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In average it costs 5 times more to acquire new customers than it does to keep current customers (Lee Resource Inc.). The most interesting stat that can been seen in the past 3 years is that existing customers tend to spend much more than new ones and if that isn’t enough to get you ‘wowing’ then a recent study by Harvard business school study showed that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.

Similar to the upper part of our funnel, the retention process needs constant optimization and there are many ways in which you can work on customer retention optimization. The retention process is so important that a customer is 4 times more likely to buy from a competitor if the problem is service related vs. price or product related. (Bain & Co.)

Retention conversion optimization – where to start?

Now before rushing ahead and starting all sorts of customer retention campaigns and efforts, the first thing you need to do is measure your customer lifetime value. Basically you need to understand how much value each customer brings into your business to be able to determine how much you should be spending on each client. If you’re not sure how to calculate it, Kissmetrics has a fantastic infographic tutorial.

The next part of customer retention optimization is defining your goals – what do you want your current customers to do? Share your product? become a monthly paying user? purchase your products or service? there are many different ways you may want to work on your retention and it is extremely important to define your goals before setting out.

3 ways to optimize retention conversion

The largest tool you will be using to optimize your retention process will be email marketing. There are many important ways in which you can increase email marketing conversion and you should definitely go over a few email marketing rules before setting out.

1. Live Chat & Tap to Call – Just before digging into email marketing there are a few steps you must take within your product itself. 45% of companies offering web or mobile self-service reported an increase in site traffic and reduced phone inquiries.(CRM Magazine) This is crucial information for products or services that can offer live chat and tap to call. Live chat or tap to call can help customers get around without adding too many additional costs on your end and reduce friction with your product.

2. The personalized experience – As I wrote in my previous emotional targeting posts, people don’t buy a product because of its features or pricing, they buy products because of what they make them feel. We don’t remember where we buy the product or the service, we remember the experience and it’s up to you to keep reminding them of this experience, show them that you know them and know what they need. Analyzing their online behavior on your site, their purchase history, demographic information and other metrics can help you personalize your messaging. Consider using heatmaps to understand what your customers do on your site and react to that. The more you know about your customers the more you can be personal and even more important the you can offer them additional products they actually want and will be willing to pay for.

This example by Coursera is a very very simple demonstration of making users feel the content is personalized, there are many more ways to personalize newsletters:

3. Royalties – It’s time to treat your customers as royalty and offer discounts or special sales for registered customers. Two great things about loyal customers is that they keep buying and they have the potential to bring in new customers for you if you pay your cards right. There’s no need to create entire loyalty plans if you don’t have the funding for it, creating a simple coupon can be sufficient. All these and many more can attract new clients and increase sales from registered customers:

   • Invite a friend coupon – Get people to invite their friends by introducing a simple coupon or an added value that usually costs money.

   • Share coupon – Get people to share your content or product

   • Discounts for loyal friends – send specific sales and promotions to your existing users that will enhance their self importance and your revenue. Even free shipping can be an added value for customers.

   The psychology behind customer retention

   While working on your email marketing, live chat and other technical elements, it is important to understand user psychology and use different cognitive biases to your advantage. Here’s why you should be using cognitive biases to increase customer retention:

   1. Using the right emotional triggers / cognitive biases can create more loyal customers

   2. Once you’ve created these loyal customers they will enhance sales and bring in new customers that will cost you less

   The Basics of Cognitive Biases

   Cognitive biases are tendencies of our brains to think in specific patterns. Strong and amazing as our brains are, our brains tend to have specific thinking patterns that have an impact on our decision making. Basically cognitive biases are “unconscious” triggers that make different connections in our brain to help us make decisions in certain ways. We’ve written many posts on how to use these cognitive biases to tap into the emotional triggers of users and increase your revenue, but as I mentioned another way of using cognitive biases is in optimizing your customer retention process. Checkout these 2 cognitive biases that will enhance retention and grow your customer base:

   1. Hyperbolic discounting – This cognitive bias means that when we’re offered two similar choices of awards, one more immediate which is worth less and the other which is further away but worth more, we prefer the more immediate award. People tend to favor more instant awards than waiting for “illusive” ones. This means that it is better to offer many small awards to users for spreading the word about your product or for inviting friends to join than promising far fetched awards.

   Dropbox allows you to invite friends to join dropbox and get 250MB for every friend that joins. Instead of offering a large amount of space for adding “x” amount of friends, you can gain something immediately. This way people may get less space in the whole but they’re more motivated to share immediately than wait until “x” people join. Additionally, dropbox gets people to sign up for their additional service Mailbox by promising additional space. Fact: Dropbox attributes 35% of their daily signups to the friend referral program.

   

   2. Post-Purchase Rationalization – The bias also known as Stockholm Syndrome is a way of subconsciously justifying our purchases. Basically when we purchase an expensive product or service we overlook its faults or defects in order to justify buying it. So even if all evidence shows differently after our purchase, we find “rational” reasons to our purchase. This bias also works hand in hand with the Status Quo bias which means that we like to stick to our routines. We stick to the same services, shampoo and the same meals at a restaurant.

   These two biases can have a huge impact on both your potential customers and current ones. Using the advantage of post-purchase rationalization you can ask your current customers to give their input on your product or service. By offering them special coupons or just your recognition to them being special clients you can get people to suggest ideas, write detailed reviews on your site and comment on new product ideas. You can keep your customers engaged, feeling important and satisfied all while using them to attract new clients.

Don’t stop here. Customer retention is an ongoing process, and can be used to bring back unsatisfied customers, increase new clients and increase sales from already purchasing customers. How much time do you devote to customer retention optimization?

First impressions are everything, and in the content marketing assets we create, our best chances to capture connections at first click-through are in crafting captivating, compelling titles. Though it may sound like an ethereal marketing art, there’s actually a pretty solid science behind writing effective content titles, and we can measurably see it in the behaviors of the Best-in-Class.

In our studies of Best-in-Class content marketers, we’ve found that the most common differentiator is aligning content with buyer personas. As cited in Trip Kucera’s recent report, Content Marketing and The Road to Revenue: Answering the Questions, 50% of Best-in-Class companies are already aligning their content with their company’s buying personas. This is compared to only 35% of companies identified as Industry Average and 12% of companies identified as Laggards. Titles may seem trivial — what’s in a name, after all — but they’re actually the most focused point where the relevance of our content and our understanding of our buyer converge. Think about it as your opening line on a first date, if your introduction doesn’t create a spark in that first moment, then you’re trying to make it up the rest of the evening — or worse, you’ve lost that person’s attention all together.

The following provides you with 10 tantalizing tips to consider when writing your titles.

1. Ask a question. Instead of a statement, make it a question.
   • Example: Is B2B Really Ready for Video and Social Media Marketing?
2. Incite an action. Inspire your readers to take action, immediately.
   • Example: Align Your Marketing and Sales Teams with the Right Metrics
3. Solve a problem. Provide a solution to a common problem you know your audience faces.
   • Example: How to Use Content Marketing to Engage with Financial Advisers Online
4. 4. Include keywords. Your SEO keywords should be first; these are what your audience is searching for.
   • Example: Integrated Lead Management – How Data Driven Marketing Increases Revenue
5. Give content clues. Give a quick overview of what’s included in the article.
   • Example: 5 Key Steps to Effective IT Ops in a Hybrid World
6. Introduce some fun. Similar to subject lines, entice your audience with a fun statement.
   • Example:5 Things NOT to do When You’re Trying to Hire a Superstar Salesperson
7. Be careful with buzzwords. If every title has a buzzword, is it really a buzzword?
   • Example: Big Data – Why your business should care about it NOW.
8. Identify your audience.
   • Example: 5 Management Tips Marketing Leaders Can’t Live Without
9. Alliteration always aligns. They are just fun to read.
   • Example: 10 Takeaway for Tantalizing Titles
10. Keep it short & sweet.
    • Example: Windows Security Holes – Must Have Info for IT Security Pros

Do you have good rules or tips to share? Please leave a comment below.

For more on how Best-in-Class companies are integrating content marketing with their lead flow, download Content Marketing and The Road to Revenue: Answering the Questions.

Bad habits yield bad results – whether they manifest in our personal or professional lives, there’s always a cost or a consequence. Squeeze toothpaste from the middle of the tube and what’s left is wasted; trapped at the back end of the tube. Squeeze your top-of-funnel target audience with product-focused content or messaging that’s intended for mid-funnel and you’re wasting your time and your audience’s attention. It sounds pretty clear cut – don’t do this if you want to be an effective marketer – yet with limited resources, misaligned expectations, or other pressures, any of us could potentially fall into this bad habit. To nip this bad behavior in the bud, here are a few reasons to never compromise on aligning content to the buyer’s journey and to never squeeze your funnel at the top.

Mind Your Marketing Manners:

Imagine you’re just starting a company and you’ve been invited to a dinner party full of investors. Upon arrival, you wouldn’t just blurt out “I’m here, who wants to invest,” would you? Of course not – that’d be extremely rude and ineffective. Instead, you’d politely converse with a few patrons, listen for their interests and pain points, and then craft tailored pitches for any relevant people. Blasting out product–related content like datasheets and technical specs at the top of your funnel is just as rude as blurting out your intentions immediately at a party. The middle of the funnel, however, is the point at which you receive permission from your engaged prospects to change the story line from their general interests to how your offering can help solve relevant problems. It’s not just good marketing to save product-focused content for the middle of the funnel; it’s also just good manners.

Too Much, Too Soon:

Returning to the mid-squeezed toothpaste tube faux pas, there are times when bad habits pay off initially – like the first big burst of toothpaste that a squeeze from the middle may produce – but afterward, air pockets, tube crinkles, and other disruptions from improper squeezing make that first squeeze more costly than convenient. Similarly, sometimes top-funnel squeezes do produce a few positive results, but in the long run, the overall funnel will not be as efficient as it could be. Best-in-Class companies, who are 93% more likely than All Others to align content to the specific stages of their buyer’s journey, get it. That’s why the Best-in-Class also understand that it takes 10 content marketing touches to progress a prospect to a closed-won deal. Those who would squeeze the top of their funnel end up pushing out too much of their content too soon, so when buyers need more touches to keep their buying journey going, these marketers find themselves coming up empty.

All Content, No Strategy:

Lastly, please, please, don’t waste good mid-funnel content on good prospects at the top of the funnel and then blame bad results on the content. This creates a vicious cycle of misaligned content creation that often ends in marketers giving up on content altogether. Content alone is not a strategy; it’s a tool. To be successful as content marketers, we need to be strategic in how we use these tools. This Alanis Morissette-esque strategy of “ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife,” ironically enough, is the hallmark of content marketers without an actual strategy. If you have good mid-funnel content, don’t waste it by squeezing it into the top of your funnel under a bad strategy.

For more information on the right kinds of content to use throughout the funnel, download my colleague Trip Kucera’s report, Content Marketing and the Road to Revenue: Answering the Questions.

The terms “content marketing” and “inbound marketing” are often used interchangeably, but recent Aberdeen Group research on content in the lead-to-revenue cycle shows that lead nurturing, not lead generation, is the top goal of content marketing. While not the same thing, the connection between content marketing and inbound marketing is strong. The concept of inbound marketing—marketing that’s driven by the interests of and engagements with buyers—shapes the way many of us think about content.

Content marketing describes the practice of producing high-value content designed to educate and/or entertain your prospect or customer about a particular topic or issue. Trip Kucera, VP of Client Success and CMO-in-Residence at Aberdeen Group, says content marketing is the alchemy of intent; engagement with content converts interest into a marketable need, while also providing an opportunity for buyers to self-select.

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is a lead-generation tactic expressly designed to draw people to your website or other digital property through “organic” means. According to Zak Pines, director of marketing at Ipswitch File Transfer, inbound marketing is something you do to acquire new leads organically versus traditional, disruptive marketing methods such as advertising or cold calling. The practice is designed to make your lead gen more effective by having leads come to you instead of going out and finding leads yourself.

Content is certainly used in inbound marketing — after all, what are search-optimized web pages but another form of content— but Pines is careful to denote the different methodologies between the two marketing practices. According to Pines, content marketers focus on creating content that is educational and useful to their buyers. Inbound marketers, he says, create content to publish or their website and other channels to acquire more leads.

“Content and inbound marketing are unique, but related concepts,” writes Kucera in recent content marketing research. “Inbound relies on content, but content marketing is not exclusive to inbound. The distinction is ultimately a bit artificial, since most companies are doing both inbound and outbound marketing, both driven by content.”

Pines agrees, noting that the distinction between content and inbound marketing “depends on the perspective you’re coming from.” Everyone uses content in various ways, such as in your demand gen programs, on your website copy, and in sales enablement materials, among other places. Nurture marketing is a particularly heavy user of content, as evidenced by the figure below.

Source: Aberdeen Group, May 2013

Every marketing discipline uses content in some form or another. As a result, content marketing is a broad concept that’s leveraged in all sorts of inbound, outbound, and other marketing stages. “The broader the view you have of content,” Pines says, “the more effective you’ll be as a content marketer.

In many cases, marketers think about inbound marketing and content marketing as the same thing because of their day-to-day work. The goal of an inbound strategy to bring people into your website organically in many cases drives the thinking about what sort of content to generate. Thus while content marketing as a discipline is focused on lead nurturing through educational/entertaining messaging, the demand generation goals of inbound marketing colors your content marketing.

In what other ways can content marketing assist in the sales process? Explore the relationship between content and buyer relationships in our report, “Content Marketing Comes of Age.”

Are you searching for ways to promote your site and increase your audience? Have you heard about content syndication but been confused about how to get started using it?

Producing high quality content on a regular basis is the best way to grow your readership organically, but don’t overlook other ways to leverage assets you already have. Today’s post focuses on syndicating content, a sometimes controversial topic that can nevertheless be beneficial if used wisely.

Content Syndication Defined

Some bloggers confuse guest posting and content syndication, but these are very different things.

• Guest Posting: you create new content for another blog or third-party website. This can be similar in subject and tone to posts on your website, but should be entirely original content.
• Syndication: you give another site the rights to republish material that has already appeared on your site. This syndicated content can be all or only part of a post you have previously published.

Benefits of Syndication

The chief benefit of syndication is that you gain exposure to a separate audience without additional work. Obviously you’ll want to find sites that are the best fit for your business. Carefully consider the readership and reputation of the site. Syndication to a highly respected authority site will tend to confer some authority to your message.

Article syndication can be a great way to gain exposure. Syndication sites, because of the amount and quality of the content they share, are able to draw, and expose your blog, to a large and usually targeted readership. – Brent Carnduff, EchelonSEO.com

What Should You Syndicate?

You do not want to syndicate too much of your content, as your goal is to draw readers to your site, and you want them to find unique content when they visit. However, you should consider syndicating some of your strongest pieces. This may seem counterintuitive, as you want to save the best for your devoted followers, but remember that your goal is to expand your audience by building a reputation with new potential readers.

The amount of content you syndicate can depend on how aggressively you are recruiting new readers. When starting a new venture, it is in your best interest to get your name out there in every way possible, including searching for guest posting and syndicating opportunities. Just remember that your goal is to reach a larger audience on a site with a high reputation. As your site becomes more established, you may reconsider how much of your content you are syndicating.

Aren’t There SEO Drawbacks?

SEO experts always preach that duplicate content can weaken search standings. But even though syndication does create duplicate content, search engines won’t find fault if you use one of these methods:

• Best Option: Place the tag rel=canonical on the page where your article appears, with a link pointing back to your original post. This designation tells Google that one URL is the equivalent of another. It also means that links made to the syndicated article are credited to your original in terms of page rankings. The tag goes in the Head section and looks like this:

• Second Best Option: If the site you are working with won’t use the canonical tag, ask them to use NoIndex instead to keep search engines from indexing the syndicated article. You won’t get the benefits of links to the syndicated site, but you also won’t get penalized for posting duplicate content. The code to prevent indexing is:

• Better than Nothing: If you can’t get a publisher to use one of the other two methods, use a Direct Attribution Link as a last resort. Direct attribution will usually ensure that the search engine knows which version of the article is the original, but the search engine still might get it wrong. To improve the odsd of success, make sure that the attribution link goes directly to the article on your site, not to your home page.

If a publisher is not willing to use any of these tagging methods, you have a decision to make. Do you refuse to do a syndication deal? Alternatively, do you decide that the potential audience gains are worth the risk?

Since you are aiming to syndicate on sites with higher traffic than yours, you run the risk that search engines will credit the syndicating site as the original publisher, and mark your copy as the duplicate. This leads to the syndicating site getting page rank credit instead of you.

When does it make sense to go ahead? If you judge that the reputation you’ll build and your exposure to potential new readers is worth it, then you may make an exception for a site that does not offer an ideal arrangement.

If used wisely, content syndication can be a tool for spreading your message and increasing your audience. There is some SEO risk to posting duplicate content on the web. Make sure you understand the terms of the agreement for syndication.

Do your research and search for sites that match your sought-after readers and have high traffic and a strong reputation.

Have you experimented with content syndication? Share you experience in the comments box below.

IBM has been spurting out good news this month like dandelions gone to seed.

Here's a few highlights:

• A huge agreement with Apple to sell iPads and iPhones to corporate customers including offering businesses a bunch of apps hosted on IBM's cloud.
• An agreement with Pratt & Whitney to do big data apps for more than 4,000 aircraft engines.
• An extension to its contract with Whirlpool to move Whirlpool's apps to the cloud.
• A huge $3 billion R&D plan to create an impossibly small 7nm transistor using materials other than silicon that could revolutionize the chip industry.
  
• A project to help China solve its pollution and energy problems.
  

Then it celebrated all this news with a much-needed beat over Wall Street's expectations on both revenue and profits when reporting its second quarter on Thursday.

But the company isn't out of the woods yet. Revenue still declined 2% overall.

IBM is banking on several areas to help it grow again: cloud, mobile, and big data.

And it had good news to report on all of those fronts, too. Mobile revenue is up 100%, it says, though didn't give the actual revenue number. Cloud revenue us up more than 50% year-to-date, it says, with hosted services on track to be a $2.8 billion business this year. Big data is up 7% this year, and security revenue up more than 20% year-to-date.

That said, nerves are still high in the company, particularly in its hardware division and especially its microprocessor unit. Rumors have been floating through much of this year that IBM wants to sell that unit and get out of the chip-manufacturing business.

Today's earnings did nothing to calm those fears. Revenues from its microprocessor chip unit were down a big 18% over the year-ago quarter.

Revenues from Power Systems, which use IBM's homegrown Power chips, were down 28%. Plus storage was down 12%, and the unit IBM has agreed to sell to Lenovo, System x, was down 3%. All told, revenues from the hardware unit, Systems and Technology, were $3.3 billion for the quarter, down 11% from the year-ago quarter.

And that means that despite the good progress report, investors are feeling cautious. Shares were down slightly, not quite 2%, in after-hours trading.

Join the conversation about this story »

A friend approaching his 60^th birthday recently asked me to look at his resume.  It was a fine resume, and I helped him make it even better.  Part of me wondered, though, why he was going to all the effort.  I have a suspicion that he will face a great deal of difficulty finding a job.  Certainly, trying to go in through front door, applying for jobs online and talking to recruiters will be a frustrating experience for him.    But, I am not worried about him.  He will find work.

Do we need jobs or do we need work?  That is a question that may define the mid and late career stages of many Americans in the years to come.  We were raised to think that a steady job with a stable employer was the ideal career scenario. That may have been true once, but it is largely irrelevant today.  Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn, writing with Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh in Harvard Business Review described the new reality well, saying, “Then came globalization and the Information Age. Stability gave way to rapid, unpredictable change. Adaptability and entrepreneurship became key to achieving and sustaining success. These changes demolished the traditional employer-employee compact and its accompanying career escalator in the U.S. private sector; they are in varying degrees of disarray elsewhere.”

Hoffman goes on to suggest that the new employment model should be one where a company hires you for a limited “Tour of Duty” and allows you to show how your perform in order to earn another tour of duty.  That’s a pretty harsh universe to work in.  Every day at the office will be a gladiatorial contest to see who will leave the building with a job tomorrow. But it’s pretty honest about where most American companies are coming from today.   It’s time we all got the memo: You have no right to keep a job any longer than the employer profits from your efforts.  (Or, that the employer perceives that it profits from your efforts, which is subjective and unfair but utterly real.)

It’s tempting to bemoan the loss of employer loyalty but the truth is that the long-term tenures at single companies were a recent phenomenon.  The steady job at a big company really only emerged in the US after the Civil War, when industrialization and railroads made it profitable to hire large numbers of people in structured, long-lasting careers.  This went on until about 1970, when it began to unravel.  By the 1980s, the long-term American job had basically died, though it would take another decade or two for people to see fully what was going on. 

Where does leave my friend, as well as the rest of us?   I say that we are all in great shape, believe it or not.  We don’t need jobs. We need work.  And there is plenty of work available – It’s just not in the format that we are expecting.  Those of us in mid-career can demand good money for our valuable skills.  Contract-based employment, entrepreneurship, self-employment, “gig” economy work – these are all ways to earn a living from work, only without a job.

What is a job anyway? A job is a market/legal structure that serves the needs of both employer and employee. You have skills that your employer can profit from.  You need income.  The job is a way for the employer to give you some stability with regular salary and benefits while capturing a greater share of your value to the business.  Think of it like this:  You might be worth $200,000 in profits to a business.  If you charged the business $200,000 they would make no money.  To make money off of you, the employer pays you, say, $70,000 and keeps $130,000 for itself.  The employer is justified in doing this because it is absorbing a risk on your behalf.  There may be months where the employer makes no money off of you but still pays you.  It is advancing you money in regular salary payments in exchange for the right to earn $130,000 from your work.

If the employer is no longer offering a job, it can still profit from your work.  However, the formula needs to change. If you are independent, you should charge them $100,000 for your services.  They will make less money from you but they will be taking a lot less risk.  You, on the other hand, will be absorbing the cash flow risk and living with some uncertainty. As a result, you deserve a higher payment.  But, the formula works.  In simple terms, this is the difference between a contractor and an employee.

For my friend, I would say he needs to find work, but he shouldn’t fret about not getting a regular job. There’s a lot of work out there for him.

Imagine you are building a new home. You are in the planning stages with your architect. I’m sure you have a lot of input on the layout of your home due to the fact that you are about to make a huge investment and ….well IT’S YOUR HOME FOR CRYING OUTLOUD. So you show up to the design meetings, you share your opinions, you review the blueprints, give your feedback and together the two of you come to an agreement on a final blueprint. Then the contractor shows up and implements the entire shebang. You do daily or weekly walk throughs to make sure everything is status qou. You’re involved.

Now Imagine if you took a back seat in all of this. The Architect would draft up designs based on what he thinks is best and the contractor would implement them with no supervision. Then you show up to your new home. Did you know it is Gothic inspired because your architect fell in love with Gothic architecture in colleg? Yup, you have gargoyles loitering over your front door. Oh and the contractor built your walls with cement. You essentially live in a mini scary castle with no cell service. Congrats on that gem.

Where am I going with all of this? There is a difference between being a hands on client vs. a hands off client. When you are hands off you tend to have no idea what is going on and at the end of the day you won’t see the value in the work that was done.

This is something us inbound marketers struggle with. If you hire us to work for you then we want to get you results- it’s in our blood. How can you find value in our results though if you have no idea how we got them for you? I personally don’t think you can.

The Hands on Client

Inbound Marketing works seamlessly when there is a healthy partnership between the client and the agency (Jesse and Walt were a bit unhealthy but we love them none-the-less).  At the beginning of the relationship, communication guidelines are established and the client agrees to be an active participant in the inbound marketing process.  The hands on client keeps that promise throughout the engagement.

Benefits of being the Hands on Client

You never feel clueless.  You are involved with your marketing efforts so you feel very comfortable with the agency that is working for you because you know what they are currently working on and their plans for that project.

You help bridge the gap between sales and marketing. In order to have a clear ROI of your inbound marketing effort, agencies need to know how sales are going within your business. We don’t work in your sales department so it is important that this information is communicated to us on a routine basis (monthly, quarterly).  The hands on client will then be able to see a very clear ROI.

There are no surprises. Perhaps you have a tradeshow coming up. Since you are involved and talk to your agency about future events your business is attending your inbound marketing agency can now aid in making those events more valuable. This even applies to new tools your business is working with and other marketing efforts you are doing in-house.

Your Inbound Agency doesn’t feel clueless. We don’t know what’s changing inside your company unless we are told. We don’t want to be the last to know, it hinders our work. If we are in the know we can only help you.

The Hands off Client

No one is more hands off than Ron Swanson but I’ve witnessed some clients that come close. When a contract is signed the client is agreeing to allow the agency to do the work how it needs to be done. If this agreement stuck then I would not be writing this article. The hands off client tends to be unreliable and damaging to the inbound marketing process.

Disadvantages of being the hands off client

Frustration due to lack of communication. Your agency has been trying to get a hold of you for the past two weeks. Now that they finally did… the $*&! hits the fan essentially.  Nothing was able to get done on your account without the approval you said you wanted to give. So now they are behind and all of you are frustrated.

You always feel clueless. How can you not honestly? If you take no initiative to be involved with your inbound agency and ignore their attempts to engage then you will have zero ideas about what they are doing. This will only hurt your relationship in the end because you will end your partnership due to ignorance of the work being done and their benefits

No clear ROI. You run a business, your business does sales, somewhere those sales and juicy numbers are recorded. Your agency needs those. If you decided not to take the time to get them to the agency or delegate this responsibility to someone inside your business to communicate this to the agency then you will never have a clear ROI.  You are wasting your money in my opinion.

Surprise!! Whether it be you surprising your agency or they are surprising you- these surprises are never good. “I have lead nurturing campaigns saying what?!”  “You are launching a sister company next week?!”. Yeah… it’s not pretty. When you are this disconnected from your marketing agency they tend to disconnect themselves as well so they can get their jobs done. This puts the two of you on different pages that will hurt most marketing efforts being implemented. At this point the relationship is better off terminated.

Let me wrap this up…

Agencies like working with hands on clients. It’s important  that you know what we are doing and that we know what your business is doing. If communication becomes sparse, phone calls go unanswered and campaigns go unfinished then no one is winning.  Be the hands on client like you would with most services you pay for- don’t let us build the house by ourselves, we can, but you won’t like it.

When it comes to B2B Content Marketing, the bad news is a skills gap is emerging as most senior marketers are far behind in the effort to produce content that engages buyers. The good news is, we can only go up from here.

In a recent content marketing benchmark study, the Online Marketing Institute, teamed up with Forrester Research and the Business Marketing Association to understand how well B2B marketers gauge their content development skills and maturity.

113 senior marketer survey respondents provided insight on the following five dimensions. How do they:

1.) Understand customers’ interests and needs;

2) Align content themes to buyer concerns and business objectives;

3) Develop content that engages buyers;

4) Distribute it to intersect with their purchase journey; and

5) Monitor how they interact with it.

Surprisingly, the results venture far from the age-old theory that “Content is King” and rather show us that from a B2B perspective, the role of content marketing is far behind showing its value when it comes to consistently delivering information with prospects and customers.

Here are some of the key findings show that most B2B Marketers:

• Do not have Content marketing in their job description. A startling 72% of surveyed marketers say less than half of their marketing staff plays a primary role in content marketing today — leaving content to simply talk of products and features, rather than interesting insights buyers seek. It’s no surprise, then, that 87% say they struggle to produce content that truly engages their buyers.

• Are too focused on acquisition and less about the whole customer lifecycle . Sixty-two percent admit to producing content on a campaign-by-campaign basis while 47% said that they focus primarily on creating content for distribution channels like their company website, online advertising, email, and social media. Another 16% said they mainly develop sales collateral.

• Fail to help & teach the customer how to be successful with their product. While 71% of surveyed marketers say their content features case studies or customer stories, only 3% admit this is a primary focus of their efforts.

• Struggle to create long-term loyalty. While more than three-quarters of respondents say they frequently communicate to their customer base, only 5% make this a priority, proving that marketers are too focused on acquisition rather than creating long-term loyalty.

See here for full press release.

The Skills Gap

It’s hard to ignore the deficiencies the report suggests. And as long as this talent gap exists, CMO’s and Marketing Leaders will need to take a long & hard look at the skills, staff, and resources directed at content marketing development.

“The gap between content marketing awareness and good content marketing execution is not surprising. It’s something we run into every day at the Institute – what we call the digital skills gap,” said Online Marketing Institute Founder & CEO, Aaron Kahlow. “There simply aren’t enough trained content marketers to do the leg work. But the imperative for education is here and seen across the board, from entry level to CMO.”

With only 4% of those we surveyed are true “masters” of content marketing, the rest of the content marketers out there have a lot of catching up to do. Some companies leading the charge – Computer Sciences Corp, Deltek, Kapost, Sungard Availability Services, and Verizon – have shared their best practices with us, all of which can be found in the full survey report and with plenty of real life examples to learn from.

So, B2B marketers, if you are reading this, you may be asking, “What can I do to improve & raise the maturity of my content marketing strategy?”

In the spirit of our digital marketing education mission, we encourage you to invest in the advancement of your career, overall success of your team and business as a whole by educating yourself on the latest fundamentals, strategy, and tactics in content marketing. To get started, we recommend checking out OMI’s current Content Marketing Classes and Content Marketing Certification.

In a subsequent post, we will talk in more detail about how you can help to fix this skills gap problem and execute smarter.

And for those BMA and OMI members, as well as qualified marketers who are interested, you can access a complimentary copy of the research report on the BMA website here.

You Have One Set of Values is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

I received an email from a subscriber to my weekly newsletter. She was unhappy with something I’d written about my childhood, and she asked me to please limit my email newsletter to business-related topics. [You can read the post 7 Things I Was Never Allowed to Do for yourself. I’m pretty sure it was number 5 that bothered her, and I can understand how it might.]

But there is no personal life and professional life. There is just life. You are who you are, wherever you are and whatever you are doing.

You don’t have one set of values when it comes to business and a separate set of values when it comes to your personal life. But even if you did, it wouldn’t matter. Your real values would still be the lowest standard you set for yourself.

If you wouldn’t dare steal in your personal life but you do steal at work, you are still a thief. The location as to where the theft occurs doesn’t change it’s nature (or yours).

If you are rude to people and treat them poorly at work while being a prince at home, you are still a rude person. The fact that you are polite to some people doesn’t change the fact that you are rude to others.

If you are a gossip at work it’s likely you are a gossip at home, too. But even if you didn’t gossip at home you’d still be a gossip.

If you have a substance abuse problem that doesn’t prevent you from showing up to the office, you are a still a person with a substance abuse problem, even if you are highly functioning. Substance abuse may begin as a value issue, but addiction that comes later is an illness. You are still ill, whether at home or at work.

What you do on your personal time is your business, but it doesn’t change your values. Your standards for yourself are yours and yours alone. You are who you are, wherever you are and whatever you are doing.

I’m going to assume that if you’re reading this, you already know two things:

1. Building an email list is the most powerful, most certain method of getting clients and growing your business online (hey, I have to say that, I wrote the #1 book on email marketing on Amazon after all ;) 
2. Building an email list isn’t easy. The vast majority of visitors to your website will leave without signing up.

Now I already have a pretty well optimised blog when it comes to getting email signups. I have a home page focused on getting signups which gets about a 6% optin rate which is pretty nice:

And I have a series of landing pages for direct traffic from Facebook ads and other sources which get a 20-25% optin rate. Also nice:

And my “About Me” page gets a very handy 6% optin rate too as I’ve optimised it to talk not about me, but about the value you can get from the website – especially if you subscribe.

What’s not so nice is that the optin rate from blog posts is painfully low. Typically less than 2%. And that’s a lot better than most people. A lot of blogs see optin rates on blog posts of less than 1%.

I got my optin rate up to nearly 2% by implementing a number of tactics. If you look above this blog post you’ll see a Leadbox offering free client winning tips:

Below each blog post there’s a section to get more of my best tips:

And in the sidebar there’s a “sticky” Leadbox that scrolls with you so it’s almost always visible to encourage you to sign up.

And yet even with all those extras, I’ve struggled to get the signup rate on blog posts above 2%.

That’s a pain because it’s a lot easier to get free traffic to blog posts. People are very happy to share great blog posts on social media. Not so much when it comes to landing pages and home pages.

2% became a bit of a glass ceiling for me. Until I found a simple, new technique that I implemented a few weeks ago…

Exit Intent Popups

OK, so I know what you’re thinking. “Oh no, horrible, intrusive popups that stop you doing what you want to do”.

Well, exit intent popups aren’t like that.

They look pretty much the same – usually a “lightbox” where the site is greyed out and a big box appears with an offer to subscribe.

What’s different is when they appear.

Normal popups interrupt. That’s why they work. They appear immediately you enter a site or after a few seconds. And they block you from accessing the content on the site until you either subscribe or click to close them.

Which is rather annoying.

The most annoying thing about popups is that they work. Really well. I’ve tested them on my site and others and they absolutely do increase signups significantly.

But I just don’t want to be “that guy”. I don’t want to put my desire to get you to subscribe above your desire to read my content. For a consultant like me whose goal is to serve, I don’t think it creates the right impression.

For years I’ve known I’ve been losing out on subscribers because of that decision. I’ve lived with it, but I’ve always been on the lookout for a solution that would let me get more subscribers without being annoying and self-centred.

Exit intent popups are that solution.

They’re not triggered by you arriving on the site looking to read an article. they’re triggered by you being about to leave the site.

They track your mouse movements and if you head for the close button or navigation, they trigger the popup.

So two things are happening (or rather not happening) here.

Firstly, they’re not stopping you reading the content you came to read. You’ve already done that and they’re triggering when you move to leave the site.

And secondly, they’re not stopping you leaving either. If you click the close or navigation buttons they still work as normal (not like those annoying “are you sure?” things that some people use).

But what they do very well is they grab your attention as you’re in the process of leaving. They bring your eyes back to the site and offer you something.

Here’s my popup in action.

So they don’t stop people doing what they want on your site, but they do attract their attention to get them to sign up. Win win.

But most importantly, do they work?

So far I’ve been testing a couple of different designs. The winner is getting a 4.5% optin rate. That’s over double my normal optin rate from blog posts.

So absolutely, they do work.

How can you get a popup like this for your site?

Well, the original exit intent popup system is Bounce Exchange which you can get for the bargain price of $3,995 per month.

OK, so you probably won’t want to take up that option :) Here are some more reasonably priced alternatives:

The List Builder app is free from Appsumo. It works with Aweber, Mailchimp, Constant Contact and Campaign Monitor and has exit intent capabilities (they call it “smart mode”). You can’t pick and choose which pages it works on though (I prefer to exclude landing pages, my home page, and other “destination pages”) and it doesn’t have the templates that the other systems have.

PopupAlly is free from Ambitionally. It works with Mailchimp, Infusionsoft, Mad Mimi, Aweber, GetResponse and iContact. The form itself is pretty basic, but it allows you to customise which pages/blog posts it appears on.

Hold On Stranger is a new service at $97 a year and up. It has good templates and eye-grabbing animation. I haven’t used it myself and it’s not 100% clear which email services it supports, but it looks interesting.

OptinArchitect is a general purpose popup and optin form creator that works with most email systems and can create anything from sidebar optin boxes to “leadboxes” type optin boxes which appear when clicking a link/button to exit intent popups. It’s $97 a year.

The original solution I used was OptinMonster from the team at WPBeginner. It works with pretty much every email system and has a big range of high converting templates and lots of options for slide-ups and other forms of popup too. It has a range of animation options to grab your visitors attention. And it has an option so that if you send your existing subscribers to the blog post it doesn’t show for them (as they’re already subscribers, of course!).

However, they increased the price from $197 one-off to $199 per year so I don’t think it’s the best value today.

I’m now using Thrive Leads for my popups. Thrive have a very wide range of popup types and designs, including do exit intent popups. They can do the “yes/no” type popups that previously were only available with the big, expensive systems. I found my optin rate went up another 30% by implementing Thrive’s yes/no feature.

Thrive Leads also have the ability to recognise previous subscribers and show something different which is a feature I’m now using extensively. It means you can show optin forms to non subscribers, but don’t bother your current subscribers with them as they’ve already opted in. Instead you can show offers or other valuable information to them.

And finally, Thrive Leads is one of the cheapest options at a one-off price of $57.

>> You can check out Thrive Leads here <<

It gets my highest recommendation.

* The links to Leadboxes/Leadpages and Thrive Leads are affiliate links and I’ll get a commission if you go on to buy the products. Obviously these are products I use myself and thoroughly recommend *

The post How I Grew My Email Sign Up Rate By 91% With One Simple Technique appeared first on Get More Clients: Proven Strategies to Attract and Win Clients.

One popular definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. The definition of content marketing insanity? Creating content, just throwing it out there and hoping for good results… and then repeating the process, ad infinitum.

To break this crazy cycle, you should periodically be taking a critical look at your content marketing to understand what’s working and what isn’t — even if this means you have less time to publish new content.

In this eighth and final installment of our “Back to Basics” series, we’ll walk you through one process you can use to understand how well your content efforts are working and continually refine your content marketing program for greater success.

The difference between KPIs and content effectiveness

In last week’s post, Cathy McPhillips provided details — and a template — for tracking your key performance indicators (KPIs). These are the high-level metrics you and your management team have selected as the most critical measurements of your content marketing program’s performance — such as the number of email subscribers you have earned, registration forms that have been completed, sales increases, etc. (see the aforementioned post for a chart of possible metrics).

While understanding and presenting high-level KPIs is important for the entire team and management, this will only offer so much insight. These metrics are key and they tell you how you are doing, but they rarely provide the insights into what is working and what you need to adjust. You need to dig deeper and look at each piece of content to see how it is performing so you can make continual improvements.

A 5-step approach

There is no one right way to figure out the effectiveness of your content marketing; but below is one approach you can use. It requires you to track every piece of content you create in a spreadsheet, like the one I’ve created here (you can also download a copy of this template so you can customize it for your needs).

Click to download the full spreadsheet.

1. Audit all of the content you have by platform: Start by documenting all the content you publish on every platform you use, and arrange it by title. You’ll also need to decide from what date you want to start tracking your content — it can be from the past or you can start today and track everything moving forward. If you are just getting started and want to refine the process as you go, it’s best to start small. For instance, you may want to see what blog posts are performing best and then move on to other platforms.

2. Decide what other information you want to collect from each post: In addition to the title of the post, consider what else will give you the most essential insights.

For instance:

• Do you have a multi-author blog? If so, track the authors of each post.
• Do you hire freelancers? If so, you may want to understand how their posts perform compared to the ones written in-house.
• Do you create content in multiple types/formats, such as blog posts, videos, and podcasts? If you want to be able to get insight into how various formats are working, add columns to denote the format of each piece of content.
• Do you categorize your posts by key topic area? I highly recommend having key categories for your posts and tracking those in your spreadsheet. This way, you can see what topics your audience seems to be the most interested in.
• Are you trying to refine your mix of evergreen and real-time content? Or “brick” vs. “feather” content? If so, have a column that denotes the longevity of a piece so you can see if your “meatier” content is indeed performing better.

As you can see, there are many things you could track. What’s important is deciding if and how you will use each piece of data you’ve tracked in your performance evaluations.

3. Figure out the key metrics per post: Looking back at your KPIs, which metrics will give you the most insight as to whether or not your content is helping you reach those business goals? For instance, if one of your KPIs is email subscribers, you should track how many people subscribed after reading each post. Note that while social shares are easy to collect (and something you can do if it’s helpful for management) I would recommend looking at additional data points in addition to social statistics.

4. Calculate a baseline for each metric: It is helpful to understand your averages, such as how many tweets your average post receives, or what your average number of email subscribers is per post? You can take simple averages of the data you collect and then figure out which posts are performing above (or below) average. I like to highlight each metric with green (above average), yellow (average) and red (below average) so I can visually see how each post fares in relation to others. It is also interesting to track averages on a monthly basis to see if content is performing better or worse in relation to other months.

5. Update your tracking document on a regular basis: Decide when you want to update your spreadsheet. When getting started, I recommend updating your spreadsheet on a monthly basis. If you look at metrics too often, your performance may look weak for newer pieces of content that have had less time to gain solid ground. But, you also want to look at the data frequently enough to improve future content.

In addition to tracking content performance, check out some other ways to figure out what topics and formats may work best for your audience.

The point we made last week bears repeating: Measurement can be as simple or as complicated as you make it. Don’t measure simply for the sake of measuring. And, especially when getting started, don’t measure too much. If you aren’t certain what you should be measuring, ask yourself these two questions:

• Do these metrics support my key goals?
• Will I take action on these metrics (i.e., will they provide me insight into how I can improve my program)?

Unless you can answer “yes” to the questions above, you likely don’t need to be collecting the data — at least at first.

Updating the team on content performance

While I am a fan of giving everyone on your team access to data, chances are you’ll soon have more data that most people want to wade through. As such, remember that you want to present insights on content performance on a regular basis (again, I would start with monthly if you are not sure where to begin).

Instead of presenting all data at once, try collating the high-level findings and sharing these as a summary of insights you have learned and are considering changing.

For instance:

• What is the top-performing content this month?
• If you have a multi-author blog, which authors were top performers?
• What formats are resonating with your audience? If something is not, should you change the way you present it? Place it on a different channel? Place less emphasis on that format?
• What topics are resonating with your audience?

As another suggestion, you may also want to consider what metrics your management wants to see if you are in the early stages of getting buy-in. But, remember you need your management team to understand that the most important metrics are the two types above.

An example from CMI

The way we track and measure the effectiveness of our enterprise content is an evolving process that we plan to continually refine. However, we are very systematic with how we evaluate the performance of our blog posts. For each post, we track the following details:

• Author
• Number of tweets
• LinkedIn shares
• Facebook “likes”
• Conversions to email subscribers
• Page views
• The format (e.g., whether it’s a podcast, an article from CCO, a contributed post, etc.)
• Topic category/categories for each post

The key metric we track is conversion to email subscribers, but we also collect information on social sharing because it helps us see what topics are getting the most traction from our audience on a given channel. We also do this to see if there is a correlation between high social shares and email subscribers. (For the most part, this hasn’t been the case; in fact, we’ve found that traffic to the post has a higher correlation).

In addition to understanding what topics and content formats are performing, there are other things I do with the insights I track:

• I consider how I can repurpose top-performing pieces into other formats, like SlideShare, to extend its value.
• I keep a list of top-performing, evergreen content pieces and curate those in other ways. For instance, we occasionally collect the best advice from older posts and include them in updated posts on the same topic (as we did in this example and this one).
• Our marketing director, Cathy McPhillips, also promotes older, well-performing  posts by sharing them on Facebook or Twitter.
• I like to reach out to the authors whose posts have performed well each month to let them know and invite them to contribute another article.
• I look for posts that have the highest percentage of email conversions — i.e., the traffic in relation to email conversions for each page — and then re-market pages with lower traffic and higher email conversions.

In summary, remember that what you track and how you collect the data can evolve over time. But, it’s critical to get a system in place and get in the practice of measuring everything you are doing.

What tips do you have that help you measure your content effectiveness?

Want more insight on how to track and improve the performance of your content marketing efforts? Learn from the experts at Content Marketing World 2014, September 8–11, 2014. Register today!

Cover image by Peter Griffin, via Publicdomainpictures.net

Last week, I had the honor of speaking with Jon Moody, Director of Marketing at Pyramid Analytics, in a webinar where he explained how he is using social channels for lead generation. The webinar was hosted by the great folks over at Business2Community.

Pyramid Analytics is a leading provider of business analytics solutions and winner of 2014 CIO Big Data award and has been using the NextPrinciples solution for the last few months.

In the webinar, Jon talked about the opportunities and challenges presented by social media for B2B companies and how he has started being able to measure the revenue impact of using social channels as opposed to being focused on the ‘vanity metrics’ such as Likes and Impressions.

You can find the full webinar here. The 3 key points that I took away from Jon’s session were:

1. It’s futile to pretend that social doesn’t matter: Though it is increasingly obvious that social media touches each and every one of us in our personal and professional lives, there are still some who think that it is irrelevant to them. Jon’s message: “If you think social is prevalent now, just think in 2 or 5 years time it will be the default way of communicating and thinking.”
2. Social media is very relevant for demand generation: There’s a lot of noise in the market today about “Social Selling” with many different “quick fixes” being suggested by gurus. However, if approached in a disciplined and scalable manner, it is indeed possible to use social media to significantly enhance your company’s demand generation process. He described the real benefits (in terms of the ability to find new leads and new revenue opportunities created). Jon’s quote: “Demand generation must include a social element or you will be missing out on a significant piece of the opportunity.”
3. Applicability to B2B or B2C: A number of the questions from the participants revolved around whether social demand generation was relevant either for “only B2C” or “only B2B”. His response was that if your business involved an individual on the other end of the transaction, it did not matter if you were in a B2B or B2C industry. (My sidebar: his response reiterates the concept of business being H2H, not B2B or B2C). Jon’s quote: “Truly applicable to any environment, vertical, industry or segment where customers or prospects are active on social and have adopted that train of thought…So I would not put a limitation on the value and where this can be used.”

There’s a lot of other interesting content in the webinar where Jon describes how he has put a process in place to manage social lead generation and how he has started attributing revenue to their efforts on social media. Head over here to watch the webinar. As always, your comments are welcome!

Chinese home prices declined in 55 of 70 cities in June, with prices overall. This was the second straight monthly decline, following the 0.15% fall in May.

On a year-over-year basis, home prices were up 4.2% in June, compared to 5.6% the previous month.

"With a substantial chunk of demand driven by speculators, falling prices threaten an exodus of buyers. Even holding cash in a bank deposit now offers better returns than real estate," wrote Bloomberg economist Tom Orlik.

But property data in general has been coming in weak.

New housing starts contracted 10.5% year-over-year in the second quarter, compared with a 25% contraction in Q1.  Property investment climbed 12.6% YoY, the slowest pace since Q2 2009. And in June property sales were down 0.2% YoY, compared with a 10.7% fall in May, which was largely attributed to a base effect.

While the pace of decline is slowing, "this does not mean that the worst of China's property downturn is behind us," UBS' Tao Wang wrote in a July 16 note.

"Weak market sentiment and sluggish sales, elevated and rising inventory (especially in Tier 3 and 4 cities), and increasing financing difficulties in the property sector will all continue to weigh on the industry's outlook," according to Wang. "While we expect developers to speed up construction in the coming Fall sale season, to accelerate sales and digest inventory, downward pressure on prices and new housing starts will likely grow. We expect construction to slow further as the Fall peak selling season passes, leading to a fresh negative drag on related heavy industries and the economy at large."

It's isn't just about home prices

Wang previously explained that we need to look beyond a slump in prices to a possible construction slump. Even in the absence of a decline in prices, a drop in construction activity "would likely have serious negative impact on the industrial complex and, through that, economic growth and bank balance sheets," UBS' Tao Wang wrote.

"Given that property investment accounts for almost a quarter of fixed investment, construction value-added is 13% of GDP, and there are extensive linkages between property and industrial sectors including steel, cement and construction machinery, the impact on the economy from a drop in construction volume is bigger than that from a worsening household balance sheet and consumption," she wrote.

We recently saw a surge in Chinese credit which is expected to support the property sector. For now, the Chinese property market is looking ugly.

Here's a chart from Bloomberg's Michael McDonough:

SEE ALSO: China's Most Famous Ghost City Got Even Worse In The Last 4 Years

Join the conversation about this story »

There’s now less small tablet choice in the U.S. Lenovo, the world’s largest PC maker based on sales, is no longer selling Windows tablets under 10 inches in size, based on a lack of U.S. market demand. The company shared the news with PC World in an email, saying “In North America, we’re seeing stronger interest in the larger screen sizes for Windows tablets and are pleased with initial customer demand for the ThinkPad 10.”

That means the Lenovo ThinkPad 8 and smaller version of the Mix 2 — Lenovo sells a 10.1-inch model — are both disappearing from store shelves and Lenovo’s U.S. retail site. Remaining stock will be diverted to other countries where demand is higher for lower-cost, small Windows tablets. That includes Brazil, China, and Japan, according to the company. Both tablets run the full version of Windows, not the ARM-powered Windows RT software.

Microsoft has long been expected to debut its own small Windows tablet, likely running Windows RT, but the rumored plans were put off earlier this year. That could be due to the lack of a more touch-optimized version of Microsoft Office for the smaller screen. Or the company may have data similar to what Lenovo has: In the U.S. consumers either don’t want or need Windows on a small screen, at least not when current prices pit the devices squarely against less-expensive or comparably priced Android tablets.

If that’s the case, the situation may change a little by year’s end. Microsoft has already eliminated its Windows licensing fees for devices with screens measuring 9 inches or less. That could reduce prices, as Microsoft recently noted at its Windows Partner Conference. I’ve also noticed falling prices of small Windows tablets over the past six months or so. The Dell Venue 8 Pro I bought earlier this year can now be had for about $50 less; with a starting price now at $249, you get a pretty capable Windows slate.

Still, these devices compete with tablets such as the Nexus 7, which has a high-resolution display and only costs $229 to start. It’s notable that Lenovo isn’t stopping sales of its small Android tablets, just the ones that run Windows. The market isn’t suggesting there isn’t demand for small slates; instead, it’s saying there isn’t demand for small slates running Windows just yet.

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What mattered in social business in the first quarter of 2014
• An analysis of Windows Azure’s strengths and weaknesses
• Gigaom Research predictions for 2014

Above: Airbnb's new logo

Image Credit: Airbnb

No, design pros aren’t taking Airbnb’s new logo as hard as you are.

Immediately after Airbnb unveiled its new logo mark on Wednesday, the company was hit with heavy criticism for its suggestive shape and its startling similarity to the existing logo of an 11-year-old IT automation company.

Although the great unwashed tech-industry masses appear both amused and confused by Airbnb’s curvaceous identity, we decided to give a handful of top designers from Google Ventures, Medium, and more a chance to voice their (more qualified) opinions.

If there really are sexual undertones, they’re intentional

Sacha Greif, creator of Folyo, Telescope, and Sidebar: There’s been a lot of noise about the logo’s supposed sexual connotations, with designers and bloggers calling out Airbnb on it left and right.

But I’d like to think that if there really are any sexual undertones, they’re entirely intentional. After all, Airbnb’s new logo is all about “belonging.” And a mother’s womb is the ultimate symbol of a safe, warm, and welcoming place.

Of course, my armchair psychoanalysis may also be completely off the mark. But even so, the fact remains that thanks to this “controversy,” we’ve all been talking about that redesign and giving Airbnb free advertising in the process.

And it doesn’t hurt that the mark itself is visually beautiful, with pleasing curves and an elegant simplicity. So I’d say the team at Design Studio knew what they were doing after all!

That time Apple announced the “iPad”

Daniel Burka, design partner at Google Ventures: Brands go a lot deeper than a visual identity. Airbnb has an excellent brand that relates to the sharing economy, neighborhoods, fantastic customer experiences, and fostering relationships. It’s somewhat disappointing to see some designers fixate on an individual component of the brand and lose the forest for the trees.

The hullabaloo about the Airbnb logo is reminiscent of the iPad announcement from Apple, when Twitter lit up with acerbic jokes about feminine hygiene products. Clearly that aspect of the iPad name bore little relevance on the potential success of the overall brand and product. Today, the Airbnb logo is the butt of some jokes, but I doubt the joke will last.

Surely not the initial reaction they were hoping for

Tina Chen, designer at Medium: The new Airbnb logo is definitely very graphically compelling. It has many aspects of a great logo – strong, clean lines that read well both large and small. You can clearly see the intended symbolism: the “A” and two “B”s,  a shelter, a heart, a paperclip. It comes with a bright coral color that’s very of the moment, and not yet overly used. It’s easy to draw and memorable.

That said, the organic shape does unfortunately evoke a number of body parts, as has been quickly noted. Surely not the initial reaction they were hoping for.

With any abrupt logo or name change, people’s initial reactions tend to dull over time, and the primary association eventually becomes the product and brand. Think of the initial reaction to the name “iPad.” Now, when you hear “iPad,” people just think of the product itself. With enough resources committed to consistent marketing, this logo and Airbnb can become synonymous too, without the added associations.

A truly great logo should have all the strong points of Belo ["Belo" is Airbnb's name for the logo] without the significant baggage. Will they wish they went with a graphic that is a little less graphic? We’ll see.

Memes and references aside, I like the new aesthetic

Renato Valdés, cofounder of Human: Airbnb has always had design in their DNA, and I think it shines through even more with the introduction of the new mark and logotype.

Memes and references aside, I like the new aesthetic. Introducing a new logo for an already successful company with significant reach and brand value is bold and often met with a lot of backlash. However, the maturity of Airbnb as a brand, and as a company looking beyond their current product offering shines through. It doesn’t happen often that a new logo makes me wonder what else they have up their sleeves. I wonder if they’ll be able to spread the Bélo in a meaningful and creative way amongst hosts and guests.

It’s a lot more playful than I expected

Kristy Tillman, designer at IDEO: I think the identity is beautiful and a lot more playful than I expected. It shows that Airbnb is growing up and setting itself up for a community-based platform. The create feature was fun to play with. I also want to give them kudos for such inclusive/diverse illustrations.

I was disappointed that the new brand didn’t retain much, if any, brand equity. There is a quirkiness factor that really embodied how radical a concept Airbnb was/is that seems to have gotten lost.

For a deeper look at everything Airbnb launched this week, check out our coverage of Airbnb’s redesigned mobile app and site.

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Our upcoming GrowthBeat event — August 5-6 in San Francisco — is exploring the data, apps, and science of successful marketing. Get the scoop here, and grab your tickets before they're gone!  

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Bitcoin is most often discussed as a volatile digital currency. But where Bitcoin's real value lies is as a payments technology that has the potential to revolutionize the legacy payments industry. 

Bitcoin offers merchant a low-cost payments system, and consumers a virtually frictionless payments experience. Value can easily be transferred around the world without transmitting sensitive information that could be used for fraud, and without forcing merchants to pay extortionate transaction fees.

But, while the emergence of Bitcoin brings with it numerous advantages, it also faces incredible hurdles.

In  a recent report from BI Intelligence, we explain how Bitcoin works, from the moment when local currency is exchanged for bitcoins, to the moment when it reaches the electronic wallet of a receiving party. We look at the key advantages of Bitcoin compared to the legacy players in the payments industry and examine the challenges that Bitcoin faces as a payment network. 

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Here are some of the key elements from the report: 

• Provides an easy-to-understand explanation of how Bitcoin works as a payments system, including the anatomy of a Bitcoin transaction and a description of the Bitcoin blockchain. 
• Along with a number of Bitcoin insiders which we interviewed for our report, we believe Bitcoin's greatest potential is as a global payments network.
• Unlike government-backed currencies, Bitcoin's elegant design places a strict limit on how many units can be created — 21 million. But each coin can be divided into 100 million pieces, which will allow it to scale as a payments technology.
• Bitcoin's daily average transaction volume stands at just $89 million compared to $16.5 billion for Visa and $9.8 billion for MasterCard. 
• In a nutshell, Bitcoin allows for the simple and secure transfer of value online, without intermediaries. There are many players in the Bitcoin ecosystem that help to make this happen, including Bitcoin exchanges, Bitcoin wallets, and miners.
• Third-party bitcoin payments processors already are stepping in to address flaws such as price volatility and the length of time that it takes the Bitcoin network to clear transactions, allowing merchants to instantly process bitcoin transactions and avoid exchange risk.
• Bitcoin faces other significant threats, though, including fraud and regulation. And right now, too much power is concentrated among a small group of miners, which opens Bitcoin up to further vulnerabilities.
• Despite the barriers, we believe the efficiency and low cost of Bitcoin in comparison to legacy payments tools — including credit cards, money transfer services, and letters of credit — will ultimately prove too tempting for merchants, individuals, and business-to-business applications to resist.

In full, the report:

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

 For full access to all BI Intelligence reporting, analysis and daily briefs on the payments industry, sign up for a free trial.

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We all know the story.  A team creates a groundbreaking new innovation only to see it mired in internal debates. When it is eventually launched in the market, there is an initial flurry of sales to early adopters, but then sales cycles become sluggish. Pilot customers are enthusiastic, but broader adoption is slow even with customer support and training. All the pieces are in place to create “disruptive innovation” and “cross the chasm,” but the results are disappointing. What’s missing?

The problem is that data, information, and value propositions are not enough to sell innovative products. We all know the saying, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” But when it comes to innovation, the truth is often “I’ll see it when I believe it.” To sell your idea to executives, buyers, and users, you have to change not only what they think, but how they think. Without the right mental model, they won’t see the problem, understand the benefits, or make the change.

Mental models are how the brain makes sense of the vast amount of information to be processed every moment of every day. They are the lens through which we see the world. The filter that separates the signal from noise. The framework for attributing cause and effect. The “sorting hat” to decide what makes it into our conscious awareness.

To understand the power of mental models, consider Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, a physician working in Vienna in the 1840s. He observed that the death rate for puerperal fever fell tenfold when doctors washed their hands before treating patients. He shared his findings with his colleagues to introduce handwashing as a standard practice. Despite the data, his fellow doctors dismissed his findings. In fact, his colleagues and even his own wife thought he was losing his mind. They had him committed to a mental institution where he died shortly thereafter.

Why couldn’t Semmelweis persuade people of his innovation? In the 1840s, the mental model of disease was an imbalance of four “humours” in the body such as phlegm, bile, and blood. Every disease was entirely internal and unique. With this mental model, Semmelweis’ colleagues couldn’t see how handwashing could affect a person’s health. It didn’t matter what the data said.

A few decades later, Louis Pasteur proved that germs, not humours, were the primary cause of disease. With this new mental model, doctors could understand how handwashing would affect health. Personal hygiene became a new standard of care. Unfortunately, this was too late for Dr. Semmelweis. He had failed to shift his colleagues’ thinking, and thus failed to shift their behavior.

Innovators change the lens through which we see the world. Companies that successfully market and sell innovation are able to shift how people think not only about their product, but about themselves, the market, and the world. Steve Jobs was one of the great mindshifters of our time. He championed the mantra “think different” and shifted the way people think about technology to be more personal and human.

Shifts in mental models go deeper than traditional thought leadership. Most thought leadership tries to establish a company as an expert within the existing mental model. Shifts in thinking challenge the prevailing model.

Over the last ten years, Salesforce.com has grown from an upstart to a market leader in enterprise software. From the beginning, Salesforce.com has focused on shifting the paradigm of computing as much as shifting customers over to its product.

For years, the company’s marketing strategy has focused on the idea of “No Software,” reflecting the shift from packaged, installed software to cloud computing and software-as-a-service. Salesforce.com recognized that only after buyers understood the mental model of cloud computing could they understand the benefits of Salesforce.com as a product.

To put the power of mental models to work in your business, start with three steps:

A. Identify the shift

The first step is identifying the underlying shift in thinking. This is different than your value proposition. It’s an assumption (usually unconscious) about how the world works.

To find the shift, ask yourself a few questions. What was the original insight that led to the innovation? Where do you feel people “don’t get it” about your solution? What is the “aha” moment when someone turns from disinterested to enthusiastic?

Try to frame it as a From and a To. This is not about bad to good, just better for the current context. As an example, consider companies selling software and services related to “big data.” The shift is not about “simple to intelligent” or “smaller to bigger.” In the area of data, the “aha” might relate to a shift in thinking about decision-making (from intuition to analytics), in data models (from spreadsheets to algorithms), or how the data is used (from target to empower)

B. Find the sticking point

Next, determine how mental models are getting in the way of your success. The sticking points are usually in one of three areas. You can tell which one by the associated symptom.

• PRESENT: The model of how things work today. Do people fail to see a problem that seems obvious to you? If so, they are operating with a different model of the current state. This is often because they don’t see how things are related. As an example, the movie An Inconvenient Truth was successful in shifting many people’s mental model of the relationship between greenhouse gases and global warming. If you are trying to get people to see a problem or opportunity, focus on disrupting their existing mental model.
• FUTURE: The model of how things could be in the future. Do people recognize the problem, but fail to see how your solution could solve their problem? This was the situation faced by Dr. Semmelweis in his Vienna hospital. People agreed that mortality was a problem, but they couldn’t see how handwashing could make a difference. If you are trying to get people to understand the benefits of your solution, focus on shifting their thinking in a way that reveals why your solution would be effective.
• TRANSITION: The model for how to bring a new future into being. Do people recognize the problem, and the value of your solution, but fail to make the change? Sometimes people recognize the need to jump from the trapeze bar they are on, and can see the merits of the new bar you are offering them, but feel they can’t make the jump. In this case, focus on a mental model related to the transition. Define a roadmap that explains to them how to get from where they are to where they want to go.

C. Build the program

Shifts in thinking don’t happen overnight, any more than going to a weekend yoga workshop makes you flexible. Think of it like learning a second language or building a new habit – in this case a mental habit. People need to see how the new way of thinking plays out in different contexts and situations.

“The really good innovations – the ones that change the world – need to be explained before they’re accepted,” Beth Comstock, the Chief Marketing Officer of GE, recently wrote. One of GE’s mantras is therefore “mindshare before market share.” GE’s strategy focuses on being a “content factory” to disseminate powerful stories. Interestingly, GE is also the home of Crotonville, one of the world’s top corporate universities. Perhaps in the future we will see corporate universities expand beyond employees to serve customers and clients as well.

Albert Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Companies that help customers shift their thinking will be more effective at solving problems and ultimately selling products.

Take a moment to think back to the days of group projects at school. In my tenure as a student, I found that, no matter the class, no matter the assignment, there would almost always be four types of people in a group:

• The person who did absolutely nothing. (You were lucky if this guy showed up to class let alone meetings.)
• The person who tried to do as little as possible. While this person completed his work, he needed a great deal of hand holding to do so.
• The person who volunteered to do just about everything but actually contributed next to nothing.
• The person who picked up the slack, essentially completing the entire project solo.

I was that last person. For me, group projects were utter torture. But you already knew that because you were that person, too. Your Type A tendencies served you well in school, and they continue to serve you well as a marketer.

Lately, however, your marketing team has been struggling to perform. The more you try to take on, the more desperate the situation seems. It’s your director’s opinion you need help. And I’m not talking outsourcing this month’s eBook kind of help; I’m talking long-term strategic help—the kind you get from an outside partner.

But like me, you don’t want to surrender your control until it’s absolutely necessary. So how do you know it’s really time to work with an inbound marketing agency? Here are a few signs:

1. You and Your Team Are Overextended

There’s a difference between having a busy week (or even month!) and being so overburdened, you couldn’t get all of your work done even if you took a vacation from work just to catch up on work. When you and your team are overextended, marketing efforts suffer. What’s often worse is work becomes less enjoyable for everyone—which can lead to departures. An inbound marketing agency can give you the help you need to get your heads back above water.

2. You Know Your Marketing Strategy is Disjointed But Can’t Fix It

There’s no doubt you’re a strategic thinker. In fact, you’ve always been the one to gently remind the team that, in marketing, strategy always comes before tactics. But strategy takes time, and if you don’t have the time to clearly lay it out (and ensure it’s being followed), it often becomes disjointed. Is everyone on your team devising tactics to work toward your ultimate marketing goal? Or are you simply doing anything and everything to get more leads? A new team of strategic thinkers can reevaluate what you’re doing to build an effective inbound marketing strategy.

3. You’re Not Sure What’s Working

Your website traffic is increasing. Your contact database is growing. Your sales team is receiving more phone calls. Do you know why? Where are these leads coming from? Are they marketing qualified? Sales qualified? If you’re not sure what’s working, you can’t know which tactics are most effective at getting you more customers and, therefore, most worth your team’s time. Working with an inbound marketing agency known for proving marketing’s effectiveness can solve this problem.

4. You Have Content, But Buyers Aren’t Biting

Your team is producing and promoting content like a well-oiled machine, and yet, you’re not acquiring more customers. The problem could be you’re not targeting the right people with the right content. To ensure your marketing messages are on target, you need to clearly define your buyer personas. The problem is developing buyer personas can be difficult, especially if you’ve never done it before. By working with an inbound marketing agency experienced in buyer persona development, you will receive the information you need to create highly targeted messaging that resonates with the right audiences.

5. Sales is Complaining (More than Usual)

Commission is usually a big factor in salespeople’s salary, which is why they’re not shy to say when something is affecting their ability to perform. If the sales team is complaining more than usual—assuming your salespeople are knowledgeable and hardworking—it could be your marketing efforts aren’t producing quality leads. An inbound marketing agency can evaluate your company’s lead scoring process along with your marketing efforts to better align sales and marketing.

6. You’re Not Reaching Your Goals

Marketing is tasked with reaching a number of goals to benefit the overall business, whether that’s nurturing more qualified leads to drive sales or growing the CEO’s online presence to help her become a thought leader in the industry. The go-getter you are, you enjoy the challenge of building strategic plans to reach—nay, exceed—those goals. But with your current resources, building robust strategies and completing all the grunt work necessary to reach those goals simply isn’t possible. Delegating the responsibility of reaching just a few of those goals to an inbound marketing agency (for example, funneling more qualified leads to the sales team) can take some of the pressure off your shoulders.

Surrendering control, especially to a group of people you haven’t worked with in the past, is difficult for people like you and me. But it sometimes becomes a necessity. If you and your marketing team are experiencing any of the above signs, it’s time to begin your search for an inbound marketing agency.

When faced with a decision, we generally consider only the most obvious and visible information, according to Chip and Dan Heath, authors of "Decisive: How To Make Better Choices in Life and Work."

However, that's rarely all we need to make a good decision, because we end up missing important facts outside of our immediate view.

In their book, the Heath brothers share the "four villains of decision making," which often mislead us in our choices:

• Narrow framing causes you to focus so much on your immediate choices that you miss other options. 
• Confirmation bias leads you to seek out information that will confirm what you already believe.
• Short-term emotion blinds you from making the right choice, even if it should be completely obvious.
• Overconfidence makes you believe you know more than you actually do. 

Fortunately, the Heath brothers also share some solutions to these problems. Here are their 14 best strategies for making wiser decisions in any situation.

Avoid narrow framing by widening your options:

1. Consider the opportunity cost. When you are shopping, you generally consider only the choices of "buy" or "don't buy." You don't realize that the money saved can be applied to another purchase. For example, if you don't buy a television, you can use the money to go on vacation. This additional option will help you consider whether you can derive more satisfaction from other options.

2. Run the vanishing options test. Ask yourself what else you could do if you didn't choose any of your current options. If you are deciding whether to fire or keep an underperforming employee, for instance, imagine that both options are not viable. Then, you would be forced to come up with alternative solutions, such as moving them to a new department or talking with them to figure out what's wrong.

3. Multitrack. Consider more than one option simultaneously. Some companies give the same assignment to different teams, so they can consider the solution from new perspectives. Try to think in terms of this AND that, instead of this OR that. For example, rather than thinking just about how to limit stress, you might also consider how to boost happiness. 

4. Find someone else who's solved your problems. The Heath brothers pose the question, "Why generate your own ideas when you can sample the world's buffet of options?" Look at best practices that other people have used. For example, if you own a struggling grocery store, look at how other grocery stores are performing and the ways they have solved similar problems.

5. Use analogies to help you think outside the box. In their book, the Heath brothers give the example of a designer who wanted to design a speedy swimsuit. She decided to analyze other things that move fast, such as sharks and torpedoes, which gave her a new source of inspiration. 

Avoid confirmation bias by reality testing your assumptions: 

6. Consider the opposite of what you believe. Actively seek disagreement by asking disconfirming questions. The Heath brothers use the example of iPod buyers, saying they should ask themselves what problems the iPod has before making their decision based on its benefits.

7. Zoom out. Look for an outside perspective on your specific situation. Read reviews, data, and advice from other people who have made similar decisions. If you are a restaurant owner, you can't rely on the belief your restaurant will be a big hit. Instead, you should analyze your restaurant within the pool of other restaurants you are competing against.

8. Use the "ooch technique." This involves running small experiments to test theories before jumping in headfirst. For example, before choosing your future career path, volunteer as an intern in the field to get a feel for how you like it.

Avoid short-term emotion by attaining distance before deciding:

9. Use the 10/10/10 technique. Imagine how you will feel about a decision in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years. This will help you consider future emotions as much as present emotions. For example, if you want to send an angry email, you probably won't feel too good 10 minutes after.

10. Use the best-friend technique. Consider your decision from an observer's perspective and highlight what's important. Ask yourself what you would tell your best friend if they were in the same situation as you.

11. Honor your core priorities. When you have trouble making a decision, it usually means you are struggling to figure out what you desire in the long term. The Heath brothers say, "We must go on the offense against lesser priorities." They cite the example of Jim Collins' "stop-doing list," which is a list he makes of what he is willing to give up to have more time for his priorities.

Avoid overconfidence by preparing to be wrong:

12. Bookend the future. Plan for a range of outcomes from very bad to very good. Keep in mind that the future is not a "point," but rather a spectrum of options, so there are many possibilities of what could happen. 

13. Think in terms of pre-mortems and pre-parades. Use pre-mortems by thinking about how a decision might fail and how to minimize the harm. On the other hand, you should also consider pre-parades, or the potential consequences of being successful. For example, if your business does well, you'll need to make sure you have enough supply to meet consumer demand.

14. Set tripwires. These are triggers to jolt you out of your routine and remind you to evaluate your decision in the future. For example, you should set a date where you will be held accountable for what you predict, so that you can reconsider your decision if you're failing to meet your goals.

SEE ALSO:  14 Surprising Things That Affect Your Willpower And Decision Making

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Thank you pages – pages that are displayed following the completion of a sale – are generally last on the list of content priorities for any brand or online retailer. After all, the sale has been made, the conversion is complete and it’s time to look for new customers and the next big sale, right? Wrong.

The best business owners know that the probability for selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, whereas the probability for selling to a potential client, someone who has never purchased from a given brand or company is only 5-20%. This statistic clearly demonstrates that it’s easier – and more profitable – to market to existing customers than to attempt to bring in new business. Clearly, retention must remain a focus for business success. A simple thank you page could be the difference between a customer that’s loyal for life and a serious decrease in potential profit.

When designing a thank you page, there are many ideas to keep in mind. A personal thank you can go a long way toward making a lasting impression and demonstrating true appreciation. In fact, according to McKinsey, 70% of buying experiences are based on how customers feel they are being treated. Positivity breeds positive outcome and negativity or indifference breeds negativity. It’s that simple. Adding a personal touch – a quick video, an image or sound bite – can increase the overall feeling of appreciation in a professional manner that leads to a positive buying experience, even after the sale has been completed.

Keeping that in mind, check out the five ways below to cleverly use a thank you page to generate loyal customers, spread endorsements and increase repeat sales.

1. Include a Coupon

What’s the best way to drive repeat traffic after a sale? Offering an incentive. Once a customer has completed a transaction, consider including an email as a pop-up, or, better yet as an email that can be used toward a future purchase. Include a quick note of thanks and make it clear that your company takes care of customers, long after a sale has been completed. The coupon can be as small or significant as you’d like, however, the better the deal, the more likely a customer is to return.

Not ready to offer a coupon? That doesn’t mean the thank you can’t be helpful. Follow Amazon’s lead by offering a list of sales items that could relate based on other repeat customers’ purchases of the same item.

2. Consider Social Buttons

Sometimes a purchase is too exciting not to share. However, who wants to brag after they’ve bought something great? You can help in this area. Allow customers to share their purchases across their social media sites. This makes your link easy to find in the future and allows the followers of your customers to learn more. Nothing’s better than a testimonial – social buttons make the process simple.

3. Ask for Reviews

Look at your top referrers. What are they? Yelp? Google+? Another site? Pay attention to your metrics. After thanking your customers for making purchases, ask them to leave a review. The timing couldn’t be more perfect – they are excited about what they’ve purchased, why not give them an outlet? Provide a link to your review page or Google+, like Warren CAT does, to streamline the process by cutting out a few steps. Generating positive feedback is always a worthwhile endeavor.

4. Add a Sign-Up Form

After you’ve taken the time to thank a customer for his or her most recent purchase, invite them to become a part of your brand’s community by signing up for your newsletter. Language like “don’t miss out on future sales, sign up today!” can go a long way toward encouraging action at the close of a sale.

By increasing the size of your e-mail list, through your thank you message, you’ve turned a static message into something that can be used to generate additional business in the future, to remind customers that your brand exists and to send out special deals and promo codes going forward.

5. Create a Referral Perk

As a part of your thank you message or email, provide a referral coupon that a customer can share with friends and family that offers a kickback for the original customer. For each person that makes a purchase using the customer’s original coupon code, the customer can earn an additional 5% or dollar amount off of the next purchase.

This is yet another way to increase the potential for future sales, from both existing customers and a new market that you may not be targeting.

Whatever steps you take, now is the time to stop thinking of thank you messages as generic and useless and to start looking for greater possibilities that can increase positive customer experiences.

Successful marketing and sales both trace their roots to one core piece of your business strategy: your company’s accurate, targeted buyer personas.

These buyer personas run the show; They determine how and where you market your products and services, and they can determine how your sales team approaches potential customers.

Unfortunately, many companies don’t realize that their buyer personas may have an expiration date. At the very least, they need to be updated and refined periodically.

If your assumptions and accepted truths about your customer’s pain points are no longer accurate, your marketing efforts simply won’t be effective in the long term.

To stay relevant, your marketing team needs to approach these marketing assets as living documents that need to be updated and maintained over time.

Fortunately, your sales team is in the perfect position to help. With the right conversations and the right questions, they can help your marketing team develop fresh, accurate profiles.

With these refined personas, your marketing department will be able to generate more targeted leads for sales.

Here’s a look at four questions your sales or marketing team can ask customers to update your buyer personas:

1. “What is your biggest challenge when it comes to ___________?”

The first step in updating your profiles is to understand how your client’s needs have changed over time.

• What problem keeps them up at night?
• Is it the same problem as when you first created these personas?
• What trends and technological developments have influenced their business or personal success?

You need to continue to analyze the path that your clients take towards becoming your customer based on the information you’ve gathered from working with them for so long.

Then, if possible, use your lead intelligence to help you make better decisions about nurturing this customer along your sales pipeline.

2. “If you could accomplish one thing, what would it be?”

This question speaks to the most important thing to understand about your customer: how they behave and the “Why” behind it.

First, the client’s answer will give you a clear indication of what motivates them, what is important to them, and how your products and services can help them reach this goal.

This is incredibly valuable information to capture in a buyer persona because each answer can have a profound effect on your entire marketing strategy.

Second, building and updating your profiles with behavior-based information will help you intelligently evaluate your customer’s goals and make informed assumptions about how each client will respond to your marketing efforts.

This inside-out understanding of how and why your client acts can give you insight into how and why your marketing strategy works.

3. “Where do you typically search for or find information about products like ours?”

Once you have an updated understanding of how and why your ideal client profile acts, it’s time to make sure your outreach strategies are still appropriate.

Ask yourself the following questions to identify where your ideal clients spend their time offline and online:

• Are they active on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter?
• Do they read blogs and news sites? If so, do they prefer educational articles or industry news?
• What’s the most engaging format? Do they prefer video clips or blog posts? Infographics or tweets?
• How much time do they spend researching each of your products?

Each answer will give you insight into whether or not your outreach efforts are as effective as they could be. You may even discover a new marketing opportunity that wasn’t on your radar, but that would help you tap into new customers.

4. “If you decide to do business with us today, who signs the check?”

Above all else, it is vital that you understand who makes the ultimate decision to do business.

Pack your ideal customer profile with detailed information about the name, role, industry, and company information as well as the demographic and personal information of the client, too.

A thorough understanding of the decision maker’s personal history and motivation will help you make even more accurate educated speculations.

This will also help you understand how many people are involved in the decision-making process, which can feed into your content marketing efforts as you target content toward each decision maker.

The more you pay attention to what your prospects and customers say, the more you learn. Rather than moving forward with established (and possibly outdated) customer profiles, evaluate each of your assumptions to see how they’ve changed over time.

The more detailed your ideal customer profile, the more targeted your efforts can be, and your marketing strategy should reflect that learning.

Use your marketing and sales team to help you create more informed profiles, and encourage them to ask the right questions to help them refine their personas with true, accurate information and added detail.

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Have you ever had a lead generation campaign fail?

Probably you have, most of us have. Failure is not such a bad thing though.  Obviously you’d rather be successful, but failure can actually be a good thing if you can learn from it. So lets talk about why many lead generation campaigns fail and what you can learn from it so that you avoid failing again.

1)  Failure To Target Your Efforts If you’re just throwing the widest possible net, you’re unlikely to catch the fish you want.  Plus you’ll end up sorting through a ton of fish that will never do you any good.

The problem with this strategy, or lack of strategy, is that you’ll waste a lot of time on prospects that will never become customers. And as we all know, our time is limited so we must be putting it to good use working on prospects that at least have a chance to become customers.

When you create a targeted lead generation strategy, you focus your efforts on the prospects that have a much better chance of becoming customers.

So, you ask, how do we target an online lead generation campaign? We start by building personas.

A persona is a tool that helps us figure out what our ideal customer is looking for.  They’re not looking for your product or service, they’re looking for solutions to a problem that they have. Hopefully your product or service will solve that problem for them.

We want to paint a picture of our ideal prospect when we build our persona. When we really know them we can identify offers that will motivate them to act.  How old are they?  Who do they report to?  What are their responsibilities?  How do they spend their workday? What are their biggest work challenges?  What are the problems they have that can be solved by your product or service?

When we answer these questions we can identify how we can solve their business problems and move them into our sales funnel.  If we’re just throwing out general content that doesn’t solve a problem for our prospect, it’s a lot less likely that we will get a lead and an eventual customer.

2)  Failure To Use Calls To Action If you’re depending on the contact us link at the bottom of your home page to get your leads, I can guarantee that you are failing at online lead generation.

You need to create lead generation campaign specific calls to action that offer content with solutions for your targeted prospect. Your call to action needs to be clear and convey a benefit to the user.  Why should they click it?  What will it do for them?  Always convey when benefit the prospect will receive from whatever it is that you are offering them.

The benefit presented needs to outweigh the prospect’s concern for giving up their data.  These days data is currency and every prospect will view the call to action and weigh it in their head, just as they do when they make a purchase for cash.  Giving up their data is as much of a transaction as purchasing  something in a store.

They will decide if your offer has value for them.  So give them that value with benefits. If your call to action is clear and benefit heavy, you’ll get conversions.

3) Failure To Use Landing Pages If you’re just sending your prospects to your home page you’re wasting your time.  If you have taken the effort to create a targeted persona and a benefit laden call to action, you must use a landing page to get that conversion.

You don’t want to distract the prospect with any content or links other than the ones that will get them to fill out that form and become a lead for you.

Focus them on the task at hand and get the conversion. Use a benefit heavy headline.  Tell them what this wonderful thing that they have shown interest in will do for them.  Reinforce it with another benefit as a sub headline. Show them a picture and give them some quick bullet points about how it will help them and what problems it will solve for them.

Give them a clear and easy to fill out form.  Ask for as little data as possible.  Every field you add to your form will reduce the number of form fills by 5% or more.  Keep it simple and only ask for data that you must have to continue.  There are so many other ways you can get that data today. LinkedIn alone is a treasure trove of data about your prospects.

So there are 3 reasons why lead generation campaigns fail and what you can do to avoid failure.  Please share this article. Feel free to comment below with any questions or ideas you have on how to make lead generation campaigns more successful.

June 21st is the day that marks the official start of summer in the northern hemisphere. That means business might get slower, while owners, employees, and consumers take some time off for the summer holiday. Being aware of this fact can help you realize your marketing efforts need 1. an automation, and 2. a good strategy for keeping them rolling. Web forms are a good solution for both these points, so read on to see how exactly you can boost your leads count.

Summer holidays can be quite a roadblock for a business’ wealth. One fact is clear: you need a method to gather more leads on a constant basis. But there’s something else you should take into consideration when talking about summer break for businesses. You also need a tool that can work on its own, in an automated way. Hosting a webinar, for example, is a great resource of leads, although it might not really work if your audience is away for a vacation.

Thus, you may want to consider employing web forms for your lead generation task. Further on, you can read some tips about what types of forms can help you gather leads. It is your call to choose the right mix of channels to implement them – on your website, on your social media channels, on your blog, in your email marketing communication, depending on the form type.

• A contact form is a basic asset on a business website. It’s the simple way for a visitor to contact you at any time of the day (or the night), while you have the full list of submissions safely stored. You’re free to browse visitor inquiries, respond to them whenever you have the chance, and have a good overview of the topics prospects or customers mentioned when reaching out to you. One more way to nurture contact form leads is to follow up on them with a targeted solution, offer or promotion, based on what they were aiming in the contact message.
• Newsletter subscription forms are popularly known for being lead collectors, as they provide you with respondents’ email addresses. Once collected, addresses can be stored in CRMs, from where you can choose to engage them in tailored email marketing campaigns. The good thing about web forms is that many of them offer integration solutions with CRMs, so that every new lead is stored automatically in the system where you need it to be.
• Contest forms have a highly incentivizing character. After all, we all love contests and getting the chance to win something. Pay attention to clearly stating what’s in for participants. Contact details you gain from contest submissions are also useful in repurposing for further marketing actions.
• Freebie forms have a similar effect to contest forms, as they do too offer something for free. The difference (and perhaps an advantage for engagement) is they offer the freebie to everyone providing their contact details, not just to one/a few lucky winners. Powerful freebies are ebooks, cheatsheets, whitepapers, recordings of webinars, and other free stuff which your visitors valuate.
• Request-a-quote forms are those type of forms your website visitors use to receive a tailored offer for their needs. After filling in a few details about the requested project or service, respondents receive your offer, while you get their contact details. Even if they’re not convinced by your first offer, following up on these leads can turn them into customers when using the right solution for them.
• Surveys can be a source of new leads too, if you include fields that ask for participants’ contact data. The survey can have any topic from market research to customer feedback. The advantage of it is that it helps you gain a better understanding of a particular matter. This leads further on to improving that matter and becoming a better service provider for your customers and potential clients. Surveys can be placed and shared everywhere, on every channel, while respondents can fill it out whenever they have time to do so. If you have respondents’ contact details, you can include them into messages referring to that particular matter from the survey.

When talking about web forms and lead generation, a few basic tips can help you increase their effectiveness. First of all, limit the number of fields to as few as possible. Nothing is more annoying than filling out a never-ending form, is it? Second, clearly let your web forms show who you are, what they’re for and what respondents get from filling them out. Third, build your web forms in a way that strengthens your brand and has a good visual impact – use your business logo, colors, images, a customized call to action (submit button) and customized thank you messages that let form respondents know their submission was successful.

Last, but not least, test and improve your web forms on the go. Perseverance is the key to success. And to lead gathering, in this case.

How are you doing with your lead gathering?

Image via Shutterstock

Content marketing sometimes gets a bad rep because its benefits are not exactly the most measurable of any marketing activity around. Most of its advantages are believed to be intangible, like the building of brand recognition and increased exposure.

Don’t get me wrong — those benefits are great and doubtlessly essential to successful online marketing, but we marketers often like to be able to get specific, measured benefits out of something. Never fear, for such benefits are certainly available with content marketing. Here are 9 content metrics that will help you determine tangible ROI from your content production.

1. Sales

The most important thing about a marketing campaign is the bottom line. Improving it and your customer base is essentially the objective of every marketing campaign. With that goal in mind, it’s important to see how your content performs against the objective.

Furthermore, once your business has enough customers to figure out an average order value, you can even find out how much money you are generating from each piece of content by multiplying the number of sales by the average order value.

2. Time on Page

One of the lesser-known search engine ranking factors is average visit duration. The more people like your content, the longer they stay on your site. In Google’s eyes, that’s a good thing, which leads to a ranking increase.

Google Analytics allows you to drill down and see the average amount of time one of your visitors spends on a certain piece of content.

3. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is another important ranking factor, a metric that measures the ratio of the number of one-page visits to the number of total visits. The lower your bounce rate, the better — it means your content is engaging enough for visitors to want to stay and browse around.

Google Analytics also lets you see the bounce rate for a specific page on your website. Content with a low bounce rate usually has lots of internal links and high-quality information easily digested by the reader.

4. Lead Generation

Some say that content marketing is all about generating leads, and that isn’t completely untrue. Lead generation is definitely one of the eminent focuses of successful content marketing campaigns.

Sometimes, it can be a bit difficult to measure the number of leads you generate with a specific piece of content (particularly if you have a complex funnel with several hoops and loops), but it’s still one of the best ways to find out your content’s ROI.

5. Mailing List Subscriptions

If you have a newsletter/mailing list on your website — and you should — then each piece of content you create should be trying to get people to sign up to it (because email beats search and social in conversions).

Some (not all) autoresponder services allow you to see from which webpage a subscription came from. That ability allows you to find out which pieces of content perform best in terms of bringing in new subscribers

6. Social Shares

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This is one of the more obvious content metrics as it is easily observed, particularly when you have a handy social share plugin configured on your site.

Here’s an example: a recent post I wrote for the Writtent blog on buzzwords obtained 1503 shares (to date). This particular post did quite well; the majority of posts at Writtent currently get

It’s a cold, hard truth about sales: Just because your business has a contact data set doesn’t mean you should use it without question, nor let it use you.

After all, you don’t have unlimited time or an unlimited budget, so dedicating resources to pursuing unqualified leads dilutes your attention – attention that might be better used on qualified leads already in your sales pipeline.

A sales lead is unqualified when it doesn’t meet all, or even some, of your identified criteria for moving the lead along in the sales process. Once you classify a lead as unqualified, you need to either revisit its ability to meet your criteria or document its missing criteria and put it through a lead nurturing process.

So how do you filter out unqualified leads and more effectively identify qualified sales leads? You start with a scientific approach to your sales process to increase your lead qualification efficiency and decrease your opportunity costs. Let’s walk through the steps of that scientific process to qualified lead generation:

Begin With The First Contact Filter

When you first establish contact with a lead, it’s critical that you have a robust first contact filter to determine the lead’s qualification. Included in your first contact filter should be questions such as:

• Is the lead a duplicate or does it contain invalid data?
• Is the target company still in business or does it still represent an opportunity?
• Is your product or service a viable option for this business?
• Is the lead a subset of a hierarchy or part of a larger opportunity?

When these initial lead qualification questions are thorough, you ensure that your time is most effectively spent with only the most qualified leads after your initial conversation. Not only does this save you more time later in the sales process, but it also fills your sales pipeline with only viable opportunities.

Use Additional Lead Qualification Filters

Beyond your first contact filter, your business (or any proficient outsourced lead generation partner) should apply further filters to help you sort between unqualified and qualified leads.

Identify Your Buyer Persona

Buyer personas are an essential part of the B2B sales process, so before you start qualifying sales leads, you need to determine the characteristics of your ideal buyer. Then, during the lead qualification process, measure each potential lead against your buyer persona sketch.

Use The BANT Method

The BANT method is an industry standard for pinpointing a qualified lead. The BANT acronym stands for:

• Budget – What is this lead’s budget for a product or service like mine?
• Authority – What is this contact’s authority at his or her company?
• Need – How badly does this lead need my product or service?
• Timeline – How quickly does this lead need a product or service implementation? (More on timelines below)

When you filter leads through these four standard criteria, you’re able to paint a clearer picture of whether it is an unqualified or qualified lead – and whether it’s an opportunity worth pursuing right away.

Focus On Timeline Criteria

While the timing factor is already a part of BANT, your sales team more precisely qualifies leads if they pay particularly close attention to a lead’s timing requirements for your product or service. Once you identify that the contact needs your product or service, determining the project timeline is critical to closing the sale effectively. If a lead’s timeline requirements are more than a year out, then he or she is not as qualified as other opportunities with timing needs nearer to the present.

Develop Customized Filtering Criteria

No single criteria system can determine a qualified lead for your company as well as you can, so whether you’re qualifying leads yourself or you’re working with an outsourced lead generation partner, you should develop a set of custom criteria that qualify leads for your specific company. Consider criteria such as:

• Company size
• Position title
• Industry
• Knowledge or familiarity with your product or service
• Other special requirements

When you create this final, customized lead qualification filter, you ensure that sales leads aren’t just generically qualified, but that they’re uniquely qualified for your business.

Qualified leads keep your sales team busy with the work that matters most: generating revenue. By adopting a scientific approach to your lead qualification process, you not only keep your sales team focused on revenue generation, but you stop wasting time pursuing leads that don’t turn into closed sales.

The sales profession is a dynamic landscape. From economic ups-and-downs to shifts in consumer trends, it’s necessary to keep a finger on the pulse of best practices in order to create scalable and repeatable success in your sales organization.

In its recent study on sales training and development, Aberdeen surveyed 260 organizations to determine the most effective sales training techniques. Aberdeen benchmarked Best-in-Class companies against average and laggard performing organizations. Companies were best-in-class if they:

• had more than 80% of their teams achieving quota
• had a 14% average increase in revenue
• had a 9.5% year-over-year increase in average deal size

Here are the five critical points for sales leaders to take from Aberdeen’s sales training research:

1. Ongoing Reinforcement of Sales Training Is Vital to Your Sales Team’s Success

Best-in-Class sales organizations follow initial sales training with a formal plan for reinforcement. When compared against sales organizations who hadn’t implemented a reinforcement process, there was a significant gap in performance for:

• Customer retention (74% vs. 67%)
• Teams meeting quota (79% vs. 71%)
• Reps meeting quota (63% vs. 55%)

According to the report, a strong reinforcement program consists of post-training follow-up, assessments, and ongoing investment into salesperson growth.

2. Enhancing The Sales Conversation Leads To Better Overall Sales Performance

A focused investment in a consistent sales messaging platform leads to a better-informed and higher performing sales team. Since today’s buyer is better able to research products and services before ever speaking with a salesperson, it’s crucial that individual reps are armed with the ability to nurture, negotiate, close, and service deals at all times. Buyers are looking for a personalized conversation, not a “standardized message.”

Aberdeen also reports that “improving the ability to engage senior-level executive decision-makers” is more popular than it was a year ago. A sales messaging initiative that focuses on uncovering needs with high-level business impact is critical to reaching decision-makers.

3. A Formal Sales Methodology Is More Than “Just A Luxury”

With an average annual sales quota of $894k among the survey respondents, and an average deal size of $137k, it is clear that companies need a formalized sales methodology to create effective, repeatable discussions at every stage of the sales cycle.

In fact, according to Aberdeen, “Whether developed internally or acquired with the help of an external sales training provider, a deliberate process to guide sales activities is essential to any organization seeking to maximize their sales results and grow their businesses.”

Best-in-Class organizations adopted these best practices as part of their sales initiatives:

Blended learning: Your team needs the flexibility to absorb content in whatever way works best for each individual.

Ongoing training:  Best-in-Class firms are 22% more likely than all others to refresh their teams’ training at least on a quarterly basis.

Given tools: Though sales staff may be told the most effective way to make a sale, unless they are provided with the right tools and support, they may not be able to translate it past head-knowledge.

4. Sharing Metrics Across Your Sales Organizations Leads To Better Equipped Salespeople

Best-in-Class sales organizations make company-wide sales information available to all sellers, creating, what Aberdeen calls, “tribal sales knowledge.”  Sharing metrics across the organization, along with having a central place to access sales best practices and tools, as well as a way for sellers to capture “institutional knowledge” drives sales performance.

5. It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint

It is important to invest – over time – in the implementation and adoption of a high-value sales process. Investing in both people and process is vital to the success of your sales organization.

Aberdeen’s research makes it clear that your sales initiative needs to go beyond the old-fashioned basics. Take the time to train your sales staff how to not only reach and impact high-level executives in the buying organization, but also make them audible-ready to customize their message to the buyer.

This kind of dedication to the transformation of your sales process can result in higher team attainment of sales quota, higher percentage of reps meeting quota, and better customer retention.