recommend starting with a single price modeled after your early adopters. Your early adopters represent your best first customers and should also represent a “significant enough” initial beachhead of customers. The thinking here is that if you can’t get these guys to accept your pricing model, what chance do you have with your other segments?

If you are further along or still insist on pursuing multiple customer segments, then come up with an average price per customer using some simple customer segment distribution model.

d. What if I’m giving away my product for free?

There is no business model in free. I have a whole chapter in my book, Running Lean, on why I consider Freemium to be a bad starting model.

Instead start with the premium part of freemium and then use free as a marketing tactic to fill up your customer acquisition pipeline.

Delaying price testing, delays testing one of the more riskier parts of your business model. Plus your pricing model does a lot more for your product than just put money in your pocket. It can change the perception of your product and the customers you attract.

CLICK here to see my bottled water example.

.

.

Ok, so you’re probably thinking all this still applies to direct business models.
How does this help with the other models?

Lets start with a definition of a business model that I particularly like:

“A business model is a story about how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value.”
- Saul Kaplan, The Business Model Innovation Factory

You create value for your users through your Unique Value Proposition which you deliver through your Solution. When you capture some of this value back through your Revenue Streams, you MAKE customers.

It’s simpler to tell this story with the direct business model because it’s a 1-Actor model where your users become your customers.

The other models are multi-actor models which complicate the story telling part a bit but every business needs to be able to tell this story.

After my next post on ballparking your busines model, we’ll pick up with multi-sided business models and then move on to not-for-profit business models from there.

---

CLICK HERE to download the Lean Canvas poster
(preferred by thousands of entrepreneurs)

---

The era of accounting with big clunky downloaded desktop applications or even clunkier spreadsheets is over. Finally.

In late 2013, Forbes columnist Gene Marks asked “Are cloud-based accounting apps ready for prime time?” In retrospect, we could safely respond to Mr. Marks with a resounding “Yes.”

As that article pointed out, for years QuickBooks Online is a “glorified bookkeeping application,” sitting alone, the only game in town. But if you’re accustomed to the old boxed retail versions of QuickBooks, you may be wondering “What alternative to QuickBooks is there?”

This truly is the era of the cloud, and that gives you many options to choose from when searching for a cloud-based alternative to QuickBooks. Cloud-based services are rising rapidly, in what feels a bit like a post-dotcom era tech revival.

The increased productivity, scalability and security offered by the cloud makes it an ideal home for accounting.

Why is that? What does the cloud offer that your hard drive doesn’t? Here, we’ll explore why the cloud edges ahead of local computing, and what it can mean for your accounting efforts. We’ll also look at a cloud accounting app – Xero – that distinguishes itself as a powerful alternative to QuickBooks Online.

Let’s get started!

Reason #1 to do Accounting in the Cloud: The cloud is more secure

If you haven’t figured out the glaring advantage to cloud-based computing and storage yet, it’s pretty simple.

If you rely on a specific computer, with its physical drives and processor, you rely on those items not to fail. The thing is: they do fail. Fans overheat. Processors routinely burn out. Hard drives grind to a halt. And what happens to your accounting documents then? What happens to the legacy software (like old school QuickBooks – we know some of you are still using it!) that cannot run on modern operating systems? What happens to your business without those things?

And that’s not to mention that when you store your accounting resources on physical media, you run the risk of losing it to unintentional damage or theft. Even the most reliable hard drive will succumb if it takes a strong enough hit, or worse, a swim.

The cloud wins here because it removes those risks by keeping your financial information securely mobile behind trusted firewalls, among other trusted cloud-based security measures. This makes it much more logical to manage your accounting purely in the cloud.

Reason #2 do Accounting in the Cloud: Cloud-based accounting is scalable

No matter if your business is a bootstrapped one-person operation or a multinational corporation, you want it to grow and increase revenue. This also comes with new costs to keep track of.

Your accounting app needs to grow alongside your business. If you run a small business with a handful of employees, you don’t need a costly premium version of a legacy application with steep recurring fees and tons of bells and whistles. If it’s just you, you don’t need payroll services. Your accounting needs to the right size for your business and then grow with you.

Cloud-based alternatives to QuickBooks are highly scalable. As your business grows and you take on new employees, you can take care of paying them by adding cloud-based tools. If your business expands its sales to reach other countries, you can scale up by adding cloud-based currency conversion.

If you don’t need any of those features, you don’t have to pay for them, by sticking with a starter cloud-based accounting app subscription.

Reason #3 to do Accounting in the Cloud: Cloud-based apps are always current

The cloud is a very dynamic concept. As developers introduce new cloud-based tools and resources, other cloud-based apps are updated to keep current.

It’s that spirit of collaboration that is most striking about the promise of accounting in the cloud. New payment management systems, human resource applications and document management and storage tools emerge all the time. Cloud-based apps integrate with new tools as they emerge, giving you great flexibility when choosing tools to use in your business.

Compare this with downloaded legacy desktop applications (or worse, spreadsheets) and you start to realize that accounting in the cloud is freedom – freedom to use the tools you’d like, where you like, without the confinement of closed legacy applications.

In the cloud, you never have to run manual updates or troubleshoot pesky problems resulting from an update. Cloud-based apps or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications are updated by the developers who make them, in real-time, without you lifting a finger. No maintenance. No breakdowns. No hassle. Link them together once and sleep at ease at night as the vendors work tirelessly to keep them up and running harmoniously.

Of course, the big advantage to keeping your accounting app up-to-date is you never have to fuss around with trying to get software to work, freeing you up to focus on the actual accounting and other important tasks.

Where to start for cloud-based accounting alternatives to QuickBooks Online: Xero

Xero accounting and bookkeeping software is number one (no pun intended!) on our list of QuickBooks Online alternatives.

Xero’s features include a convenient, easily laid out dashboard that puts all the important information you need, right out front.

Xero scores extra points from us for having been made for mobile – and for allowing you to access all of its built-in features and views from your mobile device, with Xero Touch.

Xero offers unlimited additional users to access your dashboard, so you can bring in professional help as needed. User permissions allow you to decide which team member can access what information. That’s a big point of differentiation between Xero and QuickBooks Online, which charges extra for additional users.

Top features of Xero:

• Intuitive bank reconciliation
• Mobile-friendly
• Invoicing
• Purchase Orders
• Expense claims
• Contacts and smart lists of segmented data
• Multi-currency
• Payroll
• Contacts
• Financial reporting
• More than 300 third-party integrations
• Free trial available

Xero offers simple, intuitive bank reconciliation, and it boasts incredibly tight mobile functionality, making it a cloud-based accounting home run hit.

Xero’s pricing starts at $9 and scales up from there as your business grows. That makes it not only a cloud-friendly choice for your accounting, but an affordable one, too.

And that will carryover – to your bottom line.

But don’t take our word for it…

See what Xero and QuickBooks have said for themselves in this accounting app comparison or take them each for a free trial test drive.

Why Is Profit Viewed As a Bad Thing? written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Mike Michalowicz It always amazes me when I see how little focus business owners have on this concept known as profit.

There seems to be a total infatuation with revenue and head count when the true health of a business investment is profit. Far too many business owners come to view profit as what they pay themselves and to me that sounds a lot like a job. My guest on this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Mike Michalowicz, author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, The Pumpkin Plan and Profit First: A Simple System to Transform Any Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine. In this interview Michalowicz reveals several simple, yet powerful ways to change the profit mindset including, most importantly, taking profit from the business first. Michalowicz also talks about his own experience of going from newly minted millionaire entrepreneur to bankruptcy a few short years later. A couple of his tips, such as creating separate bank accounts for things like expenses, salary and profit, may seem like a shell game at first read, but I know first hand that it’s a powerful way to create some financial discipline where there often is none. Several years ago I had Greg Crabtree, a CPA and author of Simple Numbers, on this show and he implied that if a business was not showing at least a 10% profit after all expenses, including the expense of paying the owner a competitive salary, the business was in trouble. I think the key is to view a business as an asset with a pretty big investment on your part. That’s the way that any potential buyer of the business would view it – “could I invest in the business and see that investment pay dividends otherwise known as profit?” The making of profit gets a bad rap for a couple of other reasons too. Many people were raised on the notion that profit is a bad thing – that someone was losing if you were gaining. This mind set is pervasive and does a great deal of harm in the way business owners approach everything from pricing to service models. Another attack on the notion of profit actually comes from well intentioned accountants who view profit as the cause of short term tax burden rather than the cause of long-term health. I know people can get caught up in and consumed by the notion of profit, but the first step is to view profit as the important measure it is in business.

Your image is what you project of yourself.   In many instances this may not be the real you, but a `you’ that you project based on the circumstances of the moment, the clients and the topic for discussion.   Whatever is projected must be appealing and likeable so that the customer will be drawn to you and be encouraged to return.   This image needs to be maintained continually and it would therefore be prudent to ensure that that image is the true you and not fake.

Products can be tangible or intangible – the service, experience, places of interest, accommodation, the friendliness of the people, the climate, meals or manufactured items for  purchase.   These are items that you must advertise and sell.   To do so, you must:

1. First show appreciation for the product that you are selling;
2. Become well informed about the products so as to respond well to the questions asked by visitors;
3. Obtain feedback from customers and visitors on their thoughts about the products and its uses;
4. Ensure that you know what problem, the product is solving – is the product a solution to a specific problem?

You are not just selling your product or services, you are in fact selling yourself and if your customers don’t like you they would feel compelled to buy from you.  Always be the true “you” as customers always appreciate dealing with people who do not put up a front and are not patronizing or arrogant, who are professional yet relaxed.

Selling embraces the aspect of promotion, not for a single occasion but for several.   Service providers must therefore view the aspect of selling as a sustained event since customers will in turn request or sell that product for you, once it is worthwhile.   The product quality and service delivery  must be consistent.

If a persons is passionate about his/her profession, he will believe in what he sells and will want to add value to his product offering, this will allow the service provider to be more confident and relaxed in his/her interaction with customers.

Every day, thousands of companies sell their products and services through channel partners such as franchisees, independent agents, and value-added resellers. Not only are indirect channel sales a significant part of the overall economy, many companies rely on them for more than half of their total revenues.

Channel vendors face the same marketing challenges that confront all types of business enterprises, but they also face challenges that companies with centralized marketing operations don’t typically encounter. For many channel vendors, the single biggest marketing challenge is that many of their partners simply don’t have the time, resources, or expertise to run effective marketing programs.

To address this challenge, channel vendors have implemented a variety of marketing enablement programs. There are three types of marketing enablement programs in use today – financial incentive programs, self-service partner portals, and managed marketing services.

These three types of programs are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are complementary components of an effective marketing enablement system. As the following diagram illustrates, companies with the best-performing channel marketing operations combine all three types of programs to equip their channel partners with the tools and resources they need to run successful marketing programs.

Each type of marketing enablement program provides specific capabilities that are critical for successful channel partner marketing, but none of these programs alone provides everything that is required for a high-performing marketing enablement system.

Financial Incentive Programs

For decades, channel vendors have used financial incentive programs to boost the marketing efforts of their channel partners. These programs have historically taken one of two forms – market development funds programs and co-op marketing (advertising) funds programs.

MDF and co-op programs are an essential component of any high-performing marketing enablement system because many channel partners don’t have the financial resources to market effectively. However, MDF and co-op programs are not usually sufficient to significantly boost the marketing efforts of channel partners. The primary problem is that MDF and co-op programs are missing what many channel partners need most – help with planning, designing, and executing effective marketing programs.

Self-Service Partner Portals

For the past several years, channel vendors have been implementing a relatively new genre of web-based marketing automation technologies to simplify and streamline some marketing activities for channel partners. In the marketplace, several terms are used to describe these technologies, including distributed marketing automation, local marketing automation, partner relationship management, and marketing asset management.

The primary attribute of these technologies is a secure online portal site that enables vendors to manage marketing content resources and allows channel partners to perform a variety of marketing activities. These technologies provide powerful capabilities, but it’s now also clear that they are not a complete solution for channel vendors or their partners. In fact, research has shown that fewer than 25% of channel partners use the partner portals provided by their channel vendors.

The main cause of the under-utilization is lack of time and expertise. Most partner portals are self-service solutions. They make it easier for channel partners to obtain marketing materials and customize those materials, but partners must still have the time and expertise to effectively use the materials that are available through the portal.

Managed Marketing Services

To increase the frequency and boost the effectiveness of their partners’ marketing activities, a growing number of channel vendors are now adding managed marketing services to their marketing enablement systems. Managed marketing services typically include pre-packaged marketing campaigns, as well as campaign execution services. With managed marketing services, channel vendors give their partners access to a “marketplace” of complete, ready-to-execute marketing programs.

Managed marketing services make it easy for channel partners to run marketing campaigns. When partners want to run a particular campaign, they simply “order” it via an intuitive interface that mimics the shopping experience provided by consumer websites like Amazon.com. Once ordered, the channel vendor (or the vendor’s marketing enablement solution partner) executes the campaign, making it completely turnkey for the channel partner.

——————–

Effective marketing enablement  is critical for driving increased revenues from indirect sales channels. Marketing enablement programs that combine financial incentives, web-based marketing technologies, and managed marketing services are the current state-of-the-art for improving the marketing efforts of sales channel partners.

Promotion Alert – An important part of my work is developing marketing content for companies that provide marketing enablement solutions to channel vendors. I have a new white paper that discusses the issues covered in this post, and it’s now available for licensing. If you’d like to learn more about our content licensing program, or request a review copy of the new white paper, send an e-mail to ddodd(at)pointbalance(dot)com.

What’s the difference between you and really successful bloggers? You know, the kinds with thousands of daily visitors, and more speaking invitations than they could possibly attend? It’s probably a lot less than you think.

Hard work and tireless content promotion efforts are necessary to success, but you don’t need to burn yourself out on the way to the top. We’ve compiled 11 of today’s best bloggers’ tips for working smarter, not harder:

1. Focus on What Matters – Tweet: @Avinash

Image credit: lonelybrand

Are you overly obsessed with vanity metrics, or tracking the wrong things entirely? Page views aren’t the best measure of how successful you’ve been at content writing if no one’s buying. Google’s Avinash Kaushik recommends looking toward “dwell time,” or time on site as a measure of your general quality and how well you’re engaging people. The higher this number rises, the more you’re able to engage and fascinate the right people.

2. Be More Complete – Tweet: @CyrusShepard

Image credit: jamesbrockbank

Are you answering your customers’ questions? Great. However, are you really delving in deep and providing exhaustive guides to topics? Cyrus Shepherd recommends his readers look toward Amazon product pages as an example of answering everything someone could want to know about a topic.

3. Think Ecosystem – Tweet: @AnnHandley

Image credit: toprankblog

Content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. That’s why MarketingProf’s Ann Handley encourages her fellow experts to shift away from the campaign mindset that was so popular back in the age of classic advertising. Your organization may choose to emphasize themes, but always consider how your content contributes to your overall narrative as an organization.

4. Don’t Strive to Distract – Tweet: @PortentInt

Image credit: iloveseo

Most content is still crap because people view it as a means to an end, according to Ian Lurie. Are you trying to fulfill your publishing quota, push your site’s rankings up, or distract your audience from the fact you’re not doing anything actually interesting? Well, then you’re content marketing for all the wrong reasons.

5. Brainstorm with Word Maps – Tweet: @SkyrocketSeo

Image credit: serps

In one of the more unusual hacks I’ve encountered, Anthony Pensabene admits he uses word maps to draw out associations and get started on tough topics. Who knows, you could have a major creative breakthrough or even generate a great piece of visual content for your audience.

6. Evolve – Tweet: @MicheleLinn

Image credit: michelle linn

Do you ever get tired of hearing “provide value” to your audience? While I’m no closer to figuring out exactly what value is than you are, I think Content Marketing Institute’s Michele Linn is on to something when she advises her audience to continually evolve and improve. It will only get you closer to your goals!

7. Be a Scientist – Tweet: @LeoWid

Image credit: siliconindia

Buffer’s not just an incredibly successful company. They’re also fabulous at content, and Leo Widrich recently revealed that much of their success is due to experiments on everything from headlines to social media promotion. Don’t be afraid to try something new, but be sure to record your blogging metrics and apply your new found intelligence.

8. Get Help -Tweet: @SavvyLuke

Image credit: marketingagencyinsider

As Luke Summerfield points out, content is an organizational initiative. If you find yourself sitting alone tapping out work most of the time, you’re probably lonely, and missing the amazing context your coworkers can provide to your work.

9. Over-Edit – Tweet: @DrewAHendricks

Image credit: smallbiztrends

Is there such thing as too many eyes on a piece of content before it’s published? I definitely don’t think so, and Forbes’ contributor Drew Hendricks agrees. Many a business disaster could have been avoided if someone had only checked a blog or Tweet before it was published.

10. Eavesdrop – Kate DiCamillo

Image credit: katedicamillo

Since books have been in print, the world’s most effective writers have been really nosy. Even if you aren’t trying to publish a work of fiction, Kate DiCamillo advises that learning to listen can only benefit your content writing. Listen to your customers conversations’, and never tire of trying to understand them better.

11. Check Your Assumptions – Tweet: @Mary_Jaksch

Image credit: attractmore

Did you take the time to fact-check before you hit publish? Never assume anything’s true just because you think it is. Even more importantly, you’ve got to distinguish clearly between fact and opinion. Mary Jaksch recommends writers check their assumptions at the door, and we couldn’t agree more.

Over the years, Gartner has taken its fair share of criticism for hype and wildly wrong predictions. But in a Twisted Sister moment of karmic payback, Gartner analyst Nick Heudecker has come out swinging in a new report that rails against one of the latest examples of Big Data hype—what he calls the "data lake fallacy."

(More about data lakes in a moment. For now, all you need to know is that they're basically the opposite of a data warehouse, meaning they're huge pools of data stored in its original format instead of being collated, sorted and filed.)

Heudecker acknowledges that these data lakes provide near-term benefits to enterprises. But while "the marketing hype suggests that audiences throughout an enterprise will leverage data lakes," he argues that most people won't have the necessary skills to take advantage of the data.

In other words, for many, "data lake" roughly equates to "unsupervised digital landfill," as one Fortune 100 IT executive described it.

Hating On The Analysts

It's always been fun to pillory analysts for alleged bias toward big vendors that can afford to pay them and for being lagging indicators of big computing trends, among other things. I've done my share of carping on analysts, including Gartner, for getting trends like open source wrong.

But as fun as it may be to call out analysts for being human, these individuals also have to slog through their share of vendor reality distortion fields and other vendor silliness. Much of the confusion over what to do with Big Data is largely the fault of the vendors that sell technology around it.

No wonder, then, that Heudecker's colleague, Merv Adrian, occasionally throws his tweeting hands up in disgust:

Even so, analysts are generally a pretty temperate bunch, rarely overtly criticizing vendors or their sloganeering.

Man Bites Dog

It was therefore surprising to see Heudecker go after one of the latest buzzwords making its way around Big Data circles: the data lake. Espoused by a variety of vendors (usually Hadoop vendors, but not exclusively so), the data lake is a mythical happy place for data to reside in its native format until someone within the enterprise needs to analyze it.

Or, as Heudecker describes it:

The idea is simple: instead of placing data in a purpose-built data store, you move it into a data lake in its original format. This eliminates the upfront costs of data ingestion, like transformation. Once data is placed into the lake, it's available for analysis by everyone in the organization.

Sounds great, right? To an extent, it is. Pivotal and GE say that they've been able to jointly cut analysis times from weeks to days by eliminating the need to "spend a lot of time, effort and money on getting the data into the right format." 

But what isn't mentioned in the linked article above, or by any of the companies marketing data lakes, is this, per Heudecker: "Since data lakes lack semantic consistency and governed metadata, [data lake] positioning assumes those audiences are highly skilled at data manipulation and analysis." 

He goes on:

Data lakes typically begin as ungoverned data stores. Meeting the needs of wider audiences require curated repositories with governance, semantic consistency and access controls — elements already found in a data warehouse. The fundamental issue with the data lake is that it makes certain assumptions about the users of information. It assumes that users recognize or understand the contextual bias of how data is captured, that they know how to merge and reconcile different data sources without 'a priori knowledge' and that they understand the incomplete nature of datasets, regardless of structure.

Some do, of course. But most don't. (And finding those that do, as McKinsey & Co. notes, is not trivial.)

Small wonder, then, that Heudecker ironically notes that "most vendor offerings or discussions about data lakes include thinly veiled offers to build the surrounding workbench, services deployment, metadata and professional services."

In other words, there's lots of assembly required for getting value from the data lake—and there are lots of data-lake promoting vendors lining up to help put all that together.

The Data-Lake Effect

Not that the data lake is a doomed concept. 

Edd Dumbhill, vice president of strategy at Silicon Valley Data Science, agrees with Heudecker's general analysis, but remains optimistic. 

Dumbhill acknowledges that the data lake is a "dream, because we’ve a way to go to make the vision come true," but insists that it is "an accessible dream." He further suggests that Google and Facebook already live this dream, while siding with Heudecker's concerns that Big Data vendors selling the data lake dream have yet to solve its challenges of "managing provenance, data discovery and fine-grained security."

In short, data lakes and other Big Data dreams can be very real, just as GE has experienced. But when vendors sell them as a panacea to Big Data woes, without calling out the very real problems with the approach, we risk scaring off buyers that need truth, not fiction.

Lead image by Max Charping

They say the Cold War is over, but Russia and the U.S. remain the leading supplier of weapons to countries around the world and are the two biggest military powers. Lately, tensions have been pretty high, too.

The U.S. supplies much of NATO and Middle Eastern allies like Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.

Russia supplies other BRIC nations, as well as Iran, much of Southeast Asia, and North Africa.

We took numbers from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute for 2012-2013 to see whom the two rivals were supplying with weaponry. The U.S. dealt to 59 nations that Russia doesn't sell or send weaponry to, while Russia dealt to just 15 nations that don't receive U.S. arms.

Fifteen countries received weaponry from both the U.S. and Russia, including Brazil, India, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

The country that received the highest dollar amount of U.S. weaponry was the United Arab Emirates, with more than $3.7 billion in arms received over that period. Russia dealt the greatest value of weapons to India, sending more than $13.6 billion.

Overall, the U.S. sent more than $26.9 billion in weaponry to foreign nations, while Russia sent weaponry exceeding $29.7 billion in value around the globe.

Interestingly, the U.S. actually recieved roughly $16 million worth of weaponry from Russia. This was part of a $1 billion helicopter deal the two nations made so that the U.S. could supply Afghan security forces with equipment they were already more familiar with.

Importantly, SIPRI's totals don't measure the cost of the transaction but the cost of the weapons' production. The numbers are listed as the production value of the weapons sold rather than the amount they were actually sold for. In addition, SIPRI does not track the transfer of certain small arms.

SIPRI gives several examples to explain their chosen method. In 2009, six Eurofighters valued at $55 million each were delivered by Germany to Austria. Therefore the delivery was valued at $330 million, even though the actual transaction likely netted a much higher total. For comparison, when The New York Times listed the total of weapons sold by the U.S. at $66.3 billion in 2011, SIPRI came up with a much lower total based off of production cost of $15.4 billion.

You can read the full explanation of SIPRI's calculations here.

SEE ALSO: Ukraine is just another proxy war between world powers

Join the conversation about this story »

Best practices from the 2014 Form Conversion Report

It all started with a common question from our customers. ‘How do I increase my conversion rate?’ Marketers know that increasing your conversion rate is one of the simplest ways to impact your bottom line. Conversion rates are a key indicator of how well your website is capturing leads and performing in your industry. Online forms, one of the biggest components of the conversion, are an often overlooked part of helping improve rates.

With help from our customers, Formstack noticed a gap of online information around form conversion rates. So, we decided to tap into our own data goldmine and put together a report of our findings. We’ve uncovered some tips that’ll help every industry with conversion rates and optimization practices.

Tips on optimizing your on-line forms

Conversion Rates by Industry

One of the first things we looked at in our data was the average conversion rate of each industry. It’s helpful to get a quick benchmark for each industry so that you can move forward with that knowledge.

Below you’ll find nine industries and the average conversion rates we discovered for each. While the specific types of forms each industry is building reflect a lot on their conversion rates, we also found four key optimization areas the higher converting industries were using more frequently.

Learnings for improving your on-line form

• 1. Custom form designs – The top performing industries are more frequently branding their form pages by using brand colours, images, text, etc. This helps eliminate any user disconnect between your site and hosted forms.
• 2. Embedding forms - Using embedded forms on the top half of your landing page exposes traffic to your form without being forced to scroll down the page.
• 3. Using form logic - Use a feature of forms, that Formstack calls ‘conditional logic,’ to show and hide questions based on previous answers. This will help reduce friction on your form by not frustrating users with unnecessary questions.
• 4. Clear calls to action - Avoid indecisive visitors by stating one clear benefit to completing the form. Multiple messages will dilute your benefit and lead to confusion.

Conversion Rates and length by form type

When reviewing form conversion rates, keep in mind that form types impact conversions. For example, if users click a link to enter a contest, it’s likely they’re ready to complete your entry form. But not everyone who visits your ‘Contact Us’ page will need to submit a form; some might just be looking for your street address.

With this in mind, it’s easier to understand why we found surveys, registrations, and contest entry forms to be among the highest converting forms. We also found these three form type are able to incorporate more form fields than other types. This is likely the result of user incentive to finish the form or the user’s preconceived notion the form will be longer because of its type.

We found many order forms include around 19 fields and convert at about 6.0%. This is one form type where it’s extremely important to be concise and limit your number of fields. Not only can you increase conversion rates with shorter order forms, but you can also save lost sales.

We suggest you keep testing your forms for many other factors such as question types, question layout and order, one versus multi-page forms, and even small things like text size and colors. You might find the simplest thing is frustrating your users and hurting conversions.

Top form submission times and tips on your button text

Timing of your promotion can be critical in our world of short attention spans and social media threads. To help combat this, we’ve analyzed the most frequent times of the day submission occur.

Depending on your form type, use this information to adjust promotions, and then schedule your emails and tweets to be at the top of inboxes and twitter threads.

We compared various form types across all hours of the day and discovered most forms are completed around 1 pm.

The six form types and their most popular times are below.

• Surveys: 10am – 1pm
• Order/payments: 11am – 2pm
• Donations: 12pm – 3pm
• Registrations: 1pm – 4pm
• Contests: 1pm – 3pm and 8pm – 9pm

Another important thing we learned from the data was that more specific button text showed a correlation with higher conversion rates. Think of your submit button as the stamp on your envelope. It’s the critical final touch to make the process happen.

Below, the column on the left represents the most frequently occurring button text we found on forms. On the right is the list of best converting button text:

Learnings about the button type

Text such as ‘Submit’ or ‘Send’ are plain and very generic. Instead, try using text that’s form specific, such as ‘Send application’ or ‘Register now.’ If you’ve got an order form, then use text like ‘Checkout’ or ‘Send order.’ Focus on making the action 100% clear to the user. Getting away from generic button text also makes the form process seem more branded.

Key Takeaways from Formstack’s Conversion Report

Here are the four big takeaways from the conversion report you can use to better optimize your online forms.

• 1. You can still convert well on a long form – It’s always a best practice to eliminate excess form fields and make forms as short as possible. But we found when it comes to surveys, registrations, and contest forms, longer forms aren’t necessarily bad.Surveys, for example, average 21 fields, but still capture a really great 21% response rate. When creating a longer form, it’s important to provide a clear benefit to users, such as assuring them all feedback will be heard.
• 2. Forms need a strong value proposition – Surveys, contests, and event registrations convert the highest traffic. Perks, such as knowing an opinion was heard or the chance to win a prize, will give users a reason to complete your form.
• 3. There are strategic times for form promotion - We discovered the most popular time for form activity is around 1pm. Take a look at your form type and the most active submission times. Then match your engagement efforts to help increase conversions. Also keep in mind every social media platform has more active days of the week. Use this information as well to time your promotion.
• 4. Expect different conversion rates - You should expect different conversion rates depending on the type of form and industry you’re in. Stop comparing your rates to that one blog post you read about a 45% form conversion rate. Your business is in an industry, and each industry performs differently.

Checkout the full Conversion Report

The 2014 Form Conversions Report was compiled and analyzed by Formstack. The team collected data from over 450,000 accounts and internal customer surveys to create this report. Follow this link to access and download the full form conversion report.

When the young journalist Napoleon Hill interviewed the industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1908, Carnegie liked Hill so much that he decided he would share all of the strategies that turned him from a penniless immigrant into the richest man in the world.

From that point forward, Hill dedicated his career to understanding the work ethics of highly successful people like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, collecting them into his own philosophy and then packaging it into articles, books, and lectures for regular people wanting to achieve more in life. His 1937 book "Think and Grow Rich" is one of the bestselling books of all time.

Before he began writing books, Hill ran two magazines with articles that provided the foundation for his most famous work. In the inaugural April 1921 issue of Napoleon Hill's Magazine, Hill wrote about "The Magic Ladder to Success," an essay based on a speech he gave on a tour of the U.S. and would later adapt into a full-length book in 1930. We found it in "Napoleon Hill's First Editions: From the Napoleon Hill Archives."

After spending 12 years analyzing "more than 12,000 men and women," both successful entrepreneurs and ordinary people, Hill determined 16 elements of exceptional leaders that anyone can practice:

1. They have a definite aim in life.

Hill likens having just a vague aim to succeed to being a ship without a rudder. "Bear in mind that both your definite aim and your plan for attaining it may be modified form time to time... The important thing for you to do now is to learn the significance of working always with a definite aim in view, and always with a definite plan," Hill writes.

2. They are self-confident.

To be capable of setting ambitious goals, you need to believe you can follow the plans to achieve them. And when you believe in yourself, others tend to believe in you as well.

3. They show initiative.

The only way to rise up the corporate hierarchy or to develop your own business is to to look for other things to accomplish once you've fulfilled your regular duties.

4. They are imaginative.

A lack of the driving force of initiative and the creative power of imagination is "the main reason why 95% of the adult people of the world have no definite aim in life, which, in turn, is also the reason why this same 95% constitute the followers in life," Hill says.

5. They are active.

You may have earned multiple degrees from elite universities and have read history's most important books, but none of it means anything if you don't turn knowledge into action.

6. They are enthusiastic.

Do what you love, Hill says, or else you will lack the energy to become truly successful.

7. They practice self-control.

Hill says that he did not start to become successful until he learned that he was working against himself whenever he gave into anger or arrogance. "No person ever became a great leader of others until he first learned to lead himself, through self-control," he writes.

8. They go beyond what's required of them.

The most successful people outperform their competition, and when they make it to the top, they compete with themselves.

9. They are incredibly likable.

When you are charismatic and foster relationships with others, you build a network of people who are willing to help you without your asking.

10. They know how to separate truth from bias.

Because their actions have ramifications for other people, leaders understand that they cannot take what they hear or read at face value, and learn how to pluck truth from others' worldviews.

11. They are focused.

Successful people are able to concentrate their energy and skills toward specific goals without becoming distracted by irrelevant issues.

12. They are persistent.

Those who are able to achieve success are not stopped by the inevitable nonstop challenges and setbacks that are in their path to attaining their goals.

13. They are resilient.

"When you begin to realize that failure is a necessary part of one's education, you will no longer look upon it with fear, and lo! the first thing you know, there will be no more failures!" Hill writes. "No person ever arose from the knockout blow of defeat without being a stronger and wiser human being in one respect or another."

14. They are sympathetic.

In "Think and Grow Rich," Hill writes that it's not a coincidence that history is filled with tyrants and dictators being overthrown. The most successful leaders work in harmony with their team, not in dominion over them.

15. They work hard.

Hill says that this sounds simple enough, but it's important to remember that even if you achieve your greatest goal, you need to continue pushing yourself or risk losing everything you worked for.

16. They are empathetic.

Hill's favorite philosophical maxim is The Golden Rule, which states, "Treat others the way you would like to be treated." He uses it as the final rung of the ladder to true success. Hill writes:

The Golden Rule acts as a barrier to all of man's tendencies toward the destructive use of power that comes from developing the other qualities outlined in this ladder. It is the thing that antidotes the harm man could do without knowledge and power; the thing that guides man to the intelligent, constructive use of those qualities he develops from the use of the rungs of this ladder.

SEE ALSO: 9 Subtle Things Leaders Do That Show They Have Integrity

Join the conversation about this story »

For years, analysts have said we would soon be ditching our plastic credit and debit cards and start paying with our mobile phones. Our smartphones would use a radio frequency called near field communication (NFC), to send payments data to compatible store registers. But NFC-based apps like Google Wallet failed to gain popularity, and NFC fell out of the mobile payments conversation.

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we take a look at why NFC is back. Apple may include it in the iPhone 6. Recent developments on the consumer, merchant, and developer side are reinvigorating NFC and making it a strong contender to become a leading technology for in-store mobile payments.

Access the Full Report And Data By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>

Here are some of the key takeaways:

• We think there is a strong chance Apple's iPhone 6 will include NFC-compatibility. If, so it will be a game changer. Apple is the only smartphone manufacturer that has enough influence over its customers to change payment behavior en masse.
• Globally, shipments of NFC-enabled phones grew to nearly 300 million in 2013. That means that there is already a large installed base of phones that can make NFC mobile payments.
• The EMV security standard, which calls for credit cards with embedded computer chips, is driving retailers in the U.S. to upgrade their payment terminals and many of these new terminals are also NFC-compatible. That means that consumers will have plenty of options for where they can use NFC-based mobile wallets, which will catalyze adoption. 
• Contactless cards will act as a bridge for getting consumers to pay with their phones. Contactless cards, which interact with readers that are also NFC compatible, are already gaining popularity in Europe for low-value transactions. Consumers would easily transition from contactless card payments to NFC phone payments.
  
• Public transport systems will spur large-scale contactless card and NFC-based mobile payments adoption. Once people get used to tapping a card or phone to pay at the subway in big cities like London and New York, it will seem more natural to do so in other retail environments.
• Though consumers have concerns about the security of mobile payments, these can be alleviated with education. NFC-based mobile wallets already have a host of security features that make them as secure, or more secure, than credit and debit cards.

In full, the report:

• Provides 5-year forecasts of mobile payments volume, shipments of NFC-compatible terminals, and phones and the installed base of HCE-enabled Android phones from 2013-2018.
• Explains that even though NFC mobile payments aren't much better than paying with cards from the consumer's perspective, there are a handful of reasons why it doesn't matter.
• Explores why the EMV security standard, host card emulation (HCE) and public transport could push NFC to become the leading payments technology. 
• Analyzes Apple's unique position with consumers could bolster NFC adoption should they add capability to the new iPhone, as we expect they will. 

Join the conversation about this story »

Late last year, Canada’s small community of executive recruiters, the big-game headhunters who poach and staff the nation’s C-suites, was rocked by news of a recruiting coup within its own ranks. Roughly half the staff at Odgers Berndtson Canada, one of this country’s biggest search firms, resigned (or were cut loose, depending on whom you believe). The very same day, they reopened shop under the banner of Boyden, a large U.S.-based company with little presence north of the border.

The defectors included some of this country’s most seasoned recruiters, folks who had handled marquee assignments with Canada Post and Bank of Canada (including the hiring of Stephen Poloz to replace Mark Carney), top oilpatch companies and universities. “The guys and gals Boyden acquired are best of breed,” says Mark Surrette, a former Halifax-based Odgers partner with more than 30 years in the business. And the sheer numbers were striking: three entire offices, with close to 90 people, that represented Odgers’ Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver regional operations and more than half its Canadian revenues. “Sometimes you’ll see a cohort leave or, on a rare occasion, an office,” Surrette notes. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mass exodus like this.”

The secession turned Boyden Canada into a significant player overnight, but aside from finding a new name on the doors, clients barely noticed. Since the regional partners owned those businesses, “we just declared a change,” says Catherine Van Alstine, a partner in Vancouver. “We had a divorce clause. There was no fight; we just left.”

Those familiar with Odgers’ Canadian operations, however, knew there was more to the story. Joe Zinner, a veteran recruiter who runs a boutique search firm in Toronto and worked at Odgers from 1999 to 2002, says the departures followed a decade of growing frustration with Odgers’ Toronto head office, which had been trying to dictate business priorities and leaving the regions out of major national decisions. “There was long-standing discontent with what the partners saw as [chairman Carl] Lovas trying to drive his own agenda,” says Zinner. A former Odgers partner who spoke on condition of anonymity adds, “The whole tenor was one of command and control, even bullying.”

While strategy disagreements and personality conflicts drove the corporate drama, the split was also a symptom of a larger shift shaking up the US$10-billion global executive-search industry. Like other professional services, executive recruiting is undergoing a sea change as technology and clients’ toughened expectations challenge the industry’s traditional ways of practice. The demise of Canadian legal powerhouse Heenan Blaikie earlier this year and the merger of global consulting giants PwC and Booz & Co. are just two signposts of the upheaval heading every recruiter’s way. Facing an onslaught of nimble entrepreneurial innovators, some recruiting incumbents are opting to go broader, expanding to offer “talent management solutions” such as succession planning and employee assessments, while others go deeper, specializing in high-demand industries or executives with particular skill sets. Many are customizing their fees and approaches to top clients’ needs. The result, according to a 2013 report by industry research firm HSZ Media, is “one of the most significant paradigm shifts in the history of executive recruiting.”

MORE: The perils of poaching: How to avoid getting wounded in the increasingly nasty war for top talent »

Today, the industry is dominated by global giants such as Korn Ferry and Spencer Stuart, but their core search business has increasingly been eroded by specialist boutiques. Odgers Berndtson, a U.K.-based multinational, has been working, like many of its rivals, to broaden its service lines; to do so efficiently, it wanted to own all outlying affiliates outright. “The big names in the industry are becoming increasingly monolithic,” says Jim Harmon, who ran Odgers’ Ottawa office and is now Boyden’s managing partner in Toronto. “Odgers sees a rollup of all the offices under a common ownership as a better way to serve clients. We completely disagree.” Boyden contends recruiters must be agile and responsive to clients’ needs. This means regional offices need to have enough expertise and flexibility to serve their local clients. It’s a question of strategy that will pester myriad consulting firms in the future: Does their success, and perhaps very survival, mean being big or nimble?

---

At the highest levels, executive search has long followed a set formula. Typically, when a firm wins an engagement, it spends several months defining the candidate criteria, quietly reaching out to leaders worldwide, compiling a short list, interviewing and investigating candidates, then acting as a hush-hush go-between for the client and the top prospects. In recent years, the initial stages of this process have been revolutionized by technology. LinkedIn and other social media have levelled the playing field between established recruiters and the independents they dismiss as resumé peddlers. “In the ’80s and ’90s, my capability was based on the strength of my network,” says Surrette of the candidate databases headhunters build over decades. Now, corporate HR managers can easily find and contact prospects themselves. The impact has been greatest at middle-management and lower levels, but it’s creeping up corporate hierarchies. “If you go on Linked­In, you’ll see jobs posted in the $250,000 to $400,000 range,” says Zinner. “RBC is posting vice-president jobs there.”

With access to the tools to do their own legwork, clients are also rebelling against the fees executive-search firms demand. Elite positions are typically filled through retainment arrangements, whereby the recruiter is hired as the client’s exclusive agent to identify and vet prospects according to an agreed-on methodology. In exchange, the firm charges a third or more of the recruit’s first-year salary, plus administrative charges—money it usually receives whether or not it successfully fills the post. “This industry has for years been done in a cookie-cutter way,” says Harmon. “Clients are simply not willing to accept the standard fee model anymore.” And companies want searches concluded faster, with targets identified quickly and with precision, says David Perry, an executive headhunter based in Ottawa. “It has to be rifle shooting, not a scattergun approach.”

Multinationals like Time Warner and W.R. Grace & Co., however, are increasingly opting to set up in-house executive-search units, relying on services like LinkedIn’s Talent Solutions. According to HSZ Media, internal recruiting efforts have grown by 25% over the past five years. “More and more, our competition is not the executive-search firm across the street but organizations that think they can recruit for themselves,” says Ken Werker, Boyden’s managing partner in Vancouver.

As a result, an executive headhunter now needs different skills to gain top-tier assignments. “Technology is a giant Yellow Pages,” says Surrette. “We’ll all bring to the table roughly the same list of prospects. Where I earn my money is in going from the list of prospects to the choices to hire.” That demands emotional intelligence and a knack for building relationships: engaging and courting candidates, identifying individuals who mirror the values and culture of the client company, and having the matchmaking skills to usher the two parties into a happy union. The ability to distil complex issues into simple facts and glean character when assessing individuals—“you only get that from experience,” says Surrette.

MORE: 13 Proven Ways to Attract Top Talent »

As technology commoditizes the lower end of recruiting, more and more search firms are targeting C-suite engagements at global corporations—assignments for which the barriers to entry remain high and client sensitivity to fees relatively low. This shift to high-level, high-value engagements in large part explains why the industry revenues in North America were up 8.5% last year despite the number of searches dropping, reports the global Association of Executive Search Consultants. At this level, elite headhunters with deep connections retain a big advantage. Top executives don’t post resumés on Linked­In and are guarded by flanks of assistants. “The CEO of Canadian Tire or Barrick will only talk to you if they deem you worthy of their time,” says Perry. “My industry is finding out too late that it should position itself as a trusted adviser. Most recruiters are positioned to build transactions and now are trying to change gears.”

Adopting the adviser role has the added benefit of opening the door to providing the additional services recruiting firms hope will offset dwindling search revenues. Korn Ferry, for example, now derives 40% of its revenue from performance assessments and other HR-related consulting. “The age of the generalist, whether you’re a lawyer or a strategy consultant or an executive-search consultant, is really over,” argues Carl Lovas, chairman of Odgers Berndtson Canada. Firms now need recruiters who focus on, say, the financial sector or mining, instead of a particular region. In Lovas’s view, this trend is tilting the search business toward integrated global firms—like the ones that have long dominated other professional services—that are capable of acting as multi-pronged talent consultants to address a client’s needs anywhere in the world. “You’re either going to be in that league or not,” he says. “The regionally owned, smaller organizations that by definition have to be generalists, there’s still room for them but not in the way there was historically.”

---

If you want to go big, central ownership makes sense. It allows a search firm to move industry specialists around depending on local needs and make its services consistent globally. Odgers has been shifting in this direction for years—a strategy that became a growing source of conflict in Canada. The firm, closely held by a small group of partners in London, has long been a powerhouse in Europe. In 2000, it gained a foothold in North America when it acquired foundering Ray & Berndtson, a firm with several Canadian affiliates. While the U.S. business was troubled, the Canadian offices were doing well and were happy to come under Odgers’ global umbrella as long as the partners retained ownership. By the mid-2000s, Odgers Berndtson vied with Caldwell Partners for the rank of biggest player in Canada’s roughly $100-million search market. The firm was busy, juggling up to 600 assignments in a peak year, but tension grew between the independent outposts and Lovas in Toronto. “It was a philosophical difference between the centre of the organization and how regional offices wanted to move forward,” recalls Surrette. “The regions have strong opinions and want autonomy—like regions of Canada. Over time, that rubs raw.” In the early 2000s, for example, the then-independent Montreal office was struggling, prompting all Canadian partners to discuss assistance options. “One day we woke up and learned that Toronto bought the Montreal office,” says a former partner. “The chair had decided. That served to piss everyone off.”

The drive toward a centralized strategy grew even more contentious over time. “While [Odgers] was looking for uniformity of the global brand and characteristics that satisfy risk objectives, we saw a definite trend toward scrappier, more creative firms,” says Harmon. In contrast to Lovas’s vision of a global leviathan, Harmon believes the new environment demands flexibility from search firms to customize their offerings and fees. For example, a client might already have 10 candidates in mind but, for reasons of confidentiality, needs to hire a middleman to approach them. At centralized search firms, says Harmon, “six signatures would be required to do something like that.”

In 2009, Odgers terminated the regions’ licences and instead offered them an “associate” status that made them answer to Toronto. This prompted Surrette to leave, taking the Atlantic Canada practice to competitor Knightsbridge. Ottawa and Calgary considered following suit but, amid the post-2008 slowdown, decided to hold off. “I always believed it’d be a matter of time,” says Surrette. “Anyone on the inside could see it coming.”

Relations didn’t improve in subsequent years. Harmon had several meetings with Lovas about the firm’s future, and “it always seemed to conclude with, ‘Consolidate your practices under my leadership,’ and that was it.”

MORE: 5 Steps To Becoming A Social Recruiting Star »

In spring 2013, the Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver managing partners met in Toronto. There wasn’t much debate: “People had come to the same conclusion separately,” says a person who was there but requested anonymity. “It was uncannily aligned.” They briefly considered setting up a Canadian super-boutique, but Van Alstine, for one, saw that as a non-starter. “I couldn’t go back to someone like HSBC and say, ‘I’ve given up my global platform and am now a Canadian boutique,’” she says. Looking to join an international brand, the group approached the challenge like any search assignment, and the Boyden name quickly emerged as the lead contender. Over the years, the Purchase, N.Y.–based firm had tried repeatedly to establish a Canadian footprint. The company’s structure was also appealing: a global federation of largely independently owned offices. And Boyden had sizable practice groups in areas where Canadians are strong, including energy, transportation and manufacturing.

The deal with Boyden was signed in November. But, as in many dissolved relationships, the parties have different takes on who broke up with whom. Lovas says that after the termination of the offices’ licences, a new five-year contract was put in place that would have expired this summer. That meant “we would be separating,” he explains. “Nothing really changed in December [when the Boyden deal was announced]. We had worked over a five-year period to make this arrangement.”

Van Alstine offers a different version: “We were three corporations that owned three-quarters of Odgers’ Canadian business. When we left, Carl lost that business. He’ll always have his story, and we’ll have ours.”

---

However the split played out, industry observers see what happened as a big blow to Odgers Canada. “It’s a dramatic shift of power,” says Zinner. “In the Vancouver office, most of the folks have 20 years with Odgers. Kudos to Boyden for stealing all those people. It was a heck of a coup.”

In the past six months, both organizations have concentrated on rebuilding as they face each other as competitors. Odgers Canada, now focused in Montreal and Toronto, is making a big bet on interim management, for which Lovas sees growing demand as senior executives increasingly retire. The firm’s consumer practice also recently completed a CEO search for a North American company based in Vancouver (confidentiality, as is typical, precludes naming names). Chief marketing officer Jacqueline Foley says it’s “a search we could never have landed within our old model due to geographical constraints and not always having the right expertise within a certain market.”

MORE: Why hiring the right employee is about to get even harder »

For Boyden, meanwhile, the key is to grow its fledgling Toronto office, where it now has eight recruiters. From there, Boyden aims to expand eastward by taking over other offices or hiring people in Quebec and the Maritimes.

Scott Scanlon, managing director of HSZ Media, agrees with the Boyden partners’ belief that smaller, more nimble players are on the rise. Top search assignments are now handed to an increasingly expansive universe of search firms, with even huge corporations hiring boutiques for CEO-type positions, he says. “The trend has been moving in this direction for the better part of the last 15 years, but the pace is clearly picking up.”

It’s entirely possible that both Odgers and Boyden will thrive in their new approaches to business. Harmon thinks Heenan Blaikie’s demise has woken up Canada’s consulting professions to the fact that no institution or practice is immune to clients’ push for “new ways to deliver value for their money.” Perry sees his industry split into two camps: the quick and the dying. “The quick know it takes new brains and savvy,” he says. “And the dying are the search firms that have been doing things the same way for 20 years and have no interest in change.”

The post How executive headhunters are scrambling for relevance in the age of LinkedIn appeared first on Canadian Business.

When buyers are making their final decision to buy, they will often times conduct an economic impact analysis. This extra step will help them ensure they have completely thought through the purchase and what they expect the payback to be. Throughout your presentation, problem resolution, and proposal stages the buyer is gathering information they can use to plug into their new (more accurate) economic impact studies. The buyer wants to look at the impact of this purchase in terms of the effect on their cash flow and other C-Suite metrics they use to determine value and impact.

The economic impact numbers (potential value delivered) the buyer and seller agree upon will now become part of the tracking mechanism used to determine if the project is successful. In the past this was rarely done. Look at all the millions of dollars spent on initial attempts at implementing a CRM (Customer Resource Management) systems. Even today the return on a fully deployed CRM investment is difficult to confirm, much less measure.

Here is the lesson in building ROI models you need to know! Be sure to be realistic when approached regarding your potential value. Buyers want you to be accurate, especially large corporations. Wall Street is very unkind to companies that are unable to make predictions and achieve results. Remember buyers can only control expenses. If your solution is supposed to help a buyer reduce or avoid expenses, you better deliver as promised. Depending upon what you sell, it could have a major impact on an organizations financials and ultimately on their shareholder value. Shareholder value is the number one concern to the CEO of major corporations.

Remember there are two sides to financial statements, revenue and expense. Every dollar of expense is important to the buyer because it is the only part of the equation they have total control over. As the seller you need to be keenly aware of this. Buyers can cut expenses at the wave of a hand, but they obviously cannot manufacture revenue. It is critical to the buyer to be able to count on the expense cuts your proposed solution is supposed to provide. If you are wrong and they don’t get the expense cut, they are going to pay for it down the road in shareholder value, staff cuts, and budget cuts.

Michael Nick is the Author of ROI Selling, Why Johnny can’t Sell and The Key to the C-Suite. Michael is available for speeches and workshops. Please contact us at 262.338.1851 or visit www.roi4sales.com/resources for more information.

The post What if Your ROI is Wrong? appeared first on ROI4Sales.com.

A colleague recently said he was waiting for a deal to close. How did he know it would close? I asked. “Because someone contacted me, and we’ve had several discussions. In our last chat we discussed price.”

What Makes A Prospect A Buyer? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

“Times, they are a changing” and if you haven’t heard already, inbound marketing is IN and outbound marketing is OUT. As times have changed so have buyers’ habits. It’s no surprise then, that marketing habits have also changed. The secret is out: inbound marketing has become the most efficient way to tackle a business’s reputation, as well as attract and convert their leads into customers. Here are 5 reasons why outbound marketing is officially old school.

1. Communication is one way

Let’s face it, outbound marketing has one way communication: the marketer’s way or the highway. Outbound marketing focuses on pushing products or services on potential customers. It is not solution based rather, it aims to tell the consumer about something, instead of attracting them with educational content. Inbounding marketing is a two-way street. Communication is interpersonal and human based. Unlike the outbound strategy, inbound methodology allows the customer to play leader in their buyer’s journey.

2. Customers are hunted down

There’s nothing more old school than hunting down customers. Outbound marketing uses the interruption approach when it is clear that today’s customers don’t like to be interrupted. The internet has transformed how people solve their everyday problems. They first identify their problems, and then seek out information to educate themselves on the best way to solve these issues. Customers want solutions, not invasive product ads thrown at them.

3. People are now in control

After years of being preyed on by the marketing hunters, customers have taken their lives back. They have realized they are in control of how they purchase. Therefore, it’s only fair that marketers change their approach. In this way, outbound marketing strategies are out, inbound strategies are in. Inbound marketers are mindful that people are in control of what information they receive and how, while outbound marketers leave the company in control.

4. ROI

Obviously for businesses, the return on investment associated with marketing is important. According to HubSpot, inbound marketing costs 62% less per lead than traditional, outbound marketing. The truth is in the numbers. I would call this killing two birds with one stone: getting more for your money and delighting your customers instead of interrupting them.

5. Outbound marketers don’t seek to entertain

Traditionally, outbound marketers strive to get their message or products to their potential customers by reaching out to them. Inbound marketing strategies on the other hand, aim to educate, problem solve, and delight potential customers, current customers, and past customers by attracting them. Once customers have identified their needs, they will reach out to you. Annoyance and interruption are things of the past.

The old school outbound marketing approaches have rightly become a thing of the past. As consumers’ buyer journeys have evolved, so have marketing approaches. It only makes sense. Business to human marketing is now what people and businesses desire. The inbound methodology will attract and convert your customers by giving them control. Don’t stay in the old school mindset, evolve into the new school!

As a marketer, you already know how to pitch your customers. But sometimes it’s easy to forget that before you can sell anything to anyone, you have to sell the strategy to your team.

In a previous post, I talked about how to sell your boss on content marketing by answering the questions he or she is most likely to have.

That means outlining the need for a steady stream of quality content, explaining the ROI as well as the cost, and making sure you have a clear plan for measuring success.

Getting that buy-in from your boss is obviously a crucial step. But what about the rest of your team? If your sales representatives, developers and customer support staff aren’t on board, you’ll face one obstacle after another, and any progress you’d hoped to make will come to a screeching halt.

Whether you’re redesigning the company website to make it more searchable, getting started with blogging or both, here are three ways to sell your team first.

1) Make Your Case

Although you’re probably well aware of where your strategy is falling short, your team may have no idea your company website ranks on Page 12 in Google search results. They may not realize your site is confusing to customers because there’s no clear path, or there’s one path for every buyer, regardless of that buyer’s needs.

Conducting a website audit can help you build your case. You can do this on your own or enlist a team to help you. Start by using a site crawling tool, such as Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider, which will pinpoint page titles, meta descriptions and links. This gives you an analysis of how your website is doing from a search engine perspective and identifies any broken or missing links.

Think of it as an SEO checkup.

Audit specialist Steve Webb recommends using diagnostic tools offered by search engines, such as Google Webmaster Tools, next. These tools allow you to look at your website’s traffic patterns and provide an analysis of important factors such as how easy your site is to access, how many pages are being indexed by search engines and how your pages are influencing rankings.

Finally, it’s time to look at how your competitors’ websites compare to yours. Google looks at more than 200 factors when it determines where a website should rank, and its algorithm is constantly changing.

That can make it difficult to pinpoint why your rival company ranks on Page 1, but it’s not impossible.

There are a number of ways to check in with the competition, including keyword tools, page rankings and social media rankings. For a comprehensive look at how to audit the competition, check out our 12-step guide.

It will take some time to sort through this data and break it down for your staff, so focus on the top-level priorities. Your team may not understand the intricacies of page indexing or site mapping, but once they see where your site ranks compared to the competition, it should all begin to click.

2) Educate Them on the Process

Once you’ve presented your team with the diagnosis, they may nod in agreement and tell you they’re willing to do whatever it takes to fix it. Meanwhile, they’re thinking, “As long as I don’t have to do any work.”

And who can blame them? They all have their own responsibilities, and, after all, they just want to see the end result. If the furnace breaks, you don’t want a detailed synopsis of what went wrong and what’s involved in the repair; you just want the final bill and the reassurance it won’t happen again.

When it comes to redesigning your website and implementing a content marketing strategy, however, you’ll need all hands on deck. Any effective website redesign or content marketing plan involves research, and that’s where your team comes in.

Explain that you’re counting on their expertise to answer questions about the sales cycle, customer concerns and other elements needed to ensure your new marketing strategy hits the mark with your buyers.

Mapping the buyer’s journey is a crucial process that involves interviewing both internal staff and customers to understand their needs.

It’s the difference between guessing what your customers want to see and actually having the research to back it up.

To maximize the value of your research and avoid wasting anyone’s time, make sure you’ve identified clear objectives for each person you’ll need to interview.

If you’re interviewing your team’s sales director, focus only on the questions that pertain to that person. Those questions should include:

• What is the profile of the ideal customer?
• Describe the typical sales cycle. How do you currently receive sales leads and follow up with them?
• How are customers finding your site?
• At what point in their search are they contacting you?
• How familiar are they with your products or services when they contact you?
• What common questions do they ask? What follow-up information are you providing?

Let your staff know that you’ll also need their help to identify several customers to interview.

This should include current customers as well as those who ultimately did not buy. Aim for no more than an hour for each interview, and be willing to work around the schedules of your staff and customers whenever possible.

3) Keep Them Informed

Your boss shouldn’t be the only member of your team who sees the progress you’re making. The changes you make will ultimately affect everyone, so make sure you’re keeping them in the loop.

Learn best practices and share them with your team before you begin. That should include design elements (as well as outdated homepage features to avoid) and the ideal structure for capturing and nurturing leads.

You don’t need every member of the team to sign off on every step—a surefire way to slow down the process—but they do need to be aware of significant changes that affect them.

For instance, your sales staff should know what information your new site will capture about each customer and what follow-up communications they’ll receive. In some cases, you’ll want to set up those follow-up communications to come directly from the appropriate representative. Asking for their input on those emails is a good way to get them involved in the discussion.

It also helps to provide everyone with a timeline of key milestones, such as design concepts for the redesigned website, targeted launch date and marketing campaign schedule.

It’s much easier to make adjustments before you’ve begun than to backtrack once you’re deep into a project. Having these conversations with your team ahead of time will help you avoid the kind of hurdles that can halt even the best-laid plans.

What have you done to sell your team on a marketing strategy? Let us know in the comments below!

Are your social efforts contributing real value to your business? Here’s how to make them pay off. A high number of followers are usually associated with the success of an organization’s social media presence. But is that enough? How do you keep your followers interested and engaged? If done right, your efforts can prove to be profitable. Kathy Tito, a career B2B demand generation specialist, shared with us her expertise on leading a social media campaign that offers true value to a business.

Q. How do you increase engagement on social sites?

There are a number of misconceptions out there about social media engagement. Unfortunately, most articles about social media are highly generalized. Few are written from the perspective of B2B based companies, with whom we work with daily. So while you may have advice suited to a large consumer brand, it is not necessarily accurate advice for everyone on social media. In turn, you feel like you’re not “doing it right” when you don’t have a million followers. With that preamble out of the way, I recommend all B2B companies know specifically who they are targeting before they really ramp up their social strategy. Step one: confirm that the titles that you wish to engage are actually actively participating on the social platform you are considering. Social engagement starts with you. Make the first move. This is not a case of, “if you build it, they will come.” Nothing ever is. The initial outreach for a highly targeted social campaign needs to begin with your outreach to your prospects, not the other way around (at least initially). There is a huge difference between blindly posting versus engaging. If you want engagement, you need to monitor your audience and speak to them, one person at a time. Social media is not a bullhorn—it’s more like a form of instant messaging. And you have to be present at all times to get the conversation started.

Q. How do you grow a following on social sites?

To be followed, you need to do some following yourself. Don’t rely on “being found.” Target your prospects, partners and other stakeholders and follow them. You have to have a pretty big reputation to follow a handful of people and receive hundreds of followers. To begin with, you will likely follow more people than are following you. But beware; Twitter does not support “spam” or “mass following.” Eventually, if not enough people follow you back, Twitter will shut down your ability to follow more, so approach following slowly. Other sites, like LinkedIn or Facebook require slightly different strategies. They work best when you know the type of follower you want, and you reach out to them specifically. On LinkedIn you can ask people to join your network or group, while on Facebook you can purchase ads to grow your followers. The overarching theme with all of these strategies is a targeted outreach. If you are selling IT servers, you want to target IT buyers (who are often very socially active, themselves), and follow them. But beware of a false sense of accomplishment when an irrelevant follower comes on board. You want to develop a relevant network, not increase your numbers for the sake of it.

Q. How do you drive more traffic to a company’s website and/or blog?

Fortunately there are now plenty of subject matter websites out there that are often looking for relevant new content. Making your content available to them will drive visits to your articles, whether or not they allow clicks back to your blog. Additionally, it’s important to use traditional tools to drive website/blog traffic, such as email campaigns (both large campaigns as well as one-on-one email outreach, from salesperson to prospects, for example). As you get more followers, promoting your articles on your social platforms will start to drive traffic as well, but not until you get a relevant following going. Make sure that each blog article or website page is used as the sales tool that it is. Bring it to the attention of your internal staff to promote within their networks. Finally, there are now useful tools that help the members of your network—and your internal staff—share your content, for a significant multiplier effect.

Q. How do you target your market on social sites?

If you choose to do it free of charge, you need to conduct online research to find members of your target market. If you choose to pay, you can certainly buy ads on each of the platforms. Paid ads are getting better at targeting; however the manual research is well worth the time.

Q. How do you evaluate content effectiveness?

If you are going through the trouble of enacting a social strategy, then be sure to use analytics that accompany each social site (and Google Analytics for blogs). You’ll begin to see which content gives you the uptick in visitors or clicks. Twitter has great overlay tools that will help you analyze your twitter response. LinkedIn has recently improved its profile analytics so you can see when you are driving more profile views. Facebook also has fairly sophisticated tracking that will allow you to see the popularity of each post. I recommend setting up a dashboard that will help you track your social media engagement.

Q. How do you generate leads from social media?

Generating social leads is really no different than generating leads offline, except that it’s much more convenient and timely. It’s often easier to monitor and engage your prospects via social media than it is by traditional methods. The key is to use tools that will help you “see” the activities of your prospects virtually all at once. That makes it much easier to jump in and start conversations that will develop your relationships. There is a fair amount of “set up” to the process, but as more and more of your prospects take to social communications, it’s well worth the behind the scenes strategy. Much has been written about the nature of the social conversation, and how critical it is to not use hard sell techniques. The more personal the nature of the conversation is, the more the conversation will evolve naturally. If you have a prospect who is thrilled that their daughter has just graduated, you’re going to respond exactly as you would in real life—and hopefully that means with a congratulatory note, as opposed to a request for a meeting! Social platforms really are a breakthrough way to “meet” and keep in touch with prospects and customers. A little guidance and assistance can move marketers, sales reps and executives very far up the adoption curve.

Trade shows have traditionally been a very popular way to market your product, service and business. With advances in social media marketing and Internet technology, like webinars, Google hangouts and video conferencing, the value and benefits of marketing via trade shows comes up. Though technology is changing marketing at a rapid pace, there are several benefits from having a exhibit presence at a trade show.

These six key benefits are why your business must have a trade show marketing presence:

1. Tradeshows Create Lasting Impressions If Done Right

The main purpose of trade show events is to showcase a wide variety of options for attendees and business to engage and interact with each other. With a well-designed trade show booth that draws attendees’ attention, a few promotional items, a contest opportunity with giveaways and sales collateral, you have a well-rounded booth experience that leaves an impression with a prospective customer for months. Consider having attendees enter a drawing by submitting a business card or completing an action on social media. These types of promotions serve dual purposes: increasing engagement and capturing potential contact information as well.

2. Trade Shows Are Incredible Face-To-Face Marketing Events

When it comes to influencing a decision, nothing can compete with face-to-face interaction. Trade shows provide opportunities to engage with current customers and attendees. It doesn’t matter whether you’re marketing a service or selling your new product, an in-person presentation and short question based conversation afterwards can help you to close the deal quickly versus an email sharing the latest sales promo. This makes pre-show planning key to trade show success. If you’ve got an employee who is a natural at “turning on the charm” or one who is great at relationship selling, should be a no brainer on them being a part of the sales team. The cost to bringing them to your next trade show event could pay for itself within hours of the show starting.

3. Tradeshow Lead Generation Potential

When it comes to trade show benefits, this is one of the biggest. Major trade shows have massive followings and attendance. For example, the Consumer Electronics Show in 2014 had over 152,000 attendees on the trade show exhibition floor from more than 150 countries. Each attendee of a trade show is a potential lead waiting to be captured. Having QR codes linked to social media accounts or lead generation pages, asking for contact information during a presentation and getting their business cards are all great ways to get fresh leads in your sales pipeline. Make it clear to them that you’ll be contacting them after the show. Make sure to follow up with the candidates most likely to buy while the event is still fresh in their mind.

4. Trade Shows Target Audiences Result In Direct Sales Opportunities

Most conventions and trade shows have a specific market or niche they focus on. By exhibiting at popular trade shows within your industry, the odds are very high that you’ll have exposure to an audience that is likely to have an interest in your product or services and are ready to buy. ALWAYS have something to sell at a trade show. It doesn’t matter if you only bring your latest products or have a wide variety of products to choose, the opportunity to generate sales shouldn’t be lost because you didn’t have something for them to buy. Don’t miss out on that sale!

5. Trade Shows Are Cost-Effective Networking and Advertising

Designing a trade show booth, renting space on the trade show floor, traveling to the show and from the show, paying for lodging and meals can seem like a steep price tag for a single marketing event. If you’ve done the pre-show marketing work leading up to the show, the potential that a trade show offers your business can far exceed the investment. Though you might have a larger initial investment to showcase your business at a trade show than other advertising or networking methods, the cost to convert a prospect into a sale is often much lower than other alternatives. With proper research and planning, trade shows are one of the most cost-effective sources of leads and sales possible.

6. Trade Shows Level The Marketing Field

One my favorite benefits to trade show marketing is the low cost barrier to get involved. From locally owned small businesses to multinational corporations, everyone has access to the same attendees at a trade show. It’s almost as simple as paying for your exhibit location space, designing your trade show display booth, promoting your business leading up to the tradeshow and interacting with the audience during the show. Even a relatively unknown business can generate large numbers of sales and leads through trade shows. Certainly this is possible via other marketing channels, but few are as easy to execute as trade shows can be.

Trade shows offer big benefits to businesses of any size. By combining exposure to a large number of potential leads with the ability to interact personally, trade shows offer an experience for both the business and attendee that other forms of marketing cannot. Though virtual events and other technologies are slowly gaining popularity, few marketing methods compete with the potential of trade shows.

What do you think?

Thanks to an article authored by Douglas Burdett, I not only discovered the 5 things I must know about my buyer persona to generate leads, but I was also introduced to Adele Revella, the Buyer Persona Institute and an incredible wealth of education and knowledge found on their website and blog.

These sources made me aware of the Five Rings of Buying Insight™ – the five things that will determine if you have buyer personas that will positively impact your content creation, lead generation and sales.

1. Priority Initiatives – “What causes certain buyers to invest in a solution like yours, and how are they different from buyers who remain attached to the status quo?” What three to five problems or objectives does your buyer persona dedicate time, budget and political capital? It’s not about you or your product.
2. Success Factors – “What operational or personal results does your buyer persona expect from purchasing this solution?” To understand the buyer’s approach to a Priority Initiative, identify what tangible or intangible rewards he or she associates with success.
3. Perceived Barriers – “What concerns cause your buyer to believe that your solution or company is not their best option?” What could prompt the buyer to question whether your company or solution is capable of achieving his or her Success Factors?
4. The Buyer’s Journey – “…reveals the behind-the-scenes story at each phase of the evaluation.” What process does this persona follow in researching and selecting a solution that can overcome the Perceived Barriers and achieve the Success Factors?
5. Decision Criteria – “Which aspects of the competing offerings do your buyers perceive as most critical, and what do they expect from each one?” What aspects of each product will the buyer assess in evaluating the alternative solutions available?

Armed with these five insights, Revella explains that your buyer personas will “reveal the buying decision you need to influence – telling how when and why the buyer engages to choose you or a competitor, or to stick with the status quo.”

It occurred to me that these rings of insight could be easily associated with Customer Success. The Five Rings of (Buyer) Insight – the five things that will determine if you have customers that will positively impact your product, relationships and growth.

1. Priority Initiatives – “What caused the customer to invest in your solution, and how are they different than your existing customers?” What three to five business goals is your customer trying to achieve with your product? It’s not about you or your product but their outcomes.
2. Success Factors – “What operational or personal results does the customer expect from your solution?” To understand the customer’s Priority Initiative, identify what tangible or intangible rewards he or she associates with success.
3. Perceived Barriers – “What concerns cause your customer from fully adopting your solution?” What could prompt the customer to question whether your company or solution is capable of achieving his or her Success Factors?
4. The Buyer’s Journey – “…reveals the behind-the-scenes story at each phase of their lifecycle.” What process does this customer follow in using your solution that can overcome the Perceived Barriers and achieve the Success Factors for adoption and retention?
5. Decision Criteria – “Which aspects of your offering do your customers perceive as most critical, and what do they expect from each one?” What aspects of your product will the customer assess in evaluating your solution and what growth opportunities are available?

As we are aware, SaaS and other recurring revenue models have three core stages critical to their success – acquiring customers, retaining customers and monetizing customers. For each of these core stages the 5 rings of (buyer’s) insight can be applied. To piggyback on Revella’s explanation – your customers will “reveal the buying decision you need to influence – telling how when and why the buyer engages to choose you or a competitor, or to stick with the status quo.” – you as in growth opportunity, your competitor as in churn or status quo as in retention.

Your organization should be constantly thinking about your product, your prospects, your customers and the 5 rings. You can be rest assured these 5 things are on your customers minds.

Do the 5 rings reflect how you determine your buyer’s persona?

The Lenses Through Which I View People is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

There are a lot of lenses through which you can view things. Your sales process is a conceptual framework from which to view sales. The methodologies that you use are also lenses on how to think about certain ideas. I study human achievement, success, and psychology, believing that all the results we produce are through, for and with people, and the problems we have are people problems.

Here are four of the lenses I use.

Anthony Robbins’ Six Human Needs Psychology: Robbins is known for a lot of things, mostly for his late-night television infomercials and Personal Power II. But that was early work for him, and as powerful as it is, the work he does with people at his live events and at Robbins-Madanes Training is far more interesting and useful. That work is fundamentally built on his Six Human Needs Psychology, which makes Maslow’s hierarchy useful.

Robbins believe that you have six human needs: certainty, uncertainty (variety), love (or connection), significance, growth, and contribution. You are driven primarily by two of these needs, even though you have all of them. Some people choose healthy vehicles to meet these needs, while others make unhealthy choices (you could exercise to change your mental state, or you could do drugs).

Robbins uses his brand of NLP, his massive charisma, and his gifts of connecting and communicating to help people change. But just knowing what needs someone is trying to meet can help you understand how best to help them.

Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits: Stephen Covey was an educator, a teacher. In 1989 he wrote a self-help book that is still one of the best of its kind, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey’s great contribution was recognizing that you first had to gain control over yourself (what he called “Independence”) before you could be effective working with others (or what Covey called “Interdependence”).

Most of the problems you or I have as a human being can be solved by working on one (or more) of Covey’s habits. The first three, “Be Proactive,” “Begin with the End in Mind,” and “Put First Things First,” are a recipe for identifying your values, designing your life, and doing what is most important. The next three habits, “Think Win-Win,” “Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood,” and “Synergize,” are about putting relationships first, being empathetic and caring, and teamwork. The final habit is to “Sharpen Your Saw,” or make time to renew yourself. This is about sustainability.

All of Covey’s work is built on the idea that there is abundance, not scarcity, and that there is always a way to produce a better result. Looking at the challenges you are dealing with through Covey’s lens can help you easily pinpoint the root of almost any people-related problem you face.

Ken Wilber’s All Quadrants, All Levels: There simply isn’t any way to describe Ken Wilber’s work effectively. Wilber is mostly philosopher, but the actionable and interesting part of his work is about developmental lines, how human being grow up and wake up. Wilber calls this work Integral Theory.

It’s not easy to summarize Wilber’s map of everything, but it begins with the idea that human beings are capable of over two dozen types of intelligence (or lines), some of the most important being cognitive and moral intelligence. Wilber suggests that cognitive intelligence without moral intelligence leads to things like Enron and Nazi doctors. [His list of intelligences includes logical-mathematical, spatial, kinesthetic, musical, spiritual, and more].

Wilber’s levels are more difficult to describe, but he has mapped every developmental psychologists work and lined up the commonalities. All human cultures grow through these levels, and the easiest way to understand them is to look at Clare Graves and Don Beck’s Spiral Dynamics. The levels are: Beige (survival), Purple (kin spirits, magical), Red (power gods, mythical), Blue (truth force, absolutes), Orange (Strive, independence), and Green (human bonds, or pluralistic), Yellow (FlexFlow, integrative), and Turquoise (GlobalView, holistic).

Wilber’s work is the best and most comprehensive map of human psychological and cultural development. This work is useful in understand why people believe and behave the way they do, and it does so without being judgmental.

Howard Bloom’s The Lucifer Principle, Global Brain, and Genius of the Beast: If Wilber is difficult to describe, Bloom is impossible. He is a scientist first and foremost, and his fundamental principle is “the truth at any price, even the price of your life.” Bloom studies the superorganism that is we humans, and one of his experiments was running his own PR firm where he handled the careers of people like Prince, Michael Jackson, ZZ Top, Aerosmith, and John Cougar Mellencamp, among others.

Bloom’s contributions to science are many, and he is the most well-read and meticulous researcher you will ever meet. Bloom discovered that the selfish gene doesn’t drive our behavior; we’re not all individual selection. In fact, we are driven by group selection too, and these groups are the products of memes, the cultural beliefs that connect us to each other.

Bloom’s perceptual framework includes self-organizing systems (replicators), the superorganism (of which you and I are members), memes (self-replicating clusters of ideas), the neural net (or group mind), and the pecking order (dominance hierarchies).

Bloom’s work helps you understand the massive cultural shifts that have occurred throughout history and what drove them. You can use these lenses to understand the great scope and sweep of history and to understand why the major issues and trends of the day are occurring now.

You can use these lenses to better understand people. You can also turn them inward and better understand the one person you most need to better underdtand.

How Social Media Really Measures Up

When it comes to measuring your social media strategy it can be difficult to know exactly on how hone in on the effectiveness of each network. This especially important to know in order to be aware of how to create engagement and influence.

Most of us think of Facebook and Twitter as the two most powerful tools for business. While these are a given in today’s online climate as part of our marketing practices, it’s also a good idea to take a look social behavior elsewhere online. Here are several key facts to help you understand your own social network activity.

1. Email marketing is a vital component to social media

A stunning statistic from the Direct Marketing Association shows us that the ROI on email marketing is a whopping 4,300 percent! This is way above how social media marketing performs, and is also growing in influence. Just take a look at the eCommerce chart on Custora and you will see the numbers climbing each year. The lesson learned here is that a large portion of your budget should be spent on email marketing – more so than on social media.

2. Video creates a high level of engagement

If your brand or business is not taking advantage of social networks like YouTube and Vimeo take a look at these statistics from Shareaholic, which places YouTube especially at the top of the list for click rates with a low number in bounce rates. Danny Wong writes in the article that “YouTube takes home the crown is because viewers are simply used to spending minutes — perhaps, hours — educating and entertaining themselves with awesome video and may have fewer qualms about taking extra time to discover more great content post-click.”

3. Get more referrals with Facebook

Shareaholic also did a study on this massive social network, and discovered that Facebook has been climbing steadily and has remained at the top of the list for referrals over the last couple of years. In just one year this grew by 38%, which makes this the place to be for business for driving traffic.

4. Amp up your social media referrals with Pinterest

While this social platform is not right for every business, it is a great place for many who would like to use social media to drive traffic to their website. According to a study by Piquora, a website can have two views per six Pin visits. This is in turn can be monetized, as their research shows that an average Pin generates 78 cents in sales. An important point to remember is that this type of activity occurs after two to three months of pinning. Pinterest is a great place to generate sales and traffic, but keep in mind that the process is slow growth.

5. Be sure to be quick to respond on Twitter

Customers and leads are looking for trusted businesses and brands on Twitter, and you could miss out on a golden opportunity by simply not staying in touch. Take a look at this powerful study by Lithium Technologies, which shows that 53 percent of users expect a reply with an hour, and that 72 percent expect a response when they have a complaint. This means that brands must act quickly and pay attention to the communication going on in their network in order to build a strong level of trust.

Marketing trends can change, but these facts speak for themselves. The takeaway here is to keep email marketing at the top of your list while staying in the game with the top social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and Google Plus. Knowledge is power, and hopefully this data will help your business hone in on what is working (or not working) in your online strategy.