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We all rely on email, we all know it can get overwhelming. To get back in control, Tim Ferris suggests setting up auto-responses that make it clear you only check your emails at certain times of day. He even offers his own for you to try out yourself.

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Metro Vancouver’s office vacancy rates are at their highest levels since 2005, rising to 9.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2014 from 8.7 per cent in the first quarter, according to a report by Colliers International released Monday. Reasons for the hike include a lack of demand for office space among traditional industries, with most having completed their lease deals; a hike in office inventory; some tenants adopting a “wait-and-see” approach on how landlords react to a larger inventory; and a slowdown in the mining industry.

Last February, 16-year-old Ann Makosinski drew applause and gasps when she appeared on The Jimmy Fallon Show. The Victoria native was showing off her invention—a flashlight powered by the heat of a human hand—on a segment with two other young inventors. It wasn’t just Makosinski’s clever adaptation of technology that wowed the crowd; it was her inspiration: the plight of a friend in the Philippines who’d failed a grade at school because she lacked electricity to study at night. Her empathy-driven ingenuity has won her acclaim and the top prize for 15- to 16-year-olds at the Google Science Fair, a place on Time’s “Top 30 under 30” list, as well as a barrage of media coverage. As she exited the stage, Fallon shook his head in awe. “I’m going to work for her one day, I can feel it,” he said.

Fallon’s line may be a cliché, but it echoes a growing sentiment, as the spotlight is thrust on Generation Z, the unimaginative term for the cohort following Gen Y, or Millennials. While dispute rages over parameters, Gen Z are loosely defined as those born after 1995 and who are now 18 and under. It’s a big group: two billion worldwide, and one-quarter of the North American population.

Research, though still in beta, points to the emergence of a stellar generation: educated, industrious, collaborative and eager to build a better planet—the very qualities exemplified by Makosinski. In fact, in a manner typical of the need to neatly compartmentalize generations, Gen Z is already being branded as a welcome foil to the Millennials, born between 1980 and the mid- or late 1990s, who have been typecast as tolerant but also overconfident, narcissistic and entitled. Those characteristics weren’t an option for the first post-9/11 generation, one raised amid institutional and economic instability, informed by the looming shadow of depleting resources and global warming, and globally connected via social media.

Much of the current chatter surrounding Gen Z has been generated by the 56-slide presentation “Meet Generation Z: Forget everything you learned about Millennials,” produced by New York City advertising agency Sparks & Honey. It found that 60 per cent of Gen Zers want jobs that had a social impact, compared with 31 per cent of Gen Ys. It deemed them “entrepreneurial” (72 per cent want to start their own businesses), community-oriented (26 per cent already volunteer) and prudent (56 per cent said they were savers, not spenders). Gen Z is also seen to be more tolerant than Gen Y of racial, sexual and generational diversity, and less likely to subscribe to traditional gender roles.

Other studies paint them as the new conservatives. A Centers for Disease Control survey of 13,000 high school students released in June reported that teens smoke, drink and fight far less than previous generations (though they’re more likely to text while driving). “Overall, young people have more healthy behaviours than they did 20 years ago,” reported study coordinator Dr. Stephanie Zaza, who noted that use of drugs and weapons and risky sex have declined since the study began in 1991.

The influential author and consultant Don Tapscott is a Gen Z optimist. His 2008 book, Grown Up Digital, features a study of 11,000 kids who were asked whether they’d rather be smarter or better looking: 69 per cent chose “smarter.” So is social researcher Mark McCrindle, of Sydney-based McCrindle Research, who has been looking at Gen Z for seven years. “They are the most connected, educated and sophisticated generation in history,” he says. “They don’t just represent the future, they are creating it.”

That’s reflected in the new spate of teen celebrities, whose industry and earnestness runs contrary to Gen Y poster girls Lindsay Lohan and Lady Gaga. Teen innovators have always been with us (Braille, hip hop and earmuffs were all products of adolescent minds), but global social media combined with crowdsourcing, open-platform education and sharing have given this generation’s inventors unprecedented influence. In 2012, 17-year-old student Angela Zhang revealed a protocol that allowed doctors to better detect cancerous tumors on MRI scans; that year, 15-year-old Jack Andraka made headlines with his inexpensive, accurate sensor, able to detect pancreatic cancer.

Their defining characteristic, so far, is that they’re a new species—“screenagers,” the first tribe of “digital natives.” That’s the much-debated term that distinguishes the wired-from-the-crib from “digital immigrants,” for whom the Internet is a second language.

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The result could well be the most profound generation gap ever: a digital divide between parents who see the Internet as disrupting society as we know it (and making them feel obsolete) and their kids, who are not only at home with the technology—“it’s like air to them,” Tapscott says—but are already driving many of the shifts happening in how we communicate, the way we access information and the culture we consume.

Gen Z are bellwethers, says McCrindle: “Where Gen Z goes, our world goes.” What that portends is seismic social disruption and the commensurate anxiety. “This is the first time in history kids know more than adults about something really imporant to society—maybe the most important thing,” says Tapscott. “[It’s] a formula for fear.” Despite this tension—or perhaps because of it—expectations for a generation have never been higher. Forbes has dubbed Gen Z “Rebels with a cause.” The Financial Times posed the question: “Generation Z, the world’s saviours?” Tapscott says Gen Z doesn’t have a choice: “My generation is leaving them with a mess. These kids are going to have to save the world literally.”

The emerging thinking about Gen Z stands at a remarkable disconnect from the particular anxiety that’s long surrounded the idea of digital natives, one stoked by such bestsellers as Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Mark Baulerein’s The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, and Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.We’ve seen more than a decade of hand-wringing over declining attention spans, eroding social skills, online bullying and sexting, along with the worry that communicating in short bursts and emoticons deadens the brain’s ability to think in complex ways. There’s also the debate raging over the elimination of cursive writing from many schools, and charges that the decline in traditional forms of learning such as memorization and rote signals a drop in standards.

Even before the crowning of Generation Z, some experts were challenging those assumptions, suggesting we may have been applying 20th-century expectactions to a new matrix where they no longer apply. Amy Bastian, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, contends that the greater the variety of things you do in the fine-motor domain, the more you improve dexterity, but refuses to declare cursive writing is better or more important for a child’s development than printing.

Where one skill is lost, another may be gained. If children are less likely to dig deep and find out the rationale behind something, or to memorize it, says pediatrician Michael Rich, executive director of Harvard’s Centre of Media and Child Health, it’s because “their brains are rewarded not for staying on task, but for jumping to the next thing”—a useful ability in the digital era. Tapscott sees the term “multi-tasking” as an old-fogey misnomer: “What we’re actually watching is adaptive reflexes—faster switching and more active working memories,” he says.

McCrindle speaks of non-natives having to adapt to the new “post-linear” digital reality, meaning events no longer follow a traditional chronology. “People watch things when they want to watch them; learning takes place anywhere, anytime.” We’re looking at the world through glass—tablets, Google Glass—designed for images, not words, McCrindle says. This is also a “post-logical” world that emphasizes emotional reaction: “Social media is more right-brain, not left-brain,” a fact to which anyone who spends time on Twitter can attest.

Gen Z is “a global experiment,” says McCrindle. No longitudinal studies have been done on the neural mapping of a species exposed to up to 10 hours daily of multi-media screens since infancy, he says. Our enduring fascination with how toddlers interface with technology is reflected in the popularity of the YouTube video titled “A magazine is an iPad that doesn’t work.” It shows a little girl sliding her finger in frustration over a glossy fashion magazine as if it’s an iPad.

So much remains unknown about Gen Z that trying to define them by a letter of the alphabet seems like a doomed effort; after all, the youngest of them are four. “Their formative years haven’t been lived yet,” says McCrindle. The survey from Sparks & Honey itself is limited in scope, based on interviews with a handful of teachers, two dozen Gen Zers and listening in on thousands of Gen Z on social media, says Sara DaVanzo, the agency’s chief cultural strategy officer. Marketing focus remains on Gen Y: “Gen Z hasn’t been fully embraced because it’s young with limited spending power; marketers don’t recognize their inordinate influence.” (Sparks & Honey advises brands to sell themselves as socially responsible to appeal to this burgeoning demographic, and to “co-innovate” products with customers.)

Defining a generation with such a broad brush overlooks the fact there will be losers, says Tapscott. He points out that while the top third of young adults in North America may be seen as spectacular compared to previous generations—better educated, with SAT and GMAT scores at all-time highs—and that the middle third is likewise more capable and knowledgeable, the bottom third are dropping out of high school due to various forces: family breakdown, pernicious cultural influences.

“It’s not a failing of technology,” he says. “It’s a failing of public policy.” But the fact remains that digital connectivity has costs. Tapscott speaks of new class lines forming between digital haves and have nots.

There are other consequences of digital life. Sparks & Honey reports that reliance on mobile devices has led to kids having poor spatial skills and trouble navigating streets without GPS; hours spent in front of screens puts them at increased risk for obesity. And Gen Z, like every generation, has its jerks: Nash Grier, the 16-year-old Vine sensation, was recently in the news for making homophobic slurs.

If you define a generation too early, “you’re really looking at the way their parents are operating, not who they are,” says Robert Barnard, CEO of Toronto-based Decode, a company that provides data on youth. Still, he argues that the older end of any demographic tends to be an early influencer or indicator of a generation’s values. He also makes a distinction between broad “generational traits” and “life-stage traits” consistent across generations. In other words, Gen Z can be more bright-eyed about saving the world because they’re 14 years old, as opposed to being 28 and competing in a brutal job market.

However accurate our projections of Gen Z may or may not be, in what can be seen as self-fulfilling prophecy, our assumptions about how Gen Z is changing the world are themselves shaping a generation that will change the world as we know it. Emojili, the first emoji-only social site, is about to launch—a the perfect platform for a generation we believe to be post-literate. Publishing is increasingly embracing short reads, or “mini-books,” evidenced by Amazon’s StoryFront. Increasingly, universities are courting those high-achieving high school and even grade school students with programs offering exposure to higher learning. The University of Toronto engineering faculty, for instance, offers Girls’ Jr. DEEP summer programs for Grades 3 to 8—an edge the Millennials surely wish they had had.

Entrepreneurship is also a big buzzword: in a world where full-time jobs and pensions are in decline, it’s a glossy way of saying Gen Z is on its own. According to the Sparks & Honey survey, this cohort places less value on higher education (64 per cent want advanced degrees, compared to 71 of Gen Y). In response, universities have replaced the emphasis on the now-dated corporate M.B.A. with “entrepreneurial hubs.” The Thiel Fellowship hands out $100,000 to kids willing to forgo university. Makosinski, about to enter Grade 12, expresses ambivalence about university. “There are so many choices out there,” she says. She’d like to spend her second year at 30 Weeks, a New York City entrepreneurship program. She also has ambitions to start her own business, a YouTube channel, after she improves the efficiency of her flashlight. She has invented a game-changing tool that could eliminate the battery, but she’s smart enough to see a viable future in YouTube, a concept alien to many adults.

Technology is seen as the great generational divide here, but if there is a pan-generational leveller, paradoxically, it’s technology, and the fact we’re all equally hooked; adults are just addicted to older, in some cases obsolete, technologies. “Parents of Gen Z kids think their kids are using too much technology,” says Barnard, “but they’re addicted to it themselves, and don’t know how to deal with it.” The only real difference is the platform. The most active people on Facebook, Barnard notes, are 30- to 40-year-old women; their children use Slingshot or Tumblr. (Sparks & Honey noted Gen Z places greater value on privacy than Gen Y, because it chooses anonymous, ephemeral communication tools such as SnapChat, Secret and Whisper, although the bigger appeal of these technologies may just be that they’re newer.)

What is not in doubt is that the power balance has shifted to the more digitally proficient, says McCrindle. The “don’t trust anyone over 30” mantra espoused by youth in the 1960s has gone full circle: now no one trusts anyone over 20. One need only look to Vogue editor Anna Wintour’s literal embrace of Tavi Gevinson, who founded the influential fashion blog Style Rookie at age 11, in the front row of fashion shows. Now 18, Gevinson is an actor and editor-in-chief of the online magazine Rookie, whose feminist message is heralded as an antidote to rampant sexualized imagery of girls. The child savant is a hot ticket, evident in the gush over Flynn McGarry, the 15-year-old Los Angeles cooking prodigy, whose pop-up dinners are sell-outs. In Silicon Valley, competition for young talent is now so intense that interns as young as 13 are scouted; Facebook flies in kids with their parents to meet Mark Zuckerberg. It’s not uncommon for some to make a year’s salary in a summer, or receive a $100,000 grant—another example of how Gen Z is vaulting over the Millennials, while simultaneously becoming a threat to Gen X and Boomers.

The new obsession with seeing youth as prophets has made 16-year-old Adora Svitak an in-demand speaker on the global think-tank circuit. The activist and author came to public attention at age 12 with her 2010 TED Talk, “What adults can learn from kids,” in which she called for “bold, childish ideas.” The talk has had over 3.4 million views and been translated into over 40 languages. Turning to children for advice has also been institutionalized in the trend of “reverse-mentoring.” Tapscott was an early adoptor, employing a 13-year-old to head his digital team more than a decade ago. He currently has five teenage “mentors,” he says.

Ironically, one of the lessons the kids have for adults is about the perils of being defined by online behaviour. “Our whole lives can literally be centred over a little piece of metal; it’s pretty crazy,” says Makosinski, who says her parents are strict about her Internet use. She depends on the Internet as a resource for everything, but knows when to take a break, she says: “Sometimes I’m just like, ‘I’m going to close my Facebook for a bit and detox.’ ”

Speaking on Skype from Barcelona, where she’s holidaying with her family after giving a talk in Paris, Svitak says the fact so many kids spend so much time online saddens her. Her fondest childhood memories involved playing outside: “When you look back, you are not going to remember the emails you sent,” she says, noting that when given the choice, kids will invariably select a video game over taking a hike: “If what’s on a cell is brighter or flashier, kids will choose that.” Adults need to exert their influence, Svitak says: “We can’t leave parenting up to the Internet.” Tellingly, even defending the value of adult wisdom and experience has fallen to youth, seen in Rookie’s popular advice column: “Ask a grown man/Ask a grown woman.”

It’s also Generation Z, demarked by the end of the alphabet as we know it, that’s calling for the end of generational segmentation. It doesn’t ring true any more, Svitak says: “It ignores a lot of the things that shape personalities and collective thinking.” It also ignores the fact characteristics are fluid throughout life. “Understanding shared Baby Boomer traits is easy because most of their lives has passed,” she says. “But anyone making generalizations about me will have to realize I will change many, many times.” Svitak’s generation is global, one with all of history and geography at its fingertips, able to draw from all eras and places. Her friends are both older and younger, she says, naming a pan-generational list of role models that includes Hillary Clinton, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, J.K. Rowling, Olympic long-distance runner Emil Zátopek. Likewise, Makosinski cites electrical engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla and the Indian musican Ravi Shankar as inspirations. “I’m fascinated by the 1960s,” she says.

Brands appeal to need, anxiety, aspiration. The creation of the Gen Z brand is no different, right from the marketing report that sparked the chatter. Sparks & Honey’s quest to identify such a young demographic was spurred by client need, says DaVanzo. “Many of our [client companies] are struggling with planning for the future in a world defined by chaos, volatility, uncertainty, ambiguity and change.” The idea of a Gen Z brand has been embraced by media as a kind of talisman for our hopes and fears.

Svitak doesn’t want any part of it. She plans to write a book on generational change—one that’s introspective. “Too often it’s from a marketer’s perspective,” she says. For now, though, our understanding of her generation comes from outside, with the understanding that the way we see Gen Z reflects everyone else’s needs, as much as who they are.

The post Get ready for Generation Z appeared first on Macleans.ca.

VICTORIA — While Premier Christy Clark touts the promise of a new industry based on the export of liquefied natural gas, news reports continue to raise doubts about her ability to deliver on the multi-billion-dollar results. “A sharp fall in European and Asian gas prices this year will put liquefied natural gas export projects worldwide under heavy cost pressure, and even kill some off, as expected returns on investments have to be revised down along with prices,” said a Reuters report out of the United Kingdom last week.

Most companies understand the importance of setting marketing-friendly prices as part of their international pricing strategy, but if you aren’t careful about how you display those prices, you can actually lose revenue.

There are two ways that companies typically handle pricing products in multiple currencies:

1. Show all currencies on a single page
2. Duplicate “sites” or “stores” for each currency/region

The following example shows how companies display all currencies on a single page:

On the surface, it may not seem problematic to allow users to self-select their region/price and buy your product. However, requiring customers to self-select is an extra click and decision point that is completely unnecessary. Furthermore, what happens if a customer in Europe tries to buy via one of the other regions? They get the product at a 35 percent discount because it’s a dollar-for-Euro converted price. That’s real money lost – and can cause channel conflict with local distribution partners.

The following example from THQ, an interactive entertainment software company, has different prices shown by country, but only after clicking through a country flag:

This interstitial page option eliminates the previously noted problem about customers seeing more than one price. However, there are no restrictions preventing customers from choosing an incorrect region and buying at a reduced price.

A slightly better option than the interstitial page option is the country drop-down selection list. With this option, customers are directed to a main company page with the option to self-select the most appropriate region or country. The following example captures this well:

I like to think of this as the “majority rules” option whereby all customers arrive at your default page, usually English language and U.S. Dollar prices. For the majority of your customers, this might be the correct language and currency, but what about the potentially large minority of customers?

If they are used to paying in Euro, British Pound or Yen, are you leaving money on the table because customers are not aware that they can change the country selection option? They may think you only accept payment in U.S. Dollar, a currently weak currency. On the surface, this option seems to make sense by eliminating the dreaded self-selection choice, but as you dig deeper, it may be the worst option because your customers may not choose the correct international option or be disappointed in the price once they see it is more in their home currency.

Another popular method for routing your customers is with dedicated domains. Tune Up, the German PC tuning company, uses this method with www.tuneup.de for German-speaking customers and www.tune-up.com for all other customers. This has the benefit of correctly routing people who search for the company’s products in search engines, but has the negative effect of not building up a single domain for SEO purposes.

Tune Up spends time and energy building link relevancy with search engines on two domains rather than one. Customers, if they are savvy enough, can visit either domain to buy their product, but this step requires a little more work than earlier routing methods.

The big question remains: What’s the best way to configure your website to show international pricing?

Ideally, you’d like to know where each customer is coming from and then automatically show them the correct price and currency. Well, that technology exists – and best of all it’s easy to implement.

Everyone browsing on the Internet is assigned an IP, which is read by your Web server software. Over the years, a number of companies have cataloged IP addresses by geographical location, resulting in 99.8 percent accuracy on the country level, 90 percent on U.S. state level. Give it a try yourself by finding your IP Address at whatismyip.com and entering your IP Address at maxmind.com. How accurate was the result?

By incorporating a service such as MaxMind or Quova into your webstore, you can almost always estimate your customers’ locations and route them to the proper product pricing page – eliminating the self-selection step and prying customer eyes. The result is that your product pricing reaches the customer for which it was intended. Your customers have a better user experience because they are not clicking as many links, being forced to make unnecessary decisions or missing international options completely – and you have higher conversion rates!

From a customer’s perspective the experience is seamless, as his/her location will be determined automatically. The concept of other localized versions of your website wouldn’t cross your visitors’ minds unless you want it to (for example, through a drop-down menu). This brings the customer’s focus to your products with localized marketing and pricing messages. Put all of this together and you have a shopping experience that is tailored to each of your visitors and will help you sell more.

There are a few things to keep in mind when considering IP-based pricing:

• Travelers – In the rare instance that someone decides to make a purchase while traveling out of his/her designated pricing region, the traveler is shown pricing from the region he/she is currently located. When people travel, they are used to seeing the local product prices in the currency where they are traveling. Plan to create a policy for such cases.
• Anonymous IP – Services that anonymize IP addresses may show an IP from a pricing region different from the one the customer actually belongs to. Few people use these services, but you should have a policy for how to communicate a solution to customers in this situation.
• Not 100 percent accurate – There is always a chance that the country returned by the IP location provider will not be where your visitor is actually located. Typically if this happens, the visitor is placed in an adjacent country. For example, someone in Denmark near the German border might be placed in Germany. These instances are extremely rare, and the benefit of IP-based pricing far outweighs this risk.

To successfully sell internationally, you must not only price your products for local markets, but display them effectively. Therefore, it’s imperative to embrace IP-based routing, especially for emerging markets.

How have you handled international pricing and your customers’ ability to see product pricing? Are there any pitfalls that you have run into?

Copywriting. Arm yourself with the knowledge needed to move people with words and you will need little else to make and save a ton of money. Regardless of which industry you’re in, when you need to effectively sell a product or service (or even an idea), copywriting is how you do it. Your copy is your salesman, one that can directly determine the success of your website, marketing campaigns, and company.

However, not every business can afford to hire a professional copywriter. The good ones usually come with a hefty price tag, plus, they are often booked way in advance.

What’s the solution?
Write your own amazing copy!
Sure, there is a learning curve involved, but any time or money you invest will be well worth it.

To help you get started, here’s a huge list containing some of the best (mostly free, but some paid) copywriting resources on the web. You may want to bookmark this one;) Feel free to add to the list in the comments.

Copywriting Websites & Blogs

1. Copyblogger – One of the best free copywriting resources on the web. Explore this site if you want to learn how to create (and market) content that engages and converts.

2. The Copywriter’s Crucible – Freelance copywriter Matt Ambrose covers blogging, content marketing, and all things copy.

3. Copy Hackers – A great place to learn how to effectively write conversion copy. Find tips, training, and lots of other information here.

4. The Copywriter’s Roundtable – Expert direct response copywriter John Forde talks web copywriting, sales science, selling psychology, and more.

5. AdCopyWriting – A website about marketing, advertising, and writing stuff that sells. Joe Robson’s resources can make you a better copywriter for sure.

6. Nick Usborne – Copywriting veteran Nick Usborne helps freelancers and businesses improve their writing skills through articles, books, programs, etc.

7. The Rant – Renowned John Carlton, mentor to many successful writers and marketers, rants and spills beans of copy writing wisdom.

8. SEO Copywriting – Heather Lloyd-Martin helps businesses master the latest SEO content creation strategies – and make more money.

9. ContentVerve – Michael Lykke Aagaard’s ContentVerve is all about content, copy, and conversion. A lot of valuable how-to posts and info on this site.

10. Unbounce – A conversion marketing blog packed with information on landing pages, conversion rate optimization, email marketing, and more.

11. Make a Living Writing – Looking to earn a living as a professional writer? Check out award-winning Carol Tice’s blog for expert tips and advice.

12. The Gary Halbert Letter – If mastering copywriting is your goal, sign up to Gary Halbert’s free newsletter. Be sure to check out his website archive.

13. ABC Copywriting – Want to make your content sing, dance, and sell? Here, you’ll find dozens of quality posts that can arm you with the knowledge you need.

14. The Well-Fed Writer Blog – Author and commercial freelancer Peter Bowerman shows you how to go from starving writer to well-paid copywriter.

15. Direct Creative – Well-known Dean Rieck offers no-nonsense direct response copywriting tips, tricks, and advice.

16. Jeff Sexton Writes – Start reading what Jeff Sexton writes in his blog to really hone your persuasion skills and start writing copy like a pro.

17. Harrison Amy Copywriting – Amy Harrison teaches businesses how to copywrite things that people actually read. Some quality resources on this website.

18. Marketing Bullets – Gary Bencivenga’s “bullets” are gold. As a copywriter and content marketer, you may find yourself referring back to them often.

19. Words That Begin With You – Justin Lambert’s content marketing blog offers copywriting insights that are relevant and useful. Worth checking out.

20. Ben Settle – Ben Settle is all about sales, and he knows how to make them. If you want to learn how to write butt-kicking emails and cash-sucking copy, follow his blog.

Starter Guides – Articles/E-books/Infographics

21. The Definitive Guide to Copywriting – An A-Z guide by Quick Sprout that teaches you everything you need to know about writing and optimizing persuasive copy.

22. Copywriting 101 – This free e-book by Copyblogger covers all the basics of copywriting in 10 easy steps. Perfect for newbies just starting out.

23. 101 Copywriting Dos & Don’ts – An excellent list of copy writing yays and nays geared toward unversed small businesses and startups.

24. Free Copywriting Worksheets – Another great Copy Hackers resource. Find worksheets here for all kinds of things related to business copywriting.

25. How People Read Online – Understanding how people read online (based on research) is important if you’re writing for the web. This infographic shows you that.

26. Copywriting Cheat Sheet – An embeddable cheat sheet infographic that covers the basics of writing copy for email, social media, and the web.

27. Free Copywriting Swipe File – Every smart copywriter has a bag of tricks (aka swipe file). Here’s one for you, courtesy of young entrepreneur Steve Fabian.

28. The 6 + 1 Model For Effective Copywriting – What’s missing in the classic AIDA formula? Danny Iny sheds some light and provides a method of his own.

29. 9 Sure-Fire Copywriting Formulas to Grow Your Audience – Speaking of copywriting formulas, here are 9 others you should know about.

30. Why grammar matters – As Tom Albrighton points out in this article, grammar matters when writing copy – see why. You can brush up on your grammar here.

Writing Headlines

31. 41 Classic Copywriting Headline Templates – Effective copywriters understand the importance of crafting powerful headlines. These templates are inspired by some of the best in the biz.

32. Writing Headlines That Get Results – Copyblogger founder Brian Clark imparts some headline writing wisdom and shares anecdotes, facts, and guidelines.

33. How to Write Magnetic Headlines – Learn how to get people to your content with this free 11-part, 56-page crash course in headline writing.

34. Can You Write a Better Headline Than This? – Well can you? If not, you may want to adopt Bnonn’s very sensible SHINE formula.

35. 9 Steps to Write Your Ultimate Home Page Headline – As Joanna emphasizes in this post, a few words could be all that stands between you and homepage conversions.

36. How to Write Brilliant Headlines for SEO, Social & Your Readers – Danny Goodwin outlines the goals of awesome headlines and analyzes 13 popular ones.

37. The Ultimate Guide To Writing Incredible Headlines – A neatly broken down guide that includes concise information and a number of useful resource links.

38. Write Great Headlines – Bourn Creative helps you understand different types of headlines and demonstrates how 1 headline can quickly be turned into 30.

39. 5 Data Insights into the Headlines Readers Click – Nathan Safran analyzes relevant statistics and data to establish what gets people clicking.

40. 10 questions to help you write better headlines – 10 things every copywriter should ask himself before his content goes live.

Writing CTAs (Call-To-Actions)

41. How to Write Call-to-Action Copy That Gets Visitors Clicking – HubSpotter Maggie Georgieva provides 5 tips on writing compelling call-to-action copy.

42. The A/B Test That Improved Call-to-Action CTR by 211% – Tony Mariotti of Friendbuy reveals how they boosted conversions significantly with one copywriting tweak.

43. The Complete Checklist for Creating Compelling Calls-to-Action – Ginny Soskey’s checklist contains the 11 essential elements of an effective CTA.

44. 6 Proven Ways to Boost the Conversion Rates of Your Call-to-Action Buttons – Are your CTA buttons getting clicks? Apply these tried and tested techniques.

45. [Case Studies] How Failed A/B Tests Can Increase Conversion Rates – When it comes to A/B testing, not all negative results are negative. Michael Aagaard elaborates.

46. What Makes a Great CTA? – To improve conversions, one must know what a winning call-to-action looks like. This post contains 10 good examples with test ideas.

47. High-impact Button Copy – How to write calls-to-action that convert – This 6-minute video shows you how to write tempting copy for your buttons.

48. How to Write a Strong Call-to-Action: 6 Simple Tips – Brianne Carlon provides 6 short and sweet tips for writing strong calls to action.

49. The Definitive Guide to Crafting Winning Calls to Action in Your Content – A nice thorough article for those not especially versed in CTAs and CTA writing.

50. 6 Factors of Call-To-Action Button Design – Copywriting and design go hand in hand, so you may find this useful. Stephanie Hamilton takes you through the basics of CTA design.

Books

51. Breakthrough Copywriting: How To Generate Quick Cash With The Written Word – David Garfinkel reveals insider secrets and shows you how to turn words into wealth.

52. The Art of Explanation: Making your Ideas, Products, and Services Easier to Understand – When buyers don’t understand your ideas and products, become an “explanation specialist.”

53. The Copywriter’s Handbook, Third Edition: A Step-By-Step Guide To Writing Copy That Sells – Copywriting, step by step. It’s aimed at beginners, but even pros can learn a thing or two.

54. Tested Advertising Methods – If you’re a small business, this informative classic is a must and will show you how to write persuasive ad copy and headlines.

55. How to Write a Good Advertisement – Direct marketing copywriter Victor Schwab was considered a “marketing master” in his day. Let him show you how to write copy.

56. Breakthrough Advertising – A rather pricey book that covers the more advanced aspects of advertising, marketing, and copywriting. Get this one once you have mastered the basics.

57. Copywriter’s Crib Sheet – 40 Proven and Tested Copywriting Secrets You can use in Your Ads Today and See Results in Your Bank Account Tomorrow – The title says it all. It’s a crib sheet!

58. SEO Copywriting Flow: Creating a Steady Stream of Rankings & Conversions – Search engines can get valuable prospects to your copy – if you know how to write for them.

59. Copywriting: For Beginners! – How to Use Copywriting to Sell Anything, Pitch Anything & Become Absolutely Irresistible – Great for copywriting rookies.

60. 70 SECRETS REVEALED: How To Write Content That Converts 600% More – If you have a website and sell something, these secrets will boost your conversions.

Courses

61. Kopywriting Kourse – A 4-part “kourse” that runs through all the basics of copywriting and teaches you to write stuff that sells, from emails to web content.

62. How to Write Copy for Startups – 4 value-packed e-books that have helped the likes of Quick Sprout, Crazy Egg, Shopify, and many others write better copy.

63. Conversion Copywriting Course – Once you’ve gone through the Copy Hackers books, this 10-week course expands on the material and lets you conquer copywriting.

64. Fired Up & Focused Optimization Bootcamp – The online bootcamp promises to improve your conversion funnel and whip your site into shape in under a month.

65. CopyHour – Have a free hour in your day? Spend it copying (by hand) web copy, advertisements, and headlines written by the best in the business.

66. AWAI’s Accelerated Program for Six-Figure Copywriting – If you’re interested in learning long form and promo letter copywriting, this is the program for you.

67. Advertising, Marketing and Sales Writing – A course aimed at sales and marketing professionals who want to land and close more sales using the written word.

68. How to Create Advertising Campaigns that Make Men Do What You Want – A 90-minute how-to webinar presented by AdCracker.com’s Steve McNamara.

69. Customer Carewords: Words on the Web that Make the Sale – This webinar by Gerry McGovern, among other things, teaches you to use search words and “customer carewords” effectively.

70. John Carlton’s Simple Writing System – Learn to write like a pro using the system of a copywriting pro. A home study course for entrepreneurs and small business owners.

Sales/Persuasion Psychology

71. 6 Powerful Social Media Persuasion Techniques – Jeff Sexton provides 6 persuasion techniques based on the principles in Dr. Robert Cialdini’s book, “Influence.”

72. Emotioneering Your Messaging: 4 Steps for Inspiring Action – Break through buying resistance by appealing to buyer emotions. Here’s a 4-step process.

73. 2 Secrets to Copy that Grabs Them by the – Well, you know. Learn 2 very important copywriting secrets that will have you “moving the needle.”

74. 2 Steps to Beating Buyer Procrastination – There are usually two reasons why buyers hold off buying products. Discover what they are and how to overcome them.

75. How To Play With People’s Minds To Get Them To Do Things Against Their Will – John Forde reveals 5 shocking ways to influence a buyer – also based on the writings of Dr. Cialdini.

76. Behavioural Economics – Mind Tricks You Can Use in Your Copywriting – Matt Ambrose shows you how to weave behavioral economics into copywriting.

77. Measure Macro AND Micro Conversions – Avinash Kaushik highlights the benefits of measuring micro-conversions and looks at a few examples.

Are there any resources not mentioned here that have had an impact on your copywriting and conversions? Help me make this a great list by sharing in the comments.

Much has been written about the research that suggests that a buyer is 57% through their buying process before they engage with a vendor. I have written about this how I think the ‘57%’ is sometimes misinterpreted. Sometimes buyers engage with you early, and sometimes the call you after they have done their own research. Strong patterns exist that correlate the level of awareness that a buyer has of a need to act as he rushes headlong to that 57% Point, directly with his propensity to buy something. That is really no surprise. The parallel pattern however is that his level of awareness is inversely proportional to your opportunity to create value. This is a vital opportunity to which every sales strategist should be paying attention and that’s because most effective selling happens before the buyer calls someone for a solution.

 

ACCOUNT PLANNING IS THE NEW MARKETING

Selling early means working in the areas traditionally assigned to marketing: raising awareness, generating interest, and being top of mind as the buyer develops a preference. Our way of expressing this mindset is “Account Planning is the new Marketing.”

Think about what good you can do for your customer early rather than waiting for them to call. This gives you an opportunity to apply account planning principles early and helps you deliver superior value.

Focus on creating, developing, pursuing, and winning business that delivers mutual value to you and your customer. If you can work on a project that’s good for the customer and good for you, it’s more likely to be non-competitive and less price sensitive. By delivering more value to your customer, you’ll improve your opportunity to succeed.

KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER

You need to have a deep understanding of your customer’s business problems and you need to know their people. Our surveys tell us that only 61% of salespeople think they’re good at uncovering their customer’s business problems, and only 54% of sales people believe that they know how to discover this key information. That’s a challenge that you must address and overcome to assure success. If you don’t understand the business problems and don’t know and understand the people, you’re unlikely to create value or make a sale.

SUMMARY

Every buying decision is subject to these four phases: (1) Awareness of need, (2) Interest in solving the problem, (3) Developing a preference for a solution, and (4) Deciding to make a purchase. You need to determine

if you acting before the buyer develops a preference or not? Whenever you can, act early to have a greater opportunity to create value. If you determine that you’re acting after the 57 percent point, you can still prevail if you qualify carefully and work from deep insight about the prospect’s business needs. Then, flank toward your strengths with unique business, target the people who can assist you – and win.

Please feel free to download our latest publication:

Battling the 57%: Deconstructing the Buyer Seller Dance.

We talk to sellers all the time that assume a buyer is thinking in the same ways that they are. You know the old saying, “never assume…..”. To build business you cannot afford to assume what’s in my head is the same thought that is in my buyer’s head instead think like your buyer.

In the last 10 hours of speaking with sales reps, some things surfaced which caused me to think about this trap we get in figuring how many people must think the way we do.

For example, one seller was telling me that if they phoned one of their dealer reps with a lead, they should not send an email immediately because it would seem too pushy. Really? That was the thought in his own head, and perhaps how he might feel (with a technical / left brain viewpoint) but certainly not a common perception in today’s busy business world.

His dealer rep is a representative of their brand and it would reflect poorly on the brand to wait until we think is “the right time” so as to not offend them. Instead, we want to call, email, and send smoke signals if we can get the rep’s attention because this hot lead could help our potential customer AND put money in the dealer’s pocket as well as the rep’s pocket too.

Therefore a seller MUST be good at thinking beyond their own heads and coming up with a number of possibilities.

Sellers with stalled opportunities often think the buyer is not interested or changed their mind because they have not heard back from them. The buyer stopped returning calls or replying to emails.

Using the advice above – coming up with a number of possibilities, it could be that:

• the buyer is on vacation
• the buyer got overwhelmed by other things going on
• the buyer sees no reason to rush (no urgency)
• the status quo is winning out

We really don’t know until we reach the buyer and talk with them directly.  Many sellers stop in their tracks once the buyer does not call back and just move on to other potential buyers. Those that do this are leaving money on the table.

As a professional seller, it is UPON YOU to follow-up with your prospective buyer until you have an idea – through speaking directly or talking with others near the buyer what they are doing instead of making up a story in your head.

This also means that just because YOU prefer the telephone, your buyer may not.

If you prefer email communication your buyer may not.

If you are over 40 and can’t understand why anyone would text a conversation, your buyer may not agree.

Open your mind to better understand your buyer. Forget what YOU prefer – think about what THEY prefer. How?

Ask them.

You may be surprised to hear the answers.

Lori Richardson is recognized on Forbes as one of the “Top 30 Social Sales Influencers” worldwide. Lori speaks, writes, trains, and consults with inside sales teams in mid-sized companies. Subscribe to the award-winning blog and the “Sales Ideas In A Minute” newsletter for sales strategies, tactics, and tips in selling. Increase Opportunities. Expand Your Pipeline. Close More Deals.

email lori@scoremoresales.com | My LinkedIn Profile | twitter | Visit us on google+

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On the heels of Procter & Gamble’s announcement that the word “marketing” will be eliminated from all job titles, companies large and small are forced to face one major fact: Branding is our present and our future. The previous title of “marketing” will now be replaced with “brand management,” but that’s not all that has changed. While marketing is still an important part of branding and selling, the P&G move does tell us one thing: The true job description of brand manager isn’t just putting information out there. No, branding professionals have a real fight on their hands.

Here are 4 reasons brand management should be your main focus, starting now:

Consumers’ Access to Brands

With smartphones in the hands of 56% of American adults and 34% owning tablets, and almost 79% of Americans accessing the Internet, consumers can find your brand whenever and wherever they please. When access to consumers consisted of a 30-second commercial during nightly television shows or a half-page ad in the local paper, your control over when and what information was shared was ironclad. Now, however, your message must be ready for consumption at any time.

Various Outlets for Brand Messaging

Because of the prevalence of smartphones and tablets, companies must also develop effective campaigns across all potential outlets. Print and television just don’t get the job done anymore. Consumers look to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Yelp! to get the information they need. Commercials may air on television, but most buyers will share them on social media and watch them on YouTube. What you create for one outlet must support and enrich the content released on every other outlet.

Consumer Ability to Change the Message

The Internet and consumers’ access to brand messages through it have made maintaining brand messages difficult for branding managers. With each message shared by users through Facebook or Twitter, the user has the ability to provide commentary that shapes the way others see the brand. Viral shares can quickly destroy the image your company has worked hard to cultivate, and only with diligent brand management can this be overcome.

Immediate and Public Consumer Feedback

The Internet has also made sharing feedback in the form of public reviews a possibility. Not only is it now possible for word-of-mouth to spread quickly, it’s actually the most trusted form of marketing available. If you’re not ready with management tactics to handle negative messages from consumers, you could quickly lose control of your company’s identity. With proper management, your reviews and testimonials become valuable social proof that helps build your brand.

In the face of such immense changes in how branding messages are delivered, companies must adapt. Jabez LeBret says, “Brand managers must let go of control in lieu of creating environments where customers can interact on their terms.” The problem is that there is a big difference between letting go of control and losing control. That’s where brand management comes into play.

Rather than forcing consumers to accept your company image through strict brand messaging, allow them to help shape your identity. Interaction and engagement will help you determine how your campaigns are received and where you might need additional work. Open your company’s website and social media to reviews and comments for that all-important social proof. You’ll be able to gauge whether you’re keeping the promises you’ve made, as well as which promises you should consider making.

With the right balance, your company will also be able to refocus your marketing efforts in favor of developing relationships with your buyers. And that’s how branding messages and images take on a new life.

With this drive toward brand management, you must always remember your brand strategy comes before anything else. That brand strategy must also move and change with public sentiment, meaning you’ll need non-stop fresh ideas. Nothing about branding is easy, but as long as you’re listening to customers and managing your company’s identity, you can experience lasting results.

We’ve all felt the frustration of calling a vendor and trying to get through to the right person. First you must navigate the automated attendant to get to the right department. Then you punch in your account number. Finally you get to a human being on the other end, and it turns out they’re not even in the right department. They transfer you to the correct one, and that agent asks you for the information you punched in earlier.

And you haven’t even gotten to the reason for your call.

Selling to B2B customers can be a similar process. Getting your message in front of the decision makers is difficult. So, how can you ensure that your B2B content makes it past the gatekeeper and into the hands of your target audience? (i.e. your ideal customer’s decision makers)

Create relevant content

Demand Gen Report found in their latest B2B Buyer Behaviour Survey that 58% of B2B buyers spend more time researching their purchases than they did in the past. Creating content that will help buyers in their research ensures that you stay top-of-mind with them as they make their decision. If your content “is relevant to their research and is helpful for them during the process,” then B2B technology buyers will pay attention to you.

Target the appropriate audience

Because there are always multiple involved in any B2B buying decision, create content that’s appropriate to those various roles and responsibilities. Understand that a one-size-fits-all approach is going to negatively impact the number of times your information makes it past the initial gatekeeper of your target audience. Repurpose your content and copy so that it appeals to IT staff, management, and senior executives. In fact, over 80% of IT executives stated that that content was a “significant” driver of their buying decisions. Eighty percent! Now that’s a BIG reason to target the appropriate audience with your B2B content, isn’t it?

Have the relevant timing

The final piece of the puzzle is to have the right timing with your content. The B2B buying pipeline is long, and your ideal customers appreciate the amount of content you can produce for each stage of the pipeline. Over 60% of surveyed B2B businesses said their winning vendors “delivered a better mix of content appropriate for each stage of the purchasing process.”

Final thought

After all this planning and creating, there’s one final thing that will ensure your B2B content gets past the gatekeeper and into the hands of the people that want it: help, don’t sell. B2B buyers are looking for information that proves you understand them and can help. To excite and inspire your target audience, your content should help them with obstacles and problems they face. By doing so, they’ll unconsciously think that you can help them solve their problems (which of course you can, but by not saying so outright, they come to the realization on their own, and create a bond with you.)

This is the second and final article on how to sell and profit from digital products. In part 1¹, we covered many of the benefits of digital products over physical goods as well as the marketing philosophies to help you build an audience for your products. Today, we will be discussing more of the tactics required for a successful digital product business. There’s also a dark side to this world, which we’ll get into towards the end.

Let’s jump in.

Sales And Fulfillment

Remember how one of the best things about digital products is that you don’t have to ship anything? Your profit margins are much higher, and fulfilling orders is so much easier! You still have to deliver the product to the customer, but e-commerce software will do that for you, so you don’t have to be involved at all.

This means you can be sipping Mai Tais on the beach or (more likely for me) playing with the kids while people are buying your product.

To set this up, you need some kind of software to show the product, accept purchases, process credit cards and then make the file available to be downloaded by the customer. PayPal has been the industry standard for more than 10 years, but it also hasn’t improved much in that time.

In fact, digital e-commerce solutions (at least the ones that are best for selling standalone products) were pretty stagnant until Gumroad⁸² launched a couple years ago.

When I was working on selling my first book, The App Design Handbook³, Ryan from Gumroad reached out to me to get me to consider the platform. I had a few questions about particular features, but what really sold me was the fantastic checkout experience.

The world of online payments has always been plagued by a frustrating checkout process, unnecessary fields and other design failures that make customers abandon their purchases. Gumroad changed that. Its checkout process is incredibly simple and elegant. The result is more purchases from less-frustrated customers.

Because my first books were about designing great software experiences, I felt that using a payment provider with a second-rate checkout process would be hypocritical.

All in One

Gumroad handles the checkout process from end to end. With many other providers, you need one tool to handle checkouts and deliver the file and another tool to process the actual payment. With Gumroad, one tool does everything. You upload the product, add your banking information (so that you can get paid) and start accepting sales!

The Overlay

Normally, you would need to set up quite a bit in order to get e-commerce working directly on your website. Linking to the payment page on a third-party website is easy, but keeping the customer from ever leaving your domain is more work (both in configuration and security).

⁴

So, one of my favorite features of Gumroad is its overlay checkout process. The checkout button on your sales page will trigger a modal overlay that contains the entire checkout process. Because that happens in a secure window, you don’t need to worry about security on your website, but you still get the benefits of the customer never leaving your website to pay.

No, I’m Not Being Paid by Gumroad

Yep, I love Gumroad. And, no, I’m not being paid to endorse it. Quite the opposite. I’ve paid Gumroad over $20,000 in payment-processing fees in the last one and a half years, and I’m still their biggest fan!

Product Launches

Once you’ve identified your market and set up your sales page and credit-card processing system, you’re ready to start accepting sales, right? Wrong.

Product launches fail for a number of reasons, and the most common is that the customer hears something like the following leading up to the launch: Silence… silence… silence… “Go buy now!”

Compelling, isn’t it? I know that would make me want to buy… not.

A Good Launch Requires a Launch Sequence

After blogging for a while and successfully launching The App Design Handbook and Designing Web Applications, I had an email list of about 5,000 designers. Because a few friends had been successful with online workshops, I wanted to try them as well. The result was a carefully planned (at least for the content) workshop on “Designing Web Applications.” I sold seats for $400 each and capped attendance at 25 people.

I thought this was going to be easy. I’d already done the hard work of building an audience, so my thought process was, “With an email list of 5,000 designers, how hard could it be to sell out 25 seats?”

With that mindset, I devised a strategy consisting of one email — which I thought was a really good email — to launch the workshop. The email was educational but tied nicely into a sales pitch at the end.

Monitoring Sales

After hitting “Send,” I tabbed over to Gumroad and waited for the sales to roll in. You know what? They didn’t come.

That really confused and frustrated me at first. In my previous product launches, I had seen up to $1,000 in sales within the first 10 minutes of launching. Why was this different?

Anticipation

When was the last time you bought a product within a few minutes — or even an hour — of hearing about it for the first time? That doesn’t happen often.

If you see a product that you sort of like and have the opportunity to buy it right then, chances are you will put it off until a bit later, and then completely forget to purchase.

With my previous launches, I had built up the anticipation over weeks. Every time I talked about it, the likely buyers got more and more excited. Then I gave a clear date for when the product would be available for purchase.

Providing Every Detail

The day before launch, I would send out an email providing every bit of information that my subscribers would need to make a purchase. The email covered the benefits of the product, pricing information and even frequently asked questions (which actually hadn’t been asked yet).

The one thing the email didn’t include was a link to buy the product.

Instead, I told them exactly when the product would be available (for example, 8:00 am EST tomorrow) and to expect another email from me at that time.

I was trying to get each person on my prelaunch list to decide whether to buy the product before giving them the opportunity to buy. The last thing you want is someone thinking, “Oh, that’s an interesting product — I should buy it. Well, my credit card isn’t handy. I’ll buy it later.”

If that happens, they will usually forget and not come back to buy.

Launch

Then, on launch day, my job was easy. I wrote a simple email saying, “Hey, the product is ready. Buy it here.” And I hit “Send.”

Whenever I followed that process, with anticipation building up over weeks or months, I’ve made at least $1,000 in the first 10 minutes after launching.

It’s the times when I got lazy and cut straight to the sales pitch that my product flopped.

If you want to have a successful launch, then repeat after me: “In order to have a successful launch, I will build up anticipation and excitement before giving my customers an opportunity to buy.”

Dealing With Fraud

Fraud is an unfortunate side effect of selling online. Until I started selling books, I had no idea how common fraudulent payments actually are. In fact, it didn’t even make sense to me why someone would buy my books with a stolen credit card.

It turns out that there is a reason why criminals want to buy ebooks about designing better software. It’s not because they want to get into designing iPhone apps as a side business. Rather, they need to validate the credit cards they’ve stolen.

Let’s say Joe the criminal has bought a list of thousands of stolen credit card numbers. Most of the numbers are no longer valid, so he needs a way to easily find which numbers can still be used to purchase products. That’s where my ebooks and your digital products come in. Joe writes a program that automatically attempts to make a purchase one card at a time until a number isn’t denied.

Then, Joe takes that valid number and either goes on Amazon to buy physical products (ones that have resale value) or creates a physical card and has someone make purchases at the local mall (again, physical products).

Why I Was Upset About $1,500 in Sales

Just last week I saw a huge spike in sales. Nearly $2,000 in a single morning is pretty awesome! At first, I figured that an article must have mentioned one of the books, driving traffic over. Then, I looked more closely at the sales. A single email address was responsible for $1,500.

This person had purchased the top-tier package of two of my design books ($250 each). That happens sometimes, so it wasn’t odd. But I saw that they had also purchased a team license for one of the books ($1,000). Why would you purchase both the complete package and the team license of the same book? That didn’t make sense.

I plugged the email address into Rapportive (a Gmail plugin for finding out about email addresses). If the address belonged to a design or development shop, I wouldn’t have been surprised, but Rapportive didn’t pull up any kind of profiles from around the web, meaning that the email address was most likely a throwaway and that the purchase was fraudulent.

One of the reasons I love selling on Gumroad is that I was able to just refer the purchases to its support team, which quickly verified that they were fraudulent. The charges were refunded and I moved on with my day.

Chargebacks

You might be thinking, “Why not just keep the money and hope that the original card owner never finds out?” Besides being morally questionable, doing that can hurt you financially.

Have you ever looked through your credit-card statement and found a charge you didn’t recognize? Chances are you called your credit-card company and told them that you didn’t make that purchase and asked for it to be refunded. That’s called a chargeback. It’s a wonderful part of using your credit card for online purchases. Your credit-card company protects you from liability if your card number is stolen. That’s fantastic for the consumer — not for the merchant.

Do you think the credit-card company or bank swallows the cost of that fraudulent purchase? Nope. They pass it on to the merchant — that is, you and me and anyone who makes a living from selling digital products online.

When a chargeback occurs, the bank takes the money out of your account, so it’s like the purchase never happened — except that the bank adds a fee. The amount of the fee depends on the payment provider. Stripe charges $15, and PayPal charges $20 (although only sometimes). This means that, after refunding the customer, you still have to pay the fee on top of the lost revenue!

Stopping Fraud

That’s why catching fraud early is so important. You don’t want to be liable for the extra fee for each chargeback. Gumroad has fantastic fraud prevention. For starters, it has excellent security measures to detect fraud purchases and prevent them at checkout. If something does get through, it covers all of the refund and chargeback fees.

If a fraudulent charge gets through and a chargeback is issued, you only lose what the customer paid and aren’t liable for any other fees that other payment-processing companies might charge.

Fighting Chargebacks

Not all chargebacks are because of fraudulent purchases. Sometimes a customer buys a product, decides they don’t like it and calls their bank to ask for a refund instead of talking to you directly. This sucks because it can be expensive for the merchant. So, to all customers out there, please don’t ever request a chargeback unless you have first talked to the seller and requested a refund!

That’s part of the reason why I always issue refunds when asked. Risking a chargeback is just not worth it. Just refund the money and move on.

If the purchase was obviously fraudulent, then you have very little recourse to dispute the chargeback. But if you can prove that the purchase was made by the owner of the card, then there is a decent chance you will win the chargeback, keep the money and avoid having to pay the additional fees. Some people are scammy enough to buy a product, use it and then issue a chargeback, even though nothing is wrong with the product.

When a legitimate purchase is charged back, Gumroad will actually fight the bank on your behalf to try to win the dispute. It does this by sending a nicely formatted document to the credit-card company showing who made the purchase, where they were at the time, and other information to prove that the owner of the card made the purchase.

It’s hard for a customer to dispute a purchase when they submitted information that matches their information on file with the credit-card company and did it from their home IP address.

Don’t Let Fraud Discourage You

This whole process is frustrating sometimes. A lot of seedy characters use the Internet for crime, and sometimes your products are a tool in their larger scheme. It happens.

First, don’t stress about it. Many things are out of your control. But secondly, sell through a provider that will prevent fraud, fight chargebacks and cover all of the fees in the process. Being relaxed about online fraud is easy when I know that the team at Gumroad has my back.

Theft And Piracy

One of the most common questions I get is, “How do you prevent people from stealing your product?”

You don’t.

Look at the movie industry. It has massive amounts of money and has spent many fortunes on digital rights management (DRM) to prevent unauthorized viewing of its movies. Has it worked?

Not at all. A quick Google search shows download links for any popular movie. Those who want to pirate your content will. You can do nothing about it.

The only thing you will accomplish by adding DRM or the like is upsetting your customers. Everyone who pays will feel like you don’t trust them and will resent the inconvenience you’ve added just for them to use the product they’ve legitimately paid for. Starting a relationship with a customer by telling them you don’t trust them is not a good idea.

Really?

Yep, I don’t do anything to prevent my books from being pirated. Instead, I focus on the customers who have paid and will continue to pay for more products. It’s not worth worrying about something you can’t control.

One Thing You Can Do

In the last few weeks, I have started doing one thing. Sometimes these torrent and free-download websites will pop up on the first page of Google’s search results. That’s not good. I’d rather that people who are searching for a way to buy my book not be shown a way to pirate it on the first page of results.

So, every so often I have someone on my team go through the results and submit takedown requests to Google, which is really good about removing the results from its search engine.

I don’t “go after” anyone. I just try to get the links unlisted from Google. It takes maybe 30 minutes every few months and makes me feel better.

One More Thing

While I was traveling with my family a year or so ago, I got a rather frustrated email from a purchaser of The App Design Handbook. He said, “I bought your book on Amazon, but the formatting is all messed up and the book is barely readable!”

A couple of things bothered me about this email. First, I care about design, so the reading experience ought to be good. That’s important to me, so clearly something had gone wrong. Secondly, I don’t sell my books on Amazon. That’s what confused me most.

After a few more emails and a little research, I learned that someone had stolen my book (to be expected) and was selling it on Amazon and pocketing the profit (not to be expected). Luckily, Amazon took it down, and the gentleman got a refund. So, if you complain about people stealing your work, just remember that at least they aren’t selling it.

The Power Of An Audience

The last two years of my life have been crazy. I quit my job, started selling digital products, doubled my annual income, wrote more books and doubled my annual income again.

Many tactics helped in the process (including the ones we’ve just covered), but none of it would have happened without my readers. I made the decision early on to focus on teaching and sharing everything I learn.

Those readers are the ones who have enabled me to sell books, teach workshops in cities around the world, get paid to travel and get access to so many people whom I now call friends.

A Portfolio Approach

When I started selling digital products, I was going for a “portfolio” approach. I would pursue any project that I thought could get a return on my investment.

My idea was that I needed to replace the salary from my design job ($5,000 a month), so I would stack revenue from these otherwise unrelated apps together until it reached that magic number.

I had products for small-business owners, speech language pathologists, students, sign-language interpreting agencies and productivity enthusiasts. Yes, each one got me closer to my $5,000 a month goal, but my time got scattered.

An Audience-Centered Approach

Anytime I worked on promoting OneVoice, my app for speech language pathologists, it did nothing to benefit Commit⁶, my app for productivity enthusiasts.

There was no overlap between those two audiences. The same with promoting the flash cards app and the ebook about design: zero meaningful overlap.

That meant that each bit of effort I put into promotion benefitted only a single product.

I’ve since changed that approach to focus on serving a single audience — well, really two overlapping audiences: designers and marketers. The topics are ones I care about deeply, so I can write about them without getting bored. More importantly, any effort I put into promoting The App Design Handbook also helps to market Designing Web Applications.

Every hour I put in returns twice the results (or more) in revenue.

Serve the Needs of a Single Audience

I still have a portfolio approach to products. My revenue this year comes from at least six distinct products. But they all serve a single audience (at least as closely as possible).

Think about the audience for your product. What else do they need? How else can you help them? Could you provide tools or training on top of what you already offer?

How To Get Started

Hopefully, through this series of articles, you’ve learned enough theory and tactics to make your digital products successful. Here’s how to get started:

1. Decide on what to sell. If you don’t already know, look at the byproducts you create in your everyday work.
2. Plan what you will teach or what stories you will share to attract attention.
3. Set up a landing page and email-marketing app to build your list (use ConvertKit⁷).
4. Create your product.
5. Decide on how to price your products. If possible, use multiple price tiers to increase revenue.
6. Set up an account on Gumroad⁸² to sell your product.
7. Set a launch day, and build up to the launch with a sequence of information and training.
8. Launch the product and start selling!
9. Take a break.

Strategize where to go from here and how to use your audience to meet your long-term goals, whatever they may be.

That’s It

This concludes the series. I hope you’ve learned some valuable techniques to make selling digital products more profitable!

If you’d like to keep learning, I’ve written a free course that goes into more detail on using email marketing to increase sales: “5 Days to Selling More Through Email Marketing⁹.”

(al, il, ml)

Footnotes

1. 1 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/07/10/how-to-profit-from-selling-digital-products-part-1/
2. 2 http://gumroad.com
3. 3 http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-handbook
4. 4 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/6-gumroad-payment-large-opt.jpg
5. 5 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/6-gumroad-payment-large-opt.jpg
6. 6 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/commit/id473527073?mt=8
7. 7 https://convertkit.com
8. 8 http://gumroad.com
9. 9 https://app.convertkit.com/marketing/sellingmore?ref=smashing

The post How To Profit From Selling Digital Products (Part 2) appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Engagement or revenue? Conversion or visits?

To help answer the  above question, I’ll be taking a look at our latest report Where Content and Commerce Collide written by James Gurd and commissioned by EPiServer.

The report provides insight and recommendations for how content can be combined with ecommerce as well as examples of what ecommerce practitioners are currently doing and the role they are setting for content marketing within the overall digital strategy. 

Interviews were conducted with leading ecommerce professionals in B2B and B2C organisations, both UK and international. The aim of the interviews was to explore how leading brands are integrating content into ecommerce journeys and what the future strategy of the business looks like, with the output being qualitative data and indicative charts based on the responses of interviewees.

10 key questions were asked, including “who has ownership of your content?” “What tools do you use to help plan and deliver?” and “Do you produce content guidelines?”

These questions and more are answered in the report, but for now we’ll be looking at content marketing KPIs.

What’s the main focus for KPIs?

As you can see by the following chart, there’s an even split between revenue and engagement.

It should be noted that those that focus on engagement also see revenue as a likely by-product of providing good content. If your customers or followers are happy with your content and are sharing it across channels with a positive message, then revenue won’t be far behind if it’s linked to a relevant product.

Revenue is a goal for every ecommerce team, but there is a split in the intention behind creating content. However does this really matter if engagement eventually leads to the same outcome? These engaged customers will also be more loyal to your brand and tend to come back to you for repeat purchases.

There’s a delicate balance to get right when it comes to putting your content under the control of an editorial team. If your focus is on engagement through providing useful and entertaining content, it’s great for the consumer but the reality is that commerce still needs to dictate a certain amount of editorial control. A commerce journey needs to occur from the content for it to be a viable and worthwhile endeavour.

Here's an example from Mr Porter. This is a nice lengthy piece, full of wit and insight that would happily exist in a non-ecommerce publication.

It’s a perfect synthesis of editorial, relevance and ecommerce. There are direct links to the product pages of all the clothes that Murray has been dressed in by Mr Porter’s style director underneath each header image.

There’s also a direct link to shop all the products at once on the ‘front cover’.

The balance comes from not making content look too commercial based, and putting off potential customers.

A dilemma your ecommerce team may be facing right now is agreeing the actual criteria for success. The criteria determines your KPIs, and your KPIs will be dependent on whether you’re using content marketing purely for revenue, engagement or as a brand-building exercise.

To take an example from the report, The Wine Society’s primary focus is on member engagement, so they prioritise page views and dwell time for its KPIs. The ecommerce team then maps this back to value metrics like conversion and revenue, but the focus will always be on member satisfaction. Content is created with a focus on what its members want to read.

The four categories of KPIs

To finish, here is a list of KPIs that can be used to measure performance, split into relevant categories.

Revenue and conversion 

• Conversion rate (basket-to-order and visit-to-order) 
• Average order value 
• Revenue 

As mentioned above, the Mr Porter editorial campaign worked to increase sales for products featured in its articles. 

Traffic 

• Total visits 
• Unique visitors 
• New vs. return visits 

You can measure the total number of visits from social media from content that is posted to a respective social channel. Each post can have campaign tracking parameters added to its URL, so the impact of social links can be measured using analytics tools. 

Engagement 

• Dwell time (time on site) 
• Pages per visit 
• Bounce rate 
• Social shares 
• Comments and ‘likes’ (including ‘favouriting’ individual content assets) 
• Product reviews 
• Banner click-through rate 

Only four of the companies we spoke to mentioned using customer reviews as a KPI for content marketing. However product reviews are proven to increase conversion rates as they provide social proof to amplify brand messaging.

Offline 

• Visits to store (hard to track accurately) 
• In-store purchases 
• In-store content usage (e.g. scanning a QR code for a product to watch a video) 
• Call tracking 

Unfortunately the integration of online and offline data was cited as a key barrier for building the single customer view and understanding the full impact of content marketing. 

For much more on content marketing KPIs and to understand content marketing inside and out, download our full report Where Content and Commerce Collide.

Brands spend a mint on planning, producing, distributing, and promoting marketing content. More than a few are wasting a big chunk of their money, because their content fails. How many marketing scheckles went into your content in 2013? 2014? What kind of ROI did it deliver? Did it leave a good taste in your mouth?

There is no way to know for sure exactly how much organizations spend on marketing content, but it’s growing every year, according to several recent studies. One point revealed in the 2014 Content Marketing Benchmark Survey; organizations considering themselves content marketing successes spent an average of 243% more on CM than firms considering themselves CM failures.

It’s not all about resource allocation, though. Sure, pumping money in can solve the problem, but not if you’re going in the wrong direction. If

your content failed, it was likely for one or more of the following reasons:

Content Fail 1 – Over Complicated

Keep it simple (stupid!). KISS is a proven principle. It’s never been more powerful than when applied to content. Buzzword laced content may be great for scientists or attorneys, but in reality, it’s going to alienate a big audience chunk; likely the ones you’re looking to engage!

There is an exception; the aforementioned scientists. A 2008 Durham University study found scientists and academics actually cite content with buzzwords more often. If eggheads are your market, buzz away; otherwise, KISS it.

Content Fail 2 – Mis-targeted

Created for the wrong (or no specific) audience, in the wrong voice. Know your audience! It’s the number one rule of marketing in general, and applies to content more than nearly anything else in business.

There’s a reason organizations spend (or should) so much time on buyer personas; relevance. If you spend time nailing down your personas, creating effective content is so much easier. If not, you’re almost guessing.

If your content doesn’t resonate, your revenue doesn’t generate.

That means your content must:

A – Deliver value
B – Speak to your audience in a voice they not only understand, but appreciate and trust.

Doing email? Once again, segmenting rears it’s ugly head. Break up your lists so yo can maximize content relevance for each. It equals more value for your recipients and better response for you.

How can you make sure what audiences like? Test your content. Hell, spy on your competitors. What’s working for them? One way to know; look at their popular content and see what’s generated the most social chatter. This Kissmetrics blog post has a few excellent tools for spying on competitors’ content.

Content Fail 3 – Not Delivered on Time

Timing is everything, and it’s rarely more true than with content. The world’s a fast moving place these days, and your audience is moving with it. Moreover, a nice slice of content is aimed to coordinate with time sensitive events: holidays, product launches, elections, legislation, sporting events, organizational changes, and so on.

That’s only the half of it.

Distribution effectiveness is also impacted by time, too. It can come down to the minute, especially for social media outlets like Twitter.

Content Fail 4 – No Visuals

Images and video are proven engagement increasers, and powerful ways to get your message across, when plain old text falls flat. It’s that whole picture / 1,000 words thing. In fact, in some verticals or platforms, visual content can be the majority.

Examples of Video Content That Dominates:

1 – An auto parts retailer (online or physical location) creating how-to videos that show how to diagnose and repair specific vehicles. Creating content showing how to use your products greatly facilitates customer engagement and sales.
2 – A travel company creating videos of different destinations and the best attractions to visit there. Some things are better off being shown, rather than just talked about.
3 – A hairstylist or beauty products company creating how-to videos and before/after images.
4 – Social media posts with a compelling image. Image and video content really drive engagement on social media. In their latest research, Social Bakers discovered 93% of the most engaging Facebook posts were images. Similarly, Buffer found that image Tweets get double the engagement of Tweets without images. Instagram is effective for businesses with a strong visual component. Think restaurants, architects, building contractors, sporting organizations, travel companies, and florists.

You get the idea. Sometimes visual content engages your audience better and conveys the message more effectively.

Content Fail 5 – Too Little

according to the latest CMI/Marketing Profs Benchmark Survey, most brands say they can’t create enough content… if they only knew! It’s the new SEO, after all! That’s far from the only reason to create more content. How can I justify my existence if you’re not creating more and more content, and calling me to help you do it? Did I just say that?

Actually, yes, but there are hard numbers to back it up. You’ve probably been beat over the head by the stats already, but B2B companies that blog more than once per week get 80-some percent more leads than those that only post once per month. If you can’t find the time to post more than once per week (You can’t, “lack of time” was listed as the numero uno content marketing challenge brands face), there’s a great reason to find a way.

Better Than Website Traffic?

The new leads aren’t strictly from greater website traffic. Great content is a credibility builder. It shows prospective customers you know your stuff, and are worthy of consideration for what they’re doing. It helps them do something that over 70% of B2B purchasers now do; use content to get them down the purchase path, before they ever contact your sales team. Think about it. Before they ever contact you, you’re already on their short list – if your content puts you there!

It boils down to having sufficient content to for two objectives:

- Attracting Prospects
- Informing Them

Do you have it?

Content Fail 6 – It Doesn’t Physically Fit

How will your audience consume it? If it’s a good bet they’ll view it on mobile, make sure they can see it there; without squinting, scrolling, or swiping. People hate that; your audience among them.

If you have recent platform data from your blog, website, or past projects, check it. If not, run some small scale tests first. Better to discover how your content’s consumed before investing major resources on it, then finding it failed because a significant percentage of your audience threw up their hands. Safer to go with recent trends and just make sure there’s a version of your stuff optimized for all screen sizes.

Content Fail 7 – Doesn’t Address The Key Audience Issue

People came to your content for a reason. What is it? Do they want to learn more about your industry, team, organization, or products? Perhaps it’s more basic; process or procedure oriented questions they want answers to. Did you answer them or point them to where they could be found? Whatever the reason they are there, if your content doesn’t address their key issue, or point them to other resources that do, it’s a flop!

How can you keep from getting called into the CMO’s office for all the wrong reasons?

First, go through the “Magnificent 7” failure points above. How does your content stack up? Next, check those below:

1 – Start with a documented content marketing strategy.

Like writing down your weight loss goals, it works wonders. According to the latest Content Marketing Institute / Marketing Profs benchmark report, it delivers a 600% improvement! Yeah, your mileage may vary, but unless your strategy has more holes that the Cougar defense in 2011, a real plan brings you nowhere but up. The survey discovered:
66% of the most effective marketers used a documented content strategy
11% of the least effective marketers used a documented content strategy
Kind of a no brainer….

Map out where you’re going and how you propose getting there; exactly. Use quantifiable goals. Without defining success, you can’t tell when you’ve achieved it, or by how much. When the CMO asks “How did Campaign X work?” in your next quarterly, you can deliver an actual answer, with numbers to prove it. No more mumbling.

2 – Testing and refinement holds the key to content success.

Marketers should test everything, because that’s where improvement lies. Incremental improvement leads to maximum performance.

Split test headlines, e-mail subject lines, web pages, social media release timing, your boss’s tires, or the pizzas you’re considering for the game Saturday. In short, use real data to make your decisions, not what feels good. Often, what feels good is plain wrong. Do you want to gamble your organization’s budget and your rep on a gut feeling, when you don’t have to?

3 – Know Your Audience and Create for Them

Did I mention that above? I should put it in all caps, online etiquette be damned. If you don’t know them, their issues, and how your organization solves their problems, how can you create content that resonates with them? What are their values, what makes them tick, and what direction are they coming at things from?

4 – Platform Optimize

Know how your audience will consume it, then ensure there’s a version optimized for each platform. Nowadays, that means a myriad of devices and screen sizes.

Responsive websites are easier than ever, and that’s a big step in the right direction, if not the entire answer. If you’re running a WordPress Site, it’s as simple as starting with a responsive template, checking all the right boxes, and doing a little image optimization. If your site isn’t responsive, send your web team (or guy/gal) shopping for a new one. It’s usually well worth the investment.

If your organization includes local outlets customers will be out looking to visit, don’t stop at a responsive website. Experience dictates your audience is looking for specific info (location, contact info, specials, etc.) and want it yesterday. Creating a different, mobile optimized site for them is a great solution. If you’re a B2C firm with local outlets, keep the meaty content on your main site, but put your meaty specials, address, map, and phone number on a mobile site with no fluff.

Mobile viewing while driving; it’s against the law in many areas, but so are many other things people do. Better to do your part and help them find what they need fast, and get their eyes back on the road where they belong.

Content Fails for Specific Reasons….. Find Them, Fix Them, Succeed

If your content’s failing, it’s not an indictment of content marketing. Too many achieve runaway success with it. It’s more likely due to a few key problems. Correct them, and your content will be out there, working to bring in new customers, and helping turn existing ones into repeat buyers.

What were your biggest content fails, and how did you fix them?

FIFA 2014. Germany wins. The end. That’s pretty much what you can expect following the conclusion of the month-long sporting event. It’s like one big party. No matter how big or how fun the whole thing was, eventually the crowd goes away and it’s time to pack up.

This is actually a sticky situation in B2B lead generation. No matter how long or how complicated your sales process, this kind of excitement is still the key to attracting potential clients. That’s why you ride on trends like the World Cup. There is a major struggle to be in the biggest conversation because that’s where you think your target market is found. So once the party’s over, it seems like the game’s over too.

Funnily enough, it’s like America’s own relationship with the sport of soccer. The sport is the iconic sport of suburban kids. But once they hit high-school, it’s going to be something else. Sound familiar?

It would be if this story is the one told by a majority of your clients. At first glance, your lead generation campaign was perfect. It got them excited about your solution. They enjoyed the conversation from the telemarketer all the way to seeing that fancy sales presentation. What comes after though? You don’t remember. That’s the problem.

This superficial nature of trends shouldn’t go as far as infect your marketing assets. That’s why marketers need to extend their concerns beyond just producing B2B leads. It’s important to concern themselves with what happens after those leads are qualified, sent to sales, and become paying customers. How do you keep up the excitement even at the end of a trend?

• Find a new one – Obviously the first thing you’d think of but might hesitate to apply because you don’t want to be a trend-hopper. But if marketing is going to have any hard truths, it’d have to be that. You need to stay relevant, stay trendy, and stay within the attention span of your target market. The good news is that once one trend ends, you can be sure another one will already be on the horizon. It only becomes a matter of how fast you can pick it up before they can.

• Focus on business relationships – If you really don’t like the trend-hopper label, then take comfort in the fact that your target market isn’t always one either. Sometimes what gets them interested can differ from the mainstream. Keeping yourself focused on maintaining good relationships with that particular target market helps you understand what they deem important not just what the whole world is talking about.

• Be consistent in spite of trends – Remember, the only reason why you’re trying to get in with a trend is so that you can redirect a prospect’s attention to your business. What you provide as a business is the foundation of your relationships with customers. Sticking true to that helps your business deliver on what it promises in its marketing campaigns. It shows that you have a culture and an organizational sense of identity.

Trends can come and go but it’d be a different story if the same went for your business. You don’t see McDonald’s ending after the World Cup right? That’s because they don’t let their marketing end with the trends.

The economy’s doing well, which should mean that there’s more money floating around. However, the paradigm that existed in the downturn years still exists – yet is, if anything, sharpened. When there was no money, competition was fierce as customers were looking for high ROI from relatively little.

Now businesses and people are prepared to spend, but they’re only prepared to spend on services or products that provide significant value. It’s recession-plus.

So if you’re not selling (yet), then here are five reasons why you may not be making the most of the economic recovery…

Speed

The main difference between this upturn and the pre-downturn years is that peoples’ expectations of sales and customer service has radically changed. As customers, we all expect speed of reaction. Recent research shows that when a complaint is made on Twitter, people expect a response within an hour.

When they enquire about your product or service through your website – they expect an equally quick response. If you wait two or three days before getting round to answering website queries, then expect someone else to have stepped in.

Expectations have shifted radically over the last few years, to the point that a slow response to a lead can be the deciding factor in whether you win the deal or not. It reflects badly on your organisation, it reflects badly on you.

Therefore, ensure that the processes and workflows are all in place for the right people to be alerted of the right leads quickly – if not instantly.

Incentive

We’ve come a long way over the last few years in understanding how our people differ in terms of reward. For many, financial reward is almost expected – and they can achieve similar or better elsewhere. What organisations have learned is that in order to improve productivity (and therefore, profitability), you have to be agile in terms of incentive.

There are more flexible ways of offering incentives that go beyond the simple commission and salary basis. For instance, offering a better benefits package (including some tax-efficient measures) can go a long way to adding the extra value that a few pounds on top of annual salary cannot add.

It’s not always all about money – seek to understand what motivates your sales team first, and the sales will come later.

Clarity

It is hugely important that expectations are set in a clear, concise manner, that is understandable – and understood – by all. Start by setting the right expectations – clearly outline the goals that your entire team are setting out to achieve. This may be an overarching growth plan, or a total sales target for the whole team.

Then, ensure that it is broken down individually or by team, and that everyone understands their own individual objectives and, most importantly, how those individual objectives fit into the wider ones.

Robert Cordray underlines the importance of clear set goals at both a business and an individual level, and the most important takeaway here is that the business objectives cascade into sales objectives, which cascade then into individual objectives.

It’s one thing to do this – it’s another to ensure that it is communicated clearly and concisely.

Measurement

If you’re not measuring it, don’t do it.

That’s what I was taught, and I’ve lived by it ever since. If you can’t measure what you’re doing, don’t even bother.

Now, sales teams are very good at measuring the top-level – i.e. the funnel. But what about what lies underneath? Sales data can tell you more about your strengths and weaknesses than you ever thought possible. Your successes and your failures tell you all about which targets you should be going after, and which leads you have the best chance of winning.

By diving into your data (be a geek), you can measure almost anything you want. Are you strong in one particular industry? Or does one particular industry have a specific buying cycle that takes up too much of your time? Or is one particular salesperson performing well with larger organisations?

It’s all there, waiting to be measured.

Integrate

Integration offers by far the biggest opportunity for sales teams, notably those who are upselling to existing customers.

The continuing ‘disintegration’ of technologies has brought about a mad rush from ERP and CRM providers to integrate a wider range of services. For instance, social listening has been recently incorporated into Microsoft’s offering while Salesforce and Oracle have both made acquisitions to get more social into their CRM systems.

The ability to provide ‘one single view’ of a customer, integrating all customer interactions and conversations – even on social media – is the holy grail for service providers, which means that it’s the holy grail for their customers.

This integration is key to getting a better understanding of customer needs, and being quicker to react to complaints or potential upsell opportunities. Without this single customer view, errors occur and opportunities are missed. As people spend more and more time on separate systems and social networks, often bypassing your website entirely, you need to integrate.

*****

I believe that the opportunities are out there for the quickest, most agile, most flexible, best integrated sales teams to make significant progress in this improving economy. Remember to measure, be quick, and use technology to bring disparate systems together, and 2014 will end up being one of your best ever.

The Danger of Data-Deprived Decisions for Event Marketing

Picture this. It’s the late 90s. A friend comes up to a wealthy businessman, John, at a summer barbeque, smiling broadly. He has started a new business. It’s a search engine that helps people to find what they need on the Internet. He’s just registered a crazy name for it, Google, tells John it’s going to make a lot of money and asks if he’ll invest $100,000 in it.

The friend doesn’t tell John how he plans to spend the money, how this Google thing is going to generate a profit or how much money John could potentially make. John apologetically tells his friend that he cannot offer his support, not knowing he’s missing out on a money-making opportunity.

While this story of loss is fictional, it illustrates data-deprived decision-making which is what is happening to many B2B events today. Marketing and sales leaders know events are essential to grow sales successfully, but sometimes they go underfunded because it’s difficult to forecast returns, costs and expected ROI.

Play the Numbers for Marketing Tactics You Can Leverage

By calculating your event ROI, you’re able to play “what if?” with alternative marketing scenarios and examine how adding new tactics into your event-marketing mix can increase your return.

Here’s how you can do ROI projections.

Calculate the Costs

• The Ballpark EstimateThe first step in calculating the predicted ROI is to project the costs. If it’s early in the game and you don’t know the specifics, you can generate a ballpark estimate. Typically, the ideal tradeshow expenditure is three times the cost of the exhibit space. So, if your space costs $10,000, you can approximate the total expense, including travel, booth-creation and setup, staffing, utilities and other incidentals will be around $30,000.
• The Itemized Cost SheetHowever, you’ll probably feel more comfortable with an itemized budget. In this case you enumerate each of the following costs:
  • Booth creation, storage and packing
  • Shipping
  • Labor for booth setup
  • Promotion and marketing materials
  • Show services
  • Ancillary events
  • Booth staff
• Predicting the Payback

How can you get a handle on the return on your investment? You’ll need to forecast the number of booth visitors, leads, and sales. Multiply the closed deals by the average sales value for total revenues. Then calculate the ROI as follows:

(Total Revenues – Total Event Costs)/Total Event Costs = ROI

• Ramping Up Your Return

Now that you have the costs and revenue of your current event plan, you can play around with alternative marketing scenarios to see if you can generate increased returns. If so, request the funding to support more ambitious goals or reallocate your budget from other areas with a lower payoff.

For example, a highly successful but sadly underused tactic is telemarketing. You can use it to:

• • Increase event attendance
  • Set appointments at the event
  • Follow up promptly and personally on show leads
  • Nurture leads until they’re ready to buy

Our calculations on event return on investment show that telemarketing can increase returns by a phenomenal 857%. Don’t go bare bones when a little extra investment in event marketing can mean big bucks. Get our eBook: “The Complete Guide to Calculating and Maximizing Event ROI.” Discover how to calculate event ROI and evaluate the profitability of leveraging additional event-marketing tactics.

How many of these 15 power tips for creating Pinterest marketing magic do you know?

When it comes to social media marketing, some marketers & entrepreneurs think that Pinterest is only about women pinning a bunch of pretty pictures about fashion, home decor and food.

While Facebook and Twitter seem to be the obvious choice for most businesses Pinterest has gained huge momentum and is now the 2nd largest driver of traffic from social media sites (next only to Facebook). Those are impressive results considering Facebook has been around for 10 years and Pinterest only for four years.

If you do not keep up with the times you will fall behind.  The Pinterest tide is rising rapidly. Are you falling behind?

Bloggers take note: 50 million articles are being shared on Pinterest every day and those articles drive more traffic to publishers than Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit and Google+ combined.

What if I told you that on Pinterest your content continues to work for you long after you’ve pinned? This does not happen on Facebook and Twitter.

Your content has long shelf life on Pinterest.

What I mean by shelf life is that at some point after you pin, tweet or post people stop engaging with it.

On Pinterest your pins continue to work long after you post them which increases your odds of engagement and that could mean more click throughs, repins, comments and likes.

Content on Facebook and Twitter doesn’t last very long. A link on twitter lasts approximately 2.8 hours, on facebook it’s 3.2 hours and via ‘direct’ sources (like email or IM clients) it’s 3.4 hours.

Now it’s a different story with Pinterest and you’re going to love this!

According to Piqora they found:

1. 40% of the clicks happen within the first day
2. 70% of the clicks happen within first 2 days
3. Remaining 30% clicks come all the way through 30 days and beyond

Incredible isn’t it? This is heavenly for any marketer; the fact that your pin on Pinterest can still create engagement with your brand a full 30 days after you pin it. Why is that important? Pinterest keeps working for you, the content you pin keeps getting shared over and over again. That’s a biggie in terms ROI!

Retailers and Ecommerce take note: Pinterest buyers spend more money, more often, & on more items than any other of the top five social media sites according to Comscore. Furthermore, according to Javelin Strategy & Research, the average Pinterest user has a $123.50 average order value. This is 126% more than Facebook’s $54.64 average order value!

Now what’s not to like about that?

Women account for most of the online retail purchases—58% according to a study by the Center for Emerging Female Leadership, which also found that 22% of women shop online at least once a day. According to Pew Research Center 1/3 of Women in U.S. use Pinterest.

What that means to your business is that if you want to attract female shoppers and you are not successfully operating a Pinterest account… then you are losing sales for sure. 

Here are 15 ways to help you excel with your Pinterest marketing.

3 powerful ways you can get marketplace insight:

1. Go to the “Popular” category on Pinterest. This will help you find out what the most popular content is and therefore what is worthy of being pinned. Armed with that type of data you are in a better position to innovate and decide which products are best to market and carry.

2. Convert one of your boards to a group board. Images that are being shared by your target audience say “this is what we want” and “give us more of this”. This is heavenly for buyers and merchandisers who are planning for seasonal inventory and merchandising.

3. Study your competitor’s Pinterest page. Check out their most popular boards. You can easily find what people are pinning from their website by going to www.pinterest.com/source/yourcompetitorswebsiteurl.com

If they are crushing sales with a product type, style or price point that you are missing then you might be able to earn some of those sales back by making changes.

 

3 sure fire ways to develop loyal fans:

1. Ask your followers to take pictures of themselves using your products. Then share them on your Pinterest group board. Give pinners a special shout out by tagging their name.

2. Give exclusive deals and promotions available exclusively for your Pinterest followers. This is a brilliant way to build up your number of followers and encourage people to promote your business. This tactic also stimulates repeat business, builds customer loyalty and could potentially start a viral spread of your business details when these customers share your brand to their friends.

3. Create pre-order sales exclusive to Pinterest followers before the product or service goes out to the general public. Nordstrom’s does this.

 

3 money making ways to generate leads:

1. Go to your “Followers” tab on your Pinterest home page and make a list of the pinners you want to reach out to. Send them a note through Facebook or tweet them if they have made that available in their about section. If not, comment on one of their pins by writing something like “Thanks for the follow. Let me know how I can help you”.

2. Go to www.pinterest.com/source/yourwebsiteurl.com and you will see who’s pinning content from your website is. These people are definitely interested in your content. This tactic has worked well for me and I write on the comment box on the image they pinned “Thanks for sharing Maria. Let me know if you’re interested in a free 30 minute consultation/coaching session”. Make sure your “Email Notifications” is turned to “Yes” in your settings to ensure you receive the pinner’s message.

3. Create a board that features your products and services. 20% of your overall content should be allocated towards what your business offers.

 

3 profit making ideas to create business partnerships:

What this means is how to find opportunities and develop strategic alliances with your connections outside Pinterest.

1. Build relationships with your social media contacts in Google hangouts, meet ups, conferences, and especially outside the computer. How?  Follow one of their boards and thank them if they respond in kind.  Be social, be helpful, pin with a caring heart.

2. Create strategic alliances and be partner focused not me focused. How, support them first, get them some leads, referrals, get them some killer new idea to help them grow and in turn, in time, they will help you too.

3. Offer a referral fee to others if they help you make a sale.  And I’m also big on thank you cards. Avoid just emailing someone when they’ve done something thoughtful or out of their way for you – sit down, use great stationary or a card, buy a stamp and write a thank you note.

 

3 proven, no brainer ideas to increase sales:

Driving traffic back to your website or into your stores will lead to new sales transactions. That is what Pinterest does shockingly well from a business perspective.

1. Install your Rich Pins! Retailer Target has seen a 70% increase in traffic from Pinterest to Target.com since rolling out Rich Pins in early 2013. Product pins include real time pricing, availability and where to buy. Pinners also get notifications when Product Pins they’ve added drop in price by at least 10%.

2. Create Pinterest contests. When The Grommet ran a two-week spring fever themed contest all participants were eligible to win a $200 gift card. It resulted in more than 4,000 product images being pinned on the Grommet Pinterest page, including 555 repins and 136,000 impressions!

3. Create images with text overlays that say “CLICK HERE” for more info. According to Reachli.com (formerly Pinerly) combining a call-to-action pin description brings an 80% increase in engagement.

The bottom line is Pinterest drives a mind boggling amount of referral traffic to your website. That in turn drives new sales. If you want to reap the rewards of Pinterest social media marketing you need to have a cohesive plan. Also pin content that your target audience can’t resist and measure your results so you know what’s working and what isn’t working.

Not sure where to start? Get Chapter 1 from my Pinterest course for FREE or contact me for a free 30 minute business consultation to avoid wasting time.

Thank you and good luck. “Pin with a caring heart” and you’ll make more money with Pinterest!

The ranks of Canada’s billionaire club are swelling, but too many new entrants have oil on their boots according to a new report from the Centre for Digital Entrepreneurship + Economic Performance (DEEP) examining the country’s billion-dollar firms.

Canada’s Billion Dollar Firms: Contributions, Challenges and Opportunities examined the change in the country’s top-tier companies from 2003 to 2012, comparing figures to five mature economies. “We found that on a per-capita basis we outperform Germany, the UK and the US in the creation of billion dollar companies,” explains Anthony Williams, DEEP co-founder and president. “Sweden and Australia and Canada are pretty close; Sweden is maybe slightly ahead on a per-capita basis, that’s a very small country population-wise compared to Canada.”

Unsurprisingly, much of the growth in domestic top-tier companies has been in the energy and utilities area, while manufacturing has taken the biggest hit:

The resources boom has boosted Alberta’s share of the country’s mega-large corporations; the Energy Province now was 52 billion-dollar firms, almost as many as traditional economic powerhouse Ontario:

The report,  produced in collaboration with the Business Development Bank of Canada, the Canadian Digital Media Network, Export Development Canada and Industry Canada, suggest that it’s been a good decade for Canada. But Williams cautions that the country’s economy needs to diversify, highlighting life sciences and technology two sectors of strategic importance in which Canada under-performs. “We’ve seen some changes in who the players are, because of the evolution of those particular industries. So Nortel has disappeared since, but OpenText has come into the fray as an example,” he explains.”And we only have one billion-dollar life sciences company in all of Canada, despite pretty significant investment in those sectors in Ontario and Quebec.”

READ: How understated software titan OpenText plans to accelerate its growth »

The list of firms that qualified for DEEP’s scrutiny is a who’s-who of Corporate Canada: Air Canada, Barrick Gold, Magna International and Blackberry all lead their respective sector listings. But there are also some innovative new entrants, including market darling Dollarama in consumer retail and movie giant Cineplex Inc.

There’s a set of companies just under the billion-dollar mark ready to make the jump, with a significant number in the beleaguered manufacturing sector. But there are only 83 firms in the $500–999 million category, compared to 169 in the $1 billion-plus range, suggesting that Canada’s impressive top-tier growth may soon stall.

READ: Is HootSuite Canada’s next billion-dollar tech titan? »

A broad base is important for future economic prosperity, Williams insists:

Canada has leveraged its strength and its natural endowments in natural resources to boost economic growth in this country and to create new billion-dollar enterprises but we lack diversity in the sources of growth across the country. If we want to diversify our growth in the future, and we want to see broad-based regional growth and not just growth concentrated in one province or one area of the country then we need to think about how we’re going to boost the success of other sectors and in particular think about life sciences, technology.

DEEP recommends closer collaboration between the private and public sectors to boost corporate growth. Among its suggestions are the development of industry-academic partnerships to foster research commercialization and the establishment of a nation-wide network of collaborative research and innovation centres.

READ: Shortage of science grads poses an impending innovation problem for Canada »

Corporate Canada will rightly celebrate a positive decade of company growth, but the DEEP report suggests that continued innovation and investment are essential to maintaining that success.

The post Canada is great at creating billion-dollar companies—as long as they sell oil and gas appeared first on Canadian Business.

Box pledges to make it easier to use its file-sync technology with Microsoft Office with a new service called Box for Office 365, due in beta this fall. Also, Box announced unlimited storage for customers that sign up for its Business plan pricing tier. Previously, only customers that enrolled in Box’s Enterprise plan had access to unlimited storage while Business customers had to pony up 15 dollars a month for 1,000 gigabytes.

While Box already had an add-on for Microsoft Office that let users open a document in a Microsoft program like Word or Excel and save it directly to Box, Box for Office 365 supposedly takes those integrations further, said Heidi Williams, Box’s Senior Director of Platform Engineering. Box will now be featured more prominently within Office than ever before and users will be able to access their recent files stored in Box directly through Office as opposed to within the Box app.

Box will also have an enhanced integration with Outlook as part of Box for Office 365, explained Williams. In the past, a user would have to proactively choose to either upload or share a file in Box when sending emails in Outlook; now with Box for Office 365, users will receive a prompt asking them whether or not they want to send their attachments via Box.

Box and Microsoft began talking about the integration around six months ago, said Williams, who acknowledged that while the two companies compete with each other in some areas like storage (Microsoft recently announced its own standalone business plan for its cloud storage service OneDrive), Box is happy to partner with Microsoft in this case. Williams said that Box and Microsoft will work on expanding their partnership and offer more integration between their two products.

“We are excited to see where we can take it next,” said Williams

Regarding Box’s news of unlimited storage, Box’s spokesperson Michael Moeschler said that the ongoing cloud storage wars were not the reason Box removed the storage cap for Business plan users, but was instead a response to customer demand.

“When you no longer have to worry about storage, you can just get back to work,” said Williams.

Last week’s news of Amazon’s Zocalo document collaboration tool definitely caused  file-sync and sharing companies to take notice (not to mention Google and Microsoft). It’s probably not that much of a coincidence that we are seeing Box and Dropbox announce new features and capabilities as a way to gain back some momentum. Just last week, Dropbox announced that it now has the ability to stream, which supposedly boosts the company’s syncing times up to twice as fast.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock user Palto.

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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• What mattered in social business in the first quarter of 2014
• What defines the key players of the IaaS industry
• How companies can grow by moving into newer, bigger markets

There's been a lot of speculation lately by those in the industry that creativity is dying. Others fear that young creatives are too preoccupied with technology rather than a big idea. In a new video, DDB Group Asia Pacific explores what it takes to make a great creative idea, and the answer isn't money. According to Agency Spy, the spot was created to show clients that creativity can't be bought and that we should thank the "Idea Catchers" who are not "machines that churn out 5-minute headlines atop of Getty stocks" because creativity takes time. 

Marketing tech company Unruly announced Ken Suh as the company's new senior vice president of global business development and Christine Ryder a regional vice president of sales in Chicago. 

Heineken launched a new social media campaign, as part of the larger "Cities of the World" campaign, using the Twitter handle @wherenext. Designed with millennials in mind, the online platform was developed with the help of R/GA London and uses an algorithm to look at social activity on platforms like Twitter to find where the best, most lively bars, clubs, or restaurants in town are.  

Adweek reports that 62 percent of executives rely on gut feelings when making crucial decisions when it comes to creating partnerships, according to a study for The Fortune Knowledge Group and agency Gyro. 

Microsoft is expected to cut about 5,000 jobs, the biggest cut for the company since 2009 according to a report by The Drum. The company will most likely cut marketing and technology jobs, but a final decision has still not been made.  

Thanks to LeBron James and his big announcement that he will be returning to Cleveland next season, Sports Illustrated had its biggest day online. The site apparently had over 6.1 millions visitors, 32 percent of which came from social media sites. 

Hulu gained exclusive rights to the hit Comedy Central show South Park, Variety reports. All episodes will be free on Hulu beginning July 24, but starting September 24 viewers will have to pay to watch. 

Therese Hessler, previously the vice president of media at The Leffle Agency, is launching her own advertising, media, and public relations agency called TMH Agency. The agency will be based in Baltimore and will work with both national and local clients, Media Post reports. 

Previously on Business Insider Advertising: 

• These Are America's 10 Most Respected Brands
• The One Thing That Makes The Idea Of Yahoo Acquiring AOL Look Not Totally Bonkers
• Samsung Blasts The iPad's Lack Of A Multitask Function In Latest Apple Attack Ad
• Adidas Steals Manchester United Sponsorship From Nike In Record-Breaking $1.3 Billion Deal
• Nike Releases Derek Jeter Tribute Commercial With Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, And Jay Z
• Online Video Advertising Is Growing Many Times Faster Than TV, Search, And Most Other Digital Ad Markets 

Join the conversation about this story »

It can often seem like digital technology is making every aspect of business move at warp speed. There are real benefits to this real-time business capability: getting to market faster, capturing value quicker, more immediate responsiveness to customer needs. For example, in a previous post I described how Amazon’s ability to continuously release software changes (8000 per day, one every 11 seconds) will crush competitors who are making a batch change every six weeks. But what about the risks? Doesn’t high speed carry the inherent risk of loss of control?

Not necessarily. As Andy Singleton, CEO at Assembla, explained to me, continuous deployment can be both cheaper and lower risk. It’s cheaper because of automation and because small development teams need less coordination and oversight. And the risk can be managed through a new kind of tool called “feature gates.”

Here is a quick look at how Google and HubSpot have managed to achieve remarkable speed in product releases while simultaneously reducing risk.

Google’s Automated Test Machine

For decades, large IT projects have crashed and burned because planners could not anticipate all of the interdependencies of new software in the extreme complexity of large software code bases. To test new software before release, managers of large projects use elaborate test procedures run by teams of “quality assurance” professionals.  This traditional testing takes weeks or months, and still misses errors. To manage new software releases at their huge scale, Google has replaced traditional testing systems that depend on people with a testing machine, known as a “continuous integration” system.  It is a copy of their production system that runs special programs that test the way component services work together. Continuous integration and automated testing is important for all modern, large scale software development.  Google’s operation stands out for its scale. Their test system is continuously compiling and deploying more than 5000 components (services), and running 100 million test cases per day.

Google’s test machine is built and run by a “test engineering” group, whose size is about 15% of their total developers. This group only builds the automated test systems – they don’t do the actual testing. The test engineers think a lot about creating incentives that motivate developers to fix bugs and write effective tests. For example, they provide dashboards that report on bug counts by developer. As developers make changes, they are tested with the most recent version, which includes all the other changes. If a test finds problems, it can tell developers whom to contact to resolve them – directly, without using middle managers.

Google combines automated testing with a related process that requires a human peer to review code changes. Together, the automated testing and peer review provide a high level of quality control that frees Google developers to actually work on the needed changes themselves. Every developer at Google has the power to make changes to any product – or multiple products – subject to the rules of testing and review. In some cases, they can go from an idea to a software release in 48 hours.

HubSpot’s Small Development Teams and “Feature Gates”

HubSpot provides “inbound marketing” software tools to small and medium-sized businesses to attract prospective customers to their websites. Singleton told me how HubSpot reengineered their aging, single software application into a vibrant matrix of 200 small software “services” (an architecture like Amazon’s and Google’s), which has enabled them to go from traditional new software release cycles, measured in weeks, to a stream of 100 changes per day. HubSpot replaced their old software with new code in about one year, incrementally ramping up new services and steadily winding down the effort on the old codebase. The new HubSpot product quickly surpassed the old product, and is now adding features and invading related categories at a rate that makes it a serious threat to competitors.

HubSpot has organized its developers in small teams (a “tech lead” and two programmers) around small software functions (“services”). There are about 20 of these teams, each of which maintains about 10 services. The teams are empowered to do as much as possible, as quickly as possible. They have end-to-end responsibilities, including design, programming, testing, release, monitoring, and responding to production problems. They get operational information about the services they own — such as speed and errors — on a real-time dashboard, and they get customer questions and complaints.

“Feature gates” are a sophisticated, proprietary tool they use for configuration, release, and monitoring. The tool enables them to turn specific features on or off, for everyone, for groups, or for individual customers. A switch decides who can access new software depending on its status, such as “hidden” (nobody sees it), “test” (only internal testers), “beta” (selected external testers), and “unveil” (everyone sees it). New features may go through an extended period of various kinds of testing (beta testing, usability testing, or “A/B testing”). Feature gates both provide support and manage risk by letting developers build and release hidden features continuously without waiting for reviews by testers or product management.

To remain competitive, almost all “Software as a Service” and online service providers will need to move to continuous delivery like Google and HubSpot have. The leaders, such as Amazon and Facebook, have already made the switch, with major transformations going on at places like LinkedIn and Netflix. Industries that rely to a great extent on software-based services, such as banking, are not far behind, with a rising number of competitors building and testing new products online.

It is just a matter of time before we see these models being applied across industries, in hardware and other products. For example, chip designers are running continuous integration through their chip simulations, and adding optional features to their chips that can be switched off or on during manufacturing. More broadly, as more and more management practices are transformed by digitization, cutting-edge software development tools and practices such as these will facilitate more open and flexible product management generally.

It’s unfortunate, but rarely do we take the time to review our content marketing plan (that is, if we have one at all). Being that it’s halfway through the year, now is the time to do those little things that may make all the difference to your end of the year results.

The tips below are in no particular order, as they are all worth addressing in some manner:

1. Do a subscriber gut-check: It might be time to look at your subscription database against your customer database. Do you see any differences between those customers who subscribe to your content versus those who don’t? Do they buy more? Do they stay longer?
2. Add outcomes to your editorial calendar: In whatever editorial calendaring system you use, add a column for outlining desired outcomes — i.e., what the reader/watcher/listener/attendee is supposed to get out of that content. How does the content improve their lives or jobs in some way? Document this, and refer to it often as your content is assigned and created.
3. Add a “from-blog-to-what?” line in your editorial calendar: Most of us have blogs, but how are you repurposing the blog content to extend its value? As part of your editorial calendar, add a section that asks, “from-blog-to-what?” — i.e., what other pieces of content could this blog post grow into? Perhaps an eBook or white paper? Maybe a podcast or research report… or possibly even a small workshop. Doing this will solve many of your content repurposing challenges. (Just fyi, I used this strategy for writing my last book, Epic Content Marketing. Many of the blog posts were strategically created to fill chapter holes.)
4. Check your unsubscribe reports: First, are you asking why subscribers unsubscribe? If you are, what’s the most common reason you see? Consider contacting some readers who have opted out and chatting them up a bit to see what you could have done better. Talking to current subscribers is a great idea as well.
5. Talk to at least one salesperson per month: You are likely creating lots of marketing materials specifically to help sales, but odds are you never talk to your sales team members as part of this process. Make it a point to ask sales what they are hearing in terms of customer challenges. Are they seeing value in the content you create? If you can, go on a sales call with your salesperson. If you want to truly create a relationship with sales, you need to get on the road with them.
6. Work your influencer list: Do you have an influencer list identified (where do your customers hang out on the web if they are not on your site)? If you don’t, start with a list of 10 and work the social media 4-1-1 strategy. Then, bake those influencers into your content creation efforts for increased sharing and partnership opportunities.
7. Test your content on various mobile devices: Is your site content responsive? Does it function correctly and can it be viewed clearly and consistently if accessed on a mobile device? How about your email newsletters? If your answer is “no,” to any of these questions, it may be time for a redesign.
8. Check your content pages for calls to action (CTAs): Every page of content you publish has a job it needs to accomplish. Double check your content landing pages to make sure each one has a specific purpose for existing, and a call to action that helps it get achieved.
9. Check your most popular “evergreen” web pages: What are your top 10 overall evergreen pages? Go back to each one and make sure the CTA is correct and check whether or not the content needs to be updated in some way.
10. Refresh your distribution “why?” list: Make a list of all the distribution sources for your content (i.e., email, Facebook, your blog site, etc.). Then put a big WHY? at the top. List out the reason (i.e., the business purpose) you are creating and distributing content on that platform. Odds are you won’t know the answer for all of them, but at least you can identify the channels that need refinement and, perhaps, take a second look at whether you need some of them at all.

I’ve been involved in online publishing for over 15 years now, and I’ve learned the little changes make all the difference. Take a few of these now and make change happen.

Landing pages and conversion optimization are some of the

trendiest topics regarding growth hacking and customer acquisition / activation. There are tons of really great posts talking about the ‘anatomy of a converting landing page’, and articles breaking down the optimization process, but I haven’t read many posts that actually prepare you for the full process, from a blank page to a first good-enough version to start with.

In the last 3 months I helped to create over 20 landing pages (for 7 different companies) from an idea and recognition of the user’s need to finalizing the design and planning the first batch of A/B testing.

The interesting things about accompanying these companies in the process was that they are all very well read and highly engaged in the conversation around landing pages, copywriting and optimization but were surprised of how the process actually looks like when starting from scratch.

One of the disadvantages of writing “how to’s” is that the process always looks very clean and intuitive, while in real life, it’s more of a hard day to day work, and less about getting immediate significant results.

There are some amazing articles out there on creating great landing pages. From how to write eye catching headlines, improving your copy, using powerful keywords and creating a compelling CTA, but not many are talking about starting from a blank page.

In this post I’m going to focus on the step by step breakdown of the landing page creation process.

From A blank document to a highly converting landing page

1. Research your audience

What is the purpose of a landing page?

In the bottom line, for your business, a landing page should convert visitors. But getting someone to convert means that you have to walk them though a journey that starts with “seeing” your product for the first time and ends with really “getting it”. Only after they get it – they will convert.

So the landing page is really about understanding how to communicate with your potential client. What you can do, how you can help them, what problem are you solving for them and why you are the perfect solution for them.

This means that every element of your landing page needs to aim to move your visitor one step further in understanding your value for them.

The best way to understand how to show value to someone is by getting to know them, their needs and how they feel about the problem your product is aiming to solve. Every element in your landing page should act as an answer to a potential user’s question which has landed on your site.

Think about what is the kind of headline that will make them understand they got to the right place? What they were looking for to being with? What would a potential client ask you? What would they need to know to be convinced that you are the right product for them?

How can you answer these questions? By simply talking to your target audience.

Do the interviews where it’s comfortable

What should you look for when conducting an interview?

1. How you present your idea - Similar to crafting your elevator pitch, you should notice the way you present your idea and how your potential user reacted to it? Did they reflect your product using different words? Did they care?
2. What were their questions - If you’re having a conversation (which you should be having) it means you said some stuff, they responded and probably asked you some following up question. Each question they ask is a question a visitor on your landing page might ask himself to fully understand your value. Unlike your conversation partner, you won’t be there to answer your landing page visitor and will probably lose the potential user over it. A successful landing page is one that can predict every question or misunderstanding users might have.
3. What is the order of the questions they asked? A good landing page must have a specific content hierarchy. Understanding which questions follows which feature or aspect of your product is a great way to understand your story flow for you landing page.
4. Spot the A-ha moment - What was their ‘a-ha’ moment regarding your idea. When you told them about your product, at what point did they have the “I got it!” spark. When did they get excited about your solution? Was it a certain feature? Design related? Write it down.

Besides understanding what your potential users want from you, it’s important to understand your audience and get the psychology behind their actions. Neil Patel wrote an amazing guide on ‘Understanding Consumer Psychology’ that will get you way ahead of your competitors in terms of understanding your potential users. You should follow this guide when progressing to the next step.

2. Plan your storyline

After talking with your target audience, you can now start applying what you’ve learned and take the first step in creating your landing page story and flow.

I usually use a 3 steps method to create my first draft of the storyline

Step 1: Write it all down

1. Make a list of all the things you want to say about your product.
2. Make a list of all the questions you were asked in the interviews you’ve conducted (and answer them)
3. Make a list of all your features.

Don’t judge your list, just write everything down. The more you’ll have written down ahead of the next step, the more productive, creative and accurate you’ll be.

Step 2: Converge and Prioritize

• Converge: – Some of the things you want to say about your product are already mentioned in the questions your users asked. Some of the things your users asked are probably listed in the existing features and so on. You get where I’m going with this.The idea behind this step is to eliminate repetition and ease some of the load that will result from combining the 3 lists together.After this step you’re supposed to have only one copy of each item on your list. So if your customers told you security is important to them and you already had it on your list of things you want to say about your product, you’re supposed to have only one item regarding security.
• Prioritize – Not all messages and features were created equal and there is a simple way to decide who the rulers and losers of the messaging chain are (messaging chain, food chain. see what I did there?): What is important to your user?

Prioritize the items you’re left with after merging the lists together using these 2 factors:

1. What is the best order of items for telling your products story
2. What did your potential users ask about / were concerned about the most.

At the end of this step you’re supposed to have an organized list that is the baseline of your storyline.

It should look something like this:

3. Build the structure for you messaging – tell your story.

You’ll notice that in the diagram above I left the design out totally.

The reason I left it out is that I want to fully focus on my story. I still don’t want to think about what elements I’m going to use or how they will look like. First, I want to make sure i have the right story flow and only than think about how am I going to present them.

For example, let’s take a look at Robin Hood, one of the best landing pages I’ve seen lately (with over 400,000 people waiting in line to sign up). Click here to see their landing page.

Here’s how I would describe it on the same diagram I showed about:

 

4. Plan wireframes and direct content

After you got the messaging flow right, you can start planning on “how” you are going to tell your story by working on a wireframe.

This is the point where you start deciding how you are going to convey each message – by text, image, or video.

If you’ll go to the Asana home page, you’ll notice that they keep things very simple by following a simple flow of:

1. What is asana – headline and sub headline
2. Why you should trust us – logos of companies using Asana
3. What Asana is for – A simple line + learn more link (the heavy lifting is in that ‘learn more’ page).
4. Is Asana right for my project? – Again, simple line + learn more link. (Same target page)
5. What features does Asana have? Video, not text.

Notice how each segment could have been easily translated to another format? They could have showed off their features with text on their landing page and not video (They do that in the “learn more” section). But by understanding their story first they were able to find the best way to tell their story and not just integrate a video for the sake of integrating a video.

Let’s take another example – let’s say I’m selling a finance product and I need to show you how secure my product is. I can either write a long paragraph saying how we use the strictest security measures and write a lot of complicated terms or simply put big logos of all the security badges and certifications I have for my site.

The wireframe stage is usually when you translate what you want to say into how you want to say it. It usually ends up looking something like this:

One of the best things about sorting your story into a wireframe, even if it’s not the one who will actually end up designing it, is that flaws are much more visible. It’s a great way to get a better feel of what you’re creating and if you’re capturing the experience or not.

I’m a big fan of Blasamiq for wire framing, but if you want to explore other apps for wire framing, you can see Mashable’s top 20 lists here

5. Audit your story

Remember that it all comes down to how your users react to your page? The wireframe stage is a good timing for testing if you’re messaging and structure are the right ones.

Simply send your wireframe to 10 different potential users, and see if they “get” what you’re offering. If the story is clear enough.

See if they still have unanswered questions, or concerns you haven’t approached on your page.

When getting feedback on your wireframe, try to also understand if beside from providing them with all the information they needed, did you provide all the information at the right order.

Let’s take a friction a finance product might have – If my users are worried about security and I’m only addressing their concern at the end of the landing page, they might wonder off looking for an answer to their security concerns and won’t follow the flow you’ve designed. If you’d introduce the security features at the right time, they would follow your flow and gain more trust because they will feel that you know what’s important to them.

See if the story you’re telling, and the order of events you’re telling it in strikes a chord with your target audience. If you’re still not there, go back to step 3. In the last two projects I worked with we had to go back and rethink the story for 4 times.

6. Add viral hooks

Getting visitors for your landing page isn’t always easy. After I make sure I got the story right, I always spend some time thinking if there is any way I can add some kind of sharing / social element to the landing page.

It can go from building in an incentive such as “share to get early access” for apps with waiting lists to simply adding a sentence saying “Do you think your Twitter followers will love our product? If so, please share us our product on Twitter”.

I would usually never push the share so much before sign up, but it can do some good and doesn’t hurt the conversation rate from what I’ve witnessed, but it does improve share rates, which is crucial for your product at this stage.

7.Finalize copywriting and design.

It’s time to finalize your copywriting, clean and brush every line, paragraph and exclamation point. Re-edit your text, make sure it looks and sounds great. Sharpen everything you can and you’re ready to go.

You’ll notice I didn’t talk much about the actual design at all (wire framing an design are cousins, but not the same thing.) There are tons of resources on what makes a great landing page design, how to choose the right colors and fonts etc. But I will leave that to another post. Here, I simply wanted to show the process of getting to that baseline.

Bonus tip:Document for A/B testing

When planning your landing page you will have a lot of discussions, second guessing and concerns about what is good enough, what might be better or more accurate messaging or copywriting. While creating the landing page, document all your concerns and potential friction points and use them later as a starting point for the A/B testing you’ll do to optimize conversions.

Creating a highly converting landing page is a work that’s never done. There are always new tweaks you can try to improve conversion rates, still, they all follow the same guideline – know your audience and deliver your story in a way they will understand and get excited about your product. It starts and ends with that.

What is your process when designing a landing page? What is your step one?

Are you signed up with Google Authorship? If you’re not sure, try googling your name or your site’s name and see if your photo appears in the search engine results page (SERP).

No photo? No Google+ circle count?

Welcome to the end of Google Authorship as we knew it.

I admit to being behind the curve in acknowledging the incredible disappearing Authorship, which occurred while I was distracted with the Vancouver Jazz Festival. In this post I had originally planned to explain how to sign up for Authorship.

Instead, I’m going to explain what you’ll be missing.

Wither Google Authorship

Google Authorship came about soon after the release of Google+ on 2011. It provided a “rich snippet” of information – including a headshot – meant to be an extension of your profile on Google+ and close the loop of author identification on the web.

With Authorship, you and your website became one and the same in SERPs.

When your site came up in a SERP, so did the photo that you uploaded in your Google+ profile. The rational was that since people like images, they are naturally inclined to click on a link that has a photo of your smiling face.

Not only did your face appear, so did a Google+-linked byline and the number of Google+ circles you’re in, so readers can see how popular you are. And there was also a “More By” link to other posts you’ve written.

Also, when readers click back to the SERP after viewing your site for a few minutes, Google would present more links to your posts because it knows people want to see more of you.

Google Authorship was created to improve the user experience by favouring sites with single authors who control their own content. Google wanted to promote real human beings who creating content and stamp out the anonymous spammers.

Until they didn’t

Google had been tightening the reigns on Google Authorship since 2013. In December they confirmed a 15% reduction in the number of rich snippets being doled out to content authors. This was their way of separating the wheat from the chaff.

Since then, Authorship photos disappeared sporadically, and by June 25 they went away completely. That day, John Mueller of Google made this announcement on his Google+ page:

We’ve been doing lots of work to clean up the visual design of our search results, in particular creating a better mobile experience and a more consistent design across devices. As a part of this, we’re simplifying the way authorship is shown in mobile and desktop search results, removing the profile photo and circle count. (Our experiments indicate that click-through behavior on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the previous one.)

So essentially, Google Authorship was thrown under the bus for the sake of better mobile SERP display.

But, if you are a verified Author, your byline will still remain. Here’s the new look.

Mark Traphagen at Moz wrote an analysis of what Google was thinking when they dropped Authorship. In it, he speculates that Authorship photos sent a loaded message to web surfers, almost like an endorsement or an implication of ranking, and that Google didn’t want that.

Also, he wonders if not enough quality authors were signing up for the program, thus diluting its importance.

Then, there is the theory that Google Authorship competed with Google ads. After all, whose link would you click on: a smiling face or a brand logo?

Is Google Authorship Worth Verifying?

Yes, indeed, Google Authorship verification is still worthy of your time. Your byline will still appear in the SERP and that is something, since it tells the searcher that a real person wrote the post. Heck, they might even recognize your name.

And, according to Traphagen, Authorship is still going to build your ranking with Google since you are still taking personal credit for writing great stuff.

I’ve already done my Authorship diligence, so there is no reason to un-do it.

My biggest regret, other than the obvious, is that I didn’t grab a screenshot of my rich snippet before the photo went away.

How about you? Has the end of Google Authorship photos affected you? Please bitch about it below.

The post No Blog Traffic? Here’s a Simple Strategy to Seduce Readers and Win Clients appeared first on Copyblogger.

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It’s as as inevitable as death and taxes…marketing and sales misalignment. More often than not, each department is operating in their own world, chasing their own goals, and measuring themselves on completely different criteria. In fact, it’s not uncommon for marketing personnel to have never even met one of their sales representatives, much less had a conversation regarding common goals and beliefs. The issue goes much deeper than conflicting goals, and has far greater impact on a company’s bottom line than you may suspect.

If your company’s sales and marketing organizations are not in alignment today, here a few of the consequences.

1. Content is ineffective

If the marketing organization is producing lovely, glossy, well-written white papers and collateral without talking to the sales organization, how does marketing know whether or not the content is actually assisting sales or converting prospects to customers? It doesn’t.

While it’s certainly true that content created for the early stages (Engage stage) of the buying process doesn’t need an eagle-eye review by a sales rep, it is critical that content meant for later stages (Convert stage) meets sales’ needs.  For example, are the product brochures conveying the messages that are resonating with buyers? Are product brochures even the format that sales reps want when they’re out in the field, meeting with prospects and trying to close deals? Who better to know what is resonating with buyers than the sales people who speak with them each and every day. Marketing should be exploiting sales’ knowledge of their buyers to helping to produce content that convert prospects to loyal customers.

Furthermore, we all know that content isn’t cheap to produce, especially if it’s produced externally. In reality, everything from hiring the writers to printing eats away at the marketing budget.

Driving alignment between marketing and sales to ensure the right message and format is incorporated in marketing content will not only improve sales conversions, but also improve the bottom line.

2. “Leads” are rejected

It’s the most obvious of symptoms and yet still so common. Marketing sits in its own world patting itself on the back for all the “qualified leads” they’ve passed over to sales. Meanwhile sales rejects the bulk of these leads or, worse yet, doesn’t even bother to open any marketing-generated leads based on a mentality, driven by history, that marketing never delivers anything of value.  Marketing continues to spend time and money generating these so-called leads for sales and because marketing is measured simply on the number of leads, versus the quality of them, never realizing there is a serious lead conversion problem. Again, wasted time, effort and money.

Luckily, the solution isn’t that complicated, but it does take hard work and a commitment to defining a solid closed-loop process. First, start with a conversation between marketing and sales. Agree on what the definition of a “qualified lead” is. Once that is decided, marketing should be measured more by the quality of leads generated than the quantity. Additionally, sales in turn should be required to provide feedback on marketing-generated leads (via CRM processes).

3. Lack of respect

Issues #1 and #2 above only serve to perpetuate a lack of respect many sales organizations have for marketing. And so, even if or when marketing does change the way it produces content or the means by which it qualifies a lead, the efforts are ignored by sales. It’s often an uphill battle for marketing to gain back the respect it deserves. And it requires ongoing efforts until walls are broken down and old perceptions are forgotten. However, one of the things that marketing can use to showcase their results is data. Sitting down with sales on a quarterly basis to review what’s working, what’s not, what’s converting or what’s not…..even if neither side like the answers…will help drive alignment. Not to mention, that much needed respect. Data doesn’t lie – it enables an honest assessment of the marketing and sales process and a discussion on ways to improve upon it.

4. Unhealthy brand or poor user experience

When sales and marketing aren’t speaking the same language, it presents itself in everything from product brochures, your website, to face-to-face visits. If sales can’t find the content they need, they’ll create their own. And odds are, it will be completely off- brand. And who can blame them? They’re simply trying to close deals and make money. Sales reps don’t have the time to search for usable marketing content and frankly speaking, they shouldn’t be spending their time searching for it, much less creating it. It’s marketing’s job to ensure the brand is protected at all times. That means the look, feel, messaging and tone must be consistent across all prospect and customer communications…whether it comes from sales OR marketing.

Driving alignment between the sales and marketing organizations can truly start with a conversation. In today’s global and largely virtual organizations, it can be hard to get people together in-person, but open communication is key.With consistent conversations, good listening and honest feedback , both marketing and sales can get what they want. They can each stop wasting time and money, and most importantly, be better equipped to meet the bottom-line revenue goals of the company. Marketing and sales misalignment doesn’t have to be inevitable like death and taxes…it can and should be a great combination, more like peanut butter and jelly.

Author: Jennifer Harmel @JenniferHarmel2 is VP of Strategy, ANNUITAS

With a shiny new Sales Lead Tracking app under their belt, the team is pretty pumped. And rightfully so. Seeing all the hard work finally materialize into an app can give even the grumpiest of cats something to smile about. As product owner, you are convinced the project’s sponsors will recognize the superb work and quickly approve your funding request for the next round of features. After all, there are always more and better features to be had.

But you soon realize this isn’t as easy as you thought. During the meeting, one of the sponsors says, “The app looks great, but I just don’t see it in the numbers. One of the key business drivers of this app was to increase the total number of leads captured, and as a result increase sales, but both numbers look flat for the past few months.” More bluntly put—show us the money.

You try to figure out why the numbers aren’t reflecting the level of excitement. You assemble the team to understand the disconnect. Looking at the analytics reports, the mystery begins to unravel. In the 90 days that the app has been available in the enterprise app store, only 50% of your target employees have downloaded it. Even more frightening is that of the 50%, only 35% have ventured beyond the login page and, of that, only 10% have fully explored the app! You get the picture. It turns out, one of the biggest reasons an app fails to meet its business objectives is—you guessed it—adoption (or lack thereof).

Adoption entails much more than just counting the number of app downloads or the number of users who have launched the app. Rather, think of adoption as the repeated use of an app in a way that not only provides value for its users but also helps the organization achieve its business goals. Getting users to download an app is a challenge that can be tackled through marketing efforts, but getting them to engage with an app is a whole different story. In this two part blog post series, we’ll explore some of the reasons why user adoption for enterprise apps could be suffering.

• User Experience – The quality of an app’s user experience can have a huge impact on adoption rate. A poorly designed app that lacks a touch-friendly UI, visual spacing, consistent use of fonts and colors, and an intuitive navigation-flow can push users to look for alternatives. Just because an app is internal-facing doesn’t mean it should be bland and boring. Organizations need to build apps that deliver rich experiences, a consistent look and feel, and an attention to detail that will boost user-engagement. And let’s not forget that user experience isn’t just about slick transparencies and hamburger menus; it also encompasses the app’s performance. Building well-architected apps that are free of any major defects will ensure users stick around long after the honeymoon period.

• Everything but the Kitchen Sink – Building mobile apps to replicate the functionality of an enterprise application is another common mistake that can negatively impact adoption. Organizations that create a “one-stop-shop” app (a paradigm widely used for desktop applications) suffer for it as a result. Because mobile is different. Cramping features into an app makes it complex to build, and even more complex to learn. This steep learning curve will deter employees from adopting the app. And with constantly looming deadlines, learning a new app isn’t necessarily at the top of an employee’s to-do list. Similar to companies like Facebook, Google, Dropbox, and Foursquare that are breaking-up their apps into smaller, single-purpose apps, organizations should focus on building simple apps with focused functionality that addresses the core needs of its users.

Stay tuned as we explore some additional adoption pitfalls in my next post.