Rnordman

(Scott Akerman)

I’ve been playing with Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 hybrid tablet-laptop for the past few weeks and what can I say? It’s a good device.

The company has been listening to complaints from both users and us media types over the past two iterations of this gizmo, which is meant to replace both your laptop and tablet, and it shows. The Surface Pro 3 boasts some nice improvements over its successors, to the point where it’s almost a pretty sweet gadget – if it existed in a vacuum. But it doesn’t, and I’ll get to why this is a problem in a minute.

In the meantime, the Pro 3 is clearly the product of some engineering magic. It’s very nearly a full-on computer, but it’s super slim and lightweight. At 1.76 pounds, it’s almost half the weight of a 13-inch MacBook Air, and it’s just a tad bit thicker than the iPad Air.

READ: Is Samsung’s Galaxy Note Pro better than Apple’s iPad Air? »

Despite that thin and light profile, it also has a big 12-screen with a hefty 2,560 by 1,440-pixel resolution. The device itself looks fine, as does its screen, and it feels good to hold. Microsoft says it went with the larger 12-inch screen because it distributes weight better, making it easier to hold with one hand. I can’t say I disagree.

The Pro’s accoutrements have also been upgraded. The device’s “kickstand” now has several lock positions, bending as far back as 150 degrees, which gives you several laptop-like viewing angles. Moreover, the detachable keyboard Type Cover has an extra hinge on it, so you can type with it flat on a surface or at a slightly more ergonomic angle.

I’ve used the device and cover comfortably sitting at a desk and lying on a couch, so Microsoft really has done wonders in making the Surface Pro 3 very much laptop-like.

The stylus is also new and improved, with a better hover mode. The top button, when pressed, also acts as an eraser in certain uses. On the downside, there’s still no secret compartment in which to store the pen, which made me wonder how long it will take to lose.

The Pro 3′s battery life is also considerably better. I got about six or seven hours out of it with moderate use, or more than just the handful its predecessors could manage. That’s still not as good as many laptops out there, or especially other tablets, but it’s a big step up over the Surface Pro 2.

Windows is still a big laggard when it comes to apps, with Microsoft boasting around 400,000 compared to more than a million for both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, but that’s of course obviated somewhat by the Pro 3 running Windows 8. Many programs that would run on a regular PC will work fine on this hybrid device.

But it’s that word – “hybrid” – that’s still the big problem. As a laptop, the Pro 3 still makes too many tradeoffs over its non-hybrid cousins. It requires a sort of assembly by folding out and attaching the Type Cover as well as the kickstand, its battery isn’t as good and it’s not still not as comfortable to type on, despite its improvements.

READ: New Surface tablets still don’t have a market » 

As a tablet, it’s nowhere near as portable and convenient as a seven-inch device like the Nexus 7 or iPad Mini. Microsoft’s relative dearth of mobile apps also hurts the Pro 3 in this regard, as there simply isn’t as much to do with the device in tablet mode. While you can always fire up full PC applications, mobile apps are generally slicker and better equipped to work with a touch screen.

The Pro 3′s price, as with its predecessors, is also a killer. Starting at $849 (in Canada) for the base version – including an Intel Core i3 processor, 64 gigabytes of storage and 4 GB of RAM – it’s already expensive. Tack on the necessary and not included $129 Type Cover and it’s almost a whopping $1,000. The top-of-the-line device, with a Core i7 processor, 512 GB storage and 8 GB RAM, is a spit-take-inducing $1,999, plus Type Cover.

It’s not hard to understand Microsoft’s pricing strategy. The company figures the Pro 3 can replace both a laptop and tablet for consumers, so as long as it’s cheaper than the two combined everything is hunky dory.

READ: Microsoft’s Surface Pro Tablet is DOA »

But that line of thinking is flawed for several reasons, with the fundamental problem of hybrid devices being the big one. Hybrids inevitably bring tradeoffs and often deliver inferior experiences compared to dedicated single-use devices, which has definitely been the case with every Surface device yet. They’re just not as good as the typical laptop, nor the typical tablet.

Moreover, many consumers already have either a laptop or a tablet, or both, and are probably not thinking about getting rId of both. In that vein, they’re probably not going to consider one or the other that does either job only partially well.

READ: Microsoft’s XBox One philosophy: give them what they don’t want »

It’s therefore tough to figure out who Microsoft’s Surface devices appeal to. The company must be hoping that consumers eventually see the logic of going with a two-in-one device, but with everybody already married to their Apple and Android tablets, the only way that’s going to happen is with some price seduction.

Microsoft is coming from behind – way behind – when it comes to tablets and it’s going to need to lure people by offering them a deal they can’t refuse. The Surface Pro 3, while a nice product, is nowhere near being that kind of a deal.

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The post Surface Pro 3 review: Will Microsoft ever learn that no one wants a hybrid?: Peter Nowak appeared first on Canadian Business.

WASHINGTON – How does the U.S. economy do it?

Europe is floundering. China faces slower growth. Japan is struggling to sustain tentative gains.

Yet the U.S. job market is humming, and the pace of economic growth is steadily rising. Five full years after a devastating recession officially ended, the economy is finally showing the vigour that Americans have long awaited.

Last month, employers added 288,000 jobs and helped reduce the unemployment rate to 6.1 per cent, the lowest since September 2008. June capped a five-month stretch of 200,000-plus job gains — the first in nearly 15 years.

After having shrunk at a 2.9 per cent annual rate from January through March — largely because of a brutal winter — the U.S. economy is expected to grow at a healthy 3 per cent pace the rest of the year.

Here are five reasons the United States is outpacing other major economies:

AN AGGRESSIVE CENTRAL BANK

“The Federal Reserve acted sooner and more aggressively than other central banks in keeping rates low,” says Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group.

In December 2008, the Fed slashed short-term interest rates to near zero and has kept them there. Ultra-low loan rates have made it easier for individuals and businesses to borrow and spend. The Fed also launched three bond-buying programs meant to reduce long-term rates.

By contrast, the European Central Bank has been slower to respond to signs of economic distress among the 18 nations that share the euro currency. The ECB actually raised rates in 2011 — the same year the eurozone sank back into recession.

It’s worth keeping in mind that the Fed has two mandates: To keep prices stable and to maximize employment. The ECB has just one mandate: To guard against high inflation. The Fed was led during and after the Great Recession by Ben Bernanke, a student of the Great Depression who was determined to avoid a repeat of the 1930s’ economic collapse.

Janet Yellen, who succeeded Bernanke as Fed chair this year, has continued his emphasis on nursing the U.S. economy back to health after the recession of 2007-2009 with the help of historically low rates.

STRONGER BANKS

The United States moved faster than Europe to restore its banks’ health after the financial crisis of 2008-2009. The U.S. government bailed out the financial system and subjected big banks to stress tests in 2009 to reveal their financial strength. By showing the banks to be surprisingly healthy, the stress tests helped restore confidence in the U.S. financial system.

Banks gradually started lending again. European banks are only now undergoing stress tests, and the results won’t be out until fall. In the meantime, Europe’s banks lack confidence. They fear that other banks are holding too many bad loans and that Europe is vulnerable to another crisis. So they aren’t lending much.

In the United States, overall bank lending is up nearly 4 per cent in the past year. Lending to business has jumped 10 per cent.

In the eurozone, lending has dropped 3.7 per cent overall, according to figures from the Institute of International Finance. Lending to business is off 2.5 per cent. (The U.S. figures are for the year ending in mid-June; the European figures are from May.)

A MORE FLEXIBLE ECONOMY

Economists say Japan and Europe need to undertake reforms to make their economies more flexible — more, in other words, like America’s.

Europe needs to lift wage restrictions that prevent employers from cutting pay (rather than eliminating jobs) when times are bad. It could also rethink welfare and retirement programs that discourage people from working and dismantle policies that protect favoured businesses and block innovative newcomers, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has argued.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has proposed reforms meant to make the Japanese economy more competitive. He wants to expand child care so more women can work, replace small inefficient farms with more large-scale commercial farms and allow more foreign migrant workers to fill labour shortages in areas such as nursing and construction.

Yet his proposals face fierce opposition.

“Europe and Japan remain less well-positioned for durable long-term growth, as they have only recently begun to tackle their deep-rooted structural problems, and a lot remains to be done,” says Eswar Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell University.

China is struggling to manage a transition from an economy based on exports and often wasteful investment in real estate and factories to a sturdier but likely slower-growing economy based on more consumer spending.

LESS BUDGET-CUTTING

Weighed down by debt, many European countries took an axe to swelling budget deficits. They slashed pension benefits, raised taxes and cut civil servants’ wages. The cuts devastated several European economies. They led to 27 per cent unemployment in Greece, 14 per cent in Portugal and 25 per cent in Spain. The United States has done some budget cutting, too, and raised taxes. But U.S. austerity hasn’t been anywhere near as harsh.

A ROARING STOCK MARKET

The Fed’s easy-money policies ignited a world-beating U.S. stock market rally. Over the past five years, U.S. stocks have easily outpaced shares in Europe, Japan and Hong Kong. That was one of Bernanke’s goals in lowering rates. He figured that miserly fixed-income rates would nudge investors into stocks in search of higher returns. Higher stock prices would then make Americans feel more confident and more willing to spend — the so-called wealth effect.

Most economists agree it’s worked.

The post 5 factors that are giving the US an edge over other major economies appeared first on Canadian Business.

A lot happens in four years, between World Cup tournaments. Apart from the rise and fall of football personalities, technology and marketing can change a whole bunch! Our Head of Studio, Ger Ashby, took time out from crafting awesome emails to assess the state of email over the past four years.

The last time that football took to the world stage, email was a very different state of affairs. While some old school players were still heavily dominating the game, a few bright sparks were just shining through. I have pulled a selection of the Top Ten B2B & B2C email open stats to take a look through the last 4 years of email, and will look at how the game has changed for marketers, designers and coders alike.

Email client open rates by device

dotmailer’s email client breakdown stats (copywrite dotmailer 2014)

The iPhone made its debut splash way back in 2007, and to this day has always rendered email well. This is a great testament to Apple in general – as seen within the latest client breakdown, the open rate on the iPhone has nearly quadrupled. The most telling statistic, is the drop in opens on Outlook. Are the B2B Outlook users of 2010 now viewing their email on a smartphone instead? Given the rise in opens on mobile clients, let’s hope those emails are optimised well for easy reading and clicking.

A quick little tip – When designing, if you’re not using responsive email code in your templates, shrink your desktop screen’s visual to 50%; if you can’t read your text easily then it is time to increase your font size and call to actions, and space out your links.

If you took the market share of all smartphones sold, Android comes out the clear winner. But unlike the beautiful email rendering of Apple, the Android smartphone will have images natively turned off, or push people directly to the Gmail mail app (depending on the user’s settings, of course). Also, some manufacturers like Samsung have their own native mail app. However, even with images off, we can see a clear growth in the rate of opens on Android devices. When you imagine the percentage of Android users looking at their emails without images, you can only hope in an images-off scenario your emails look professional, have clear sections and a strong call to action.

How your email design *should* look with images off

Tablets – not a hard pill to swallow

Tablets have gone from strength to strength over the past few years, represented here with iPad making a huge dent on the face of email. The statistic may be even higher due to results being skewed by the Android’s ‘image off’ preference. The standard width recommendations of a desktop and webmail template lend themselves well to the standard tablet canvas. In most cases a regular, non-mobile optimised email design will look fine. However, you’d be mistaken to think that the user is receiving the same experience. Ask yourself: Has your email been optimised for the tablet user experience (UX), or does interacting with it leave the reader all fingers and thumbs?

Is the Outlook grim?

Outlook’s presence is still strong, and in many cases these same recipients often receive on multiple devices. Sadly, marketers can’t just ignore that it still exists. With Outlook 2010 becoming the preferred client for many businesses, designing your email with both background imagery on and off is a must. With careful positioning and dissection we can use the vector-based mark up (VML) to force these backgrounds – but you need to be aware of the restrictions here, so let’s just say testing is a must.

Outlook is based on the MS Word engine (yes, really!) and its many versions have always been a bane to the humble email marketer and digital designer alike. Sometimes the version upgrades take baby steps forward, and other times giant steps backwards. All the little things build up like limited styles, table breaks, padding properties and with more recent versions you may need to add extra code here and there to deal with any cells containing images smaller than 20px in in height. In short – it’s a pain, but it still exists so we can’t ignore it.

The shape of growth

Great to see we still have a strong presence of the webmail clients, despite Yahoo and Hotmail’s decline, in favour of Gmail. All web clients do come with a fair share of code tricks, like pre-header text, background colours, emoticons and padding. Growth is not such a bad thing when Gmail are playing ball with marketers – and with their most recent additions of the promotions tab and gallery view, it seems that they are.

It’s not just about the subject line, pre-header or inbox call to actions any more. It’s now also about your hero section and creative, huge news for designers and marketers (need to know more, please see my recent blog with Gmail layout and creative tips below).

Paradigm shift happens

For me, the pie looks a little tastier these days and is not just puffed out with pastry. Audiences are actively choosing to have good rendering or to view it away from their normal Outlook desktop. Not only does this allow for increased diversity and control over general coding features, but also encourages things like Progressive Disclosure Content, Proximity Marketing, and video. Along with other factors, the fact that Apple Mail’s use is consistently growing, shows me that they value the importance of great design, UX and rendering regardless of its medium in the same way that the majority all email users do. Thinking ‘Mobile First’ may just be the way forward, our great friends at Litmus recently reporting stats of over 50% global open rates on mobile.

Outlook has traditionally dictated the email landscape, but now that people can view their required MS Exchange accounts on other devices. I personally think it’s time that Microsoft Outlook shapes up or ships out. Once upon a time there were fears that mobile would ‘kill email marketing’ – however, with an increase of 5 fold, our stats show the opposite. But hey, every turn of the century we fear life will implode and face an apocalypse of some sort …did you know, the world was once flat and the web was coded with HTML tables; how strange.

It’s time to start humanising and connecting with your readers and consumers. Start refining your data, analyse the performance of your layouts & design, play with your code, cultivate your dynamic content and automation …I think this place we call email is going to get really REALLY interesting!

The eyes of the world are on Brazil as the country hosts one of the largest international sporting events of the decade – engaging a massive global audience in games of triumph and tragedy. The first 32 games of this year’s World Cup have reached over 54 million total viewers, already surpassing the scope of the entire 2010 World Cup, and millions more will tune-in between now and the event’s culmination on July 13^th. While sports fans may shift their focus from Brazil following the conclusion of the World Cup, the business world should keep its eye on the country’s robust and promising economy.

Brazil’s Market Opportunity

In 2013, Brazil’s economy grew 2.28% and its gross domestic product (GDP) reached $2.243 trillion, due in large part to the country’s reliance on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) for both jobs and growth. Of the total number of businesses in Brazil, 98% are SMEs that provide 96% of the country’s employment opportunities.

An abundance of natural resources, rapid growth in the manufacturing and service sectors, strong consumer spending, and recent domestic investments have made the country an increasingly popular destination for foreign investment. Until 20 years ago, Brazil was a relatively closed market with limited engagement with foreign companies. Since opening its market, the country has relied heavily on foreign investment to drive industrialization. In order to attract foreign companies for capital intensive projects in mining, telecommunications, IT, and chemicals and petrochemicals, Brazilian legislation has traditionally accommodated multinational organizations and international investors.

In March 2014, Brazil’s Purchasing Manager’s Index (PMI) was 50.6, representing the seventh successive monthly rise of manufacturing production. Reports of increased demand and business expansion plans continue to encourage manufacturers to hire additional employees, steadily increasing the rate of manufacturing employment since February 2014 and reinforcing the economy’s upward growth trends.

Brazil Manufacturing Industry: Representative Sample

Challenges to Brazilian Expansion

Brazil’s dynamic, expanding economy certainly offers new business opportunities, but there are reasons to be apprehensive. While Brazil’s GDP grew at an annual average of 4% during the previous decade, numerous structural issues threaten to hold back economic growth. High taxes, outdated regulations, poor infrastructure, an underperforming education system, and corruption continue to plague the country, and the World Bank has placed Brazil in the bottom third of countries in its 2013 “Ease of Doing Business” rankings.

Many of the challenges that go along with establishing operations in Brazil stem from major structural problems related to the Brazilian macroeconomic and policy environment – including the length and complexity of the startup process, legislative and cultural bias, bureaucracy, and access to financing.

A shortage of skilled labor is another barrier to growth in Brazil’s labor-intensive manufacturing industries. As the government works to reduce the tax burden, more industrial surveys are saying the lack of skilled workers is deterring growth. In 2012, the overall cost of manufacturing increased 6.6% while the cost of labor grew 11.2%

Unquestionably, these obstacles in market entry pose a challenge for SMEs looking to capitalize on the growth and opportunity of Brazil’s manufacturing-friendly economy. As The Economist notes, “The World Bank’s annual report on doing business in various countries reads like a productivity to-do list for Brazil: make it simpler to start up and wind up companies; cut and streamline taxes; [and] increase domestic savings and investment.”

Overcoming the Barriers to Entry

Brazil’s legislation and Brazilians’ mindsets tend to favor: 1) multinational corporations that are willing to do a major upfront investment in the market, and 2) small and medium enterprises that achieve market entry through acquisitions and strategic local partnerships. Joint ventures provide organizations with valuable knowledge of the country and help international companies navigate the intricacies of the bureaucratic requirements of conducting business. To demonstrate this business strategy, payroll services company Paychex, recognizing Brazil’s vibrant market of small businesses and evolving regulatory requirements, announced its expansion into Latin America via a partnership with Semco in early 2014. This June, the Brazilian Minister of Finance announced new measures to expand access to the Brazilian capital market that will continue to build the country’s economy in anticipation of the 2016 Olympics. As such, other companies will likely follow in Paychex’s footsteps to explore what the Brazilian market has to offer.

Despite these encouraging steps, successful expansion cannot be achieved through partnerships alone. As CBS Money Watch reports:

“The message for investors is, don’t treat (emerging markets) as one…It is very important to do your homework at the country level.”

Businesses must conduct thorough market evaluations to assess the size, opportunities, and demand drivers of each market of interest. Further, market validation often requires a combination of both secondary and primary research to garner additional insights. Surveys to employers and consumers evaluating the needs or gaps in current services, or in-depth interviews with executives from adjacent organizations that have achieved prior success in the market of interest, serve to supplement market research with data that is not available through secondary sources. Applying research to develop market strategy allows businesses to validate opportunities, make data-driven decisions, and maximize future revenue potential.

So while World Cup fever may fade in the next month, the promise in Brazil’s emerging economy will continue to grow.

A recent poll in the United States found that almost 70 per cent of employees look for another job upon returning from vacation. Now, you could chalk a stat like that up to too much sun or too many Pina Coladas by the pool, but in reality, it is more likely the case that many employees are already considering jumping ship before going on holiday. Often an employee’s unhappiness is reflective of a company’s poor morale and culture, and mangers and HR recruiters need to be wary of ways to keep current employees happy as well as attracting new ones.

Indeed, retaining rock star talent actually depends a lot on company culture too. One simple way to do this is to build a positive working environment that allows staff the opportunity to perform at their best, feel valued, be inspired and work creatively. Look at the number of highly-talented employees who leave well-paid, authoritative positions at big companies and you can see that there are other drivers in play besides salary and prestige at play.

Have Supportive Employers

Building a positive workplace is based on promoting a company’s values and priorities, and everyone in the executive team or any kind of leadership role needs to understand and embrace these values in order to promote them. Employers need to be supportive of their employees, provide fair and equal treatment to every single staff member, and recognise employee achievements on a regular basis.

Perks

A workplace should also provide a variety of perks to help keep employees happy and feeling valued. Some of these perks could involve bonuses or salary increases in line with industry standards. Recruitment specialist, Robert Half, have a number of industry salary guides that outline what an employee position is worth.

Companies like Google rewards staff members with a variety of benefits from free organic meals to free medical and dental; on-site gyms and even nap pods. While these perks come at considerable expense to Google, it is money well spent when you reflect on the rigorous recruiting process the company sets for itself. Google is all about retaining its staff and in response Google employees are loyal and productive.

Communication

Managers need to be able to share their ideas about what constitutes success in both the deliverables and performance levels of the job. It’s essential that supervisors provide regular feedback to staff members and are clear about the career development and earning potential of the role and any future positions within the company. Managers need to listen proactively to employee feedback, foster open and honest communication with team members and ensure that each employee is clear on the direction of the company and its corporate culture.

Training

Training isn’t just important for employees but also for every person who is in a management or leadership role as well. Every manager can usually increase their ability to retain staff members by further developing their management skills. After all, a leader needs to value their team and each person’s contribution in order to effectively create a unified and positive workplace.

To help develop managers at all levels of an organisation, companies need to invest in regular management training. Leaders need to be given access to courses, books and other educational development opportunities that help them learn how to give and receive feedback, recognise and value employees, handle complaints and staff issues, promote a motivating work environment, and mentor and coach all their employees.

A summary of SEO techniques you should focus on

Some basic SEO mistakes are all too easy to make. Here are some problems with the overall approach to SEO that I’ve seen. Do you recognise them?

• 1. Putting all your eggs in the SEO basket.

SEO can be an extremely fruitful internet marketing strategy for any business, but depending solely on SEO is a dangerous game to play.

Here’s why:

• Marketing is not ‘one size fits all’. What works like gangbusters for one business may produce almost nothing for another. That’s why companies should use a multi-faceted marketing strategy to test the waters with a variety of tactics, and continue to evolve their strategy over time as results are produced.
• SEO is not instant. Results from SEO don’t come overnight. It takes time (sometimes lots of it!) and patience. Other marketing strategies can fill your pipeline in the meantime and help you reach your target audience through multiple channels in the long run.Pay-per-click (or PPC) marketing, for example, typically produces results much more quickly and is highly controllable. When your organic traffic starts to take off, you can scale down PPC spending if you like, and the option to increase spending again is always available.
• Once isn’t enough. Typically, it takes more than one view or visit to entice a user to convert. Generally, the more times they see your brand or product, the more likely they are to visit your site again and convert or buy.Remarketing is a tactic that allows a company to show ads to users based on behaviour. So, if a user finds you through organic search but doesn’t convert on that first visit, you can serve them ads as they browse the web to encourage them to visit your site again and, hopefully, become a customer!

While SEO is certainly a major component of any well-planned marketing strategy, it is still only one component and should be used in conjunction with other complementary tactics.

• 2: Skimping on body content.

It can be all too easy to get caught up in the mechanics of SEO. Every page needs a unique title and description tag, both for proper indexing and to distinguish your page from the thousands of others displayed for every Google search.

Remember, though, that the content of a page is much more than just optimized title and description tags. Awesome meta tags on their own are not enough to increase your site’s visibility or convert users once they’ve arrived on your page.

Be sure to take the time to craft unique and useful content in the body of the page as well. Body content matters just as much (if not more) as those header items and it’s the ‘meat’ of where you will engage users once they have arrived on your site.

Matt Cutts (a well-known Googler known for occasional cheekiness) recently illustrated the importance of body content by creating a video with his body missing.

Google is known for being somewhat secretive about its algorithm but when Matt Cutts goes to this kind of length to make a point it’s worth listening.

• 3: Status quo

Change can be difficult in any aspect of life, so it’s understandable that moving away from dated SEO techniques that once worked  and might even appear to continue working – is not easy. After all, if a keyword stuffed list of every single town you service hasn’t caused a drop in traffic yet, why change?

Eventually, using outdated SEO strategies will lead to consequences. That doesn’t necessarily mean a penalty; it could simply mean competitors catching on to newer techniques sooner and overtaking your site. Either way, marketing builds your business so you don’t want to get stuck in a rut and risk compromising the flow of new business into your company.

Stop optimizing content for a small and very specific set of keywords. Focus on writing helpful and useful content that has an obvious theme and intent.

Write for your users and not to toot your company’s horn. Don’t judge success by your site’s exact ranking for a specific key phrase (because that no longer exists). Instead, track trends in traffic and conversions.

Don’t buy links. Don’t create unnecessary lists just to stuff keywords into your content. Don’t use a ‘Helpful Links’ page. Don’t don’t don’t!

• 4: Duplicate URLs

Many are aware that duplicate content is a no-no in the SEO world, but it doesn’t always happen on purpose. Did you know you might unknowingly be creating duplicate content through multiple variations of the same URL?

For example, if you have both www.mysite.com and www.MySite.com, or www.mysite.com/widgets and www.mysite.com/Widgets, and one doesn’t redirect to the other, you actually have two separate URL’s containing the exact same content.

Yes, upper case versus lower case does make a difference!

If you don’t have proper redirects in place, this can occur even if you are only publishing one version of each URL. It tends to happen especially when other sites link to you and use non-standard formats (e.g. any format they want!).

Your web designer can add a lowercase redirect rule to prevent this from happening.

• 5: Blocking your own site

Has your organic traffic suddenly dropped off the map? Sure, it could be a penalty caused by an algorithm update, but it might be simpler than that.

It’s very easy to accidentally format your robots.txt file to disallow your entire domain from being indexed by search engines. (Oops!) Double and triple check this one, and check it often!

• 6: Overly complex or non-useful structure

Trying to ensure all the finer technical details are in place sometimes leads to making things more complex than they need to be. The simpler route is almost always a better route. This goes for nearly every element of the site. Simplicity helps both users and Google understand how to navigate and interact with your site.

URL structure
Instead of:

http://www.abccompany.com/cat12/prod345

Use this:

http://www.abccompany.com/sneakers/nike-air

• Navigation

Make it text-based so that Google can see it and categorize your sections logically. Try not to make users search for the category they need.

• Internal linking

Link to other pages of your site within the page content where it makes sense, but also provide other tools to make things easy for users. This might include a sidebar with links to all the pages within that category to make navigation simple.

• 7: Doing keyword research once…and never again

Just like SEO tactics change over time, terms in your industry and the way people search for your products or services evolve as well.

Doing keyword research once and never again is like buying a new car and never changing the oil. SEO, just like your car, needs ongoing maintenance and care, and its specific needs may change over time.

Check out the changes in search volume between ‘canvas shoes’ and ‘espadrilles’ over the last ten years.

Both have their regular cyclical patterns and become more popular over the summer months, but ‘canvas shoes’ never comes close to matching ‘espadrilles’ (which look to be more popular than ever) in volume.

• 8: Not creating link worthy content

Some call it ‘link bait’, but no matter what you call it, the idea is the same to create content that will be loved by your target audience and is also worthy of other sites linking to it.

Link worthy content can include pieces like whitepapers, infographics, videos, tutorials, how to articles and lots more.

‘Regular content’ is, of course, the starting point that every site needs to flourish, but many times users are itching to be further engaged.

Developing a link bait arsenal is like killing two birds with one stone because your site becomes more and more attractive to users and potential customers, and positions you as an expert in your industry, worthy of those precious inbound links you’ve been coveting!

• 9: ‘Click Here’

As a web-based society, we’ve (fortunately) moved past the need for using the words ‘click here’ on every link. Most users understand what links and buttons look like and, as long as your user experience is simple and logical, they will click on the links you provide.

Using the anchor text ‘click here’ also provides absolutely zero SEO value…unless your page content is themed around the phrase ‘click here’. Instead, let the anchor text be part of the natural content on your page.

Example:

• Click here to see our selection of red sneakers.
  Instead – Check out our red sneakers!

Give Google a strong hint about the content of the page that you’re linking to and make your content more logical and pleasant to read for your users.

• 10: Skipping data markup

One area where Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have actually collaborated is for schema.org. Schema.org is a joint effort to standardize website data markup for the major search engines. Basically, structured data markup is coding that makes it easier for search engines to understand the various elements of a website.

Data markup helps search engines better understand websites in order to return the best quality search results, and it can also enhance the user experience by displaying rich snippets as part of search results.

Google currently can display rich snippets for items like recipes, reviews, breadcrumb navigation and a few more.

Even though you won’t see all data markup displayed in search results, it makes sense to give the search engines as much information about your site as possible.

It’s also very easy for a web designer to add this markup to your site.

Thanks to Cheryl Ambruch for sharing her advice and opinions in this post. Cheryl is Director of Content Strategy at Miles Technologies You can follow the marketing team at Miles Technologies on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

Credit and debit cards have already gone a long way to getting people off of cash and checks.

But there is one type of payment that still requires a trip to the ATM or a desperate hunt for the checkbook. Called peer-to-peer (P2P) payments, these informal transactions are made between people — say to pay someone back for a concert ticket or to pay a babysitter for a few hours of work.

A new crop of apps, though, is changing the way these types of payments are made. In a new report from BI Intelligence we take a look at apps like Venmo, Square Cash, and M-Pesa, which are allowing people to transfer money back and forth using just a smartphone. Already, PayPal-owned Venmo, one of the leading mobile P2P apps, says it saw $314 million in transaction volume on its app last quarter.

In the report, we take a close look at what's so compelling about these mobile P2P apps, and forecast mobile P2P payment volume through 2018. We explain what differentiates some of the most successful P2P apps and how we see adoption of smartphone-based P2P payments ultimately transitioning people onto mobile payments in general.

What's really interesting about these apps is not just the services they provide for people, which solve a real pain point. It's the fact that these services could ultimately get people to make mobile payments in general. There's good reason to think that this is what these apps are really after. These companies often make little to no money off of facilitating peer-to-peer transactions, but if they can become the platform for in-store mobile payments, there could be real revenue at stake. 

To access the full report and all our coverage of the payments industry, sign up for a free trial.

Here are some of the report's key findings: 

• Globally, the volume of P2P payments is over $1 trillion and only a sliver of those transactions are currently conducted via mobile phones.
• In emerging markets, there is especially huge potential for P2P payments made on cell phones, due to a lack of financial infrastructure. A high proportion of the population in these markets lack access to checking and savings accounts.
• Kenyan telecom Safaricom provides an excellent case study for the success of mobile P2P payments  in emerging technology markets. The telecom has a product called M-Pesa, which allows its users to transfer  money to one another via text message. Largely as a result of M-Pesa's success, an impressive 92% of Kenyans say they have used mobile P2P payments. 
• In developed markets, adoption of mobile P2P payment services won't be as fast. But we believe they still have real potential in the long-run because these services solve real pain points for consumers. Our high-end estimate is that mobile P2P transactions volume could reach $86 billion in the U.S. by 2018.
• Mobile P2P payment services are usually free or next to free to use, which begs the question of how they will be monetized. Different services have experimented with fees and even advertising. But mainly, these services will serve as Trojan horses to gain user trust for mobile-based transactions. 

In full, the report: 

• Forecasts transaction volume for mobile P2P payments through 2018 and gives an estimate for the size of global P2P payments. 
• Explains the value of mobile P2P payments to consumers and why there is such a compelling case for mass adoption. 
• Profiles ten companies' P2P services that we think are indicative of the breadth of services on offer. 
• Analyzes the major obstacles that mobile P2P payments face, including interoperability and security risks. 

BI Intelligence is a subscription research service from Business Insider. We cover the payments, mobile, digital media, and e-commerce industries. For full access to all our charts and analysis, sign up for a free trial.

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There were already 11 other golf courses nearby when Don MacKay set about to build Muskoka Highlands in 1992. At the time, it wasn’t clear whether Ontario’s cottage country, two hours north of Toronto, could support a 12th course, but MacKay believed in his business plan—a low-key, public links-style facility—and convinced a cautious banker to loan him the money. It may have been the last time a proposed golf course received such serious scrutiny in Canada.

Since then, MacKay says more than 18 courses have been built—and bankrolled—within a few hours’ drive. But there aren’t nearly enough people to slice, hook and duff balls along all those freshly clipped fairways. Business is hurting and competition between operators is growing fierce. “If you talk to a golfer, he’ll say the game of golf is fine,” MacKay says. “But if you talk to a golf course owner, he will say the business of golf is suffering because we overbuilt.”

The numbers are stunning. There are an estimated 2,400 golf courses across the country, while Statistics Canada pegs the number of golfers in Canada at about 1.5 million. That’s one course for every 625 players, or 14,500 Canadians—among the highest number per capita in the world. Moreover, Canadians appear to be playing less golf than they used to. A recent study by the National Allied Golf Associations, or NAGA, found that the number of rounds played on the average Canadian course has dropped 10 per cent over the past five years, with the blame falling on everything from waning interest to the time commitment required.

In the U.S., a painful industry shakeout is already under way. Equipment sales are down, closures of golf courses are commonplace and an estimated 400,000 players left the sport last year alone. In Canada, meanwhile, clubs are slashing fees in a bid to stay in the black, with some more successful than others. The award-winning Sagebrush Golf & Sporting Club near Merritt, B.C., recently applied to put itself into receivership, following in the footsteps of others such as Tobiano (Kamloops), Tower Ranch (Kelowna) and the Rise (Vernon). In Ontario, the private York Downs Golf & Country Club north of Toronto put itself up for sale to developers, while a candidate seeking Toronto’s mayoralty wants to turn a money-losing municipal course in the east end into a park to ease the taxpayer burden.

How did the industry end up in such an obvious hazard? Overly optimistic predictions about how many retired Baby Boomers would hit the links was part of it. But the real culprit was golf’s unhealthy relationship with North America’s overheated real estate market. Developers can sell houses for far more money if they back onto a golf course and the fancier the golf course, the bigger the premium. But not everyone who wants to live next to a golf course plays golf—so many courses sit relatively empty. Egos also play a role. “I watched in astonishment as people poured tens of millions into a course that they probably knew they weren’t going to get their money out of,” says MacKay, who once worked for a company that built golf courses.

Now the industry is scrambling to find its way back out of the rough. Some operators have cut back on watering and maintenance, allowing courses to exist in a more “natural” state. Others are grasping for new ways to sell a centuries-old game to a time-pressed audience, experimenting with faster-to-play courses and pay-as-you-go pricing. One course in B.C. is using eight-inch cups on the greens to make putting easier, while others propose going as big as 15 inches, roughly the size of a large pizza. Golf Digest raised eyebrows this year when it featured a scantily dressed Paulina Gretzky on its cover—not because she’s a golfer, but because she happens to be engaged to one.

Perhaps the most desperate response is to lure people to use golf courses for sports other than golf. MacKay, for one, promotes something called footgolf, a sort of golf-soccer mash-up that involves kicking the ball down a fairway and trying to land it in a 21-inch hole. He’s unapologetic. “When 40 per cent of kids under 15 play soccer and [five per cent] play golf, you realize that you need to appeal to a different market,” he says. “We’ve got to put more people on this course. I don’t care if they’re flying kites or riding bikes. We have to get more people because golf is golf and there are only so many golfers out there.”

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An aerial tour of Toronto’s golf course glut

In the past, lobbyists might have courted government officials by taking them out for a round at a swanky golf club. Now, the golf courses themselves are lobbying for special treatment. NAGA officials recently visited Parliament Hill to demand that companies and their employees be able to claim golf rounds as an expense for tax purposes—something that hasn’t been allowed for decades. Jeff Calderwood, NAGA’s chair, says it’s a question of fairness, since other forms of entertainment, including meals and hockey tickets, are eligible for deductions of up to 50 per cent. But he doesn’t deny that golf is facing a crisis of its own making. “We’re somewhat victims of our own success,” he says, pointing to a study the group commissioned that concludes golf, all totalled, is worth $14.3 billion to the Canadian economy. “It’s been ‘build it and they will come’ for so many decades. We probably got a little bit ahead of ourselves.”

While Calderwood maintains that golf remains fundamentally healthy—“other sports would kill for the numbers we have”—NAGA’s study reveals why golf course operators are worried. NAGA considers the total population of Canadian golfers to be 5.7 million, meaning anyone who has ever picked up a club. However, only a quarter of them, or 1.5 million, are deemed “engaged,” meaning they play regularly. North America’s waning interest in golf has also been reflected in the sales of golf clubs and apparel, with companies such as Dick’s Sporting Goods, Callaway Golf and TaylorMade reporting bleak numbers in recent quarters.

The solution seems straightforward: Reach out to all those passive golfers and lure them onto the course. But it’s easier said than done. In our fast-paced, always connected world, most people don’t have the four or five hours needed to play 18 holes on a regular basis. And, unlike in the previous decade, there’s no Tiger Woods-sized celebrity to sell the game to an iPad generation. In fact, some now wonder if the industry squandered its biggest star by letting Woods define himself through lucrative endorsement deals with megabrands like Nike, Accenture, General Motors and PepsiCo—relationships that immediately soured when stories of Woods’s extramarital affairs emerged. “They did not use Woods to promote golf; they used him to promote professional golf, i.e., money,” writes James Corrigan, the Telegraph’s golf correspondent. “Instead of being the face for a worldwide initiative to get the kids on the fairways, he was the face for a sport laden with riches.”

Golf course design and construction also contributed to the problem. “I think that every course that was put up in the 1990s was probably put up with real estate, mine included,” MacKay says. But most developers are long gone once the houses are sold, leaving the expensive task of running and maintaining the golf course—which might not make financial sense on its own—to someone else. Some courses even ran into trouble before they were completed. In North Cowichan, on Vancouver Island, the Cliffs Over Maple Bay is a Greg Norman-designed course plus housing development first proposed more than a decade ago. The course was laid out, lots sold and houses built. But the developer failed to secure a source of water to keep the course irrigated. The result: Pricey homes backed onto a clear-cut forest, with no clear plan of what comes next. Even Woods’s design company, Tiger Woods Design, has faced difficulty with high-profile projects in the U.S. and overseas. To date, only one of the five courses listed on the company’s website looks to be nearing completion.

The U.S. housing crash similarly exposed the inherent weaknesses of the real estate model. Across the U.S., golf courses built as centrepieces of faltering real estate developments have been mothballed and are now being rezoned for residential construction. Canada, which has yet to experience a real estate downturn, is also facing pressure to replace fairways with driveways—but for different reasons. In Vancouver, for example, Mayor Gregor Robertson drew the ire of some golfers two years ago by suggesting municipal courses lease some of their land to developers to create room for affordable housing. On the other side of the country, a 2012 auditor general’s report showed Toronto’s five municipal courses face dwindling profits and may eventually need taxpayers’ support.

These days, most new courses are privately built as destination resorts (although real estate continues to be a key component in many projects). Cabot Links, near Inverness (population 2,500) on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island opened as an 18-hole course in 2012 and was heralded as one of the country’s best. Now another 18-hole course, Cabot Cliffs, is being added at a cost of roughly $14 million—including an $8.25-million loan from the province. Steely nerved golfers will begin hitting tee shots over its craggy gorges and windswept ravines in 2015.

While such projects attract awards and tourists, they don’t encourage more people to take up the game. “The modus operandi has been to build bigger, tougher, longer courses,” says MacKay. “People want the big, spectacular views. It’s not so much about the playability; it’s more about how tough can I make it and how private can I make it.”

In fact, some courses seem to pride themselves on how few people avail themselves of their services—or, at least, they did. “A busy day for us is 10 foursomes on the course, and we consider ourselves 100 per cent full with 60 people,” the general manager of B.C.’s Sagebrush resort told the Vancouver Sun two years ago. “The consequence is people have a sense of freedom on the course without being pushed from behind or being delayed from in front. In today’s golfing world, quite understandably, that is a difficult thing to come by.” No wonder Sagebrush’s owners, carrying $35 million of debt, have hit a wall.

For those courses keen on keeping as many pairs of spikes clattering by the clubhouse as possible, everything is on the table. At Toronto’s Cedar Brae Golf & Country Club initiation fees are as little as $3,500 for new members—a fraction of what they were three decades ago. Other private clubs allow the public to play on certain days and have relaxed their dress codes to include jeans. Rules are increasingly becoming guidelines. Don’t like your lie? Move the ball. Hit a bad shot from the tee? Take out another ball and try again.

At Redwoods Golf Course, near Vancouver, Doug Hawley has gone further than most. This year, he’s outfitted the course with eight-inch holes on Tuesday nights (4.25 inches is the standard) in the hopes of making what may be the world’s most frustrating game easier to play. While traditionalists grumble, Hawley argues “so-called purists” are no strangers to cheating, even if they don’t acknowledge it. “They’re taking gimmes, they’re not playing by all the rules or completing the whole game,” he says. Besides, the advantage of bigger holes isn’t necessarily reflected on scorecards. It’s psychological. “A lot of the pressure is on the green, because that’s when the game becomes one of centimetres,” Hawley says. “So by making that easier, it takes the pressure off golfers and they tend to go for it a little more. They watch the pros make 30- or 40-foot putts, and now they think they can make them, too.” Has it worked? “I’m a lot busier on Tuesday.”

Back in Muskoka, MacKay is throwing tradition out the window by embracing footgolf. The game, first developed in Europe, appeals primarily to soccer fans looking for ways to hone their skills, or simply to people who like the idea of hanging out on a golf course without the headache of swatting around a tiny white ball. It’s played just like golf (minus the clubs and balls, of course) and usually involves 18 holes distributed over the fairways of a nine-hole golf course. MacKay acquired the rights to start a Canadian version of the American FootGolf League and says about 20 courses in Canada are considering adding footgolf to the mix.

When it comes to regular golf, MacKay is also tinkering with the industry’s pricing norms. At Muskoka Highlands, golfers can pay nine-, 12- and 18-hole rates, with plans to adopt a dynamic pricing system that will allow the golf course to sell green fees the same way airlines sell airfares: by using computer algorithms to figure out when demand is highest and charging more for those times.

Even golf course architects, those faceless monsters responsible for ruining otherwise impressive shots with ill-placed water holes, sand traps or leafy trees, are rethinking the way they go about their business. Neil Haworth is a Canadian golf course designer who spent most of his career in Asia, where he’s worked on some of the region’s top courses, including Shenzhen Golf Club in Guangzhou, China, and Sheshan International Golf Club near Shanghai. He recently completed a renovation project at the Parcours du Cerf golf course in Longueuil, Que., that involved transforming nine holes of a 36-hole facility into a new, faster-to-play 12-hole executive course, the first of its kind in the province.

Haworth says one way to appeal to a wider audience is a greater focus on forward tee boxes, which often lack the dramatic vistas or challenging obstacles that the back tees do. He also suggests golf courses adopt slower greens and fewer bunkers, which are expensive to maintain and “tend to catch the golfer you don’t need to catch, because he’s shooting 120 already.” A change in attitude is evident at the professional level, too. For the first time in recent memory, this year’s U.S. Open was held at a course without any rough. As part of a $2.5-million renovation, North Carolina’s Pinehurst Resort ripped out the lush, Augusta-style turf that edged the fairways on Pinehurst No. 2 and replaced it with sand, hardpan and brush. The new look was sold as a nod to its century-old heritage. “It’s the way it should be,” gushed two-time U.S. Open winner Curtis Strange. But an equally compelling reason for the makeover is what it will mean for the grounds crew: They need 150 million fewer litres of water each year to do their jobs. Which should free up time—and money—to cut soccer ball-sized holes into the fairways, should it come to that.

The post Why Canadian golf is dying appeared first on Macleans.ca.

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Getting high quality traffic to your website is very important, especially when you are undertaking a digital marketing campaign. The social media platform has become a popular tool for helping websites in improving its search ranking and search engine optimization process. A strong social signal can significantly enhance the popularity of your brand and in driving quality traffic to your business. Measuring social signals, thus has become an important aspect of your SEO and digital marketing goals and with the help of social analytics, you can manage to pull together measurable metrics that can help you optimize your social media marketing campaign.

What is Social Signal?

If you have different business social media accounts and they get likes, votes, pins and shares, you are already generating social signals for your business online. The more social signals your social media profiles are able to generate, the more your brand is becoming popular online. At a certain point, your social signal helps to generate traffic for your business and it becomes an undertaking of social SEO strategy. Unlike the traditional search engine optimization which often involves using backlinks, keywords and anchor texts to generate traffic to a website and improve its search rank, social SEO involves interaction among the social users, which are “humans” instead of the mere mathematical approach used in the traditional search engine optimization. Social SEO has now become more adherent to Google’s Penguin and Panda releases for measuring search engine optimization outcomes.

The benefits of social signals to your business are numerous. It can improve your website’s search engine ranking page. Social signals have a strong influence on how the search engine ranks a website and it significantly replaced backlinks as a metric used by Google for search ranking. Once people begin recommending your brand through social signals such as re-pinning, liking, voting, and sharing your posts, there is a high probability that your business is growing its popularity, traffic and conversion rates.

The Essence of Social Analytics to Business

Social analytics is now considered to be a part of business intelligence strategy where statistical data is collected, analyzed and used in predicting customer behavior. The analytic results coming from the social data used can help businesses to become more responsive to the changing needs of their customers and market industry trend. It is also used by online marketers to review and monitor the marketing strategies of their competitors. The use of analytics has become an important tool for businesses in understanding the mass of meaningful data that is available to improve their market competitiveness and in bringing their brand closer to the consumers.

How to Use Analytics in Measuring Social Signals

Analyzing social data can be very complex when done manually. Using an analytics tool can make the process more intelligent, organized and can capture important metrics that would be difficult if not impossible through human intervention. The Google Analytics is the popular tool used by online marketers in measuring social metrics and signals while there are other paid analytic tools that have similar features for tracking social data and analyzing them for social SEO.

1. Using the social referral metrics

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It is important to learn which among your referring sources bring high quality and organic traffic to your website. This will help you concentrate your social SEO strategies on these referring sites in order to find more social users who are likely engaged and like your business.

• If you are using Google Analytics tool, use the social sources metric to identify the traffic trend coming from the different social media sites.
• Once you have identified which source is taking high traffic to your business, click on each in order to find which among your site’s web pages are the most visited.
• It also has an activity stream feature where you can see who among the social users have been sharing, liking or voting for your web page content.
• Reinforce the engagement of your brand with social users by taking note of the most viewed content on your website which tends to attract the attention of your target viewers.

2. Evaluate your social conversions

Image credit: blog.kissmetrics.com

If you are too keen about monitoring and keeping track of your business social conversion rate, the social conversion metrics will provide you an overview about the number of your goal completion and business conversion coming from the social media sites.

• Most analytics tools will require you to enter your own conversion goal prior to enabling its reporting activity.
• Filter the report according to your specific goals. You can also set your own goal values as well as the conversion value that you want to monitor in order to filter results.
• Find out which social media networks are taking high conversion rate to your business.

3. Measuring your social media reach

Tracking down your business social media reach is essential in order to understand and measure your social media marketing reach.

• Use the social media reach metrics for analytics in order to identify your audience growth rate.
• Evaluate whether there is an increasing number of your business social followers.
• Connect your social media data to reach the potential profit earning from various social media network sources.
• Identify which social media search engine optimization campaign has been bringing the higher number of social media traffic and followers to your business.
• Optimize that SEO approach you are using in order to grow more followers from your social media profiles that do not generate better social reach for your business.

4. Track down your business social engagement

Image credit: www.razorsocial.com

Tracking down the social media reach of your business is not enough. You need to dig deeper into your social analytics undertaking by tracking down its social engagement as well. As the number of your social media followers starts growing, it is crucial to know whether you are attracting social users who are interested in converting for your business.

• Track down the average engagement rate from your social analytics to pulse whether your followers are not merely subscribing fans and followers, but are actually interested about what your business is all about.
• Identify which among your social followers are actually listening and taking action to respond to your business communications.
• Use the analytic report to identify which of your web page contents tend to engage your social network members longer.

Maybe it’s the foolish amounts of venture capital swirling around Silicon Valley, but it often seems as though we are all playing a game in which the contestants have to determine what is a parody and what isn’t, and it’s getting harder instead of easier. Is the app that sends a single word — “Yo” — to another user a parody or a real company? Turns out it’s real. How about one that makes fake reservations at restaurants and then sells them to the highest bidder? Yup, that’s real too. But ReservationHop seems to have triggered a collective feeling of disgust that others haven’t, which may be a sign that there is still some hope left.

Creator Brian Mayer started the service as an experiment after he waited too long for a burrito, and apparently wasn’t intending to make it a big splash with it, but word quickly got out and Twitter had a field day with the idea, turning it into what the founder called “a maelstrom of hate.” The vast majority of the responses — as Mayer noted in a subsequent blog post about the blowback — called him a lowlife scumbag, or variations on that theme, and said his idea was morally bankrupt.

This is irresponsible and sleazy and exactly what people hate about startups sucking the life out of San Francisco reservationhop.com—
mat honan (@mat) July 03, 2014

Reservation Hop is horrifying and can hurt restaurants. Wow, @bmmayer, you are now San Francisco sleaziest tech a-hole.—
  (@sarahharbin) July 03, 2014

Part of the problem for Mayer could be that ReservationHop comes on the heels of some other ethically questionable startup ideas, including ParkingMonkey, which allows people to buy and sell public parking spaces (at least until the city said it could no longer do so). Restaurant reservations may not fall into the same category as public parking, but the idea that a business would make bookings under pseudonyms and then sell them seemed to trigger a warning bell for many — in part because, as Redpoint VC partner Ryan Sarver pointed out, it adds risk for restaurants instead of sharing that risk with them.

Ethics? Didn’t really occur to me

To Mayer’s credit, the ethical drawbacks of his idea seems to have occurred to him at some point during the firestorm of criticism, and he says in his blog post that he is thinking of approaching restaurants to see if he can work with them instead of just acting as a kind of parasite that takes advantage of a weakness in the system. But his post also contains a passage that to me at least says a lot — for better or worse — about the downside of the startup mentality. As he puts it:

“Let’s talk about the questions/criticisms everyone has. What was I thinking! How dare I sell something that’s free! Is this even legal? Is it ethical? Restaurants are going to hate this! To be honest, I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking through these questions. I built this site as an experiment in consumer demand for a particular product.”

The assumption in Mayer’s post — and, it seems, the assumption behind similar business models like ParkingMonkey or Sweetch — is that if something can be monetized, then it should be. It’s as though capitalism, or tech-startup life, was a game in which founders try to spot loopholes in the laws or social contracts that govern our behavior, and then figure out ways to get someone to pay to exploit them. This isn’t necessarily a recipe for disaster, but it avoids any question about whether such loopholes *should* be monetized. As Mayer puts it: “If someone does pay for it willingly, is it really unethical?” Well yes, maybe it is.

i wonder if startups will eventually start squatting in emergency rooms and let people pay to get to the front of the line.—
Selena Larson (@selenalarson) July 03, 2014

My new startup stands in front of you at movies until you pay me to sit down—
mat honan (@mat) July 04, 2014

If you're tired of having to share the 911 emergency system with everyone, an SF startup keeps a few operators tied up for highest bidders.—
Andrew Kueneman (@andrewkueneman) July 04, 2014

Should all loopholes be monetized?

As a number of people noted in the Twitter firestorm that occurred after the idea became public on Thursday, there are plenty of other opportunities to exploit monetizable opportunities other than just restaurants or parking spots: why not have a system where people hold a place in the line at the emergency department, and then people could pay to get quicker access to medical care? Or what if someone arranged for a date under an assumed name, and then you could bid on the right to get access to that particular person?

All of these seem absurd in various ways, or clearly unethical. But where is the line? And should that line be drawn before or after a startup founder launches a new app or service to take advantage of that need? Uber and other successful startups have run into similar challenges even after they became substantial businesses: for example, is it unethical and/or in poor taste for Uber to charge more for rides that occur in the aftermath of a massive storm, or is that a necessary way of redistributing the slack in the system?

I think Parker Higgins hinted at a really useful way to think of whether an idea is ethically questionable: Namely, does it produce some kind of value for all endpoints within the service — users, contributors, suppliers, etc. — or is it just about extracting some kind of value that already exists in the system so that the founders can get rich? With ReservationHop, users who bid on open tables clearly get a benefit, but the restaurants arguably don’t.

That’s not to say that a service that takes advantage of a legal loophole or makes questionable ethical decisions can’t make money, or become a successful company. It just means that it is going to continually be fighting an uphill battle to get people to treat it as a respectable business.

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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Nanigans CEO Ric Calvillo talks to a lot of ad-tech analysts. Every time he asks them what the biggest disruption in the advertising technology space is, they say RTB, or real-time bidding.

But that’s actually much smaller than another, much bigger phenomenon, one that potentially threatens the entire ad industry.

“RTB is only $4-5 billion,” says Calvillo, referring to the exchanges that sell millions of ads per minute in hyper-efficient automated bidding mini-wars for real-time ad delivery via the web or mobile apps. “The online global ad market is about $100 billion … and between Google, Doubleclick, YouTube, and Facebook, direct-to-client ad sales via self-serve total about $20 billion.”

“So 20 percent of the market has been sucked out of the ecosystem.”

The ecosystem Calvillo is talking about, of course, is the ad-reselling ecosystem, which is increasingly occupied by a sometimes-bewildering mix of third parties that are middle-men between advertisers and publishers: supply-side networks, demand-side networks, ad resellers, real-time exchanges, and hundreds of specialist companies occupying dozens of niches in the big market of creating demand and selling stuff.

176 game developers with over $600M in annual revenue helped us
study 51 mobile ad providers for the best mobile monetization strategies

That’s the market that Calvillo wants to disrupt, while also taking on ad giants like Facebook and Google. To say the least, it’s a tall order.

Advertising markup

The current complex ad ecosystem largely lives on the difference between what an ad costs at some publisher, and what you pay them.

“The typical markup on media is 100 percent,” Calvillo told me, though in automated exchanges it is often less. “If they were really selling it for $20B, third parties would have made some of that … there’s at least $10B of extra margin that Google and Facebook has captured.”

This is pretty much the way the advertising ecosystem has always worked, of course. Brands hired agencies to create campaigns, build creative, and buy ad placements in magazines, paper, radio, and TV. Agencies made money on the difference between what they bought ads for, and sold them.

That’s pretty old-school at this point — the internet has made many things more efficient, and ad buying is just one of them.

So why is the ad-tech ecosystem booming, with seemingly dozens of new companies popping up monthly?

Pay more, get more

One reason is that you might actually want to pay double for your ads, if you knew they were four times as effective.

So ad-tech companies are investing millions in big data, trying to build predictive analytics that take what they know about you and your behavior and build algorithms for which ads are most likely to be welcome, topical, and timely. That helps them predict the value of an impression much better than a client who ventures solo onto Google Adwords or Facebook Ad Network, and potentially generates effectiveness that overrides efficiency.

Companies like Nanigans process 250 million ad events daily, Calvillo said, so they have much better capability in judging where an advertisers’ money is best spent. In addition, since brands need to advertise at global scale, sending out millions of customized ads to users in different locales with different languages, customs, preferences, and buying habits, a partner who can manage billions of monthly impressions could be helpful.

Nanigans is doing all those things too.

But the boom in ad-tech companies has created another problem: everyone wants a cut. So an advertiser might find itself placing a bid to buy an ad on a demand-side platform which goes to an ad exchange that matches it up with a supply-side platform with the appropriate inventory which then actually finally places the ad on a publisher’s site. At each stage in the long process, you’re paying some percentage points extra, which over time ads up to a lot of extra cost.

So Calvillo has another ace up his sleeve, he hopes.

Ad platform as a service

Instead of the traditional model of buying and selling ad inventory for clients, Calvillo is re-directing Nanigans away from a Facebook-centric ad-management partner towards becoming a software-as-a-service ad company model. Call it ACaaS (ad company as a service), or APaaS, advertising platform as, yes, a service. It’s in part a response to the complexities and consequent cost of online advertising, and in part a response to the big boys of online publishing, like Google AdSense and Facebook Ad Network, going off the reservation and into the wider internet, where they are no longer selling their own inventory.

“When Facebook and Google go off their own inventory, they act just like a network,” Calvillo said. “Then they add 32 percent mark-up between the SSP [supply-side] layer and the DSP [demand-side] layer. We think SaaS can disrupt that.”

In other words, Calvillo is seeing Facebook’s and Google’s efficiencies, and raising them another, while also reducing the number of layers between advertiser and publisher to one. The result could be to give every brand and advertiser all the advantages of the house: massive scale, hyper-efficiency, big-data-informed knowledge of people who they’re targeting ads at, and at-cost ad prices.

How?

By removing middlemen, of course. And by not working just for the advertisers, but also for the publishers who are currently selling their ads at wholesale for Google and Facebook and other ad companies to sell at retail, and losing 32-100 percent of the ultimate potential revenue.

“We could sell a SaaS contract for all these publishers … and you get billed by the publisher,” Calvillo said. “Our fee is nominal. That’s a long-term play, so direct billing is critical … we don’t want to have to pass the media dollars through the way the DSPs have.”

One network to rule them all?

The result looks pretty much like a supply-side platform, Calvillo agreed, but he argues that over time, these layers will collapse. Which would eliminate the modern middlemen of the ad-tech world: One network to rule them all, and in the end, bind them.

The results could be both more money in publisher’s pockets, and more ads that brands could buy.

“For display media, there’s a nonlinear bid-to-volume curve,” Calvillo said. “If you have a big e-commerce site and you’re paying [ad company] Criteo 40 percent markup … even with a SaaS fee if you can bid 30 percent higher, and make double your volume. That could be huge from a competitive standpoint.”

There’s so much complexity in the market right now, Calvillo says, that people don’t know what they’re paying, they don’t know who they’re paying, and they don’t know what their ads actually cost before getting marked up at each stage in the long chain. Some clients who work with other platforms, he told me, have taken the trouble to find out how much extra ad networks were costing them, and the result was not pretty.

Ultimately, such a system would conceivably bring more transparency to the market. At the cost of significant amounts of business for the current internet giants, of course, who will have something to say about the matter.

“The question is: will Google or Facebook own everything?” Calvillo asks.

His goal is to ensure that they don’t.

His challenge, of course, is not only that they are already well on their way to doing so, even a massive direct-to-publisher network cannot ignore the huge audiences that they have. And that this kind of an approach is barely even a market as yet. And, perhaps most importantly, that everyone else, including Google and Facebook, would also like to sit in that sweet spot between advertiser and publisher, collecting a piece of all the action, all the time.

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1.15 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 w... read more »

Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major glob... read more »

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New customers have a tendency to evolve through three phases once they decide to buy from you.

Initially they feel very excited about their decision, before going through a learning curve where they may struggle with blending in your products/services.

Finally, they begin to experience the value that you provide and the relationship settles down and finds its own balance.

Phase 2 can be a potentially vulnerable time for a sales person, because without the benefit of an established track record, and in the face of possible problems – no matter how minor, this is the time when most newly acquired customers are apt to change their mind.

The process of buying has four main components that all customers will evolve through. They:

1. Have to be motivated to want to buy from you
2. Make a decision to buy from you
3. Want to feel convinced that they have made the right decision
4. Look for reassurance that they are doing the right thing

Once the customer has placed their order, they are at the second stage in the buying process. If a sales person doesn’t provide the relevant reassurance that validates the benefits of their decision, then the likelihood of the customer cancelling their order increases dramatically.

This is often referred to as ˜Buyers Remorse.” Therefore, it is important to provide tangible demonstrations that the customer has made the right decision.

These can include the use of testimonials, higher initial servicing levels, regular contact and, if appropriate, training sessions on the areas effected by the introduction of your product or service.

There are a number of additional ways that can improve the post-sale part of the sales process:

• Set a service agenda for the first 30 days after the sale, so that your customer knows exactly what they can expect from you. This may include visits and phone calls at the point when they receive your product, or your service begins. This enables you to have established contact frequency at important times when teething problems could occur.
• Ask each customer for their preferences in the way you manage their account and ensure that they have all the contact information for every eventuality.
• After the call, send a hand-written note thanking them for their business – this is a personal touch that only takes a moment, yet leaves the customer feeling valued and special.
• Identify which areas in particular the customer feels is vital to the way you manage their account, so that you can pay close attention to these areas.
• Agree up-front how future problems will be handled.
• Document all successes and evidence of your value in writing. For example: “I noticed that your delivery was received on time last Thursday and am delighted that you now have our products in stock.”
• Actively ask questions to check their satisfaction. For example, “Was everything as you had expected?” “Is there anything we need to change?”This helps to flush out problems and manages the customer’s expectations, so they feel they are genuinely being looked after. If there is a problem, the earlier you know about it the sooner you can remedy it.
• Resolve any complaints quickly and to the customer’s satisfaction.

Never think of the first sale as the end of the sales process, but rather the beginning of the next sales cycle. What you do after you’ve made the first sale determines whether you get the next one, and the one after that, and referrals.

Be assured, the more tender loving care you sprinkle on your customers, the greater the yield you can anticipate in return!

Every customer is a potential advocate – and beyond that, an evangelist.

One of the problems with creating generic “unique value propositions” is that they are just that – generic. They might be a useful basis for communicating mass-marketing messages, but they are not a suitable basis for a truly productive sales conversation.

To be truly effective – and to have real impact – your sales people need to be crafting uniquely customised value propositions for each individual prospect (and often each significant stakeholder).

If that sounds like hard work, it is. But here’s why it is worth it…

Your prospects are tired of generic value propositions that do not relate to their specific current situation and priorities. They filter them out. And even if they appear to be in the meeting, their mind is probably somewhere else.

Only 1 in 8 sales meetings create any value

It’s one of the man reasons why Forrester found that prospects rated only 1 in 8 of the sales conversations they had with sales people as being in any way useful, or a good way of investing their scarce time.

Think about that fact for a moment: the vast majority of meetings between sales people and their prospects are regarded by the potential customer as a complete and utter waste of their precious time.

It’s no wonder that so many sales “opportunities” end up with the customer deciding to do something else or increasingly to decide to do nothing – driven, no doubt, in part by the depression brought on by so many incompetent, value-less sales conversations.

Throwing mud (or worse) at the wall…

If you’re in a simple, transactional sales environment, your sales people might be able to get away with communicating the same standard value proposition. After all, if they talk about it often enough to enough people, some of it is bound to stick, right?

But if you’re in a complex, consultative sales process in a considered purchase buying environment with multiple stakeholders, communicating a standard generic value proposition isn’t going to get you anywhere…

… apart, that is, from an invitation to go and bore somebody else instead (but please don’t tell them I sent you).

Sophisticated buyers expect you to create value

You see, faced with an increasingly educated and informed prospect community, simply communicating your generic value isn’t enough: you need to co-create specific value with the prospect in a way that reflects the issues that are most important to them.

This shift from communicating value to creating it is one of the most profound differences between transactional and consultative selling. Some currently successful transactional sales people are simply not equipped to make the shift.

So if your organisation is determined to make the transition from a transactional to a consultative sales environment, it’s probably best to keep those sales people focused on the sort of selling they have proved they can do well.

A very different set of sales skills…

But the sales people you assign to consultative buying situations need to do better. They need to co-create unique and relevant value with their prospect, and this requires a very different set of sales skills (and a different management approach).

Value creation depends on the ability to truly understand the prospect’s situation and what they are trying to achieve. It involves creating a gap between their aspirations and their current actuality. It requires an ability to adapt and tune a generic value message so that it addresses the prospect’s particular priorities.

And it doesn’t stop there: given that most complex, high-value buying decisions involved multiple stakeholders, it requires the ability to anticipate and address the concerns and motivations of all the key players in the prospect’s buying decision process.

Satisfying the “WIIFM” test…

In short, you need to answer the unspoken “what’s in it for me, my department and the company?” question that is going to be on the lips of every significant stakeholder. This is a significant challenge.

It’s why, according to research conducted by the CEB and published in “The Challenger Sale”, the performance gap between average and top sales performers is three times wider in complex sales environments compared to transactional ones.

This stuff is hard to master. Not every sales person will succeed. The costs of failure are significant. That’s why it’s so important to assess sales people for their cognitive skills, and for their ability (as the CEB describe it) to teach, tailor and tale control of each sales situation.

Assessing sales skills

There’s a role for sales people who are good at consistently communicating the value of their company’s products – and it’s typically in repetitive, standardised transactional sales.

But in complex, consultative sales environments, you had better be sure that your sales people are capable of communicating a uniquely tailored value proposition for each separate customer and stakeholder.

And if they’re not, you either need to move them into a role better suited to their talents, or brace yourselves for some pretty disappointing sales results.

Online shopping has become so much more than simply a place to buy.

Ecommerce websites are now places to curate brands and promote customer interaction and editorial content is a key tool to ensure consistent engagement for continued sales and results.

Here’s an overview of how you can use content to help increase conversion rates.

Using content to drive engagement

Having enticing content on your website not only informs customers, but helps engage them with the brand. Great content encourages customers to spend longer on the website and this added level of engagement can often point customers in the direction of making a purchase.

For example, Sony PlayStation’s blog provides a wealth of creative, engaging content to persuade new and existing customers to choose their games console over competitors.

As a result, there are a number of ways to persuade your customers to follow through with a purchase. Fashion brands, for example, can provide buying or size guides – particularly if the company has a nonstandard retail model.

Providing unique size guides explaining exactly how the products will fit ensures that customers have as much information as possible before they purchase.

Online retailer Farfetch analysed the value of different content pages by comparing the conversion rates of viewers and non-viewers and found that visitors who had engaged with the site’s FAQ page had a greater propensity to convert. 

Targeted content for targeted results

Content retargeting allows marketers to serve customers with specific content. This includes techniques such as campaign mirroring, retaining past searches or re-engagement through blogs. Aligning your content in a personalised manner allows you to streamline the customer experience of your brand across different platforms.

Campaign mirroring involves matching on-site content with other campaigns to remind customers of products and deals they have seen elsewhere. Stationery retailer Staples, for example, target returning users who have entered from a previous email campaign with related content.

In addition, having the inner workings of your site respond to visitor behaviour is even more compelling.

In-page alterations have a greater effect on conversions than on-page, so incorporating banners that will alter according to the search term a visitor enters, for example, can help drive conversion uplift.  

Booking.com’s homepage is a great example, not only does it remember the destination a visitor has searched for the next time they return, it also serves suggestions of other similar destinations in a section called 'recent searches'.

Lastly, specifically targeting users that have seen your blog with content will ensure that they remain engaged with the brand. Ebay, for example, engages and rewards its readers through its blog.

It integrates the blog with a strong social media strategy that draws upon their premise as a marketplace and encourages buyers and sellers to interact with each other. Their social media sellers’ blog concept ensures that they empower the sellers to target specific users that would like their products.

By now you will have good idea of the benefits of personalisation for your online offering. Check back for Part Three next week for more information on Merchandising and Geo-targeting. Here's part one on upselling and persuasion. 

At the Bay Area Maker Faire in May, Anouk Wipprecht stood on stage as Tesla Coils sent close to a million volts of electricity coursing through her chain mail suit.

Wipprecht also wore a 3D printed dress, plus plasma balls on her shoulders that glowed with each arc of lightning. It was the equivalent of a Fashion Week runway show for the geeks who had gathered at the Faire to see the latest robots, drones and wacky inventions.

Arc Attack Tesla Coils send electricity coursing through arts Anouk Wipprecht’s suit. Photo courtesy of Anouk Wipprecht.

Wipprecht has created a dress that extends spider-like legs when someone draws too close and another dress that becomes transparent when you want someone near. Each creation interacts with its environment, telling the world something about its wearer without them ever having to open their mouth.

“I make statement pieces,” Wipprecht said in a recent interview with me. “It’s the very poetic nature of what electronics can do.”

But like the fashion that appears on Paris or New York’s runways, her creations are not exactly practical for everyday wear. They are really meant to inspire the advancement of textiles that combine both fashion and technology.

Over the next decade, that could finally become possible.

Materials science matures

So what does it take to merge technology and fashion? The world isn’t lacking for talented designers, who have already turned out good-looking pieces of hardware like the Jawbone Up and Ringly. What was missing until now were electronics small enough to fit into clothing the same way as a button or a single cotton fiber.

That started to change with the advent of the mobile phone, the mass adoption of which pushed manufacturers to develop ever smaller but more powerful chips and batteries. The need for long-term monitoring in the healthcare industry has led to tiny temporary tattoo-like patches of circuits and sensors. We can now weave antennae and other wires directly into clothes in the form of microscopic conductive materials like silver nanowires.

Regina Dugan of Motorola shows off an “electronic tattoo” at D11. Credit: Asa Mathat/D: All Things Digital

But the technology isn’t quite to the point where it is easy to make a smart textile. Startups that wish to do so need to find their fabric and sensors and then independently develop a way to combine them.

“Quite frankly, we thought it would easier,” smart sock startup Heapsylon CEO Yet Vigano told my colleague Stacey Higginbotham last year. “The materials research has been challenging to say the least.”

One of the biggest challenges is the battery. Designers can choose between a small size and a long battery life, but not both. They can’t be woven into clothes in the form of fibers and it’s hard to make them safe for the average washer or dryer. As a result, wearables like the OMsignal shirt tend to have a tiny electronics pack that needs to be removed before every wash.

The OMsignal tank top and partner app. Photo courtesy of OMsignal.

But once again, this technology may get a push from another industry. Researchers in the medical industry are working hard to create wireless charging devices that could power a pacemaker or other implant. Someday, that same technology could power the millions of wearable devices that could be in our future.

An electronic shirt for everyone

CEO Alison Lewis with the Switch Embassy shirt and purse. Photo by Signe Brewster.

When designer Alison Lewis surveyed the tech industry, she only saw ugly wristbands and clunky attempts at electronic clothing. She wanted technology and fashion to be on the same level, and for people to be truly excited about wearing technology.

“A lot of people can make something that has a board stuck inside of it and add some lights,” Lewis said. “Very few people can take something and create it so that it feels good; you can fold it, wash it and hang it on a hanger.”

Lewis, who helped start Made in Space, the maker of a 3D printer bound for the International Space Station, first made a dress that displayed the wearer’s heart rate. Since then, her startup Switch Embassy has created a t-shirt and purse with embedded LED lights. The LEDs and circuits are woven right into the fabric. They are washable and foldable.

Creating the shirt “was hard. It was very hard. It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Lewis said. “But it acts as what it is: a shirt.”

Switch Embassy’s smart textiles can display artistic lights or even text messages. Gif by Signe Brewster.

The shirt and purse are not yet widely available, but when they are buyers will be able to use a mobile app to display custom designs and messages. Future models could display heartbeats or change based on input from the accelerometer already built into Switch Embassy’s products.

“I think lights are just the beginning,” Lewis said. “I think everybody focused on the wrist is missing the point. Until you start thinking about fabric and fashion, (wearables) will always stay in … healthcare.”

It’s a sentiment that would please Wipprecht. Until technology, like fashion, can augment who we are in the exact way we want, it won’t be compelling enough to wear on our bodies.

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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• What we expect for wearables in the near-term future
• How to balance cloud-based and edge-based mobile data with hybrid application design
• Flash analysis: smart watches

How often have you heard that the secret to good marketing is to thoroughly understand everything you can about your customers: who they are, their demographics, attitudes, habits, etc. However, this belief, like so much of conventional wisdom, may not be entirely accurate. In fact, a relentless focus on knowledge about customers may even be counterproductive.

People primarily buy from you not because of what you know about them, but rather because of what they know about you. The idea is to create top-of-mind awareness and thought leadership around your brand, thus making the buying process as easy and painless as possible. This is the essence of solid pull marketing.

Here are a few reasons you might consider spending less time listening to your customers:

1. Of course customers want you to listen, but what they really want is for you to meet their needs. This is why Apple has sold so many products, despite the fact that Steve Jobs supposedly didn’t listen to his customers.
2. Knowing customers may not be enough. If you provide lousy products and services they probably won’t come back, regardless of how much you listened.
3. Customers are already buying – you need to reach new audience segments. You want to keep your customers happy, but you also need to think about how to broaden your appeal to people or companies that look very different from current buyers.
4. Customers can misguide your efforts because they usually want something similar to what they already have. For example, in the software industry, this often means enhancements to current features. While this is fine for today’s customer base, it may not be what new and lucrative customer segments require.

I read an interesting article on this subject on LinkedIn (courtesy of Gregory Ciotti), titled Why Steve Jobs Didn’t Listen to His Customers. As Jobs said, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” The point is that to lead in product design and delivery, you sometimes have to be in front of your customers, not behind them.

Another interesting quote in the article came from Mario D’Amico, senior VP of marketing at Cirque du Soleil: “Any innovative company struggles with how much to listen to customers. Most realize that you cannot trust them to tell you what your next new product will be.” D’Amico argues that in industries where companies thrive on innovation, asking customers what they “want” actually does not improve a company’s competitive positioning.

Jobs and D’Amico make good points. Yes, it is important to listen to customers – I certainly keep in touch with the needs of our clients and try to use the lessons learned to continually improve our services. But you need to accomplish the business equivalent of walking and chewing gum at the same time – keeping in touch with the needs of current customers while getting out in front with offerings that will appeal to multiple segments – and being brave enough to solve some problems that your customers don’t even realize they have yet.

In what appears to be a move to expand its mobile team ahead of the much-rumored launch of the iWatch, Apple has hired the sales director of Swiss watch-maker TAG Heuer, a subsidiary of LVMH, according to a report from CNBC. A senior executive in the company’s watch unit told the news outlet that the sales director left last week to join Apple, and that the consumer electronics company plans to label its new smartwatch device as “Swiss made” in order to appeal to luxury buyers.

Jean-Claude Biver, the president of LVMH’s watch division — which includes the TAG Heuer, Hublot and Zenith brands — said the TAG Heuer sales director left last week, “to take a contract with Apple” in order to launch the iWatch. There have been widespread reports that Apple was looking to hire Swiss watchmakers to give its device the edge over similar smartwatch products that have either been launched or are expected from Samsung, Google and other device makers.

According to a number of recent reports, the iWatch (if that’s what it is actually called when it hits the market) is expected to have a rectangular touchscreen made of curved glass, made by LG, and will have wireless charging capabilities, including possibly a solar charging feature. Research firm IHS estimates that the market for wearable technology — including fitness tracking and related features — is expected to triple between 2013 and 2018, to $30 billion.

In a research note for clients released earlier this year, Morgan Stanley estimated that Apple could generate up to $17.5 billion in sales in its first year from the iWatch, outpacing even the iPod. The firm expects that the smartwatch will sell for about $299 and will be seen as a must-have accessory by many existing Apple customers.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Todd Hamilton

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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• What first-quarter 2014 meant for the mobile space
• What the global tablet market will look like by 2017
• A look back at this year’s CES and what it means for tech in 2014

Research by the Content Marketing Institute uncovered that 93% of Australian marketers surveyed have used some form of content marketing over the past year. What’s staggering is that only 33% of them found content marketing to be effective.

Why is this the case?

In this blog, we discuss 5 potential reasons why content marketing might be ineffective:

1. Non-targeted messages

Even if you’ve created the best content plan and hired the best writers and marketers to come up with the best content, your content will not be effective if it’s not targeted to the right people.

You need to ensure that your messages are targeted to your buyer persona, and that you are using the channels that provide the best reach to your buyer persona. This can only be done after you have an in-depth understanding of your buyer persona from the roles you target, to the type of companies you target, to the channels you can reach them with.

2. No measurement in place

There are some organisations that jump into content marketing without a clear plan, simply doing it because everyone else is. CMI finds that only 52% of marketers use a documented content marketing strategy. This lack of a clear content plan means there are no goals or objectives set against their content marketing efforts, and most likely, there is no measurement system in place.

To know if your content marketing is effective, you must set objectives for your content marketing efforts. For instance, the number of leads generated, the number of sales generated from those leads, and the amount of revenue obtained from those sales. Then use an analytical tool to measure your performance against those objectives. The tool could be an Google Analytics (for websites), HootSuite (for social media analytics) or a comprehensive marketing automation tool such as HubSpot. Only when you have the right metrics to measure and a good analytics tool can you determine the effectivness of your content marketing.

3. Stand-alone pieces of content

In the complex B2B buying environment, different types of content used independently will not generate any valuable results. Having a website, a blog, and social media profiles that aren’t connected will not give your prospects a path to follow, and hence is not effective content marketing.

For content marketing to be effective, you must build a journey, for instance, your prospect starts with a post on a social network, then clicks on a link to read your blog on the website, then fills in a form to download a whitepaper. To progress the lead beyond this, you must have an email campaign in place to reach them and stay in touch with them. Once you have established a relationship with them, only you have permission to request a chat or a meeting. Ultimately, content marketing must be integrated to truly make an impact to a company’s bottom line.

4. Incosistent communication with audience

All too often, content is not prioritised and only written when the marketer has time. Content marketing is meant to keep your brand / product / service top of mind, so if content is not published regularly, you lose that connection with your potential buyers.

Create a schedule for your blog posts, social media updates and email sends, and stick to it. This consistency will help you stay connected with your buyers. The advent of marketing automation tools also helps with this, as you can write content well in advance and simply schedule blogs, posts and emails to go out at the right time.

5. Irrelevant content

These days, buyers have so much content vying for their attention, and as a result, your content must be relevant, engaging and attention-grabbing, all at once.

Ensure your messaging is relevant by talking about the problem your buyer persona faces, or a specific need they have. Writing about how your product is the greatest product ever will not get any results, as it is not relevant to the audience in the early stages of their buying journey. It will help if you create a content map to outline what you will discuss at each stage of the journey.

To create engaging and attention-grabbing content, you must make sure you have the right skills in your team for it. Use of different types of content such as videos, slides or infographics can also help your brand cut through the clutter.

To learn more about content marketing and its contribution to lead generation, read our blog on the business owner’s guide to a successful lead generation engine. Or, to learn about the content marketing revolution, download our whitepaper below.

That’s an easy question.

The answer is ‘Everybody’.

OK, so maybe we need to explain the answer a little bit.

Landing pages are vital to your business. It doesn’t matter if you are a startup looking to get those first five thousand users, or a car dealership who wants visitors to ask for quotes. Without landing pages, people who come to your website will not convert into users or leads. It’s as simple as that.

What exactly ARE landing pages?

According to Wikipedia, a landing page is a “single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search engine optimized search result or an online advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement, search result or link.”

In other words, a landing page shows a specific message, to specific people, at a specific time.

But why do I NEED a landing page? Surely my marketing message is right there on the home page, for everyone to see? All I need to is drive traffic to my website, and BAM, people will start signing up (or buying, or asking for quotes, or whatever you want them to do).

But they don’t. And the reason for that is that…

Website visitors aren’t ready to buy

96% of your website first time visitors aren’t actually ready to make a purchase just yet. People browse websites like they window shop. They have five (or fifteen) tabs open in their browser. They are comparing prices while looking at cute cat videos on YouTube, or reading their friends’ posts on Facebook. So your marketing messages on your homepage have to compete with quite a few attention grabbers.

Landing pages are, in effect, a single marketing message. They give your visitors exactly what they are looking for, and give them a compelling reason to stop their window shopping, and sign up right now. Landing pages tell the people who see them that they have found EXACTLY what they were looking for.

Keep in mind that people arrive in your website – or landing page – from a number of sources. They might have found you on Google, clicked a Facebook post, come from a YouTube ad, and the list goes on. This leads to another problem, namely that…

Websites don’t have enough landing pages

As we just noted, people can come to your website from a number of different sources. Those sources, or rather the messages in those sources is different. The expectations people have from the link they’ve just clicked are different. The REASON they’ve just clicked the link is different.

Taking a message that’s tailored for someone who clicked an ad in Google and using it for someone who clicked a link in a friend’s post in Facebook, because he shared your image of a humorous vegetable, just won’t work.

The more landing pages you have, the better. In fact, businesses with over 40 landing pages generated 12 times as many leads as those websites with only five. Why? Because the message that the landing page used was tailored to the specific link that people clicked, and to the specific device that people used to click ON (yes, there’s a difference between mobile and desktop landing pages).

Of course, to change this situation, budgets need to shift. Why? Because today…

Money is spent on getting traffic, not conversions

Companies spend $92 to bring traffic to their website. They will then spend $1 (that’s a single dollar) to convert them.

Yes, you need to drive traffic to your website. And yes, you’ll need to spend advertising dollars to make sure that you get a significant amount, as you are competing with lots of other websites out there. That is a given, and should be part of your marketing strategy from the get go. But traffic without conversion – conversion of any sort – is wasted (by the way, if you aren’t using retargeting methods with Google and Facebook, then you should be).

But you also have to spend some of those dollars to convert that traffic. The conversion might be software sign ups, or it might be loan applications, but if you don’t have the right landing pages with the right messages in play, that get to the right people, you’ll find that you’ve spent a great deal of money on traffic – and have nothing to show for it.

There is a lot of buzz in the air about content marketing. Businesses that need to increase their brand awareness, credibility, and preference with their target audiences are turning to content marketing in greater numbers as a proven pull marketing strategy that aligns well with important business metrics. Whether your goals are to increase market awareness, drive website traffic, build lead generation, or improve sales funnel conversion, understanding how to create copy that delivers results is fundamental to achieving success.

From strategy to execution, you need to accomplish this in a consistent and on-target manner that leverages your brand’s core promise while turning your differentiators into compelling content that systematically engages your critical audiences, and causes them to take action.

The Payoff Earned from Effective B2B Content

Effective B2B content attracts visitors to your website, provides value for your social media outreach, converts website visitors to leads, and much more. High-quality B2B content delivers on a specific purpose:

• Attracts organic search traffic
• Converts visitors to leads
• Supports your brand’s value proposition
• Provides online and social media value
• Targets various stages of the buying cycle

In addition, your content marketing efforts can have a large payoff, in five major areas:

1. Large increases in brand awareness. People buy from companies they know and content can help you get known.
2. Make it easier for prospects to find you. Quality content helps web searchers find you quickly.
3. Credibility boost. Visitors to your website will judge you by the quality and quantity of the content that is relevant to their needs.
4. Lower cost per lead. Content marketing is a pull marketing strategy and as such, produces leads at a fraction of the cost of push marketing leads.
5. Shorter sales cycle. Good content helps prospects learn about your products and services and self-qualify themselves. This enables prospects to make a much faster purchase decision.

How Much New Content Do You Need?

This is one of those “it depends” questions. If your company is in a well-defined market where the competition isn’t strong, you might require a relatively small amount of new content. By contrast, if your company is in a complex and highly competitive space, you may need quite a bit of new content. Either way, the payoff is large.

The key to success is to get started. You can’t procrastinate hoping that positive results will miraculously happen. Make the effort today and begin creating good-quality B2B content that will help you meet your marketing goals and drive solid business results.

When you have made the decision to start using social media for your business, you need to have a goal. It could be to gain more exposure or to increase online conversation or as for most businesses, it is to generate leads. This is one of the hardest things to do on social media so keep reading if this is something you want to do.

Did you know that 23% of internet users spend ALL of their time on social networks and blogs? Since 2010 social media has been the leading channel emerging channel for lead generation. For you to get the most leads from social media, follow the below steps;

1. Use Multiple Channels

To give yourself the best possible chance of generating leads, you need to use more than just one or two social channels. Like me, you may find certain channels more beneficial than others but you never know where your customers are coming from so its important to have your business on the main social networks; Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn and Instagram.

2. Do Your Research

Do you know who your target customer is? Once you have defined your demographic you can then decide on which social networks will work best for your business, allowing you to create more leads. This will include using keywords across social to find out where you get the best interaction and also researching your competitors.

3. Content Creation

Without a clear focus, consistency and great unique content, you won’t have as much engagement as you usually would. You must have a content strategy which includes a breakdown for what you are sharing on each social network.

4. Engagement

Once you have a clear, focused content strategy, you need to focus on engagement. Reposting, answering questions and overall engagement with your community is important for the success of your business on social media.

5. Cross-Promotion

Once you have decided which social networks are best for your business, you need to make sure you are cross-promoting information about your business. Having social sharing buttons on your website increase click-through rates by 150%.

6. Track Results

Without tracking your social media results, you will never know if what you are doing is generating as many leads as you possible can. Social media monitoring tools are necessary to give you the best possible evaluation.

7. SEO

SEO is a huge part of online marketing. There are 4 billion global searches every single day and it is important that within these searches, your keywords bring up your business. Make sure your bio for all social networks includes keywords based on your business.

Are you generating enough leads on social media?

With 60 to 90 percent of buyers making their purchase decisions before they hit an organization’s sales funnel, marketing and sales are turning to predictive intelligence to capture unknown prospects and target the right leads. As I have been working with enterprise companies on their lead generation pain points for over 14 years, there are several questions about predictive intelligence solutions that I’m regularly asked on the front-lines.

On July 9th, Matt Heinz, president of Heinz Marketing, and I will be leading a discussion on how you can use predictive intelligence to target the right buyers and close more deals. Here’s a sneak peek of what you can expect to learn as we address these questions during the webinar.

How do you know you’re not just applying the tip of the predictive analytics iceberg?

Image source: Econsultancy

Which types of data uncover the most business-growing insights?

In an interview with CMO Eric Siegel, founder of Predictive Analytics World and author of Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die, he commented: “It’s the holy grail of marketing—to proactively pounce on every individual customer opportunity.” By leveraging the sheer amount and variety of data accessible today, marketers and sales can not only “pounce,” but can accurately “pounce” on data-backed leads—a significant change from traditional lead scoring, which uses only a fraction of the data of predictive intelligence. So, what types of data lead to the most accurate prediction of buyers? Heinz and I will discuss the differences between external vs. internal data; behavioral vs. attribute data; and known vs. anonymous data to help you make an informed decision.

What kind of results can you expect to see from predictive intelligence?

Early adopters of predictive intelligence, like Cisco, have already seen promising results from their initiatives. Beyond sales and marketing efficiency gains, predictive intelligence has the potential to improve your business across a number of KPIs—from conversions, to time-to-close, to revenues. I’ll be discussing what results you can and should expect from predictive intelligence, including:

- Improvements in accurate sales forecasting

- Growth of deal sizes

- Closing more accounts

- Personalization of marketing outreach

- Maximization of budgets

What are the differences among predictive intelligence solutions?

It’s critical to evaluate predictive intelligence solutions by how they align to your specific business objectives. Different needs—for example, prioritizing existing leads vs. finding net-new leads—warrant different approaches. Here are a few guiding questions to help you gauge what sort of solution will work for your company. Prepare your answers to these questions ahead of the webinar to find out what solution fits your needs.

1. Are you having trouble locating net-new leads? How important are they to achieving your sales pipeline this quarter or year?
2. Are you satisfied with current lead scoring processes? What would you like to see improved?
3. Are you struggling with low marketing-to-sales qualified lead conversions?
4. How much return are you getting from your content marketing? Are you satisfied, for example, with your ad click-through rates?

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If you ever want to make the ranks of master copywriter, there are some things you need to have down pat — like these 15 copywriting techniques.

A true champion copywriter knows how to utilize each of these techniques to maximum effect to gain more product sales. So without further ado, I present 15 Must-Know Copywriting Techniques — read ‘em, learn ‘em, implement ‘em!

1. Long-Form Copy

A lot of the so-called copywriting “gurus” will tell you that the shorter a piece of copy is, the better it is. However, that isn’t the whole story — the truth is that long copy can succeed. It has often been proven to beat its shorter counterparts.

The trick to making long-form copy work, however, is to be able to hold a reader’s attention for the entire duration of it. In and of itself, that is no easy task.

2. Storytelling

We’ve written about storytelling on Writtent before – twice — because it’s such an effective copywriting technique. Not only do stories engage readers, but they also help to emotionally and personally connect a brand with their audience.

3. Bullet Point Writing

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Bullet points are useful for displaying a lot of information to readers in just a few sentences. The next time you’re trying to describe the features of a product, try using bullet points. Readers will be able to organize the features in their head much better than if you were simply to describe them in several paragraphs.

4. Scarcity

Scarcity of a product creates urgency in the reader. By writing your copy so that the product advertised appears to be in limited supply, you’ll urge your readers to take action and buy now, rather than later. Here’s Heather Lloyd-Martin’s take on scarcity in copywriting.

5. First-Person Copy

For big brands and Fortune 500 companies, first-person copy generally isn’t a recommended copywriting technique. But for smaller, more personal businesses, writing in the first-person can be tremendously productive. It helps you put yourself in the customer’s shoes and identify with them.

6. Factual Bases

If your entire copywriting is abstract and you haven’t thought to include actual facts – cold, hard, researched truths — your copy is pretty much doomed to failure.

Statistics, research, and case studies are an immense help in persuading people to buy something. Incorporating them into copy without sounding like a textbook, however, is the tricky part.

7. Risk Reduction

The main inhibition people have that prevents them from buying something is the involvement of risk. More specifically, the risk that the money they invest in the purchase won’t be worth the returns.

When you write your copy, you need to keep risk to a minimum. Make potential customers feel as if they have nothing to lose but everything to gain.

8. Image Use

We’ve all heard the saying that a picture speaks a thousand words … so as you can guess, images are tremendous assets when you write short-form copy. They help you get the point across in fewer words and make the copy appealing to visual personalities.

Don’t run rampant with them, however. Make sure you’re only using images that are 100% relevant and that you’re only inserting them in places where a concept you’re trying to describe is better conveyed with a picture than with text.

9. Strong Post Scripts (P.S)

Post scripts have long since been a popular copywriting technique. They help to convince the reluctant readers who scroll all the way down the copy and past the “buy now” button. A well-crafted post script could be the factor that pushes a reluctant over the edge and into your customer base.

10. Commands

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No, you shouldn’t come right out and say “buy my product” in your copy, but you should (subtly) command in your copy.

Like post scripts, commands help to conquer readers who are unsure or have doubts about purchasing your product. Use them sparingly throughout your copy, hidden in clauses and sentences. Steve Fabian describes the art of copy commands beautifully in this blog post.

11. Save Time

For some of the world’s less technically-inclined population, the whole process of online shopping is a pain in the neck. The idea that it might take more time than it’s worth is often one of the inhibitions that keep people from taking the plunge and buying something.

In your copy, come outright and tell readers that the buying process is incredibly simple and takes no longer than 2 minutes.

12. Time-Sensitivity

We discussed urgency back in copywriting technique #4, scarcity. It’s essentially the same concept with time-sensitivity. Give your product launch a deadline, and then use that to create a feeling of urgency in your readers.

13. Sell Benefits, not Features

When you sell a cake, do you advertise the icing or the actual cake? No doubt the latter.

The benefits of a product are the cake. The features are the icing. Don’t mix the two up. Center your copy around the benefits of the product you’re selling, not the features.

14. Customer Testimonials

Social proof will work wonders for your copy. I don’t care what industry you’re in; people are always more likely to buy something when they know that other people have already bought the product (and loved it).

No product’s copy is every complete without a customer testimonial or two thrown in at just the right time.

15. Bonuses

Everybody loves a good deal right? That’s why promotional schemes like buy-1-get-1-free have always held a special place in the hearts of customers around the globe. Offering product bonuses is a highly influential copywriting technique that will escalate the value of your product in a potential customer’s eyes.

Even if you were going to include something in the product package anyway, try excluding it from the main copy and marking it as a “bonus” instead.

P&G’s decision to formally end the era of “marketing” at the company and make the shift  to brand management may accelerate what amounts to much more than a title change for marketers generally. To me, it could point to a fundamental re-examination of the role of the people responsible for brands.

While “marketing” and “brand management” are often treated as synonyms, there is an important distinction between the two terms. Marketing focuses on the activities associated with the promotion and distribution of products and services. Brand management has, for many, been historically focused on identity management but is now much more concerned with the active management of the market value and competitive strength of a brand as an (intangible) company asset.

Marketing is about spending money. It’s how brands accumulate value. Brand management  should focus on how products continue to wrap story and distinction around what they offer to increase competitiveness and build loyalty. The two are linked – but different. Marketing is the means. Brand management should be the goal.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the break-away from a pure marketing function should come from the company that pioneered brand management itself. According to Eric Schulz, P&G were the first to recognize, and act on, the cannibalization risk of their own portfolio approach. “By distinguishing the qualities of each brand from all other P&G brands, each would avoid competing with one another by targeting different consumer markets with a different set of benefits,” he explains. “This was especially important in product categories that the company manufactured several competing brands, like laundry detergent.”

P&G is still renowned for its deeply product-centric approach. No surprises. On any given day, around the world, three billion people will interact with a Procter & Gamble brand.

But the decision to now move on from having marketing directors (a term P&G have been using since 1993 and that itself replaced the term “advertising directors”) indicates to me that for a scaled house of brands, the competition to ‘stand for something’ might be increasingly globally rather than regionally driven and that the focus could be shifting away from  promoting products to driving up overall perceived value of the brands individually and as a portfolio.

In time that has the potential to shift the criteria for success. Marketing goals are often measured in volume and sales. When you think about brands as assets however, success becomes a broader idea and the focus is less on how they are being managed and much more on why they are being managed – for the contribution they make to the balance sheet.

To me, a future responsibility of the CMO (and a very good reason to improve relations with the finance team) lies in directing how brand managers help to appreciate these assets; how they lift not just topline value through demand generation but also underlying overall corporate value. According to CoreBrand, companies like P&G are only now starting to realize that they are leaving billions of dollars in potential corporate brand value on the table by not directly linking their corporate brand to the collective brand equity value of their portfolios. CEO James Gregory makes the point that, “When done well, corporate branding and product branding should appear seamless. I predict the next ten years will see spectacular combined campaigns from the leading consumer companies. P&G’s “Thanks Mom” campaign … was just the beginning of this trend.” His opinion reinforces my own view that in order to gain the most value from their brands, companies need to tell all their stories.

All of these motivations are conjecture in the case of P&G. I have no way of knowing if any of these agendas is behind their decision. But there are some things that seem much more certain. Total value will overtake revenue as a key driver for brand teams; advertising is still important, but not as singular to the role as it used to be; and collaboration (even some level of integration) with the data and finance teams seems highly likely. Add in mobility … and things at the bottom of the tea cup really start to cloud over. The ripple effects of those changes, and the many others we haven’t even anticipated yet, will in turn evolve how brands are strategized and what and where they communicate.

Here’s the good news. If your current role is in marketing, there’s probably no huge rush to change your business cards. Brand management may be the emerging black, but it still has some way to go in terms of widespread traction. Observes Ad Age, “P&G seems well out in front of the rest of the marketing world — or what used to be known as the marketing world — on this. A search on LinkedIn shows nearly 73,000 marketing directors and associate marketing directors … but only 1,350 brand directors or associate/assistant brand directors.”

Sponsored By: Brand Storytelling Workshop Series

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

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Any social media network of value grows organically, not artificially. But just because you can’t force or buy growth doesn’t mean you can’t nurture it. As the social media specialist at my last organization, we grew fans and followers from 400 to 40,000 in less than a year. You’ll see solid growth in your own fan and follower counts if you implement my 14 ideas for providing quality engagement and finding and engaging influencers.

Your Organization

 1. Get executive buy-in: This is more than just a nod in the hallway. Real buy-in means executives are blogging twice a month for the company blog, tweeting, or engaging on YouTube.

 2. Set up a Social Media Advisory Council: These folks will help to work as a hub-and-spoke system from wherever social media lies (marketing, public relations, or other), into other departments within the organization. The council works on ways to incorporate social media throughout the organization.

Facebook

3. Get Local/Get out: We had our best engagement when we had feet on the ground. Give out free coffee at the local shop and post photos. You’ll get a lot more engagement than just posting a few links to your blog.

4. Get Ads: Facebook ads may be one of the most effective ways to get targeted fans. Facebook ads allow targeting by geography, employer, likes, school, education, or even birthday.

5. Get them to Stay: Once your fans click on your ad, give them a reason to stick around. Some ideas: contests and giveaways, games, and thought-provoking content.

6. Blog. Blog, Blog: Not only are blogs great for your website SEO, but they’re great for providing interesting content to your fans. Don’t make the mistake of making your blog a never-ending string of ads for your company. 50% to 90% of your content should be non-commercial, or at least non-salesy.

7. Engage: Post contests, sales, and coupons — ideally three to five times per week. Somewhere around 90% of your fans will not interact through the page, but rather through their feed. Provide content that maintains its effectiveness on its own, especially images, videos, or questions.

8. Apps: Make your Facebook page your social media hub by using Facebook apps in to import your Twitter feed, YouTube Videos, Flickr Images, SlideShare presentations, and many other networks right onto your Facebook page.

Twitter

9. Blog. Blog. Blog: Yes, blogs are great for Twitter, too. Promote a blog post a few times over the course of a couple weeks to draw additional followers to your post. About 80% of your Twitter posts should contain links, and at most about 20% of that should be content you created.

10. Find Influencers: Tools like Crowdbooster, Commun.it, Topsy and FollowFriday Helper can help provide insight into who mentions or retweets you most often.

11. Engage: Thank followers for engaging, following, mentioning, or retweeting, and create a list of influencers to monitor their feeds as well.

12. Track: How do you know what content is making inroads with your influencers and networks? Track links and content! Include share icons within your blog posts to also track organic blog post impact and viralbility.

13. Time Posts: Use your tracking info to find out what days and times are best for retweets and clicks, and use that to your advantage. Determine when you have the most brand mentions, which can help pinpoint when content is most likely to be retweeted.

14. Hashtag: Although #you #can #over-hashtag, effective hashtag use helps to contribute to the conversation, especially if your organization is participating in a trade show, conference, or other industry type event.

Best of luck identifying influencers, engaging networks, and building your fans and followers. What other tips do you have for building networks? Include yours below!

One of the biggest threats to Apple's future profits and stock price is growing price pressure in the smartphone business.

An estimated 70% of Apple's profit comes from the iPhone. And most of that comes from high-end iPhones that sell for about $600 apiece ($200 to the consumer, with subsidy, in rich countries). Apple's gross profit on these phones is estimated to be about 50%.

Over the past couple of years, the growth rate of Apple's iPhone business has tanked (see below), which has caused Apple's profit growth to slow. Sales growth has slowed because developed markets have matured, and Apple has not had a phone priced to sell well in huge emerging markets like China and India, where growth is still rapid.

Apple's decision not to offer a low-priced phone has opened the door for, first, Samsung and other incumbents, and, now, a group of upstart Chinese smartphone makers that are growing like mad.

The first phones offered by Apple's low-price competitors were cheap because they were crappy.

In the past year, however, the quality of low-priced phones has improved dramatically, to the point where the design and specs of some of these phones, as well as the religious devotion of some of their brand fans, has come to rival that of Apple.

And sales of these phones are starting to explode.

In the first quarter, for example, sales of phones by Xiaomi, the "Apple of China," soared to a staggering 15 million, up 278% year over year. See the chart from analyst Tony Danova of BI Intelligence below.

Xiaomi already sells more phones than Apple in China. The 15 million is also approaching nearly half the number of phones that Apple is expected to sell worldwide this quarter (about 35 million).

Yes, when Apple finally releases the big-screened iPhone 6, the company will likely sell something on the order of 60-70 million of them for a couple of quarters. But at the rate Xiaomi's sales are growing, it won't be too long before its sales start to close in on Apple's.

Xiaomi's top-of-the-line phone, the Mi3, sells for about $320, about half the price of a comparable iPhone. Xiaomi also makes other well-designed phones that sell for $100.

Nor is Xiaomi the only maker of high-quality, low-priced phones. BI tech editor Steve Kovach recently tried a phone from a new company called OnePlus. Steve says it's one of the best phones he has ever used (and he's picky). And this phone, the One, also costs less than half of a top-shelf iPhone.

The chart below, also from BI Intelligence, shows the rise of the low-priced smartphone makers. Collectively, they already sell way more phones than Apple.

Importantly, many of these phones are not "cheap plastic crap," as Apple devotees (I'm one) are fond of sniffing at any gadgets that aren't made by Apple. They're slick. And Xiaomi and its charismatic founder, who learned a thing or two about designing and launching products and building fan loyalty from Steve Jobs, has a fanatical following in China.

The ~$300 difference in price between these phones and Apple's phones is Apple's profit.

If Apple is ever forced to reduce its prices to compete with the likes of Xiaomi—or if any would-be full-priced iPhone buyers are ever seduced by the far more attractive prices offered by the likes of Xiaomi—Apple's profit is going to tank.

Will that happen?

Diehard Apple fans scoff at the idea.

Apple, they say, is like BMW or Mercedes—a premium brand for premium customers.

Xiaomi, et al, meanwhile, are like, well, Chrysler or Ford.

That analogy sounds persuasive... until you remember two things:

First, Apple's customer base has already expanded way beyond the "luxury" market composed of folks who buy Mercedes and BMWs. Apple's market share in the United States, for example, is about 40%. The "luxury" share of the overall U.S. auto market, meanwhile, is only about 10%-11%. So Apple is already selling a lot of phones to people who drive Chryslers and Fords. 

Second, unlike cars, phones are a "platform market," meaning that third-parties build products (apps and services, in this case) that are designed to work with a particular platform. In platform markets, market share is important: If a platform's share falls too low, there is less incentive for third parties to build products and services for the platform. And with fewer products and services built for the platform, there's less reason to use the platform. So if Apple's low and declining market share in some markets could ultimately make it even harder for the company to compete, even if it priced its products more aggressively.

Apple will likely have an easier time maintaining its prices in developed markets like the U.S., in which carriers continue to offer subsidies, and in which the subsidized top-of-the-line iPhone only appears to cost $200.  In emerging markets, however, and in markets without subsidies, the threat from lower-priced phones is more immediate. And the combination of low platform share, plus price, will likely make it very hard for Apple to grow its share much in markets like India and China.

Does this mean Apple is toast?

No. 

The iPhone 6 upgrade cycle is likely to be huge, and Apple's profit margin is so gigantic that it could get creamed and still be making staggering amounts of money. Apple also has more money in the bank than it or any other company will ever need.

But it does mean that Apple's profit margin is likely to come under pressure in the next couple of years, as the smartphone business fully matures and high-quality, low-priced phones become ubiquitous. And margin pressure generally does not bode well for stock prices.

Disclosure: I'm still an Apple shareholder (iPhone 6, baby!)

SEE ALSO: Sorry, Folks, Rich People Don't Create The Jobs

Join the conversation about this story »

Marketing automation software provides marketers with a virtual playground of helpful tools for more targeted and effective digital marketing. But the ability to achieve better alignment between marketing and sales is a benefit that can’t be overlooked or underestimated.

One of the hottest buzzwords flying around the B2B marketing community in the past few years is marketing automation. But as popular as marketing automation software is becoming (the latest analysis from Frost & Sullivan predicts global software revenue will reach $1.9 billion by 2020), the term is admittedly nebulous, somewhat misleading, usually defined differently depending on who is asked and is often viewed through a marketing-centric lens.

Interestingly, Forrester Research prefers to use the term “lead-to-revenue management” and points out that marketing automation software was initially developed solely to “bridge a gap between lead generation activities and selling activities that are managed by a CRM system.” So one of the primary purposes of marketing automation, and no doubt one of its compelling benefits, has always been that it helps to connect what marketing is doing with what sales is doing.

Marketing automation bridges a gap between marketing and sales

As buyer behaviors have changed, the relationship between marketing and sales (or business development depending on your industry lingo) is changing as well, making the need for increased alignment and closed-loop communication absolutely critical. A successful marketing automation implementation can help align marketing and sales through increased communication and transparency, leading to better productivity and ultimately higher revenues. According to research from SiriusDecisions, B2B organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing departments achieved 24% faster revenue growth and 27% faster profit growth over a three-year period.

Alignment is a big win for many companies, especially those with larger and more sophisticated sales and marketing teams. Because let’s face it, marketing and sales have historically had an interesting relationship to say the least. Most organizations have experienced at least some level of dysfunction between marketing and sales, with them often operating in silos. Sales always wants to know what marketing is doing to contribute to the bottom line, and marketing has always had a desire to show that what they do actually does contribute to the bottom line. And marketing automation provides an infrastructure for better, closed-loop communication and can help bring down silos and help marketing and sales to actually work together.

Marketing automation provides sales teams real-time and actionable intelligence

One of the primary ways that marketing automation helps to align what marketing and sales are doing is by providing internal sales and business development teams with real-time, actionable intelligence on what prospects and leads are up to. Instead of being a black box, marketing automation brings sales up to speed on who is visiting your website, when they are visiting, pages they are viewing, content they’re downloading, emails they’re opening and clicking on and what social media posts are driving them to your website and landing pages. This real-time intelligence lets your sales rep have a much more targeted and relevant conversation with prospects and it can also help to shorten the sales cycle.

Marketing automation and CRM integration closes the communication loop

Most marketing automation software platforms have the ability to integrate with popular CRM systems, such as Salesforce, Sugar and Microsoft Dynamics. This is where the communication loop is closed and sales and marketing can achieve alignment. Integration provides sales and business development reps all that amazing sales intelligence­—every single digital action and touch point with both leads and customers—all inside their CRM console.

Handoff sales-qualified leads

Perhaps nothing annoys the sales team more than when marketing “leads” are passed over to the sales team before they’re qualified. So the ability to implement lead nurturing and lead scoring programs means that unqualified leads that might have been interested in your whitepaper, but are not ready to talk to sales (or even interested at all), are no longer automatically pushed over to your sales teams to waste their time on emails and phone calls. Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) can be nurtured until they cross a company-defined scoring threshold and demonstrate sales-ready behavior.

And one of the great things about integrating marketing automation and CRM, is once marketing and sales have come to an agreement on what defines a sales qualified lead (SQL), the entire process can be fully automated. And with tweaks to the lead scoring criteria, marketing can adjust both the quantity and quality of leads being pushed into the CRM and over to sales.

Marketing automation can be more than just hype, more than just a shiny new tool for marketing and not just another line-item expense. Companies that have successfully implemented marketing automation are seeing the value it brings, the least of which is much tighter alignment between their marketing and sales teams.

You’re already sold on the benefits of using content marketing to attract and nurture customers, but now it’s time to sell it to your boss.

Maybe he prefers to stick to what he knows and what has worked for your company in the past. Or perhaps he needs some time to take it all in. Whatever the case, it’s your job to convince him. The trick is to think like him and anticipate his questions.

Here are six questions you should expect your boss to ask about content marketing.

Do We Really Need It?

These days, you can’t depend on newspapers to pick up your press releases or the local TV station to cover your grand opening. It’s certainly an added bonus if they do, but as content strategist Jay Baer says, we have entered an era where every business needs to consider themselves a TV station and a magazine.

Useful content drives traffic to your website and introduces visitors to your products and services one step at a time, guiding them to make an informed decision. Potential buyers need a clear understanding of what you offer the moment they arrive at your website. Then they need more information, but not all at once. They also want to see what you’re up to on social media.

Content marketing allows you to nurture them through the sales cycle and keep track of every interaction.

In short, if you have a website, you need content marketing.

What Does It Cost?

The cost of content marketing depends on your existing resources and how much you determine you can allocate from your budget. In the simplest terms, if you have the staff to regularly produce content, the channels to distribute it and a way to measure the results, you have enough to get started. The question is whether you have someone who can dedicate the time and effort to leading that charge. That means developing a strategy, maintaining an editorial calendar, coordinating with those you identify as contributors and effectively promoting the content through email and social media.

If this person is already part of your staff, the budget will be minimal. It may only consist of paying for some promoted posts on Facebook or sponsored content on LinkedIn each month. It could involve the purchase of a better email marketing platform. Or, if you don’t have the in-house resources, consider hiring a content marketing agency. This will give you access to writers, designers, developers and strategists who will do all the heavy lifting for you.

The monthly fee all depends on your objectives.

Our basic blogging package at Kuno Creative includes market research by trained journalists and two posts per week for as little as $2,000 a month.

Other services we provide include social media, paid search and redesigning your website so it’s more customer-friendly and set up to support your content marketing efforts.

Would it be cheaper to hire a freelance writer? Sure, you could find someone willing to write for you for a nominal fee per post, but if there’s no underlying strategy to what they’re doing, it won’t resonate with your buyers. The advantage of hiring an agency is you’ll have access to a team of professionals who live and breathe content marketing. They have the resources to properly distribute, promote and measure the results of the content. Any good agency will also take the time to interview your buyers and really get to know your business before they start writing what they think potential customers want to hear.

Can It Work With Our Existing Marketing Strategy?

Content marketing is meant to enhance, not replace your current strategy. If you’re already active on social media and are regularly communicating with your customers through email or newsletters, you’ll see results faster because you can use all those outlets to promote your content, driving more traffic to your website.

Content marketing offers more insight into who’s looking for more information on your products or services and gives your sales team qualified leads to contact. A content marketing platform such as HubSpot can be integrated with your existing customer relationship management system. If you don’t use a CRM, it will give you a database that’s updated every time a visitor interacts with you by opening an email or clicking on a new blog post.

What’s the Return on Investment?

The most important thing to remember about the value of content marketing is that it’s long-lasting. Once you share the information, it lives on within your website and continues to improve your search engine rankings. It’s also gradually building trust with your customers so by the time they’re ready to make a purchase, they’re already familiar with your brand and its offerings.

But your CEO is a numbers guy, so let’s look at the statistics:

• The ROI of content marketing was three times that of paid search, yielding 31 leads compared to just nine, according to a recent study by Kapost and Eloqua.
• The average cost per lead was also much lower for content marketing— $32.25, compared to $111.11 for paid search.
• A 2012 HubSpot report found organic search leads have a 14.6 percent close rate, while leads generated by outbound marketing efforts have a close rate of 1.7 percent.

You can track your ROI by calculating the number of leads generated through your content marketing efforts each month and identifying the cost per lead. Keep in mind, though, there are many other ways to gauge the success of content marketing, and not all of them are easily quantified.

Don’t forget to consider other factors, such as social media engagement, brand awareness and buyer trust.

How Do We Measure Success?

The ROI will speak for itself, but what else should you monitor to know how well your content is performing? A useful content marketing platform should provide you with real-time data that shows you:

• How many people visited your website this month compared to the previous month
• How many viewed a particular blog post so you can easily see what type of content is most interesting to your readers
• How many people filled out a form to download a piece of content you provided
• How many subscribers you’ve added to your blog
• How many people opened your emails and actually clicked through them
• How many marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads you’ve gained

Watching these numbers will help you fine-tune your strategy. If you notice a particular email didn’t perform well, for instance, you can re-send it with a new subject line to customers who didn’t open it. If you see a certain blog topic has attracted more views than anything else you’ve written in the past month, you’ll know where to focus your efforts moving forward.

What Do We Need to Get Started?

Before you jump in, your company needs a clear understanding of its goals for content marketing and what you consider to be key performance indicators. Every piece of content you create needs to be rooted in those goals.

Do you want to grow your email subscriptions? Attract 5,000 visitors to your site each month? Generate at least 10 sales qualified leads each month? Be specific, and put it in writing.

Next, develop a roadmap for your content based on who your buyers are and what motivates them. If you’re not sure how to do that, check out this guide to help develop buyer personas for your audience.

Whether you’re creating your own content or hiring someone to do it for you, establish some basic standards for appropriate messaging. If you’re a publicly traded company or you work in a heavily regulated industry, your investor relations team and legal advisors should be involved in this discussion.

Think about what images best reflect your company’s mission. Take stock of your existing resources to determine how you can incorporate them into your strategy so you don’t have to start from scratch. You probably already have helpful guides or brochures; perhaps you just need to update them and put them into a digital format.

Consider who will contribute to your content and what experts you can position as thought leaders in your company. How can you make the most of your staff and their skills? Do you have a great designer who can help make your content more visual or an intern who’s a video editing wizard?

Take inventory of where you are now, where you want to be and who or what will get you there over the next six months. You can always re-evaluate and make adjustments as you go.

So, what are you waiting for? It’s time to get started!

What have you said to sell your boss on content marketing? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo credit: LendingMemo.com