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We have written about the pricing models of infrastructure-as-a-service offerings for years, often with a air of mystery surrounding them. As companies such as Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft continue to drop prices, citing improved economies of scale and advances in their underlying infrastructure, industry watchers debate the size of their profit margins. A whole market has emerged around helping users navigate complex pricing structures and figure out what they’re actually paying.

On this week’s Structure Show podcast,  Ben Uretsky, CEO of startup cloud provider DigitalOcean, explained how his company thinks about pricing and profits, and why it has developed simple, linear system — double the resources equals double the monthly cost (which starts at $5) — for cloud costs. Here are three quotes from the interview that get to the heart of the matter, but you’ll want to listen to the whole thing for Uretsky’s thoughts on everything from privacy to IPv6 to DigitalOcean’s growth strategy.

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Cost plus margin means profit

“At DigitalOcean, we decided to do something very unique. We calculated our costs of operating a droplet [the DigitalOcean unit of infrastructure], and then we set a fixed price point that starts at $5 a month, and we know that we’ve built in a fair amount of margin for us to be able to operate a a successful business and be able to grow as a company.”

Proudly not offering high-volume customer discounts … yet

“Actually, one of the interesting things that has come up, as larger customers have approached us, a huge part of the conversation is ‘What kind of a discount can you offer us?’. It’s weird, but I am actually proud to say that, to date, we have not provided any discounts to our customers because we feel that a one-price-fits-all — whether you use a single droplet in our cloud or you’re using several thousand — you should essentially pay the same price because it costs us the same amount to run the infrastructure.”

Why AWS and Google won’t kill DigitalOcean (like some of us have suggested)

“The simple … is, since you have so many entrants come into the field and they’re all still around today, it means the market is very healthy and there’s no reason DigitalOcean would fail as a company. To dive into some of the specifics, we have a tremendous amount of venture capital that’s helping to propel the business and accelerate our rate of growth. As I mentioned with our pricing plans, we’ve built in a profit margin directly into the products that we’re offering, so we’re not operating in kind of a fantasy revenue model — we are actually generating a profit every single month even though we are a price leader in the space.”

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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• How the PaaS market is moving beyond deployment and scaling
• How organizations should determine when PaaS is appropriate
• What mattered in cloud during first-quarter 2014

Whether it's a boss, a salesperson, or a customer service agent, we're often in a position when we need something from someone else. Asking questions can sometimes help shift the balance of power in your favor.

Read more...

We are in what the golf industry likes to call peak season, but that doesn’t mean you must spend a fortune for a green fee. It remains a buyer’s market for golf in the Metro Vancouver area, where courses have had to aggressively price their product to fill tee sheets.

Why should it matter whether the Product Marketing Manager is good enough? Those of you who have great people in these roles know their value. They are the glue between product management and sales. They create marketing strategies that maximize and accelerate market penetration and profitability. Simply put, they make Go-To-Market readiness and Sales Enablement success a reality.

Every email your business sends has the potential to build relationships and boost sales. VerticalResponse is here to help ensure each email you send is effective. So, we’ve created a guide that breaks down eight components of an email. With this handy information, you’ll be on your way to creating successful email campaigns in no time.

1. From label

We start with the “from” label. Everyone pays attention to where an email comes from, it’s the first thing a person sees when they scan their inbox. Since this is such an important piece of inbox real estate, you want to make sure that the from label matches your company name, or whoever your recipient signed up to hear from when they subscribed to your list. This helps easily identify an email’s source.

2. Subject line

When an email lands in your inbox, you decide whether or not you’re going to open it in a matter of seconds, right? One of the things you base your decision on is the subject line. Your subscribers do the same. This is why subject lines are so important. You could offer your customers the best deal or information in the world, but if you have a poorly written subject line, your customers won’t get far enough to take advantage of that great deal.

Beth Nagengast, who uses VerticalResponse to promote Cinquain Cellars, a winery in Paso Robles, California, says subject lines should be straightforward. “Tell your customer what’s in it for them,” she says. It’s good advice. Take a look at the subject line examples below.

The email from VerticalResponse tells customers the information they can expect to read about. The email from the electronics giant offers a deal. Both subject lines tell readers why they should open the email.

Tips to creating subject lines:

• Keep it short. Stick to 40-50 characters.
• Don’t overuse punctuation (i.e. !!!) or symbols.
• Don’t use all caps.
• Don’t repeat the from label.

For more tips, check out our Savvy Subject Line guide.

3. Pre-header

The pre-header is like a subject line’s sidekick. It’s the first line of text in your email. Some email programs, like Gmail or mobile phones, include the pre-header after the subject line so the reader can get a little more information before opening the email. See the grey text after the subject line? That’s the pre-header.

It’s another way to grab attention. Whether it’s displayed next to the subject line or not, that first sentence in your email is vital. You want customers to keep reading. Try to write something that builds on the subject line and tells readers exactly what the email is about.

4. Content

Now it’s time to get to the meat of your email marketing: content. The message that you create should provide value to your customer. Teach them about your business, offer a promotional deal, or keep them informed about new products or services. Whatever your goal is, make sure the content is succinct and informative.

To set your emails apart from the rest, make a commitment to quality. Create content your customers want to read and then keep it coming. You want your customers to look forward to your emails. Importantly, every email should be error-free. You don’t want to sink your credibility with an email that’s riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors.

You’ll also want to vary the kind of content you send. You can’t fill your customers’ inbox with dozens of promotional emails. If you try to sell too hard, you’ll push customers away. Offer an array of content. A company newsletter is the go-to email marketing for Cinquain Cellars. It helps the company build a relationship with customers. From product tips to a company newsletter, the name of the content game is diversity.

5. Call to action

The point of every email is to get subscribers to take some kind of action. Whether you want them to make a purchase or take an online survey, a clear call to action makes it easy for the recipient to follow through.

When you’re creating an email, ask yourself, “What do I want the recipient to do?” If the answer is to make a purchase, you could include a “Shop Now” button in the email. If you want customers to take a survey, you would include a link that takes the recipient directly to the questionnaire.

The main thing to remember when creating the call to action is that it should be clear. We’re talking blatantly obvious. Take a look at this email.

The call to action is easy to identify. Recipients click on the “Shop now” button, which takes them directly to the online retail mecca in seconds.

One of the best ways to create a clear call to action is to use a clickable button.

Tips to creating a strong call to action:

• Keep it short: A call to action should be no more than five words; most are only two words. You want something that’s simple and effective. No need for flowery language here.

• Use active language: You want customers to act now, not two days from now. Use active words to get your customers moving. Phrases like “Purchase now” or “Try our new service today” are good examples.
• Create a sense of urgency: Give customers a reason to act now. For instance, put a limited time frame on deals so customers won’t wait.

6. Images

There’s an old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, and it especially holds true in email marketing. Using an image in an email is a great way to appeal to your customer’s visual nature. One of the easiest ways to incorporate images is to highlight your product or service. Take a look at the example below.

This email wouldn’t be nearly as effective without the pictures of the product. The images give customers an idea of what the new product looks like. It’s invaluable information for customers and gives them a reason to shop.

If you’re trying to market something that isn’t product-related, such as a service, you have to think outside the box. For instance, think about whom your product or service helps and try to use an image that relates. Take a look at the example below.

This online university uses a picture of a mom and a child in its email to encourage adults to come back to school. Notice how the image complements the text. That should be your goal.

7. Social media buttons

Don’t forget to include social media buttons in your email. You want your customers to engage with your brand as much as possible, so make it easy for them to check out your feeds. Take a look at the email below. Notice the Facebook, Twitter and YouTube options near the bottom.

8. Unsubscribe option

You may not be aware of it, but there are laws regarding email marketing. The CAN-SPAM Act says your email must include a way for customers to opt out. You can go about this in a couple of ways. You can put the word “Unsubscribe” at the bottom of the email that is linked to an unsubscribe option so customers can click on it and remove their names from your list. Or your readers can hit reply and include Unsubscribe in the subject line. At VerticalResponse, we manage all your opt outs.

You wake up after only five hours of sleep and sit in traffic to drive for an hour to get somewhere only 10 miles away where you have to spend 8+ hours of your day being abused by narcissistic management and dealing with whiny customers. You’re so exhausted by the time you get home that you barely have the energy to do anything before you have to go to bed and do it all over again.

You hate your job, and so do many Americans. In our “pursuit of happiness,” we’ve lost sight of what we want. Perks and better-than-average salaries have tricked us; dead-end employment and glass ceilings have trapped us. Is it time to find a better job opportunity, start a business, or acquire an existing one? Maybe you should have been a doctor or lawyer so you could start your own practice after a few years. Is it too late to start a blog and make money online? You wonder how you can put up with the job you have now until you’re able to transition your skill set and knowledge into your own venture. But before you can move on and make a change careers, you have to be introspective to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

Reasons Why You’re Still At The Job You Hate

Money isn’t the only reason why people stay at a job they hate. Human beings inherently seek out security, and if you know your job is stable, especially in an unstable economy, you’re more likely to rationalize sticking around even when you’re clearly struggling to be happy. This potential for instability is most likely the biggest factor entrepreneurs consider before starting their own business, particularly when they have a family, mortgage, education costs, etc.

Here are some reasons why you might still be clinging to your miserable job:

1. Fear of the unknown. Most people are creatures of habit. We stick to what we know because it’s comfortable and familiar. This is absolutely the worst reason to stay in an unwanted situation, but you’re not alone.

2. Financial stability. Job security means income security, regardless of its size. Even if you’re shopping at the 99 cent store for groceries while your whole paycheck is going to rent and bills, it’s still a reliable paycheck. Taking on your dream job may mean an unsteady income and that’s flat out scary.

3. Lack of marketable skills. You’ve been working the same job for twenty years – the one that only required that you type 45 words per minute and have decent verbal and written communication skills. Unfortunately, while you’ve been excelling in your own territory, technology has expanded to reach all work related areas. You likely worry about the “do-it-all” aspect of being self-employed because you aren’t confident you can.

4. Money, money, money. Some people believe that success is measured by the size of your bank account, and those who have big ones probably feel mighty successful. Does depositing a hefty check offer satisfaction? What great sacrifices are you making to keep that lifestyle? Some may prefer money over freedom, while others value their contribution to society.

How To Change Careers

It’s not easy trying something new, no matter how unhappy you are with the old. There’s always some kind of excuse or maybe you just need to learn how to motivate yourself. There are people who hate their jobs so much that they take their stress home and suffer from health problems, emotional disorders, and family dysfunction. If this sounds like what you are experiencing, maybe it’s time to make a change.

1. Start gathering references. You know those coworkers who like you so much? Get them to write you letters of recommendation because they will come in handy with loan officers when you are seeking a business loan from the bank. Collect contact information for anyone in your company with a title who knows you well enough to serve as a reference for future clients, assuming you won’t be competing with your current employer. Even if that is the case, build up your network; you never know who you may want to hire away to work with you.

2. What’s the plan? To get anything done in life, we need goals. When searching for a new career, goals such as furthering your education will help you transition careers and industries. If you’re long-term goal is to become self-employed, then start reading books on the industry you want to transition to. If possible, you can even slowly start building a part-time income in the next 12 to 18 months to soften your move to full-time self-employment.

3. Don’t burn the day. Use your free time wisely. Instead of watching a sitcom or surfing the internet during your downtime, be productive. Want to make money from home? Try a freelance writing, editing or graphic design business. Want to start an event-planning business? Start building your network and volunteer on the weekends to work with an existing company. Interested in opening a restaurant? Work at a local one similar to the style of restaurant you want to start. Yes, the current job you hate is exhausting, but utilize any free time you have to take advantage of opportunities.

4. Don’t scoff at company paid workshops. While you’re still able to, take advantage of current resources to develop new skills and meet people who might become your first customers.

5. Do not despair. Why dwell on your unhappiness? We all know nothing positive comes of that. Be productive and take steps to achieving your goal, then focus on the good stuff. Go out with your friends, get a hobby, or do whatever it is that allows you to relax. Leave work at work, where it belongs.

6. Don’t bring everyone down with you. Friends and family are there to listen when you’re down. Managing stress is crucial to maintaining balance in your life, but being overly negative can work against you. Learn to channel that energy into positive change. As John Lyons said: “Look at frustration as a positive thing. It is the frustration that drives you to improve.”

7. Be grateful. You may hate your job, but at least you still have one. By all means, keep looking for better opportunities, but don’t ever let your disappointment spoil your gratitude. There is always someone worse off.

Most of us have learned that money doesn’t buy happiness and that, by following your dreams, you can find contentment and inspiration. They say a happy worker is a good worker, so imagine how productive you could be if you only loved your career, self-employed or not.

What steps have you taken to change careers or transition from a job to self-employment?

Image via Shutterstock

To execute a great content marketing strategy, you have to produce a large amount of content that will

resonate with your target audience, get their attention and their appreciation. While quality of content is always important, quantity plays a role too. So, the main question is – how can you come up with an endless amount of ideas for your content marketing plan and still hit a home run every time?

Generating new ideas for blog posts that will attract your target audience and get a massive amount of shares is hard, but far from impossible. In this post, I want to show you 5 methods that will help you to stay fresh with ideas for amazing blog posts. But first, I want to emphasize the fundamentals of understanding the essence of what is magically called “great content”. I will keep it short.

What is great content anyway?

The intuitive definition of “great content” is content which is good enough to make someone value it by reading it and as a result sharing it. I believe this definition captures what people think about when hearing the generic tip of “create great content”.

I think “great content” can be broken down into 3 functional definitions:

1. Good writing – comprehensive writing that has clear structure and is grammatically correct.

2. An interesting topic – picking such an interesting topic is of course subjective and is influenced by who your target audience is. Hence, picking an interesting topic means – writing about a subject your audience can relate to.

3. Give Value – Giving value is also a subjective matter. If I’d write a post on “how to open a Twitter account” to a reading audience that is already a pro Twitter user, the post will have very little value to them. On the other hand, writing a post on how to use Twitter to discover blog posts and ideas can be valuable to my readers. Giving value means that my topic should be interesting and the level of expertise of content should be suited for my readers. If you get the right value – you will get the “people who would want to share” effect right as well.

Now that we have established the fundamentals which stand behind great content, we can understand how these 6 twitter methods work. It is all based on picking the right subjects and writing about it in the proper depth. Now let’s view how you can use Twitter to generate endless ideas for great content for your content marketing efforts.

Step by step methods to get thousands of visitors worth blogging ideas

1. Search for keywords and get inspired
If you’ve really done your homework while crafting your content strategy, then you should already have a set of keywords you’re tracking and trying to influence in. Other than being important to improve your ranking on Google, keywords are very useful to help you find relevant content for your ideas that will inspire your posts.

Here’s how it’s done:

1. Start by choosing a relevant keyword that would be great as a general topic for your blog. For example, let’s say “customer acquisition” is a subject my readers care for.
2. Next, go to http://search.twitter.com and simply type in “customer acquisition” in the search field.
3. Scan through the results and feel free to be tempted by opening the articles that attracted to you in a new tab. I recommend not exceeding more than 7 new tabs, in order to avoid information overload and to stay focus.
4. Read each of the headlines and try to try a new idea as a spin off to the posts you opened.
5. Scan through the article’s content and try to answer one question: “From what I’ve just read what can I elaborate on?” and jot down all the answers you have in mind. Don’t judge your ideas at this point.

By now you should be looking at around 5 – 6 new ideas that surround your target keyword “customer acquisition”. Which is what we came here to do, right?

2. Tweet chats

If you’re not familiar with Tweet chats, they are a great way to engage with relevant potential members of your community and a great place to get inspired for blog posts ideas.

A tweet chat like this: “A tweet chat is a live Twitter event, usually moderated and focused around a general topic. To filter all the chatter on Twitter into a single conversation, a hashtag is used. A set time is also established so that the moderator, guest or host is available to engage in the conversation.” As described by Steve Cooper from Hitched Media on Forbes

There are tweet chats around almost every topic out there, and besides being a great place to talk to potential followers (Hey! You’re all into the same field of interest, right?) it’s a great place to see what interests or tackles your community. Each question or topic that gets discussed is a potential blog post you can write.

Bonus tip for the hard workers: if you write down who asked which question, and who was involved in the conversation, you can later on share your new blog post on Twitter mentioning those Twitter users.

Here are your next action items:

1. Map the topics that are relevant for your business.
2. Map out the relevant tweet chats by the topic you chose as relevant to your niche. Here are 3 great sources for tweet chat schedules:
   • Gnosisarts.com
   • Tweet reports
   • The tweet chat blog
3. Create an excel sheet and track: name of chat, the chat’s hashtag, describe the moderator, topics they discuss, time and date for the next chat. Make sure you’re writing down the time based on you localization.
4. Show up. Make sure to be live on Twitter on the right day and time, and follow the tweet chat hashtag.
5. While chatting, write down the topics or questions that come up. Next to each note you take, write down the Twitter handle of the user who asked the question, so you can follow once your post is up.
6. By the end of the chat, you will probably have a few topics to choose and prioritize from for your next post. Pick the one that was discussed the longest and got the most users involved.
7. WRITE THE POST!
8. Publish it and share it on your social networks, don’t forget to mention the people who were involved in the chat. Also, don’t forget to mention in your post that you were participating in the tweet chat. If you’ll promote the moderator’s chat on your blog, they will promote your post on their social channels.

3. Be the first to post a roundup blog on industry events using hashtags.

Creating timely posts aren’t usually hit for the long term traffic, but they can get you tons of traffic in a short period of time, which usually means awareness and discovery, that can eventually last for a long period of time.

The events in your industry, whether they are conventions, new product launches, special events etc., are all great opportunities for you to blog about and get some massive trafficking; Given that you are one of the firsts to blog about it and distribute it.

So how can you come up with an event round up and post fast enough to beat the other pro bloggers in your industry? Here’s the trick, step by step.

1. First, create a free account on Storify. Storify is a web-based tool that allows you to draw posts from your social networks into an organized blog post you can publish on your blog of choice. This means that if you see a tweet or an Instagram photo you want to embed into your post, you just drag it and drop it onto the post. It’s that easy. It’s a very easy tool to use – click here for the guided tour
2. Before the event starts, create an opening paragraph introducing the event and what should be expected from it in terms of content. Getting the opening paragraph out of the way can usually save you some meaningful time when rushing to post first. Tweak it after the event if needed, but get the biggest chunk out of your way.
3. On Storify, search for the event’s hashtag or keyword that the event is tagged by on social networks and follow the results.
4. Choose the status updates you believe which will tell the event’s story the best. For this step, choose several posts that fight for the same spot on your post. I’ll get to it later. Do that for the rest of the event.

 

• During the event’s “dead time” (there’s always a few dead seconds or minutes between parts), jot down short paragraphs to connect between the social updates you gathered. The updates are without a doubt the main text body for your post, but you should try and connect them with one or two lines of original paragraphs.
• The second the event is over, start researching the profiles you quoted status updates from. You want to make sure your quoting users who are influential in your niche – both for credibility and reach.
• Finish editing your post: this means your opening and closing paragraphs and the two liners you’ve put between social updates. Remember, the social updates should tell most of the event’s story.
• Publish and distribute the blog post on your social networks – don’t forget to “thank” everyone you’ve quoted through their social updates. First do it by mentioning them on Twitter, but if they don’t respond, feel free to send them an email as well, thanking them and making sure they know that they were featured on your post.

 

Now you’ve got a trending post, on a trending topic with lots of people who have interest in sharing it. Good job!

4. Get inspired by popular posts in your niche.

When planning to write a new post, make sure the topic you’re targeting will resonate. You have to be sure you’re choosing a subject your target audience cares about and would want to read and share. The best way to do it is to check out what is the most popular topic they are sharing.

But how do I find out which topics are currently popular and gets most share on Twitter? Here’s the trick.

1. Go to Buzzsumo.
2. Search for the keyword you want to target on your next blog post, or simply search for one that is relevant for your industry.
3. Now you get a list of the most popular content that’s been shared on the topic you’ve searched for in the last 6 months.
4. On the right, you have a ‘sort by’ option. Choose Twitter shares to get the articles that got shared the most on Twitter.
5. On the left, you have a filter by date option. If you’re looking to create an evergreen piece of content, set it for 6 months. If you’re looking to focus on something more trendy and timely, choose the past month, week or 24 hours. That depends on how popular your topic is.
6. Choose one of the top performing articles and read it.
7. Ask yourself – do I have anything to add? Can I dig deeper into this topic? Do I have an opposite opinion? If so, you’ve got your next blog topic.
8. Write and publish the post!
9. If you are feeling ambitious, send an email to the writer of the original post who inspired you and let him or her know he/she inspired you to write a post and of course, send him/her the link. If he or she liked it, they might share it with their followers. #win.

5. Influential’s lists

If you’re reading these advanced tips on using Twitter to come up with blog posts ideas, I’m guessing you are familiar with Twitter lists by now. If you’re not, here’s a great article by PCMag that will help you to close the gaps.

Now that you know what the lists are, you can do one of two things – go and create your first list and gather influential people in your niche, or simply search for existing awesome twitter lists.

To build your own list, you will need to map out the influencers in your niche and simply gather them in your list.

If you want to start with a pre-made list, you can:

1. Go to Google and type your niche + Twitter list, you will get some good results there.
2. Go to http://search.twitter.com and look for an influencing people in your industry, go to their profile and on the stars bar (where you got number of tweets, followers, following stats etc) click on more and choose “lists”. Then, click on “member of” and see what lists they are on. You can see the name of the lists in order to get better understanding on what the list is about. Follow a few lists that are relevant to you.

After you’ve set up the lists you would like to follow, simply review them for ideas and inspiration anytime you want to write a new blog. It’s as simple as that.

Writing blockbuster posts isn’t an easy task and it rarely gets done by gut instinct.

So tell me, what creative ways do you have to get blog posts ideas?

Smog may be stifling Beijing’s image, but Kristian Li wants to turn that infamous haze into a marketing hook. The Toronto-born brewer, who has sold his Jing-A craft beers (with cofounder Alex Acker) in China’s capital since 2013, is pouring out a murky concoction that cheekily reminds Beijingers of their city’s dismal pollution. Li and Acker dubbed it the Airpocalypse IPA and, upon its recent debut, they announced a temporary discount that would coincide with the city’s air quality index. If pollution reached a level of 500 or more on that scale, then the suds would be given away for free—a fitting deal, considering the brew’s equally hazy flavour, which Li and Acker attained by leaving the batch completely unfiltered.

The campaign went viral on social networks and in the international media. But the Jing-A duo say they’ve had even greater success with tapping into more positive aspects of Chinese culture. Unlike many local breweries that work to recreate the types of lagers expats are homesick for, Li and Acker brew distinctly local flavours, in the hopes of dipping into the deeper Chinese market.

“China is the biggest producer and consumer of beer in the world,” Li says, pointing out that the Middle Kingdom brewed 50 billion litres in 2012 alone, and that beer is China’s second-most consumed beverage, after tea. Mintel, a market research firm, says the nation’s beer market grew by 29 per cent since 2007, and that its overall value rose by 63 per cent in the same period, to [the equivalent of] $78 billion. Of course, those figures were dominated by huge corporate beer brands like Tsingtao and Yanjing. “If we can get just two to three per cent of that clientele drinking craft beer,” Li says, “it’s a pretty lucrative opportunity .”

Li and Acker, who previously worked in Beijing’s telecom industry (the former at Microsoft and the latter at Apple), hope to whet those appetites with flavours such as Jing-A’s Toasted Chestnut Brown Ale, for instance, brewed with the bite-sized nuts that are one of Beijing’s distinctive snacks. Their Full Moon Farmhouse Ale is infused with the sweet gui hua flower used to flavour some of the nation’s most popular teas. Li and Acker drive fresh batches around town in a keg-equipped electric “egg” scooter, a signature Beijing vehicle. “It’s all about using organic local ingredients,” says Acker, who hails from Connecticut. Li says the market is responding. “We started brewing two years ago,” he says, “and now, we’re in Beijing’s top three.”

“I love the unique flavours at these breweries,” says Lolly Fan, a local music promoter, who recently became hooked on craft brews. But she thinks the appeal may be lost on some Chinese customers. After all, this is the nation’s first generation to have easy access to bars, let alone artisanal beer. “Most Chinese people go to bars to watch shows or dance, but in a brewery, you enjoy beers and talk. A lot of customers might wonder why there’s no mojito on the menu.”

Yin Hai, a brewer and owner of Beijing’s NBeer pub, says that bewilderment is understandable, given that the Communist era left China closed off for so long and its radical reforms opened the cultural floodgates so quickly. “Fifteen years ago, when wine just got into China, everyone mixed it with Coca-Cola,” Yin says with a laugh, adding that the Chinese elite are now some of the most seasoned wine importers in the world. (The same happened with coffee.)

A lack of consumer awareness isn’t the only buzz kill for Beijing brewers. Li says general food safety and hygiene concerns, which stem from notorious lapses at Chinese restaurants and grocers, have led to strict bottling regulations. These all but prohibit small operations such as Jing-A from selling their brews on a grander scale. “If we wanted our bottles in grocery stores, we’d need to have a bottling-grade facility,” he says, adding that licences are only granted if the applicant produces a huge minimum quota.

Carl Setzer, owner of Great Leap, the city’s first and biggest craft brewery, which successfully experimented with local ingredients before Jing-A, says he’s not merely frustrated by China’s rigid health regulations—he’s terrified by them. “There’s a very draconian, but very real law here that says if you make a product that kills Chinese people, you get the death penalty,” Setzer says, adding that fear of execution is only one reason he sticks to the rules. He’s also compelled by the idea of credibility. “If we operate in grey areas because it’s China—wink wink, nudge nudge—then we’ll never persuade the higher-ups who want to see effective change in the food and beverage industry.”

Pan Dinghao, owner of Panda Brew Pub, says the fledgling industry has already worked through other challenges. “At first, we had trouble finding quality local malts and hops,” Pan says, but that problem has shrunk, as pro and amateur brewers have coordinated societies, online stores and social media networks to share tips on Beijing’s ingredient options, regulations and other fine points.

Setzer is encouraged by the scene’s overall progress, saying he sold 38,000 pints last month and those totals keep growing. Acker and Li say Jing-A’s sales have quadrupled since last year. The advantages of brewing in Beijing may well trump any setbacks. “I have a lot of friends in Boston, where every neighbourhood has its own craft brewery,” says Acker. In contrast, Li says, Beijing is like a wide-open frontier. “I have a friend back home who opened a brewery in [Toronto’s] Kensington Market,” he says, “and it cost him $1 million to start. In Beijing, you only need a fraction of that; a majority of the equipment used abroad is manufactured here.”

Acker says the low stakes and lack of cutthroat competition encourage Beijing’s craft brewers to collaborate on batches, events and promotions. In fact, the collaborative spirit may almost be a necessity in Beijing. As Acker puts it, “We’re all committed to spreading the gospel of good beer together.”

The post Craft breweries bubble up all over China appeared first on Macleans.ca.

People often confuse value with price. What is the difference between the two and why is it of any consequence to you? Shouldn’t they both go hand in hand? That’s not necessarily so let’s explore why.

The Eye of the Beholder

What is the first question people often ask when they want to purchase something? “How much does it cost?” And, that’s only after we’ve turned the object over and over looking for the price tag. In today’s economy, the concept of value and price has gotten trapped together. They are not synonymous. You may wonder why some people are still buying expensive items when most of us are counting our pennies and trying to keep every available coin in our pockets. The answer might lead to the truth about value and price. Price is just that – a dollar amount assigned to an item or service. It usually reflects the going rate locally or globally. As a business owner, you want to stay competitive without alienating your target customer base. It’s a matter of profit as well. If you come in too low, then you are undercutting your own business and you will lose money. Value refers to the significance that we apply to a good or service. It is tied into the perception of your business brand. Honda has built a reputation as a solidly made car. As such, people will invest more in one because it will keep their families safe and they can drive it for a long time. The decision, to buy, moves beyond mere price to what is perceived as the additional benefit that comes along with purchasing this kind of car.

Translating Value

As you work to present your products and/or services to the customer, consider how you will translate the value of your brand as well as the price. Time and time again, business owners who reach their customers on a more personal level with their marketing strategies are delivering value along with their price. If a customer feels that they cannot do without your product, for whatever reason, they will buy and continue to buy despite an economic downturn. So, how do you do that? Look at your products or services and ask yourself a few questions. What can they do for your clients that others can’t? Besides the physical product, what are you also offering your clients that they can’t see? Here’s an example. If your product is organic, it probably costs more, but what are the benefits of that? There are no pesticides used which pollute the land and are dangerous to humans. Families can confidently feed their children without worrying about artificial ingredients. You are promoting healthier children as well as a healthier environment as a bonus.

The Verdict

Is price or value more important? They are not the same, but communicating the value of your products to customers can keep them buying even if the price is higher than the competition. Loyalty may run deeper when you build your brand on value rather than just price.

Is the concept of the business biography a fairly recent innovation? Perhaps so. Think back to 20 years ago: We may have had investor profiles and other forms of written marketing collateral, but nothing like the sheer number of business bios we have today. In fact, between your company’s LinkedIn bio, its Facebook bio, its Twitter bio, and its Google+ bio—to say nothing of your website’s ‘About Us’ page—you probably have more bios than you know what to do with!

The question is, are they any good? The bios you have on each of your social channels ultimately reflect your company’s values, its priorities, and the benefits it can offer to clients—or at least, they should. That’s what makes it so important for your business to have a unique bio for each of these different social channels: Ultimately, prospective customers are going to look at these bios to get a feel for what your brand is all about.

Whether you’re just now writing social media bios for the first time or refining the ones you have, here are five tips that might make the process more effective:

1. To begin with, focus on value. We’ve said this before, in other contexts, but it warrants repeating here: Your customers don’t really care that much about the whole long and detailed history of your company. They really care about what’s in it for them. So, while you might think of your bio as being mostly about you, you really shouldn’t: It should be just as much about your customer, the benefits they receive when they do business with you, and the reasons they should pick you over your competitors.
2. Your bio should be a reflection of your business, but, more specifically, it should be a reflection of your company’s social media presence. In other words, you need to reflect the topics you post or tweet about. If your company is a property management or real estate company but you mostly post homeowner tips and insights, make note of it in your bio. Explain the value you’re trying to add to the consumer experience, through your social media posts.
3. To some extent, it’s smart to keep things friendly and personal. That doesn’t mean professionalism goes out the window, and LinkedIn is somewhat of an exception here, but remember that this is social media. You’re allowed to be reasonably brief, conversational, and welcoming. In fact, we encourage it.
4. Avoid empty words. We’ve made extensive note of this elsewhere. The long and short of it: There’s no need to pad your bios with meaningless buzzwords or business clichés. Convey specific value, and make it clear what sets your brand apart.
5. Finally, for your Facebook and Google+ bios in particular, make sure to include some contact information. Yes, there are separate fields for this, but it never hurts to put your website URL and phone number right there in the bio field.

It probably sounds like heresy to talk about “Good Revenue” and “Bad Revenue,” particularly when you’re struggling to make your numbers and everything seems good. But that’s just the point, understanding what “Good Revenue” is, focusing on finding it, minimizing our time chasing “Bad Revenue” makes achieving the numbers much easier!

Now that I’ve thoroughly confused you, let me try to drive some clarity into the idea.

Good revenue not only provides you the cash you get from the specific deal, but position you to build upon that base, creating more revenue, more easily. That may come through follow on sales in the account, because we’ve created a very happy customer, but the more important impact is what it does for us in building our credibility, visibility, knowledge, and experience base in a new segment.

Let’s imagine we’re a brand new company launching new product. Our initial sales are very difficult. We struggle to create visibility, awareness and interest. Once we’ve found a customer, we have a challenging and long sales cycle. We have to demonstrate our knowledge and experience in the market and in solving similar problems—kind of tough when you are brand new. Additionally, regardless how well we have researched, we’re really learning on that first sale. We’re trying to understand the customer problems and how we really address those problems, we’re trying to figure out the sales process–who needs to be involved, key activities, triggers, competition, the buying cycle, all the things critical to closing a deal. So those first deals are tough, they take a long time, and demand a lot of attention from everyone in the organization. But we’ve been successful and closed the deal—we may have had to discount a little to get it, but we’ve closed it.

Now let’s think about the next sale into that segment. We already have the experience of that first sale under our belt. We understand a little more about what the sales process should be–thought it’s not perfect. We know a little more about the things we need to do to win, based on our experience with the first sale. We have “experience” in the segment–so we may be more conversant on issues, we may even be able to reference the first customer to add greater credibility. So the second sale is a little easier–it may take a little less time and resource, we may have not have to discount as much because we understand our value and can defend it better.

Then as we get our third, fourth, tenth, hundredth sales into that segment, our ability, our experience, grows. Through our increased experience, we are much more credible when we engage customers in the segment. We know how to best align our sales process with their buying process, our win rates increase, our sales cycles decrease, our margins, perhaps our average deal value increases. We start to develop a reputation in the segment, when we prospect, customers have heard of us, they know we are credible and can produce results, they are more willing to consider us as a solution provider. Customers are even approaching us, we aren’t having to find them, they know what we’ve done for others in the industry/segment, so they come to us.

By focusing our efforts within our sweet spot, we actually accelerate our ability to grow. Each deal enables us to more effectively and efficiently pursue other deals. This is “Good Revenue.” We not only get the income from the deal, but it builds our capabilities and experience to go after more, more easily/effectively.

By contrast, “Bad Revenue” is like reliving that first sale for every deal. Each deal is new, we have no experience—they are tough because our competitors are more established, they know how to get deals done, plus the customers know them. Each deal is so different, so it’s very difficult to build our experience base. Our win rates are, naturally, much lower. Our sales cycles are much longer. We have to invest more resource to win each deal, so the cost of selling (customer acquisition) is high–higher than our competition. Then to win these deals, we proably have to do all sorts of unnatural acts–particularly around pricing.

Imagine every deal being like this! It’s impossible to grow, we’re constantly starting from scratch.

Here’s the most counterintuitive part of all this. As sales people struggle to make their numbers, they tend to cast a wider net—reducing qualification criteria, chasing opportunities further outside our sweet spots. The more the sales person struggles, the further they look. What’s happening is they are actually doing the wrong thing, they are reducing their ability to win and make their numbers. Their win rates plummet, sales cycles increase, they struggle—so then they cast yet wider net—and the death spiral continues.

There are times when we choose to chase “Bad Revenue.” For example, if we are trying to expand our sweet spot, penetrate a new segment, we purposely go after customers far out side our sweet spot. But we do so knowing we will have to build our experience, credibility, and so forth–so we can get our first success, then start building on that, chasing Good Revenue in the new segment (the smart way is Geoffrey Moore’s bowling alley approach).

Individually and organizationally, if we want to maximize our growth and success, it’s critical to understand the difference between Good Revenue and Bad Revenue. We have to identify and focus on our sweet spots–consciously focusing on Good Revenue opportunities and not getting diverted by Bad Revenue opportunities. When times get tough and we are struggling, we have to narrow our focus and increase the intensity of chasing Good Revenue. We have to resist the tendency to chase every deal.

Do you understand the characteristics of your Good Revenue deals?

We talk a lot about boring content here at Sprout Content. That is, how to avoid creating it.

Despite the growth of inbound marketing over the past years, there’s still a lot of boring content out there: websites full of facts and figures, blogs that are written in business jargon, and email newsletters that could put someone to sleep.

We happen to have a lot of clients who are B2B companies in “behind-the-scenes” industries. That means it’s up to us to figure out a way to make paper converting, document storage, senior living telecommunications systems, etc. interesting to their audiences.

In an effort to help put a stop to boring content, we decided to host a webinar, something this boutique content marketing agency had not done before.

No Business is Boring! How to Create Exciting Content for Unglamorous Industries aired last Thursday, unfortunately, at exactly the exact time of USA vs. Germany’s World Cup match. While we may have lost some soccer fans (who we hope will watch the webinar on demand now), we considered the broadcast a success.

Like any first attempt at something, there are lessons learned and things we will do differently next time around. If you are considering hosting a webinar, learn from us:

Set a Timeline and Stick to It

Create a calendar of all of things that need to be done for the webinar (promotion, logistics, brainstorming, creating the presentation, etc.), divide them among your team and make the webinar a priority. It’s the only way it’s going to get done.

Choose the Right Day and Time

Studies show people typically prefer to attend webinars on Wednesday or Thursday. We chose a midday time slot (11am CST) in hopes that people would take their lunch break with us. The only real way to know what’s best for your audience is to ask them. Conduct a poll via social media or survey through email marketing.

Create a Landing Page

You will, of course, direct people to the webinar registration link provided by the software you have chosen to use, but having a landing page on your website is also very important. Answer the 5 W’s: Who (presenters), What (topics to be covered), When (date and time), Where (how the webinar is accessed) and Why (value to audience) so your attendees have clear communication on what to expect.

Communicate via Email

Your webinar software should provide the basics to communicate with people who register: at least a confirmation email and reminders. We opted for reminders to registrants one week, one day and one hour prior to the webinar. We also promoted the webinar in a dedicated email to our entire database of clients and prospects.

Promote, Promote, Promote

In addition to email marketing, we posted webinar announcements on all of our social media channels, specifically to LinkedIn groups and Google+ communities dealing with similar subject matters. We spent a little money on a Facebook ad, which achieved good reach for the amount of money we spent. All of our staff members networked with their own professional and personal circles.

Dedicate a blog to your webinar. Add a slider and/or call to action on the home page of your website.

Reach out to your partners and clients. We mentioned our book Brands in Glass Houses that was co-published with the Content Marketing Institute in our webinar promotion, so they were happy to help spread the word.

Practice, Practice, Practice

We can’t stress this enough. Even with a practice run that was wrought with technical difficulties we thought we had overcome, we still had a few issues during the live broadcast. We will likely upgrade to a better software solution the next time around, but be sure that you test out switching presenters, recording and any polls or live activities several times.

Want to see the result of all of this work? Watch our webinar No Business is Boring!

Sophia #9 100 Strangers (Photo credit: Just Ard)

Often studied in psychology, is the phenomenon of what people say and do is not always what they mean. Lurking in the sub-conscious as well as on conscious levels are guarded perceptions, defense mechanisms, mental images, prejudices, and etc. Often needing in-depth qualitative studies in social psychology to determine how groups of people think, behave, and make use of language.

In social psychology, archetypes are often used to help communicate the social psychological dynamics of people. Helping psychologists to translate their qualitative research into meaningful insights and portrayals of people in a social context.

In the business world, marketers and sellers must especially be on guard for this type of social psychological phenomenon when what people say may not actually be what they mean. The use of personas in marketing helps us to understand customers and buyers deeply within a social and cultural context. Giving us insight into how purchase decisions are influenced as well as helping us to connect with customers on the things, which matter most to them.

Sometimes, and often lately, such efforts stray far from this intention.

Inhuman Personas

A disturbing pattern I have noticed recently is personas used in a marketing context, particularly buyer personas, are not really sounding like personas. While they have been adopted more widely, I am afraid some businesses are adopting in ways providing little value nor representing true personas. Serving more as profiles versus personas, which give insight into what really matters and what people really mean.

Recently, I have been doing helpful reviews of personas previously created. With people who believed they had received the right level of guidance but somehow are not getting the results they expected. Something struck me hard when in the process of reviews. It is this:

The personas did not sound very human.

Personas, in a B2B context and particularly buyer personas, can stray far from their original intentions and design methodology. Which provides the most value when the purpose is to help us understand the human story of customers and buyers. Yes, it is important to understand how purchase decisions are made and why. However, it is equally important to understand this within the context of a human story.

Product-Speak And Corporate-Speak

The mad rush to fill the void of buyers conducting their own research and evaluations before sales intervention with content has led to a narrow focus on the buying process. Not in truly understanding the human story and context taking place. The result is personas in marketing look and sound very corporate.

Personas in marketing can become very corporate indeed. Filled with product-speak and corporate-speak. Filled with jargon-related product-driven and sales-driven terminology. Where we have personas laden with bullet point reference to buying criteria, KPI’s, ROI’s, KSF’s, objections, risks, products, and more. Sounding very corporate-speak and not very human at all. Leading to very little understanding of the human story involved in purchase decisions.

Human-Centered Personas

In order for personas, particularly buyer personas in a B2B setting, to have true value in helping organizations to learn about their customers and buyers deeply, they must be more human, empathetic, and authentic. They must tell the story of the human experience and offer contextual guidance.

There are four principles modern marketers can keep in mind to be guided by human-centered personas – whether they are buyer personas, customer personas, or user personas in a marketing context:

Focus on the contextual situations. Many buyer persona initiatives, for example, are approached from a non-contextual approach. They are approached from a buying process and “deal” approach, which in my book is a profiling approach. When you do this, you wind up with sales-driven and product-driven buyer personas covered with corporate-speak.

Listen to and see your customers. To get to know your customers involves qualitative listening and seeing. Using qualitative contextual inquiry and other qualitative research techniques to understand what goals matter. To my first point, when buyer personas in particular are approached from a “deal” perspective, most companies will rely either on internal data and sales knowledge or if buyer interviews are done, they stem from recent win or lost deals. When this happens – you wind up with personas, which are sales-driven “deal” speak.

Do not confuse intelligence with insight. The word “insight” is so overplayed today in marketing, it seems any type of basic intelligence is called an insight. Unfortunately, this also means basic intelligence information related to selling is called an insight and contained in personas. From a sales profiling as well as qualifying perspective, you absolutely need to know about customer priorities, initiatives, KPI’s, purchase criteria’s, and the likes – these have existed for decades. Persona-based research is designed to uncover revealing behavioral as well as humanistic insights, which can often be unarticulated and not so obvious both to the seller and the buyer at first. By pre-determining or labeling your intelligence needs as insights beforehand, you are closing the window to true revealing insights into the human experience.

Use personas to model human-centered interactions. The end goal of personas in marketing should not be to wind up with a 1 or 2-page description piled with corporate-speak. The end goal of personas in marketing is to help us understand what matters to people, what goals they are attempting to accomplish, and serves as an informing guide for developing human-centered marketing approaches. To reach this end goal, it involves understanding the use of scenario design and mental models as well as story-based modeling. These are very core and essential elements of persona development – even more so as the digital age accelerates.

By following these principles, you can avoid buyer interviews in which people end up saying what they do not really mean and personas, which can be rendered meaningless.

Human Understanding

Oftentimes, when personas are developed without contextual-based qualitative research and approached from strictly a buying process deal aspect, they do not have a very long shelf life. They do not serve as the archetypal living and breathing representation of customers or buyers. One of the key underlying foundations of personas has always been to bring human-centeredness to understanding people’s use of as well as purchase of products or services.

With the advent of the digital age, it is becoming increasingly important to develop a more human understanding of people, whose personal and professional lives intersect. Our goal being to understand and to tell their stories about what our customers are attempting to achieve and how we can help.

More importantly, adopting a human-centered approach to personas in marketing can help you to become part of your customers’ story.

I’m an ENTP — what are you?

If you’re familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality assessment, you know exactly what I mean, and you’re likely to respond with “I’m an INFJ” or one of the 14 other MBTI types. When you do, we each have shorthand for how the other prefers to think about the world.

Those of us who have done project management for any length of time know that many project challenges arise not from some technical or budgetary reason, but because you’re dealing with people. It’s often hard for even people with the best of intentions to communicate effectively. That’s exactly what the MBTI addresses. Knowing what Myers-Briggs type you are — and, crucially, knowing the types of your other team members — can be a great help in getting past those communication roadblocks on your projects.

What is the Myers-Briggs?

The MBTI is a psychometric assessment that was first published in 1962, based on work that Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs, started as far back as the 1940s. These two psychologists worked from the typological theories of Carl Jung to develop four dichotomies with which they tried to capture our psychological preferences:

• Energy source: Extraversion (E) versus Introversion (I)
• Absorbing information: Sensing (S) versus Intuition (N)
• Decision making: Thinking (T) versus Feeling (F)
• Orientation to the outside world: Judging (J) versus Perception (P)

Project manager and organizational development consultant Jennifer Tucker uses the following shorthand phrases to capture what each of these preferences is about:

• Extraversion: “Let’s talk about it”
• Introversion: “Let’s think it through”
• Sensing: “Let’s look at the facts”
• Intuition: “Let’s look at the possibilities”
• Thinking: “Let’s keep this objective”
• Feeling: “Let’s focus on the people”
• Judging: “Let’s get to closure”
• Perception: “Let’s keep our options open”

Many resources explain the four dichotomies in depth. My favorite introduction is the book Do What You Are, which explores the Myers-Briggs assessment from the standpoint of career development.

It’s important to recognize a couple of things here:

• First, these are the preferences we express in our lives, not immutable qualities about us. For instance, just because I’m extroverted doesn’t prevent me from sometimes engaging in the kind of quiet introspection more common to introverts. Similarly, just because my main way of dealing with the world is “Thinking” in MBTI terms, that doesn’t mean that I lack feelings.
• Second, none of these categories is superior to any other category. ISFJ isn’t any better or worse than ENFP, for example — but it is useful to know the differences between those two types if they belong to two members of your team.

How Is the Myers-Briggs Used in Business?

The MBTI has many uses in the business world. You don’t use it to assess someone’s fitness for a job — it’s not an aptitude test. However, you can use it to help yourself or others figure out how best to approach jobs, which careers might be the most enjoyable, and what pitfalls you may face when you work with people of different types. Some organizations administer the MBTI to all of their personnel, from the CEO to the custodians, so they can learn more about how each person prefers to deal with the world.

I was first exposed to the MBTI as a teenager, when my father was running a church with a very large staff. He and his colleagues wanted a better way to understand the roadblocks that they sometimes ran into when they were trying to communicate or work on projects together. Everyone on the staff took the Myers-Briggs assessment and read up on the different dichotomies and types. Doing so helped them to grasp the different psychological styles of the members of the team, which in turn helped them talk to one another more productively.

In my experience, too, that’s what the MBTI is so good at: uncovering the differences between us that aren’t right or wrong, but that sometimes keep us from connecting well in meetings or 1-on-1 conversations.

For example, Intuitive types like me — especially Intuitive Thinking (NT) types — often can grasp the big picture very quickly. Once that happens, new ideas get flowing, and we tend to get bored rather than enlightened by having things explained all over again. Meanwhile, though, Sensing types, who are strongly connected to individual facts, often want to spend more time combing through the details, seeing exactly how everything fits together.

Without the clarity offered by the MBTI, it would be easy for the Sensors to think that the Intuitives are simply being impatient, or for the Intuitives to think that the Sensors are being nitpicky or slow on the uptake. Equipped with the insights from the MBTI, though, it’s much easier for folks on each side of any of these dichotomies to see how other team members process things differently, not “wrong,” and thus better defuse those points of potential frustration.

How the MBTI Can Help Your Team

In her booklet “Introduction to Type and Project Management,” Tucker lays out the idea that not only individuals but also teams and projects themselves have Myers-Briggs types. For example, if most of the team is Introverted, the team as a whole may take on that identity. Similarly, a product-focused team might embody Thinking (by focusing on the technical facts of the product), whereas a customer-focused team might align with Feeling (by focusing on the people using the product).

Tucker proposes a rubric for recognizing project type for each of the four dimensions of the MBTI, though she cautions that making such assignments is “more art than science.” Here are examples for each dimension:

• In Extraverted (E) projects, team members tend to have lots of meetings with each other and with external stakeholders to discuss ideas, but at the risk of wasting time in meetings and over-communicating in a way that creates confusion. By contrast, Introverted (I) projects are more often characterized by quiet hallways and a set of individual contributors who are toiling away on their own parts of the project; for them, under-communication could lead to surprises later on.
• Sensing (S) projects are often characterized by clear benchmarks of success and regular measurements against them, but these teams run the risk of getting lost in the details and missing new possibilities. Meanwhile, Intuitive (N) projects may have teams that come up with bold new ideas — but fail to connect those ideas with the hands-on actions required to meet delivery timelines.
• In Thinking (T) projects, teams often operate on the basis of objective analysis and logical measurement, but sometimes at the expense of paying attention to the needs, interests, and concerns of individual team members or different groups of stakeholders. Feeling (F) projects, conversely, may see teams that value inclusion and consensus, but that fail to make hard-headed assessments about tradeoffs or the completion of unpleasant tasks.
• Judging (J) projects often proceed with a focus on the successful completion of incremental tasks, resulting in a methodical pace and clear evaluations. This can, however, lead to overly rigid adherence to schedules, discouraging innovation. By contrast, Perception (P)-driven projects tend to be flexible and open to ambiguity, but at the cost of chaos, misunderstanding, and missed deadlines.

As you assess a project, you can dig into the strengths and blind spots of each type to help you look for areas to emphasize or watch out for. Some project team types, INFJ for example, are more likely to frame their basic mission in conceptual terms, which can be great for establishing a forward-looking vision of possibilities… but which can also lead to scope creep and an underestimation of the details that will really be required to fulfill the vision. (It’s worth noting that every type is at some risk of scope creep.) By being aware of the potential pluses and minuses of your team, you as a project manager can work to harness the best attributes while steering clear of the negatives that might hamper your project.

The benefits of using MBTI to keep project teams humming were brought home to me by my friend Jeff Johannigman, a human resources pro who coaches organizations on MBTI, but who also began his career as a developer in the video game industry. In his first management role, Johannigman, an Extraverted Feeler, was doing his best to use “management by walking around” (MBWA) to check in on his team members and make sure they had what they needed to get their work done well. His approach backfired because he was managing a team of Introverted Thinkers; the miscommunication was made clear to him one day when an experienced coder snapped at him to “stop micromanaging me.” What Johannigman saw as making himself available to his team, the team saw as intrusive — not because any of them was right or wrong, but simply because they saw the world in different ways.

It all comes back to communication. Successful project management is largely about coordinating streams of work among people with different backgrounds, preferences, and areas of expertise — which means that it’s really about fostering communication that works for the various members of the team. If you’re dealing with a stalled project, or a team that isn’t getting as much out of its talents and resources as it should be, it’s worth trying the MBTI as a tool for cracking the code of the different cognitive worldviews that can so easily divide us.

Mobile device usage is fast on track to overtake PC usage. With the rapid proliferation of smartphones (over a quarter of the world’s 4 billion mobile phones are smartphones), it’s no wonder businesses everywhere are looking to capitalize. If you’re wondering whether it’s worth it, then consider this forecast by Goldman Sachs that puts mobile specific commerce, or m-commerce, at $638 billion by 2018. For scale, that figure represents the entire e-commerce accounted for in 2013.

While B2C businesses are well underway in their adoption of mobile, B2B businesses have yet to fully take advantage of all that mobile has to offer. The reasons to embrace mobile are too compelling to ignore.

For B2B, mobile means everywhere and all the time. B2B users and audiences are accessing brands at various contact points, especially through portable mobile devices. This portability means you can reach target audiences anywhere and at any time. The value comes in timing outreach to have the hardest impact using location-based services and usage trends.

Integration for mobile is also backed by undeniable math. Mobile means lower costs and higher ROIs. Open rates for text marketing far exceed those for email marketing and the costs of running mobile campaigns are less expensive per user than direct mail. Meaning the cost-per-conversion for mobile campaigns is lower overall than traditional marketing solutions and ROI is extremely optimized.

With mobile on the rise, how best can B2B businesses optimize and take advantage? Here are some starting points:

Mobile friendly emails: how to configure content for mobile display Marketo’s white paper, recently updated for mobile email marketing, offers these tips to optimize email marketing content for the mobile user.

• Keep your subject lines short: the ideal length is 15 characters or under, use the space to have maximum impact
• Always check and edit the text version of the email: while many smartphones can read HTML email, in the off chance they can’t, make sure to double check the text version for quality assurance.
• Keep the body content concise: consider the average mobile user consuming content while in motion, likely skimming the email for useful information. Clear and to the point content helps the user find what they need and ensures they do not stop reading your email before getting to the main point.
• Limit design and pay attention to size: a rule of thumb for the optimal mobile viewing experience is to keep content design between 500-600px wide. Be especially conscious of these limitations when including graphics.
• Clear Call to Actions: once again, consider the overall length of your message. With the limitations on space, the CTA must be even more impactful and obvious than traditional email marketing. For click-thrus, make sure the landing page is mobile compatible.

Integrating social media campaigns with mobile. Using social media in a mobile setting means engaging consumers to turn likes and follows into action. Social media offers community building elements. The following steps help generate a community around your brand:

• Partake and facilitate conversations with your audience. Relevant and meaningful interactions can transition your social media campaign into a mobile-driven experience.
• Encourage user-generated content with rewards. A win-win, consumers get rewards, the business gets referrals on a highly visible platform.

Run a Mobile Paid Search Campaign. Mobile Marketer reported a study from Google, which stated that 70% of all mobile searches result in action within the hour. For desktops, that figure drops to 30%. Mobile search is relatively new compared to traditional desktop searches. Use this to your advantage to grow revenue using mobile paid search, which for the time being is much more cost-effective than traditional paid search campaigns. Here’s how to get started:

• Compile a keyword list: for a mobile campaign, keep in mind what consumers are doing when conducting mobile search. Google has a tool that lets you research keywords used on mobile devices vs. desktop. Make sure to have a keyword list that is mobile-friendly.
• Buy mobile keywords: list all relevant keywords for the campaign, split into themed ad groups and make sure to refine your list before bidding.
• Writing the ads: like traditional paid search, consumers are interested in the product over the company. In a mobile setting, with limited space and attention-span, it is even more imperative to focus the ad around the product. Provide immediate benefits in the body. And lastly, include a clear and impactful call-to-action.
• Mobile landing page: not your homepage. Once again, the ad is for a product not the company in general. Develop and link to a landing page where the consumer can access the product immediately without having to navigate through your website (they might lose interest in both the company and the sale).
• Use keywords in the ad: this is where your paid search campaign comes full circle. The best performing ads are those that use keywords in the headlines. This signifies to the user that the ad matches their specific search.

Optimizing for mobile is much more than developing an app to correspond with your business. This is especially true considering current industry trends that demonstrate the growing proliferation of mobile in all facets of life. For B2B businesses mobile is unchartered territory with limitless potential.

How has your brand or business been impacted by mobile usage and how have you addressed these changes?

Comment below with initiatives you have taken to optimize your business for mobile.

Photo Credit: Nigel Maine

Picture this: You go to work one day, pull up your website’s daily visitor count and are floored to learn that over 500 people made it to your site yesterday. You’ve topped your record and you feel confident that the word about your business is finally getting out.

Why Your Website Visitors Bounce

But then you look at your bounce rate and it’s sitting at 45 percent. That means of the 500 people who visited your site, 225 visitors only stayed on your site for a few seconds before clicking out. They might have closed their browser, realised your site was not what they were looking for or just lost interest. There are a number of different reasons why people leave websites so quickly, and while 45 percent is not at all ideal, it’s not the worst. There’s lots of room to work.

What you need to do is improve your website conversion. Not sure what that is or where to start? Never fear, we’ve got the low-down on website conversion, the best ways to track it and how you can better optimise your website so you can finally see why your website visitors bounce and how to keep them on your site longer.

The Basics

So what, in its simplest terms, is website conversion? Website conversion is the process of getting users to stay on your site and do whatever it is you want them to do. A blog might want more subscribers. A retailer wants visitors to become consumers. Website conversion means getting website visitors to do one or more of the following actions:

• Buy a product
• Register for an upcoming webinar
• Fill out a lead or contact form
• Download a whitepaper
• Sign up for your weekly/biweekly/monthly/whatever newsletter

The more visitors who complete these tasks, the better your leads will be , and your salespeople will be able to close more sales.

Website conversion is measure by a percentage of your visitors. While an ideal rate varies depending on each industry, business-to-consumer (B2C) websites that sell necessary items (think shampoo, deodorant and other items you use every day) usually average above 15 percent while non-necessary items (such as designer shoes or video games) are at about 1 to 4.5 percent. Business-to-business (B2B) rates often average somewhere between five and eight percent.

This means that this percentage of visitors to these websites are filling out forms or signing up for newsletters. The percentages may look smaller, but let’s say a B2C essential-item selling site averages about 40,000 visitors per day, that’s 6,000 strong leads or 42,000 leads per week.

The bottom line is that you have to present your visitors with a call to action. Give them a good reason to buy from you or sign up for your webinars, and you’ll see your bounce rate sink lower and your conversion rate grow bigger as your sales begin to grow as well.

How to optimise your website conversion

Now that you know what website conversion is, how it’s measured and why it’s so important, let’s now discuss how you can go about improving your website’s rate. There are so many different tools and programs out there that will help you design a good website and get usable feedback to see if users found your site as easy to navigate.

Most SEO experts divide the most popular conversion tools into one of three categories: user testing, concept testing or attention and click testing. Though they all work slightly differently, they are all dedicated to helping you design a better website and predict how well it will improve your conversion rate.

User Testing

Let’s face it: you don’t always know what your customer wants. Though you agonise over it at times, there simply isn’t a way to be 100 percent sure that your site is everything your users need, but with user testing tools, you can sure come close. These tools help you see if your site is formatted in a way that visitors will find useful and easy to navigate, and you can test out any ideas for conversion funnels you have.

• Feedback Army ($20): Feedback Army is known for its quick turnaround time. You can post images of your website’s design and get almost instant feedback on the layout and flow of it. By submitting questions, you’ll get 10 responses back from the army of reviewers.
• Morae ($1,495 for whole software suite): Don’t let the price get you down. This software program comes in three parts: Manager, Observer and Recorder. With the Recorder software alone, you can record the audio, video, any on-screen activity and the keyboard and mouse movements. With the other programs in the suite, you’ll be able to see your website from so many different angles.
• Loop11 ($350 per project or $1,900-9,900 per year): What’s unique about Loop11 is that it is self-serving. You have complete control over posting your website and providing tasks and questions for your reviewers. You might ask them to go through the checkout process or sign up for a newsletter. Their feedback will help you see whether or not your website flows as well as you think it does.

 Concept Testing

The goal of concept tools is to provide a place where you can test your own ideas for a page layout as well as the layout for a whole site. You can create your own mock-up of a site and then let potential users, clients and co-workers provide feedback. With their comments you can then go about fixing the site and making it as best as it can be

• Markup (Free): This nifty site lets users actually draw on a live website, which makes it easier for you to share your ideas with designers. The images can be saved to your computer and sent out to other designers or clients.
• OmniGaffle ($99.95+): This program, which is for Macs only by the way, endows you with the ability to fine tune a wireframe, process charts or create diagrams. It makes it easier to quickly lay out the website’s structure. You can create whole website designs or single pages.
• Mockingbird (Try for free, plans from $9 and up): This shared program gives your team all the tools it needs to create designs, link them together, preview and then share website designs. You’ll have everything right at your finger tips.

 

Attention and Click Testing

Grabbing a visitor’s attention can be the most important and most difficult aspect of website design. These tools are best for trial and error. You can test out different styles to see what is keeping visitors interested and see what is turning them away. You can also test how well you’re getting people to perform the actions you want.

• Attention Wizard (Free and paid subscriptions from $27-197): This great program lets you upload an image of a website or an actual live site, and the program will create what they call and “attention heatmap.” Simply put, they’ll show you were they think visitors are being attracted to on your website, which will help you decide where to post buttons, images or links.
• Google Browser Size (Free): Now that this site is available with Google Analytics, you can do so much more. Google Browser Size lets you make your own diagrams of different browser sizes so you can easily see where your “call-to-action” part is available to viewers without having to scroll around the page. This will help you see how many visitors are actually viewing what you want them to see.
• Inspectlet (Free and paid packages from $9.99-199.99): What makes Inspectlet so awesome to use is that it combines heatmaps, screen captures and analytics. You can create your own heatmaps and see what your visitors see, all while getting analytics to help you see where you visitors are going.

Of course, before you go with any testing tool, always do your research and determine which tool is going to give you exactly what you want.

How to keep visitors on your site

Website design can only go so far. You still need to give you visitors a good reason to stay on your site so they can remain long enough to want to sign up for newsletters and webinars or purchase your goods and services. After all that work of gathering feedback and redesigning your website, you might be wondering what more you could possibly do.

Here are a couple of website ideas that will keep users on your site.

1. Keep your content up-to-date and readable

If you don’t already have a blog on your website, put one up. You should be routinely blogging and posting new content to attract new readers and keep past readers coming back for more. Google also rewards sites who post new content regularly by pushing them up higher in search results. You’ll have more regular visitors and be more visible to new visitors searching for you.

Don’t forget that readability is very important in a blog, as well as anywhere that text appears on your site. If your visitors can’t get through the text, they’ll just click off your page so remember these tips:

• Paragraphs should be short and sweet, two to five sentences long at best
• Section out your content with subheads to guide readers
• Use numbered or bullet lists that will stand out to visitors
• Bold or italicise words, but be careful not to go overboard

With all of this emphasis on blogs, it’s also important that you…

2. Use different multimedia formats

Videos and images tend to capture a visitor’s attention, and if you can keep them long enough, you just might convert them. While many visitors like reading blogs, others prefer visual images to tell them why they should care or be interested.

From videos to slideshows to podcasts, there are lots of different ways to interest all sorts of visitors. As you experiment, you can measure the success of each media format and see what is working best for your viewers. Once you’ve found a good match, start focusing a little more heavily on it.

3. Keep users internal with links

When you’re on Buzzfeed or your local news outlet’s website, they probably have a list of internal links either along the side or at the end of the article. These internal links lead to other pages on the site you might be interested in, and their usually within the same topic or genre.

It’s important to keep visitors on the site, so by offering new material, you can let your visitors browse all your great content. Without links to other related articles or content, your visitors will take what they came for, maybe an answer to a question, and then take their business elsewhere. You can also install a “Related Posts” plugin that will automatically generate links to content within your site that closely relates to the article the visitor is already reading.

Beware. Many websites use this opportunity to keyword-stuff their links with SEO phrases. Keep all links as natural sounding as possible. If you’re linking to other articles, just use the name of the article.

4. Make the call to action obvious

We spoke briefly about a call-to-action earlier, but let’s return to this topic and flush it out more fully.

Remember that the overall goal is to convert visitors into leads by getting them to do a number of actions from buying a product or signing up for a newsletter. Sometimes the best way to get people to do these things is to just tell them. No consumer is a mind reader so go ahead and ask them to please complete a task. Many blogs end with a question, prompting visitors to leave comments and interact with the author.

Some sites require that all visitors register before viewing any content on the site. Forcing a visitor to complete a form will only drive them away, but those that do go through with the form are probably strong leads. At any rate, it’s not worth it to drive away potential customers so soon by making them act. Let them come to it naturally.

We’ve covered a lot of ground here, and there’s still a lot more we could talk about. What questions do you have about why your website visitors bounce? We’re here to help.

An overview of the Content Experiments feature in Google Analytics.

Featured photo: Couch by emdot 2005 | CC BY

Some time ago, I was doing a deal review with a great sales team. They were preparing for an important call on the key decision makers of a customer. They deal, if they won, would have been huge–$10′s of millions. More importantly, it would have displaced their biggest competitor–the current incumbent in the account.

The customer was undergoing a huge expansion of their business–building new sites, all of which required massive investments in new solutions. The sales team had been invited by the customer to discuss what they could do. The customer was considering a potential shift from their current solutions to a different approach. In preparing for the meeting, they knew all the advantages they had over the competitor’s solutions. They could present a lot of data, they had a sound business case and value proposition. They had some insight into areas of dissatisfaction the customer had with their current supplier.

But they were struggling with figuring out what their real edge might be.

As we worked through ideas, I posed a question to the team, “If you were in your customer’s shoes, and could put aside all your passion and enthusiasm for your current solutions, what decision would you make?”

After a moment of silence and reflection, they stated, “We’d stay with the current supplier!” They went on to describe the risks of change, their familiarity with the current solution/vendor, some capabilities of the current solution, and cited, “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t,” and a few other well thought out ideas.

Then I asked, “If the right answer is not to change, then why are they interested in talking to you?”

They paused, looked at each other, then said, “We don’t know.”

To be fair, they had some ideas, the customer had expressed some issues and problems they were having with their current solutions. They’d expressed real interest in some of the new capabilities my client’s solution could offer. They knew the customer wasn’t totally happy with what they were currently doing. But, given all that knowledge–and the knowledge they had of their own solution, the team still thought the best business decision was for the customer to stay with the incumbent.

And, despite all the meetings they had and information they’d gleaned, they didn’t know why the customer was interested in talking to them.

So the team screwed up their courage, and went into the meeting with one key question:

“If we were in your shoes, knowing what we know of your current situation and investment in the competition’s systems, we probably would continue to use those systems in your new locations. So why are you interested in talking to us about our solutions?”

Then they went silent.

The customer could have said, “You know, upon reflection, you’re right, it probably doesn’t make sense to change. Thank you for your help.”

But they didn’t.

In fact, it was as if the flood gates opened. Framing the question in that context caused the customer to open up in a way they’d never done before. They talked for over an hour about problems they were having with their current systems, challenges in the relationship with the current vendor, things they wanted to do, but couldn’t do easily with the current tools. They went on and on about the competition.

The team took notes, but largely stayed silent. They asked a few questions to probe and clarify, but mostly listened.

When the customer finished talking about the problems with the current vendor, They went on to talk about their perceptions of my client’s solutions. They discussed the things the really liked, things they had learned in researching my client and their solutions. A few concerns they had.

But most of all they described why they wanted to buy. They discussed what they needed to know, and what they needed to overcome to make a switch from their current solution to my client’s solution. They laid out, without really saying so, all the things the sales team needed to address to win the business.

As sales people, often we are confused about why a customer might change. We may be blinded by our passion for our own solutions (or making our quotas), so we focus on convincing the customer of our own superiority. But we may not be addressing the customer’s real issues or our opportunity to differentiate ourselves.

Every once in a while, it’s very powerful to put ourselves in our customers shoes and answer the question, honestly, “If I were the customer, what choice would I make?” If the answer isn’t your solution, then the most powerful thing you can do is pose the issue to the customer.

The worst possible thing that can happen is they can say, “You know you are right.” But that’s probably what we would have discovered at the end of a long and painful sales cycle, anyway.

More likely, particularly if they have invited you to participate, there are a whole number of issues they are struggling with, just waiting to tell you, if you just give them the chance.

If your solution doesn’t make sense to you, it will never make sense to the customer. But if they are asking you to compete, then there is something that’s causing them to be interested—find out what that is!

As for my client, the customer told them exactly what they needed to do to win the business. They won all the expansion business and are on the path to displace the competitor in the existing locations. So far, they’ve collected $159 Million and expect to do a lot more.

Many products, especially technology products, are marketed as revolutionary or game-changing. Most people know better than to trust marketers at face value.

Disruptions to the market could be defined as those who alter the balance of an industry between supplies, consumers, existing and new competitors and alternatives – Porter’s five forces. These changes alter the industry’s profitability, growth rates and expectations for future growth.

Examples of true disruptions include when streaming TV and movies over the internet (Netflix, Hulu) became a viable alternative to in-store rentals (RIP, Blockbuster) or when computer components enabled smaller companies (Dell) to compete at lower costs than industry leaders (IBM, HP).

Market leadership is not powerful enough to stop market disruptions

In the majority of cases, the new technology was available to industry leaders who chose to disregard it as a fad or inferior to their existing technology. There were clear signals of the market disruption, which leaders chose to ignore.

Sony ignored the digital music revolution, allowing Apple to dominate the market with the iPod and iTunes. Sony had everything to win: the company invented portable music with the Walkman a few decades ago. Sony owns movie and music publishers and distributors. Sony produces consumer electronics, computers, and mobile phones. The company’s mission is to innovate around content to deliver new experiences. And yet, Sony chose not to participate in the disruption.

In 1974 Steve Sasson created the first digital camera by using a commercially available CCD sensor which Fairchild Semiconductor would sell to anyone. In an interview, Sasson said: “The revolution was going to happen, I didn’t know when, and I didn’t know how effective it would be. In the end result, the fundamental business model of Kodak was undermined by the new technology.”

The problem? Digital cameras did not require film, which was the core of Kodak’s business. The company deliberately chose not to participate in the new market (for some time) because it threatened its core business. Kodak tried to ignore the future. Kodak thought its industry leadership gave it enough power to stop the advances of technology, the change in consumer behavior and the power of truly disruptive technologies. Kodak was wrong.

Jeff Bezos said it best “Amazon isn’t happening to the book business. The future is happening to the book business“.

Pay TV is being disrupted today

The signals of a new market disruption are clear: History repeats itself in front of us: 47% of U.S. households subscribe to an internet TV or movie service, up from 24% just four years ago, according to a new study from the Leichtman Research Group

According to the consumer electronics association (CEA,) 5 million U.S. TV households rely exclusively on internet TV, and 10 percent of all TV households said that they’re likely to cancel that service in the next 10 months. 17 million TV households use antennas and/or internet services instead of traditional pay TV services. About 100 million households subscribe to pay TV, down 7% from 2013 according to the research firm SNL Kagan.

Pay TV is an oligopoly today. The companies who benefit will try to slow down change or make small moves to participate in the market, but they so far lack the balls fortitude to disrupt the market themselves and compete with their own services in the new paradigm.

Lawyers Can’t Stop Disruptions

The very next day after the Supreme Court ruled against Aereo, a new TV streaming service, in a copyright lawsuit brought by the oligopoly of TV broadcasters, another company, Simple.TV, started promoting a new streaming service.

“If cable companies believe that their old ways of doing business are protected by the Aereo Supreme Court decision, they are clearly misguided, consumers are rejecting cable companies and traditional consumption models. The horse is out of the barn.” – Dan Nova, partner, Highland Capital Partners.

Tesla, who is clearly pushing to evolve the automobile market, is struggling with lawsuits and laws promoted by the old-school market leaders. New Jersey, Arizona, Maryland, Texas and Virginia ban the direct sale of cars to consumers. the theory is that dealerships protect consumers. The reality is the big automakers can’t compete effectively with Tesla and are looking at lobbying as a way to protect their obsolete model.

The end of TV as we know it

The writing is on the wall. Disruption is happening. It may take a little longer, but it is unstoppable. Broadcasters, publishers and others in this industry can exploit their current position and start planning for chapter 11 or they can embrace the new model and lead it.

Unfortunately, not all problems in the industry can be solved by disruptions. Some, like programming, are consequences of consumer behavior. I find it interesting that:

• One of the most trusted sources of news is Jon Stewart on Comedy Central
• MTV does not broadcasts music videos anymore
• Discovery channel is mostly science fiction (just do a search for ‘Discovery Megalodon hoax’ or ‘Sirens’, which set a viewership record for Animal Planet in spite of misleading viewers about the fact it is pure fiction
• Honey BooBoo is one of the leading shows on the Learning Channel
• Swamp People and Pawn Stars are some of the star shows of The History Channel

Market disruptions are accelerated by abuses of their market power, which upset customers and make them far more interested in alternatives. Customer dissatisfaction with pay TV service is well documented.

There are some clear signs of industry leadership abuse that open the door to competitors:

• Having to wait a few weeks to get service
• Sitting at home for the better part of the day waiting for the technician to show up in the 6-hour ‘window’
• Paying $200 for TV service
• Extra fees for every TV, another extra fee for HD, ‘convenience fees’ and other dumb service fees (bad profits, as Fred Reicheld calls them)
• Having to wait for the next airing of a TV show we want to watch right now
• Waiting an hour to talk to customer service while listening to a message that tells us how valuable our call is and how much they love us
• Too many TV commercials, most irrelevant to us, which play at a higher volume than regular programming
• Not being able to watch a TV program on demand or via Roku/Hulu/etc. because the producer wants to ‘engage with customers directly’ on their own website (TLC, NFL, Formula 1 , etc.)

There is a reason why Comcast has the honor of being voted Worst Company in America. Time Warner Cable, Verizon and AT&T made finalists too.

Entrepreneurs will jump to opportunities to disrupt

The beauty of a market economy with a culture of innovation is that entrepreneurs will jump at the opportunity to fix problems in an industry. The definition of an entrepreneur is someone who sees opportunities where someone else see challenges – or abuses in this case.

Silvercar is a great example of a company that is challenging market leadership by challenging the accepted industry practices .

You don’t have to be a startup or a small company to challenge an industry status quo. T-Mobile has been positioning itself as the ‘un-carrier’ with great results: 1 million new subscribers in the last quarter and creating $8 billion in shareholder value in the process.

Who will disrupt your market?

The call to action is to understand the market disruptions in your market and get ahead of them. To identify the accepted practices in your industry that consumers hate and use them as opportunities to innovate and get ahead. To compete against your own company and cannibalize your own products. To be a driver of the industry instead of the road kill. This is your wake up call.

Although there are several online marketing strategies, you need to constantly build your email list, as email marketing continues to produce great results when done correctly. A solid email list gives your business access to your target market around the clock. It is a quick and affordable marketing channel to present your list with a special offer or breaking news.

You could have great sources of email marketing content and effective email subject lines, but if you are sending your emails to an outdated and inactive email list your efforts will not produce results. In order to keep your email list responsive you need to constantly add new subscribers. How do you do this? Read the five tips below — they can help you build your email list.

1. Make Your Opt-In Highly Visible

In order to collect the email address from your website visitor you need to present them with an offer. Entice them by offering something of value in exchange for their email address. You could have the best offer, but if your visitor isn’t going to see it then your conversion rate is going to be pitiful.

Now, not every visitor that lands on your website is going to scroll down to the bottom and look at every square inch of site content. You need to position your call-to-action on top, above the fold. Your visitor should be able to immediately see your CTA as soon as they land on your website. Make it highly visible and make sure that it draws some attention. Remember, your visitor isn’t going to land on your site and look for your CTA, so you need to make sure that they can’t miss it!

2. Promote Your Content & Expand Your Reach

If you are creating great content then you need to promote it across social media and industry blogs to expand your reach. If you are planning on using your content to convert readers into email list subscribers then you need to promote it as much as possible. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn are great platforms to share your content.

If your brand is constantly growing then your social media following will grow along with it. Instead of trying to convert your social media following directly into sales, use the opportunity to point them to great content. If they read something that they feel provides value they will be likely to opt-in to your email list. Never be scared to promote your content to your social audience. Don’t forget tip number one above: make sure your call-to-action is highly visible — not only for visitors to your homepage, but to each piece of content you publish as well.

3. Provide Value

The worst thing you can do is to throw together a low quality offer that provides zero value. If someone subscribes to your email list in order to get your offer and they discover that it is not something of value they are going to unsubscribe from your list and probably never interact with your brand again. Consumers are presented with offers every single day. Virtually every single website has a free guide or some “value” offer to encourage the visitor to submit his or her email address.

Put yourself in the shoes of your target market and think about what they would like. What would they consider to be something useful and valuable enough to give you’re their email address? The eBook we give out on our website is over 80 pages and provides real value. It isn’t an 8- page advertisement, and that is why our unsubscribe rate is almost zero! One of the biggest mistakes responsible for poor email marketing performance is a low quality offer.

4. Study Your Conversion Metrics

You need to constantly track and evaluate your conversion numbers. If your subscriber number slow down and die off then you need to make changes. Split testing your offer is one of the easiest ways to see what is going on with your numbers. If your visitors feel like the offer is not valuable then they will pass, so test multiple offers and see what one pulls in the most subscribers.

You can also test different form colors, button text and colors, and even the form fields that you require. One reason many businesses see a low conversion rate when it comes to their email list is because they are asking the visitor for too much information. Gather just enough information to make an initial contact with your subscriber.

5. Spell Out Your Offer

If your visitors are not subscribing to your list it might not be because of the actual offer, and instead the problem is how to offer is being presented. Take a look at some offers out there. Many just simply say “free download” or “free eBook” – a generic CTA like that will never produce great results. The visitor has no idea what the offer is, so they have very little interest. If anyone does submit after seeing a weak CTA will be a very low quality (and useless) lead.

If you are offering a free eBook then you need to make sure that someone can look at your CTA and immediately know what the eBook is about and what they will gain from reading it.

These tips will help you build your email list, but don’t forget that email marketing is just a small piece of a successful online marketing strategy. If you would like more free online marketing tips make sure to sign up for our free marketing newsletter and download a copy of our eBook titled, “The Complete A-Z Online Marketing Strategy Guide.”

When was the last time you took a long hard look at what makes your customer base tick?

Think customer personas – those detailed representations of the different segments of your target audience. Fueled by data driven research that map out the who behind the buying decisions of your products or services, customer personas can help inform everything from more effective copy to product development.

If you answered “it’s been awhile” or “never,” you need to keep reading.

According to a recent study by the Edelman Group, brands are failing to understand some of the fundamental motivations and concerns their customers have. Brandshare, Edelman’s consumer marketing study, surveyed 11,000 people across 8 different countries who have taken part in at least one brand engaging activity (like following a brand on Facebook) in the previous year.

The study found that 51% of respondents feel brands are underperforming when it comes to asking about their needs. Only 10% consider brands are doing this well.

image source

The above graphic makes it clear the considerable gap between consumer expectations and companies’ ability to match them.

More Bad News For Companies Keeping Their Heads In The Sand

It gets worse. Two research studies released this year paint an even more grim picture. Responsys surveyed over 2,000 U.S. adults to find out how they feel about their relationships with brands. 34% said “they have ‘broken up’ with a brand due to receiving poor, disruptive or irrelevant marketing messages.”

The UK based customer experience management firm, Thunderhead.com, conducted a similar study of U.S. consumers. After interviewing over 2,000 adults, they found ¼ would switch to a different provider after one negative experience. Close to 1 in 5 would sever ties feeling they could never re-establish trust after a significant negative experience.

image source

As the data shows, too many people are getting fed up with how businesses are interacting with them. With only 6% of senior executives believing that their companies understand their customers’ needs extremely well, it’s no wonder why customer acquisition and retention has become a substantial problem.

The Case For Building Customer Personas Out Of Data-Driven Research

Patching together actionable information about your customers with gut feelings, good intentions and some duct tape is not a recipe for conversion success.

If the above studies aren’t enough to make you start quivering in your boots, take a look at the debacle of JC Penney’s 2012 rebranding.

Image via Bigstockphoto.com

Within a month of taking the helm as CEO at the retailer, Ron Johnson launched a radical rebranding. He not only changed the look and feel of the stores – getting rid of lucrative JCP private label brands, replacing them with designer inspired ones priced too high for most customers – Johnson instituted a complete overhaul of how the company did business.

JC Penney’s went from a sales model based on constant coupons and markdowns to “everyday low prices.” It was a disaster. Sales collapsed within months of Johnson’s takeover.

“I thought people were just tired of coupons and all this stuff. The reality is all of the couponing we did, there were a certain part of the customers that loved that. They gravitated to stores that competed that way. So our core customer, I think, was much more dependent and enjoyed coupons more than I understood.” Ron Johnson to Businessweek.

Where Hubris & Failure Meet…

Not only did Johnson admit he didn’t understand what his customers wanted, he has made it clear why. When asked if he would be willing to try out the new pricing structure and radical store makeover on a limited basis, his response was, “We didn’t test at Apple.”

As the man in charge of Apple’s retail stores previously, he blindly instituted a plan based on what worked elsewhere without testing and apparently without taking into account what drove his customer base to shop.

What Customer Personas Are … Really

With all this discussion of the mistakes companies are making in not understanding their customers’ concerns and motivations, the argument for using a tool such as customer personas based on data and testing seems obvious.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, let’s begin with a definition from one of the leading experts in the field of buyer insights research.

“Buyer personas are research-based archetypal (modeled) representations of who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, and why they make buying decisions.” Tony Zambito

In essence, personas are fictional representations of segments of buyers based on real data reflecting their behaviors. Their purpose is to put the people behind company decision making in the shoes of the customer.

What Customer Personas Are NOT

The problem with many personas is that they are either based on irrelevant data, poorly sourced data, or no data at all.

As Ardath Albee, a B2B marketing specialist and the creator of the Up Close and Persona tool, notes in an interview with the Content Marketing Institute,

“…I see a lot of personas that are what I kind of call ‘Ouija Board’ personas, because they are based on stuff that marketers would never know.”

Let’s add to that “stuff” that’s essentially useless for the business goal you’re attempting to achieve, i.e. increased website conversions or in store sales.

While some basic demographics information such as gender and age may be applicable, other very specific attributes (what the family dog eats, unless you’re selling dog food) gleaned from research or anecdotes are useless.

What A Customer Persona Looks Like

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Customer personas can be as basic or complicated as you’d like. They can take various forms; but at the end of the day, their utility lies in how effective they are at creating a clear picture of what drives the different types of buyers of your products or services.

While there are plenty of templates and examples to follow online, think about modeling personas from your available qualitative and quantitative research focusing on:

• Behavioral drivers – These encompass your customers’ goals, what they want to accomplish, their journey to finding your business.
• Obstacles to purchasing – Take into consideration the hesitations and concerns your customers have. How do they view your product or service and how does that impact how much information they need to make a decision?
• Mindset – Your customers come to the buying experience with expectations and preconceived notions. Are they shoppers who want the thrill of the bargain or expect a more refined experience? Selling a weight loss program will be more emotionally charged than, say, selling routers.

Giving your personas names and faces are less important than ensuring they are based on real people, not stereotypes. As Tony Zambito notes in his article, 7 Criteria To Ensure Doing The Right Things For Buyer Personas, about reviewing ineffective buyer personas, “…they read like job descriptions and offer little insights.”

Giving Shape To Your Customer Personas With Qualitative Research

In order to fully understand not only the different segments that make up your customer base but what motivates them, you need to begin with asking them questions. Some of the most valuable ways you can go about doing this is through:

1) Customer Surveys

Conducting surveys online or off with open ended questions are critical to understanding how your customers frame their motivations and needs. The goal is to get inside your customer’s heads to make sure your personas are based on what real people think, not just your idea of what they think.

Consider asking between 7 and 10 questions designed to give you the best insights based on their behavioral drivers, obstacles to purchasing, and mindset as described above. Depending on your business, the questions will vary. But, the end goal is always the same – getting actionable information that serves your needs.

For example, survey questions can include:

• When did you realize you needed a product/service like ours?
• What problem does our product/service solve in your life?
• What doubts or hesitations did you have before buying?

2) Phone & In-Person Interviews

18 Tips on Conducting Killer Customers Interviews from Zachary Cohn

Talking to your existing customers can provide valuable information into their buying habits, what motivates them, and the words they use to describe your product or service.

While conducting interviews can be expensive and labor intensive, the answers can be illuminating. You can go back and ask your respondents to elaborate, getting details not available through surveys.

3) Web & Exit Surveys

These include such things as Qualaroo pop ups. Qualaroo is a third party application that allows you to have a single question pop up on your site at a designated time. It is a particularly good tool for finding out why your customers are not completing a purchase.

The question to ask depends on your overall goal. Do you want to understand if your site or products/services on your site are meeting their needs? Or do you want to understand what potential sources of friction are keeping customers from buying?

Experiment with your question to see what gets the most responses and responses with the most insights.

If “Why didn’t you complete a purchase today?” wasn’t as successful as you had anticipated, ask “Do you have questions you weren’t able to answer today?

Distilling The Qualitative Research

Start segmenting your users based on commonalities you find. Look first to intent then to possible hesitations and the ways in which your customers are susceptible to persuasion.

You may find 2 personas that you can clearly define or 4. The number depends on what the research will support.

For instance, let’s say you’re selling a line of organic household cleaners. After combing through the survey and interview answers, you determine that one persona reflects the following:

Beth, a 35 year old woman who is worried about her family’s exposure to chemicals in the environment. She cares about reducing her carbon footprint and is willing to pay a little extra to make sure she’s buying a product that’s sustainable.

• What are Beth’s behavioral drivers? These products give Beth a sense that she’s doing something right for her family and the environment. She can easily order them online which works for her hectic schedule.
• What are Beth’s obstacles to purchasing? She has concerns that all of the information about where the ingredients are sourced are correct. She worries about the packaging that houses the products and how they will be shipped, i.e. if they contain harmful substances.
• What are Beth’s expectations from the buying experience? Presentation is important. She wants a product that reflects her values. Getting a bargain is not as important as getting a product she trusts.

While putting a name and an age isn’t a must on your personas, it does help with visualizing a person behind the persona. Beth feels real as opposed to Persona #1. You and your team may be more likely to ask yourselves what that particular component of your customer base needs and wants when creating things like copy or design.

Using Quantitative Data To Back Up Your Qualitative Personas

You’ve created a few personas with your qualitative research – segments based on user goals, behaviors, and attitudes. By diving into your website’s Google Analytics you can round out your personas with quantitative findings.

Look At Segmentation

With the new advanced segmentation features from Google Analytics, businesses can more accurately determine individual user behavior on their websites.

You can create segments that reflect:

• Average revenue per user
• Transactions per user
• New versus repeat customers
• Frequent customers

Brian Massey touches on this a little more in, “7+ Under-Utilized Google Analytics Reports for Conversion Insights” & is something we plan to examine further in future articles.

Applying Personas To Your Buyer Behaviors

You’ve spent the time developing your personas, validating them with your research. Now, it’s time to rely on them to help you make decisions to test.

This is where your own findings about what motivates and distresses your customer base intersects with behavioral science. Here’s just one example.

Prospect Theory & Customer Decision Making

Remember the cautionary tale of Ron Johnson and JC Penney? To him, a pricing model that revolved around “fair and square” and relative transparency made perfect sense. To his entrenched customer base, not so much.

The JC Penney shopper expected to see markdowns and to use coupons. When they no longer could view prices from the retailer through the lens they had become accustomed to, no matter the rationality/irrationality of the vantage point, they no longer saw the value.

Kahneman and Tversky ascribed this economic behavior to what they called Prospect Theory. People evaluate outcomes relative to some reference point – usually involving their current situation. Gains and losses are viewed through the prism of perceived outcomes instead of absolutes.

In 1981, the two researchers posed this survey question to a set of randomly selected respondents:

Imagine that you are about to purchase a jacket for $125 and a calculator for $15. The calculator salesman informs you that the calculator you wish to buy is on sale for $10 at the other branch of the store, located 20 minutes’ drive away. Would you make the trip to the other store? The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice

68% of the respondents were willing to make the extra trip to save $5 on the calculator. When the question was posed to another set of respondents but the pricing reversed – the calculator cost $125 and the jacket $15 with the calculator being on sale for $120 elsewhere – only 29% of people were willing to drive across town.

The savings is the same but the framing of the question different. $5 is $5 except when placed within the context of the savings coming from the higher priced item.

As William Poundstone notes in his book, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value,

“The price of being so acutely sensitive to ratios and contrasts is a relative insensitivity to the absolute.”

If only, Ron Johnson had spent a bit of time thinking about that.

Real World Conversion Stories

Facebook fields user complaints to the tune of 4 million conversations a week. In an attempt to get people to communicate with each other instead of just receiving anonymous complaints, they changed their reporting messaging around one set of users.

They focused in on teenagers of both genders and age ranges to understand what were the biggest obstacles to reporting a photograph posted by another person they wanted removed.

Facebook’s goal was to increase their automated complaint form conversions, thereby getting resolutions without employee interventions.

After talking with different segments of teenagers, they found the word “report” as a click trigger caused undue friction. Kids didn’t want to get their friends in trouble. When they changed the phrasing to “this post is a problem,” complaints increased.

Image Source: Facebook via NPR.org

As well, Facebook tested a change in the form allowing the person complaining to name the recipient and the emotion that got triggered.

Image Source: Facebook via NPR.org

According to the data, they found nearly an 85% likelihood that the originator of the photo post will reply back to the person offended or take the photo down when the words “It’s embarrassing” are used.

This is a good example of how you can take your qualitative research that informs your personas, apply it to an area of your business, and then test it using quantitative means.

What Happens When You Start With The Quantitative Data?

UK online watch retailer, Watchfinder, took a deep dive into their Google Analytics to understand how to better engage with their site visitors. They found that less than 1% of their visitors completed a transaction on the first visit to the site.

According to a case study on the Google Analytics blog, Watchfinder decided to set about a remarketing campaign using Google ads. They started by gleaning customer segment insights from their analytics by creating lists based on user language, location, and what stage of the purchase funnel they were in.

In conjunction with a traffic performance analysis, they realized that much higher engagement and conversion rates were coming from particular ISP addresses in the London Financial district.

By re-targeting these site users with messages tailored specifically to employees at the large investment banks, they were able to increase the average order value on the site by 13% with an overall return on investment after 6 months of 1,300%.

Here is a case where the quantitative data can be instructive in its own right – shedding light on a subset of the customer base. It would be interesting to see how adding this data to any qualitative persona modeling done could even better define their marketing efforts.

Conclusion – Act On The Data Then Test

Customer personas are a tool. With all tools, they are only as good as the people using them. They can provide tremendous insights into how to create better user experiences, persuasive copy, or pricing models. The key is to model them out of data that serves whatever goals you’re attempting to attain.

Most importantly, remember your personas should reflect real people with real motivations, desires, and concerns. When we lose sight of the human element, the customer isn’t far behind.

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Software Defined Networking (SDN) has quickly spawned what appears in some respects to be a cottage industry of would-be disruptors to the more traditional networking approaches. With hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital flowing into the space and dozens of infrastructure companies now vying to be the preeminent SDN vendor, how can anyone — customers or investors — predict who the breakout players will be?

SDN is a How, Not a What

The most basic thing that potential customers and investors need to understand is that SDN reflects how solutions work, not what their fundamental purpose is. Whether or not something is SDN is almost immaterial to the role that the device or solution plays. Indeed, most common networking problems can be solved with both legacy solutions and their SDN counterparts.

Think about SDN like the type of engine in a car. For most buyers, it’s a detail that gets weighed along with how much cargo space there is and how many cup holders are available. For others, the distinction between a V6 and a V8 is hugely important. But even in the latter case, the type of engine typically serves as a proxy for how much power or acceleration the car has. The real objective is not the engine but what the engine provides.

Generalized Networking

Because the industry is focused on how SDN applies to generalized networking, there has been an over-rotation towards a vague set of use cases. These use cases are broadly applicable, which has the benefit of positioning SDN in lots of places. However, because they lack specificity, they don’t constitute a plan that people can readily say “yes” to.

The result is that there are an awful lot of companies pitching generalized SDN solutions that fit everywhere and nowhere all at once. The fear this evokes on the buy side is one of forklift upgrades or rip-and-replace solutions. The buy-in required to authorize a total change in direction is huge. It goes well beyond just the technical buyer. To displace an entire vendor, you frequently have to get political air cover, sometimes from someone as high up as the CEO.

Small companies won’t generally have the clout to unseat an incumbent in this type of setting, barring a solution that is an order of magnitude faster, cheaper and more scalable.

Specialized Use Cases

If generalized networking isn’t going to be successful, then what will be? SDN deployments (especially those early on) will be focused on very narrow use cases. It might be a specific application (HP and Brocade have focused on Lync, for example) or may be a very specific deployment scenario (such as lighting dark fiber between buildings on a campus). The more specific the use case, the easier it is for potential buyers to say “yes.”

The challenge, of course, is that no one wants to narrow their target addressable market (TAM). When you are a startup seeking funding, claiming your target addressable market consists of all Ethernet switching makes it easy to put up a multi-billion-dollar opportunity. If you narrow that to only those deployments where dark fiber needs to be lit up between data centers, you shrink your TAM.

What is Success?

However, success in the business world is not measured by TAM. Zero percent of a massive TAM is still zero dollars. Startups need to get cash into the company early. Those early deployments are important because they force an iteration of the product and provide success stories and customer references from which to build. Without these wins, it is easier to make continual, even meaningful, progress without ever making any money.

So Who Will Break Out?

The companies that will break away from the SDN peloton are the ones who focus on getting deployments in the real world. A narrow set of use cases trumps a massive TAM in this case even if the former is a lot less sexy.

Customers and investors should ask questions about the overarching value proposition. If the answers are always framed in the general case, it is likely that the solution is aimed at the general networking space. And aiming at something so large is not that different than aiming at nothing at all.

Instead, vendors should ask questions about target customers. Is there a repeatable use case that has traction among multiple customers? Or is every deployment a snowflake, unique to the set of conditions that created it? Breakout success requires scaling the business, and scaling means making things repeatable.

Finally, the standard questions about customer references should be present. This is not because of the specific references so much as what they indicate. Vendors that can push past the analysis paralysis that so many SDN buyers are facing typically have a solution that is scoped narrowly enough to get a “yes.” That, more than anything perhaps, is an early indicator of success.

[Today's fun fact: The highest denomination of US currency is $100,000. If I had one, I would buy something off the dollar menu and ask for change.]

Alright, truth serum: Have you ever created an off-the-cuff marketing campaign to generate some leads but opted out of implementing the necessary tools to analyze performance? If so, you are setting yourself up to commit an epic marketing mistake: making decisions without statistical evidence or support.

Long gone are the days of throwing a marketing campaign out into the real world while already developing the next campaign’s messaging and appearance. No more! Executives now are looking for campaigns to demonstrate a high marketing IQ that includes the ability to capture meaningful trends from past and current campaigns, and then extract actionable insight for future initiatives.

You Think You’re So Smart?

To be competitive and successful in today’s cutthroat markets, companies must access historical data from previous campaigns, track activities in real time through a campaign, and compare changes in performance and results before embarking on a new campaign in the future. This means making intelligent, data-driven decisions based on in-depth reporting and thorough analysis.

Sound easy? Maybe not, but it can be when marketing teams are equipped with the most up-to-date marketing automation solutions to track, measure, and optimize all leads. But finding the right technology can be challenging. For example, Google Analytics can provide reports on website activity and PPC performance, while voice-based marketing automation tools can track all phone leads from various initiatives. When marketing automation and analytics solutions are combined, the reports are more detailed and the insights extracted are more valuable. In other words, decision makers will have a much higher marketing IQ.

Is Marketing Automation for You?

With so many marketing technologies available on the market, it can seem near impossible to find the best options for your company. A recent study from Software Advice looked at a pool of companies currently searching for marketing automation technology and identified some purchasing trends including:

• The majority of buyers are evaluating marketing automation for the first time
• Marketing automation’s key purpose is to improve efficiency
• The most popular features are lead nurturing and analytics capabilities
• Companies of all industries and sizes demonstrated a need for marketing automation solutions

Time to Buy. Where to Begin?

According to the study, most companies had some kind of software in place to enable certain marketing activities and were looking to upgrade to a more intelligent solution. Improvements automation could make to their current operations included:

• Better lead management
• Automated processes
• More features and functionality
• Improved integration
• Ability to accommodate significant company growth
• Enhanced services to customers

The top three features requested by the vast majority of companies were lead nurturing, reporting/analytics, and lead scoring. Because these features provide marketers with greater insight into campaign performance, customer activities, and channel ROI, they are key for future growth. Without these features, decision makers are left with limited intelligence to guide future campaigns or properly gauge ROI.

Got My Tools. Good To Go?

Once the automated technologies are in place, marketing teams can go back and refine the settings to ensure the appropriate metrics are being tracked, functions are integrated with other solutions, and customer data is available to the right teams. Not all data should be collected through automated processes equally. Teams must identify their key metrics for gauging performance and then design campaign reports around these statistics.

Similarly, decision makers must understand what analytics and trends are most important when determining ROI and moving forward with future campaigns. Focusing all reporting and analytics on a few metrics may limit the scope and detail of any actionable insights extracted. Likewise, reviewing data of little relevance to campaign success may only complicate the analytics process and make the right decision harder to realize.

A high marketing IQ is built on accurate data and advanced analytics. The latest automated technologies allow marketers to reference historical data, track in real time, and make adjustments quickly and efficiently for a more continuous reporting experience. To truly demonstrate high marketing IQ, companies must understand their unique needs and implement the latest solutions to support data-driven decision making.

Too often, businesses get caught up in the marketing game that they forget what it’s like to be on the other side as a consumer. And while it may be tempting to think in terms of sales revenue, having a consumer frame of mind will allow your brand to anticipate their needs and desires before competitors reach them.

Social Prospecting is the action of searching for potential prospects, engaging them and attracting them into your site so when they view your content a
nd landing pages, they are converted into leads.

To illustrate this point, consider a recent college graduate who tweeted about landing a job in Los Angeles, and evaluate your marketing strategies from her perspective.

1. Be Proactive.

Ask yourself what questions she may be having and provide solutions. While she may have not directly announced that she is apartment hunting, it can be inferred as the traditional first step someone takes when moving to a new city. Certainly respond with helpful information and contribute to conversation when appropriate, but waiting for someone to explicitly mention a key phrase or hashtag is reactive.

2. Send information in a genuine fashion to build relationships.

As an affordable, yet luxurious apartment complex located in the city of L.A., you can provide a long-term home for this prospect. However, she likely won’t be ready to sign a lease after one interaction and can quickly see through insincerity. Instead, provide her with relevant and useful information such as a website listing of fun things to do in L.A. for young people or a blog post about ways to meet people in a new city, topics which are indirectly related to your business. While sending helpful content to prospects, you are simultaneously maintaining awareness in their minds, and when it comes time to make a purchase, your brand will be at forefront of that decision.

3. Convey the intersection of where your business meets their needs.

A response is not an invitation to initiate a hard sell, but rather an opportunity to continue the conversation by sharing supportive and applicable content. Once someone is determined sales-ready, though, show how you can benefit them through the services your business provides based on their individualized needs. Keep the consumer’s best interests in mind when pitching products.

4. Be Patient.

If they see something they like, they’ll let you know. If not, you still haven’t lost. This strategy has allowed you to create brand awareness and appear genuine, instead of revenue-hungry. In the future, with you at the top of mind, you may have a sale!

When given the task of social prospecting, remember the golden rule. If you are out there, consistently and genuinely providing helpful resources to prospects, you will soon find a pool of people interested in your business. Once the foundation is laid and a trustworthy relationship is established, you can invite prospects to your website to attain the solutions they are looking for and you provide.

Most people don’t notice it at first glance but managing a sports team can be a bigger game than just playing the sport itself. Is this distinction important when generating software leads? Definitely. It’s like the old saying, “Don’t see the forest for the trees.” You don’t just learn everything about what your B2B prospects do just from what they sell.

It’s like the difference between the problems of playing golf and the problems of managing a golf course. Sure, both easily connect but the connection is just another way of tying them together. It doesn’t mean your focus will be on how the game is played.

This misconception is common among first-team lead generators who don’t probe often enough and just qualify software leads based on a layman’s understanding of an industry. They don’t stop to consider if…

…they have operational problems.

Say you’re an SCM software vendor and you choose to ignore individual retailers (or even restaurants) all because you don’t care about selling DVD players or fine dining. That doesn’t mean those organizations worry about that and about how to manage their suppliers at the same time! So as you can see, the focus went from the entire business to just what they sold over the counter.

… their problems are universal.

When your mind is focused on their industry, you tend to forget problems that don’t discriminate between them. Here’s another example, a bad CRM database is problematic for businesses both in the insurance as well as automobile industry. They may have different target markets and sell different products. That won’t keep issues like recording customer data from affecting both their sales.

… such problems have nothing to do with industry.

What does presenting your regular financial report in an accurate graph have to do with, say, the quality of a new novel? Nothing. That’s the point. Your local bookstore may care about the latter but that doesn’t mean they won’t also need the former. They’re not related. They’re just needs that happen to exist in the mind of the same customer.

So just as managing a sports team can be a lot different than just playing the sport, your software leads need more information before passing them on to your sales reps. It’s true that speed can really make or break a B2B marketing campaign. However, you’ll actually make faster calls if you worked with more information. Don’t just rely on knowing the sport your prospects are playing!

It starts with a hesitation.

It becomes an objection.

It festers into a doubt.

And it costs your company leads.

What I’m talking about is sales call reluctance. It doesn’t come from the prospects; it comes from the sales reps themselves. Whether you’re a new teleprospector or a seasoned inside sales rep, everyone experiences varying levels of call reluctance when B2B prospecting.

A dip in sales can be a result of poor training that overlooks the issue of call reluctance and not combating inside sales reps with a strategy on how to address it. There are a number of reasons why an inside sales rep can experience call reluctance: a lack of confidence in the product or service they’re selling, in the approach they’re going to take (whether it be phone or email), or in having a conversation with a live prospect. Inside sales managers should focus on inspiring confidence in their teleprospectors through product training, role-playing, and establishing a solid sales methodology.

However, inside sales managers should also have a training process in place that focuses on execution. Many inside sales reps are bogged down and can become overwhelmed by their sales calls. They want to know what they’re doing. They want to know how they can track their success. And most importantly, they want to know what to do next.

Here are the five W questions you can ask your inside sales reps to keep them on their toes and ready to progress to the next step when teleprospecting:

1. Who:  Do you know who specifically you’re about to call and why? It’s not enough to have a company name. You need the name of a specific decision-maker or sales target. You also need their specific contact information to initiate a conversation. This may sound basic, but way too many salespeople are given a phone book and/or simply a list of companies and asked to get rolling. This bogs down their process and also creates artificial call reluctance that significantly decreases their activity and results. Focus on providing your sales team with explicit lists and with accurate contact information.  It may cost a bit more upfront, but the ROI on your sales team’s time and performance will be more than worth it.

2. What:  What are you going to say? What value are you going to provide to the prospect? You can’t script a phone call, but you can certainly script a voicemail. And a follow-up email. Without these templates, it takes way too much time to work through a reasonable prospect list.

3. Where:  I’m not just talking about physical location, but also channel. Are you just calling? Are you leaving a voicemail? Are you following up with email? A ping on a social channel? Mapping this specific sequence is important not only to maximize the value and impact of those touchpoints, but also to make sure execution is swift and efficient.

4. When:  Are you really trying to reach decision-makers on the phone in the middle of the morning?  When they’re all in meetings?  Are you really trying to call East Coast prospects at 3:30 Pacific time?  Dayparting your sales activity is important, especially if you understand the work habits of your prospects.

5. Why:  Think content. Think teachable moment. Think about why the prospect would want to spend time with you and would get measurable value from the conversation. This is a high bar, higher than just avoiding a product discussion up front. But the more you can successfully build high value in the first sales interaction, the more confidence your inside sales team will have in what they’re about to execute. It will reduce call reluctance, drive higher sales activity, and create better first impressions and value with your prospects.

When I execute our own sales process for Heinz Marketing, I ask myself these questions. When I have crisp answers to the above questions, I’m far more effective and efficient at working through my sales execution.

I’m curious to hear your perspective and/or experience with sales call reluctance as well. How would you train your inside sales reps to handle their own objections?

Remarketing is an extremely powerful tool for the savvy online advertiser – particularly if your website gets high traffic.

Remarketing is basically when you tag your website landing pages to give cookies to your visitors. You can target those visitors with custom tailored ads based on their website activity. Those ads follow them around throughout an advertising network.

Here’s a dozen advanced tactics to consider as you implement, test and tweak your next remarketing campaigns.

 1. Remarketing Tactics: What pages are you tagging?

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One of the fundamentals to a successful remarketing campaign is determining what website pages you should tag. This is across the board – whether you’re tagging with Google Analytics remarketing code, an AdWords remarketing code or a third party remarketing tool.

Determining what landing pages to tag is directly related to your marketing objectives, as these are the pages from which you’re setting up your entire ad campaign around.

Let’s say your company wants to generate 20% more leads within a 30 day time period. You might decide to tag (and remarket to) bounced visitors of your three top performing lead generation landing pages. They would likely be the most warmed audience to increase leads in a short time. Choose to tag the three pages for your specified campaign.

Or, if your company needs to increase sales by 5%, you might decide to tag your top selling product pages.

 2. Remarketing Tactics: Split up your remarketing campaigns

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Don’t treat all your website visitors the same. Segment your remarketing campaigns to more directly speak to the wants and needs of your customers. How much time a visitor spends on your site, how many pages they view, and what pages they visit can determine how aggressive or how nurturing you should be in your remarketing.

For each segmented ad group, you can create different Call to Actions (CTA’s) for various sales funnel success – with links to objective based web pages. Monitor your conversion rates and create workflow segments to guide your prospects through to a sale.

 3. Remarketing Tactics: Make multiple ads sizes with images and copy to match

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I’d highly suggest that you make ad creatives for all different network ad sizes.

By doing so, it ensures your ad is eligible to show on every Google Ad network site you need. In other words, it optimizes your message reach and will allow you to follow your website visitor on more of their trafficked sites.

 4. Remarketing Tactics: Bid more on shopping cart and conversion abandons

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You know a visitor is more interested in your business and products when they’ve visited particular landing pages. This includes bounced traffic from shopping carts and lead generating pages like ebook and webinars.

As soon as they’ve left, it’s time to keep reminding those lost leads to come on back and continue your conversion process.

Adjust your remarketing bid strategy to spend more on your warmer traffic by increasing your ad spend and decreasing frequency capping (we’ll dig deeper into this soon) on conversion landing pages.

 5. Remarketing Tactics: Bid less on homepage and non-converting page visitors

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On the flip side, lower your ad budget for bounced traffic from your homepage and other information pages. If a visitor is still in the “checking you out” stage in the sales funnel, you should still try to bring them back. But, they’re generally not worth as much to your company – yet.

Target your non-converting traffic with ad campaigns to landing pages with a soft CTA (such as a webinar or ebook download) or your information pages and blog.

Spend proportionally less on your early stage visitors to increase your remarketing ROI.

 6. Remarketing Tactics: Offer coupons to repeat visitors or product page viewers

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Use coupons and discounts to incentivize a lost shopping cart visitor to return to your product page. Someone who has visited your online store and has clicked through to a particular product page is likely very interested in purchasing that item. For whatever reason (they got distracted, the price point was high, they were comparison shopping, etc), they left your sales funnel. This is an ideal time to reach out to those lost sales by remarketing with a coupon offer.

Your potential customer sees your special offer – just for them, wherever they are online. You’re more likely to convert that person (and get a sale). You also increase your brand awareness and begin to develop a loyal, repeat customer.

Offer discounts to warm leads, such as a frequent or repeating visitor to your site too. If someone say, clicks on your homepage, views your “about” page, then trafficks to flip through your product pages, remarket to this segmented list with an offer of (say) 25% off their first purchase.

 7. Remarketing Tactics: Focus on content and education rather than direct sale

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If you have a high traffic website, your business can benefit by using remarketing to increase clicks to your non-lead generating landing pages. Focus on nurturing your bounced traffic to educate them about your business, your products and how you solve their problems.

Yes, your ultimate goal is to get leads and sales – that’s what pays the advertising bills. But, by driving interested consumers to a ‘free’ page, on which you’re not asking for anything in return, you build brand awareness and nurture lost leads. When they are ready to convert, this priming often results in a higher cost sale – and a more loyal customer.

 8. Remarketing Tactics: Consider Google remarketing member duration

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Determine the duration of your remarketing campaigns. How long you’ll follow each visitor will vary based on your sector and for each campaign you’re running.

Google gives you a default of 3 months. That’s great if you have a long sales funnel such as a B2B and your objective is to increase brand awareness, for example. But, if you’re in a short sales funnel, like retail, and you want an immediate sale, consider changing your follow to 30 days.

 9. Remarketing Tactics: Consider Google remarketing frequency capping

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Similar to remarketing duration, consider your remarketing frequency capping. This is how you set the number of times your ad gets displayed in a day, month or week to your targeted visitor.

You’ve likely seen those ads that follow you around everywhere, all the time. Do you click on them? Do you ever buy from the company? Likely not. Set up a frequency cap that gets your brand seen and familiar but doesn’t also annoy the crap out your market.

Every advertiser will have different needs for remarketing frequency capping:

• If you’re an online retailer promoting a limited time coupon, make sure your ad gets seen more frequently immediately.

• If you’re an enterprise company developing relationships and leads, tone down the frequency of your ads, and keep them longer term.

Use your analytics to determine the best frequency options for your business campaign objectives.

 10. Remarketing Tactics: Change your ad message to non-converting targets

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Target your campaigns to your non-converting visitors, but change up your message after a certain time period. Let’s say you’re running a remarketing campaign for 30 days. You’re offering a 25% discount for first time buyers. But, after 10 days, you notice a drop in CTRs. It could be that your market is now just fatigued with the same ad they’re seeing from you. Make a difference and create a renewed interest in your brand by changing your ad message and design.

It could also be that your market isn’t responding to your deal, so instead give your bounced traffic free shipping. Change up your CTA message. Change your image too.

 11. Remarketing Tactics: Remarket to converted customers

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A common best practice in remarketing is to exclude your converted customers. So, if someone downloaded your ebook or made a purchase, you would no longer chase them down online to get them to convert. This is reasonable, but I’d say it’s not always the best way to generate repeat customers and increase brand awareness.

I’d suggest you tag your post-conversion landing pages to remarket to customers who’ve already converted with you. Create a clever remarketing campaign to retarget your market with a low frequency and longer duration to keep your brand top of mind.

If you:

• Have a sale in 6 months, retarget to your previous customer list.
• Are introducing your new fall fashion, increase your member duration to retarget heavily when your new stock arrives.
• Introduce a newly developed SaaS product, retarget to your previous conversions and offer a 10% discount for being loyal customers.

 12. Remarketing Tactics: Test, test, test

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Always A/B test your remarketing campaigns. Monitor your views, CTRs and conversions.

Adjust your:

• Budget
• CTA
• Images
• Campaign landing pages
• Ad messaging

 

By testing your ads, you can increase your ROI without breaking the budgeting bank. As you know, sometimes the smallest of changes to your ads can multiply conversions – and bring in thousands more dollars for your business.

 Conclusion

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Have you used remarketing for your business or clients? What successes have you had? Share your advanced tips.

Written by Krista Bunskoek @ Wishpond

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It’s 2014 and the sales game has changed drastically. Welcome to the age of social selling.

For sales people, this means cold calling is not as effective anymore.

Based on a study conducted by GE Capital Retail Bank here’s why you’ve got to change the way you sell:

• 81% of people look at products online before making a purchase
• 60% of consumers start their research with a search engine before heading to a specific website
• 79% of shoppers feel empowered by technology because it provides access to information

According to a recent report by Pardot, 72% of buyers who plan to purchase a business product begin their research with a Google search. Besides Google, B2B buyers also use personal networks (15.5%) and LinkedIn (2.5%).

To maximize success, you’ve got to get with the times to drum up new business.

Here is a collection of some of the most recent and best infographics related to the social selling industry. Get out there and generate some leads using social media!

1) Compelling Stats on Why You Should Generate Leads With Social Media

First, let’s take a look at the benefits of social selling. The infographic below was created by Neil Patel where he shows some stellar stats on social media and marketing and then outlines steps to develop a social selling strategy.

Courtesy of: Quick Sprout

2) How to create a successful B2B online marketing program

Next, we take a look at how you can amp up your strategy with a clear content marketing program. A content marketing strategy is essential to drive inbound leads, engage customers and convert them into sales. The infographic below is broken up into six critical components: strategy, content marketing, traffic generation, lead generation, lead management, and analytics and measurement to help you through it.

The Science of B2B Online Marketing infographic designed by circle S studio.

3) LinkedIn Dominates B2B Leads

A whopping 80% of social media B2B leads come from LinkedIn. With that said, here are some great tidbits from Oktopost on how to optimize your LinkedIn status updates and a breakdown of what times in the day are great for conversion! Cool right?

4) How to Create A Killer LinkedIn Profile

So if you’re prospecting on LinkedIn, make sure your profile showcases the very best of you. If you’re contacting someone new, you wouldn’t want to give a bad first impression right? Link Humans put together a great infographic on 10 great tips and tricks to help you boost your LinkedIn profile.

10 Tips for the Perfect LinkedIn Profile from LinkedIn

5) How to Engage Prospects on Social Media

Wondering how you even start a conversation on social media? Look no further. Here’s a graphic that will get you in the gabbing-groove.

6) Social Selling – Pencil It In!

So now that you’ve got a good handle on social selling, it’s time to schedule your lead generation strategy. Here’s what a typical day can look like for you when you’re ready to start selling online! Take a few tips from Ben Martin here:

 

Your CMO is probably brilliant and your VP of Sales is likely good at closing deals. And though the two are supposed to work together to drive revenue, it doesn’t always happen that way. In fact, both are often confused about what the other is doing, how they’re doing it and when they’re doing it. Not to mention they rarely see eye to eye.

But, imagine a scenario where sales and marketing respected and understood each other’s points of view. What if all discussions were about more than just pointing the finger when a campaign didn’t deliver the expected pipeline? Sounds ideal if you ask me.

The good news is—alignment is possible, it just takes some work. And according to the Aberdeen Group, the effort is worth it since companies with sales and marketing alignment experience up to a 20 percent growth in annual revenue.

To get started, sales and marketing need a shared vision. They need to agree on common goals, strategies and success metrics. They’re on the same team after all, so they should strive for the same things. Furthermore, they need to make their expectations of one another apparent and realistic. But getting there isn’t always easy.

Sales and marketing alignment is not a new concept. Businesses have tried to build this professional camaraderie for years. However, there still seems to be debate about what alignment actually means, who’s responsible for what and whether each side is pulling their weight. It’s exhausting just thinking about it. But when these teams don’t work together, it’s obvious, and worse, it’s detrimental to the success of the organization.

To gain a better understanding of how sales and marketing can align their efforts, check out the following tips:

Agree on the Basics

Both sales and marketing struggle to agree on things as simple as defining leads. To succeed, both teams need to agree on the basics that make up campaigns, such as:

• Terminology (what defines leads)
• Goals (volume of leads needed)
• Strategy (how you reach your goals)
• Expectations (quota, pipeline goals, quantity of content, etc.)

Without a shared understanding (and agreement) of these essentials, sales and marketing activities will remain disjointed.

Create Closed-Loop Reporting

Closed-loop reporting is one of the most powerful tools online marketers have in their arsenal. The idea here is all activities should be based on actionable data and insights in order to drive prospect engagement. It’s crucial sales and marketing work together to gain the intelligence they need to optimize these efforts.

Marketers should strive to arm sales with the insight they need in the field, and sales should inform marketing of what’s working and what isn’t. Neither should make assumptions about what is useful to the other—it’s important to communicate this early on. Often, organizations will rely on CRMs and other marketing analytics software to “keep tabs” on the progress of leads and other key bits of information they might need.

When sales and marketing agree on what tactics are most effective, they need to be used. For example, sales should not ask marketing for an email nurture to follow up with prospects, then not use it. If marketing utilizes resources to build a certain tactic or campaign and it doesn’t get implemented, then those efforts are wasted.

Implement Bi-Directional SLAs

Before implementing a service level agreement (SLA), sales and marketing need to determine how much effort will be required to meet their goals. Per HubSpot, implementing a bi-directional SLA is crucial to alignment, because it helps both teams determine what percentage of opportunities they can realistically create and what percentage of opportunities they can influence.

Sales should decide how much effort they need to spend on each lead and how many follow-ups they should attempt. And marketing needs to establish the percentage of leads that should come from their activities versus the percentage that come from sales prospecting. Determining the level of effort from each team will allow the organization to allocate resources properly and build an effective strategy to meet their goals. Also, an SLA will allow both sales and marketing to hold each other accountable for their activities.

At the end of the day, it’s about teamwork and communication—especially upfront. Sales and marketing don’t have to like each other, but they do have to work together. So team up and put those brilliant minds to work.

Still not sure how you feel about this union? Check out this guide to sales and marketing alignment—it might just change your mind.

photo credit: StockMonkeys.com

How long does your marketing message stick around when you’ve left the building? Oddly, not long at all. Today’s consumers are pretty savvy.

Unless they actually like you or are ready to do business with you, they won’t keep your business card. They’ll Google you, and then they’ll bookmark your website.

You’ll be forgotten unless you get in front of them again or unless they find they really need your service. With lead magnets, however, you can stay in front of them every day.

What Is A Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet is just a fancy way of saying “lead capture content.” It’s a piece of content that you use to generate leads. It’s marketing, really. Lead magnets consist of special types of content though. It’s not the usual stuff that you post on your blog, or the stuff that you upload to YouTube.

Lead magnets focus on connecting your customers with the type of content with a call to action that gets people motivated to do something. That’s the ultimate positive customer experience because it’s delivering the right sales information your customers are already looking for at the most opportune time that your customers need it.

Be Prepared With a Great Online Experience

When you have successfully pushed out a lead magnet, you’ll know it. You’ll get a firestorm of traffic to your site. Before that happens, you kind of want to have your ducks in a row.

First things first. Get your hosting plan set up to scale. There are lots of companies out there, many of which are reviewed by sites like VirtualHosting.com. Most of your service providers today have cloud-based systems that scale up and down nicely.

You only want to pay for the bandwidth you use, ideally, which is why VPS and cloud servers are so nice. You get to deploy and destroy servers at will.

What Marketing Content Doesn’t Work

Now for the bad news. There’s a lot of marketing out there that is terrible. If you’re looking to your competitors to see what works, stop. Most everyone is copying everyone else these days, and everyone is getting dumber.

A lot of new companies just don’t know where to start, so they look to those whom they want to be like. Sadly, many of the gurus out there are doing testing that doesn’t necessarily optimize returns, but does optimize for the types of clients they want.

When you’re first starting out, though, you don’t have the resources or the client list, to test and optimize. You just want to optimize for leads – lots of them. You’re not going to get that from the established boys in the industry.

Free content, like free PDFs, free ebooks, and free reports have been played to death. Inflation is a serious problem in marketing. Marketers know how to sell. They know how to market. They don’t always know how to deliver on a promise though. And, this is what you’re seeing in the marketplace right now. For years, consumers have been bombarded with “free” stuff.

Eventually marketers figured out that you didn’t need to offer anything of real value. You just had to offer something for free and people would sign up to an email list. Well, like all good exploited tactics, this one was eventually worn thin. People stopped responding to it, and for good reason.

There is now a glut of free and useless stuff out there in cyberspace. Poorly written, sloppily arranged, inaccurate, information – and it’s making your job hard. People just plain don’t trust “free” anymore.

What Marketing Content Works

Anything you have that’s valuable will work to draw in leads and get them to sign up to your email list. “Value” is the operative word here, you’re creating a great customer experience in your lead generation and prospect development.

If you can solve a problem for a client, give away information that you would normally charge money for, or get people to take a survey and get an immediate result, then you might have a chance to win that customer. The key is to craft an experience that creates a positive emotional connection with that potential customer.

For example, you could offer a “10 Point Checklist” for prospects. The more useful the content, the better customer experience. You could also offer a “1-Page Quick Start Guide” on how to solve a nagging problem you know every one of your target audience suffers from.

Whatever you offer, remember – value and immediacy are going to win you the email address and keep your prospect “hot” and engaged.

I have the opportunity to join calls with our inside sales team during the sales process frequently. It is exciting to speak with executives at companies who are in the beginning stages of creating an inside sales team themselves or are entertaining the idea of outsourcing. Choosing to outsource the function is often the result of these conversations, usually because these companies haven’t quite mastered best practices yet and need support. I really enjoy the task of taking on engagements to help develop the inside sales function, whether we continue our efforts after the first few months once up to altitude, or whether we hand off the inside sales processes to them once they’re running at full capacity.

During the initial discussions with sales and marketing executives, there are always common themes in the questions that are asked. As AG Salesworks is a top consideration for many companies out there, I thought it would make sense to address the questions that I hear the most:

1. How many opportunities should I expect to see per month, after the team is fully ramped?

The answer really depends on anything from your average ticket price to the titles being called, or to the type and quality of leads being called on. On average, for one full-time inside sales rep, you can expect 8-12 leads to be uncovered per month. The key here is to not be shocked if your outsourced team does not hit 12 leads in month one. It takes a month or two to reach that goal, and the key is to be patient and make the necessary tweaks in scripting and process during this crucial ramp time.

2. How do I know where to buy my list from?

There are so many great list procurement options out there today. You need to determine if you want a huge database of thousands of contacts for the volume aspect, or a smaller, more targeted list that may have higher accuracy when it comes to contact information.

3. How will data, opportunities, etc. be shared?

With the sophistication of CRM integration options out there, it is an easy process to transfer information back and forth. You just need to figure out the information that is most relevant to you when looking at metrics and data with your outsourced team, and work together to determine the best hand-off process.

4. How many calls do you make?

Gone are the days of tracking every call made. What really matters is the quality output that results from those calls. Focus on the number of quality conversations per day instead of the number of calls. Averaging 8-12 conversations each day is a good metric.

5. How should I measure the quality of the leads that are passed over?

It’s crucial to track the opportunity from creation to pipeline to close. Make sure your outsourced team tracks their leads and ensures that the first call happens with the prospect and your sales rep, and that there is a real opportunity there. If the second step is a demo, that is a perfect example of a great quality lead. If the prospect explains that there is no opportunity for two years and that the rep should call back in 18 months, that should be marked as unqualified.

There is so much to think about as you embark on the journey of creating your own inside sales team or outsourcing it. It can be overwhelming, but keep these questions in mind as you start talking with firms out there.

Have you considered outsourcing your inside sales and/or lead generation efforts?