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Canada’s housing market continues to boom, and with that comes huge demand for new construction and skilled professionals to carry it out. Here’s a list of Canada’s top 10 jobs in the skilled trades.

Click or tap any job title highlighted in red to see its complete job profile. You can see our methodology here.

Rank	Overall Rank	Job Title	Median Salary	5-Year Wage Growth	5-Year Job Growth
1	10	Electrical & Telecommunications Contractor	$72,800	13	28%
2	19	Longshore Workers	$70,720	30%	13%
3	28	Heavy Construction Equipment Supervisor	$62,400	15%	50%
4	49	Oil & Gas Well Operator	$70,720	30%	15%
5	65	Construction Manager	$72,800	9%	19%
6	68	Locomotive Engineer	$62,400	20%	-15%
7	78	Construction Trades/Contractors Supervisor	$60,008	14%	27%
8	85	Pipefitting Contractor & Supervisor	$69,326	8%	43%
9	93	Power Line & Cable Worker	$66,650	7%	-3%
10	98	Industrial Electrician	$62,400	9%	5%

The post Canada’s Best Jobs 2014: Top 10 jobs in skilled trades appeared first on Canadian Business.

Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation took effect on July 1. And with that, the fear and loathing reached fever pitch.

While there is some genuine confusion among businesses about some of the new regulations coming into force, it’s also tough to feel too much sympathy for those who are complaining like it’s the end of the world. CASL was passed in 2010 and the regulations were finalized in December, 2013, meaning that businesses have known new anti-spam rules were coming for four years and have had six months to get ready for them.

Furthermore, CASL is generally in line with anti-spam laws found in Europe. In 2003, the European Union adopted a set of laws that revolve around opt-in, where businesses must get the express consent of individuals in order to send them commercial electronic messages, which is also how CASL functions.

Critics of the Canadian legislation have focused on the penalties – up to $1 million per offense for individuals and $10 million for companies – and there’s little doubt they’re on the high side. Stiffer penalties may be a trend in the making, however. The United Kingdom’s spam enforcement authority, for example, was originally empowered to issue fines of up to £5,000, but that was raised dramatically in 2011 to £500,000, which is just about $1 million (Canadian).

Much of the criticism is rooted in the fact that CASL is fundamentally different from the U.S. system, as well as that used in Australia and New Zealand, which revolves around opt-out. Brought about by President George W. Bush in 2003, the “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act” gives a green light to businesses to send spam. If consumers don’t want to receive it, they have to expressly opt out.

While the legislation had the clever acronym of CAN-SPAM, as in putting spam into a can, critics have suggested “YOU-CAN-SPAM” is a more appropriate name since it effectively legalizes unwanted email.

Two points can be taken away from all this. First, Canada is well behind peer nations in adopting anti-spam mechanisms – more than a decade, given that many jurisdictions adopted legislation in 2003 or 2004.

The other point actually works in the favour of Canada and Canadians because, when a country is late to a particular party, it can learn from the mistakes of others and adopt better regulations. The Canadian government is thus smart for moving to a stricter European-style opt-in system rather than what is acknowledged to be a wholly ineffective U.S.-style opt-out system.

Even still, that hasn’t stopped the kvetching about CASL. If it hasn’t been complaints about the “draconian” nature of opt-in to the high penalties for violating it, it’s been overblown rhetoric about how the legislation will prove to be the end of everything:

I wonder how many #Canadian small businesses will be out of business by Dec 31 because of #CASL?

— Stuart R. Crawford (@stuartrcrawford) June 24, 2014

And then there’s the bizarre comparisons of spam to physical mail:

Tomorrow, Canada will limit our digital freedom of speech for messages that are totally legal in print form #CASL #CRTC #CDNpoli #CDNtech

— Mark Goldberg (@Mark_Goldberg) June 30, 2014

The answer to the question in the first tweet, if anyone has any doubt, is “none.” As both Industry Canada and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission have stated, harsh enforcement is highly unlikely, especially against legitimate small businesses. Warnings are more probable:

Fact: No automatic fines for #CASL violations; penalties based on factors such as past violations: http://t.co/4OTajPFSJM

— Industry Canada (@industrycanada) June 20, 2014

As for the comparisons to physical mail, there are number of reasons why that particular analogy is completely off base:

1. Cost: In case this one even needs explaining, businesses face significantly higher costs to send out flyers, catalogs, letters or any other sort of physical mail, whereas electronic messages cost virtually nothing. This is kind of the whole reason why email took off and why there is spam in the first place.

2. Blockage: Many businesses are dissuaded by the cost of sending out physical mail, but some aren’t. Fortunately, Canadians have the right to eliminate those mailouts entirely too – all they have to do is attach a note to their mailbox stating that they do not wish to receive unaddressed mail. Spam filters from some of the bigger email providers do a good job at keeping out most of the electronic junk, but prior to CASL there was no virtual equivalent to that mailbox note.

3. Cuts: If the costs and the ability of Canadians to block unaddressed physical mail aren’t enough, businesses are increasingly having to deal with the fact that Canada Post is scaling back home delivery. By 2019, most people will be picking up their mail at community boxes. And with people having to actually leave the house and possibly travel a few minutes to get it, it’s a safe bet many people will only venture down to those mailboxes once in a while. Lower effectiveness is yet another discentive for physical spam.

So yes, sending out unwanted physical mail without consent is legal while commercial electronic messages aren’t, but why does that matter? Of all the complaints circulating out there, this is surely the one with the least merit.

Ultimately, there’s something very Canadian about complaining about new laws, especially digital ones, and that’s often a good thing. Debate and questioning is, after all, an important part of a democratic society.

But there’s also something very Canadian about doing things slightly different than the Americans. In this case – where the government has chosen to outlaw spam rather than legalize it – that’s definitely a good thing.

The post Why Canada’s Anti-Spam Law won’t harm small businesses appeared first on Canadian Business.

Dodge has been teasing the automotive world for months with tales of its mythical Hellcat HEMI engine and the prodigious amounts of power it produces.

But we were simply blown away when the automaker finally announced the engine's astronomical 707 horsepower and 650 ft/lbs of torque rating. Dodge achieves this incredible power by mounting a supercharger on its venerable 6.2 liter HEMI V8. 

With the Hellcat engine, the Challenger moves into some unfamiliar real estate, squarely in the middle of supercar territory. As the most powerful muscle car ever produced, the Hellcat's 700 plus ponies out-muscle several iconic members of the supercar club, like the 700 hp Lamborghini Aventador, 650 hp Chevrolet Corvette Z06, and even the company's own 640 hp Viper.

In addition to its awesome engine, the Challenger SRT HEMI Hellcat will also come with an all-new interior inspired by the vintage 1971 Challenger.

Not everyone will be able to access the Hellcat's earth-shattering horsepower. Much like Bugatti, which givers owners a special key to access top speeds, Dodge will give owners a red key fob to access up to 500 hp and a black key fob to access all 707 hp.

The introduction of the Hellcat engine should be a welcomed boost for the Challenger, as sales are down 12% so far this year and lag significantly behind its two main competitors: the Chevrolet Camaro and the Ford Mustang.

Since its introduction in 2008, the Challenger has always been a product full of old-world muscle car charm built around the mystique of its HEMI motor. But the 375 hp HEMI had found itself outgunned in recent years with Ford and Chevy have both releasing special high performance editions of their respective muscle cars.

N , the Challenger can finally retaliate. The new engine's 707 horsepower will allow Dodge's muscle car to finally close up any performance gaps between it and the 505 hp Camaro Z/28, the 580 hp Camaro ZL1, and the 663 hp Shelby Mustang GT500.

Dodge has yet to announce pricing for the Hellcat-equipped Challenger, but expect it to fall somewhere in the same territory as Ford's $55,000 Shelby Mustang and Chevy's $72,000 Camaro Z/28.

SEE ALSO: GM Recalls 28 Million Cars — Here's Why Investors Aren't Breaking A Sweat

Join the conversation about this story »

Your website is like a high-performance car. Similar to a Porsche, your website should grab attention, navigate easily and hit max speeds. To keep a fancy sports car in tip-top shape, you use a specialized mechanic. To keep your website in tip-top shape, you should use Google Webmaster Tools (GWMT).

Think of this Google feature like a toolbox full of fine-tuning agents that can help you improve your website. GWMT isn’t just about performance either; you can learn how customers find your site and use this information to tweak certain pages and boost website traffic.

“Google Webmaster Tools is a free resource that gives you a ton of useful information,” says Chipper Nicodemus, our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Manager. “You don’t need to understand Google’s algorithms or have a vast Internet background to use it, either. It’s a user-friendly tool that business owners should dive into.”

At VerticalResponse, we want you to get the most out of your website. So, let’s follow Nicodemus’ advice and dive right in. We’ve created a guide to walk you through all that GWMT has to offer.

Set up and verification
First, you need to sign in to GWMT. If you have a Gmail account, you’ll need your Gmail password. From there, you’ll enter the URL of your website. You’ll also need to verify that you’re the owner of the site. There are a couple of ways to do this, and it varies depending on things like where you created your site. To figure out which process is right for your site, check out this link to the GWMT verification methods.

Familiarize yourself with the dashboard
Once you’ve set up and verified your account, you’ll be able to access the GWMT from one dashboard. Our guide will go through each one of the tabs on the left. We’ll explain what each feature does and tell you what you can learn from it.

Site messages
If Google wants to communicate with you, this is where they do it. For instance, Google will send you a message if there have been any attempts to hack your site, or if a new version of software is needed. It’s just like an inbox; you want to keep an eye on incoming messages.

Search appearance

Structured data

• When you do a search, you’re presented with a list of relative links. Each link has a brief description under it, which helps users decide which link is best suited for their needs. For example, when you Google “Best Italian restaurant in Miami,” you get these results with snippets under each link.

• Wouldn’t it be nice if you could control what those snippets say about your business? You can do that by creating structured data, which is what Google uses to create your snippet.
• To create this data requires some HTML knowledge. It does get a little technical, so if you’re a beginner, we suggest you check out the next option on the list, data highlighter, which is an easier tool to use that achieves similar results. However, if you’re up for a little challenge, GWMT has a step-by-step process on its website to help you create the snippet that appears in a web search.

Data highlighter

• Think of the data highlighter as a tool to teach Google what’s important on your site. You don’t need any HTML experience, just go into your site, highlight certain types of data and categorize it. For instance, if a local hotel highlights text about its upcoming concert series and categorizes it under “event,” Google will showcase it in a search like this:
  

• There are several kinds of data that you can highlight including: articles, events, local businesses, restaurants, products, software applications, movies, TV episodes and books.
• Like the structured data tool, you’re telling Google what information should show up when your site is searched.

HTML improvements

• If there is something you can do to make your user’s experience better, Google will let you know in the HTML improvement section. Here’s a look at what might appear:

• You might see suggestions like “duplicate meta descriptions.” You’d fill out this field to describe a particular entry. For example, when you write a blog post, you’d put a brief description of the post in the Meta description field. You don’t want duplicates, so Google will warn you about something like that in the HTML improvement section.
• You’ll also see title tag suggestions. These titles are what show up as links in the search. For example, when you search “VerticalResponse,” the purple text is the title tag and clickable link. These suggestions will help you fine tune your titles so searchers know what your site is all about.

Site links

• You know those additional links that show up under the search results? They’re called site links. For instance, when you search “VerticalResponse” you not only get the link to the main page, you also get a series of other links, like the “Log In” and “Pricing” links that you see below. These are site links.

• Right now, Google selects these links for you, but through this tab on GWMT, you can demote a link if you don’t want it to appear in your search results. Just put in the URL of that particular page and click “demote.”

Search Traffic

Search queries

• This is probably the most beneficial tab on the GWMT. Here you’ll find out how people get to your website.
  

• You’ll see a list of search terms that led people to your site, which is a valuable tool, says Nicodemus. “As a business owner you assume you know which words people are using to find your site, but this list can reveal terms that you weren’t even thinking of,” he says.
• Learning these search terms might persuade you to make some product adjustments, Nicodemus says. For instance, if you’re selling coffee mugs online and a lot of people find your site by searching “brown coffee mugs” and you’re only selling black mugs, you might consider adding brown mugs to your product line. “It’s a great way to find missed opportunities,” Nicodemus says. “Business owners can use this information to add products, remove under-performing products, and create relevant blog content that uses these keywords.”
• The search queries page will also show you a graph of impressions and clicks. Impressions are the number of times that your site showed up in search results. Clicks are the number of times people actually selected your website from the results, and the click through rate is the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click to your site.
• How do you keep these stats high? One of the best ways is to keep your site updated regularly with high quality content.

Links to your site

• This section tells you who links to your site and how. It’s organized in basic categories like “Who links the most” and “Your most linked content.” Why does this matter? The more quality sites that link to yours, the better your Google ranking. If you’re providing quality content, other sites will link to your content naturally.

Internal links

• To improve navigation on your site, you’ll want to provide internal links. For instance, on this VerticalResponse page “Check it out” and “Apply now” are two internal links that take customers to another spot within the website.
  

• Internal links make it easier for people to surf your site and tell Google the importance of a page. The more internal links that point to a page, the more Google assumes its significance.

Manual Actions

• This tab is another way for Google to communicate with you. If there are any actions that you need to worry about, Google will let you know.

Google Index

Index status

• This tab shows you the total number of URLs that Google has recognized and will appear in search results. Google finds these URLs with a ton of computers that “crawl” through the Internet to look for new and updated pages online. Once a new page or an update is found, the Googlebot scans it for important information and indexes it so it can be found during a search.
• The index tab shows you the number of URLs the bot found. Why is this important information? You want to make sure that Google can find and index your site. A steady increase in the number of URLs is proof that Google can find your site and catalog the content on it. Here’s a good example.
  

• If you see dramatic increases or decreases in the graph you might have a problem with your server, or something is blocking Google from crawling your site and you’ll want to investigate further. Again, a steady increase is all you really need to look for here.

Content Keywords

• This is a list of the most significant keywords that are used throughout your site.
  

• The keywords are listed in order of usage, with the most used keywords at the top. You can click on each word and see where it appears on your site. This information, along with the search queries information, can tell you how Google interprets your business site.
• If you feel like the keywords that are listed aren’t accurately reflecting your site, it’s time to rethink your content strategy. You might consider making a list of keywords you want associated with your site, and add the keywords that people are using to find your site (found under the search queries tab) and create a master list of keywords. Use those keywords in your website content and blog topics.

Remove URLs

• If Google has indexed a part of your website that contains confidential information, you can send a request to have that URL removed. This should only be used for emergency cases, like exposed confidential data.

Crawl

Crawl errors

• As the Googlebot crawls through your site, it will list any errors it finds with your site. Here’s a look at a typical list of crawl errors.

• The most common error is a 404, which means the page can’t be found. If you’ve redesigned your site, you might see this a lot if you didn’t redirect people to the right page. You’ll also see these error messages if you take down old content. If another website linked to that old content, you’ll get the 404 error message too. If that’s the case, send an email to the site manager and ask to have the link updated.

Crawl stats

• This shows you how often Google is crawling your site. You’ll want to check this graph from time to time to make sure that Google is scanning through your content. If you think Google should be checking in more often, make sure you’re updating content regularly and you’ll keep the bot coming back for more.

Fetch as Google

• This handy tool lets you see a webpage the way Google does. Just enter a URL and hit “Fetch.”
  

• This option is particularly helpful if you’re trying to troubleshoot issues with your page. For instance, if you have crawl errors or HTML suggestions and you’re making attempts to fix those issues, you’ll be able to fetch the page and see if the problem is fixed in the eyes of Google.

       Blocked URLs

• If you have content on your site that you’ve blocked from Google on purpose, you’ll see a list of those links here. Remember when we talked about confidential pages that you didn’t want Google to include in searches? You can keep track of them here.

       Sitemaps

• A Sitemap is exactly what it sounds like; it’s a map that helps Google recognize all of the pages on your site. This isn’t something the Googlebot handles, you actually have to create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google. How do you do that? We suggest using XML-sitemaps.com. This site will walk you through the process and get the information to Google. It might sound techy, but it’s beneficial. If you can get Google to recognize all of the pages on your site, your searchability will increase.

       URL parameters

• This section allows you dictate which URLs Google crawls, but unless you’re an Internet aficionado, you’ll probably want to stay away from this. If you enter the wrong URLs you can negatively affect your site. It’s best to leave this one to the pros.

        Malware

• If your site has fallen victim to hackers, Google will let you know. You can also request a malware review from Google to make sure all infected areas are clear.

       Security issues

• This tab is another way for Google to get in touch with you should there be any security concerns. It’s just another inbox-like feature that you should monitor.

Additional tools

• You’ll find some helpful resources in this section. We’ll go over the most important and easy-to-use tools.
  

Google Places

• You want customers to be able to find your business, its location and contact information in a snap, right? Then you should check out Google Places. In a few simple steps you’ll get your business on the map – literally. A map with a pin showing your location will appear in search results. Other important information will also pop up in searches.

Google Merchant Center

• When you Google “new shoes,” a list of relevant links come up along with several pictures of products.

• To improve the chances of your products showing up in these product listing ads, you’ll want to follow the link to the Google Merchant Center. You’ll be able to enter information about your product and improve your searchability.

Page Speed Insights

• If a customer has to wait for your page to load, they might get impatient and go to a competitor’s site. To avoid this, use the Page Speed Insights tab to see just how fast your page loads on both a desktop computer and a mobile device. Check out the report below.

• You’ll get a rating. In this case, the desktop rating is 81/100. To improve the speed, it gives you a list of things you can change to make your page load faster.

Labs

Author stats

• If you’re writing content for your site or for others, you can see a list of your top ranked articles. Of course, you’ll need to associate your articles with your Google profile for the posts to show up. You can learn more about that through the Google Authorship site. It’s worth your time. It shows you what articles are getting read so you can adjust your topics accordingly.

Instant preview

• This option is a lot like Fetch as Google, it shows you a page as Google would see it. It also tells you if there are any errors as the bot works to preview the page. Again, it’s another way to learn about bugs in your system.

Hopefully, we’ve helped you learn your way around GWMT. It’s a powerful tool for business owners who want to improve their website performance and traffic without spending a dime.

Are you using GWMT? Which features do you find the most valuable?

Oftentimes, EMR systems are often the subject of either miracle stories or absolute mayhem for the practices that use them. Naturally, your marketing campaign should be geared at telling the former.

On the other hand, is your team telling these stories in a bubble? They can have the most successful EMR lead generation campaign in your company’s history. That doesn’t mean real success when that campaign’s activities are in a vacuum.

Ardath Albee tells a few similar experiences between email and content marketing. In her example, she found great content but the salespeople who followed up? Not so much.

It’s a disconnect that happens when your own marketing team is operating without getting tapped by the rest of the organization, your sales reps in particular.

No offense to sales reps out there but I actually think you’re the only people besides the client who need to be deeply involved in the story that your marketers are telling. This activity involves everything from content marketing and PR to establishing rapport and discovering pain points. So at the next chance you’ll get, ask your reps about how they see the story you’re telling:

• Is it an infomercial or a fable? – What’s the difference between the two? Informercials represent the cheesiest , most clichéd, and most self-absorbed examples of bad marketing. Fables on the other hand offer something of value: a lesson, a moral, a piece of insight. Obviously, your sales reps need to see your story as the latter: a piece of informative content that offers answers to healthcare problems.
• 

  Hey mack, been payin’ attention?

  Are they comfortable with sharing?

  – The more complex the buying process, the more easier it actually is to share your expertise. On the other hand, sales reps often have trouble with the idea because they fear for sharing trade secrets or cannibalizing the business. But as communications director Frank Strong can attest, that’s not always the case. Your prospects are still just as likely to call you for a solution regardless if you show them how to do it themselves. Mainly, could it be because they’d rather just understand and necessarily spend more for it?

• Are they also paying attention? – If your sales reps don’t like being treated as the cash registers of the B2B world, then they need to pay attention to how marketers tell the company’s story, qualify prospects, and identify needs. They need to understand what your marketers are telling their audiences in order to add more when it’s their turn to add to the conversation.

Your reps will sound less and less like the profit-motive salesman if they were actually paying attention to what’s being told (rather than looking the other way and smoking the figurative cigar). Heck, sometimes I wonder if it ever really was the other way around. I mean, they’re the ones finally scoring the deal. They’re the ones supposed to be having longer conversations with prospects. But instead, we get accounts of sales reps behaving as if their content marketers and lead generators never existed! Shouldn’t it be high time that they all sat down together and listened to the story?

We’ve all been there: Sitting down to your desk, turning on your computer – only to find your inbox flooded with offers that you never signed up for. If you’re like most people, you just delete these and don’t think about it. However, some people go the extra step to flag unwanted messages as spam to make sure they don’t get your message again. This is why an opt-in email campaign is so vital to ensuring that your emails are reaching the right contacts, the ones who expect to see your messages – and not those who could potentially harm your reputation.

If you send campaigns to people who have not opted in, you have the potential to reach more prospects (by email blasts, etc.), but you also run the risk of getting yourself flagged. Whether it’s a drip campaign or a one-off blast, if you keep sending to unengaged, random recipients (whether or not you’ve had contact with them), you’re asking for a spam complaint. All it takes is one little click on the recipient’s part to cause you a great deal of trouble.

What’s an opt-in campaign?

An opt-in campaign is one in which you offer something (e.g., a newsletter) to a reader, and that reader must check a box to get that something; that is, they have to opt in. (Pre-checked opt-in boxes do NOT count at all, as they do not represent or indicate any degree of interest from the person. And in some countries, they are illegal.) Opt-in campaigns are advantageous for many reasons, the most obvious being that your recipients are real, alive, and want to receive your emails, which alleviates the risk of spam traps and complaints. With an opted-in and engaged sender base, your recipients don’t miss important offers, correspondence, and announcements, so they stay happy and engage more. By choosing to opt-in, your recipients are signifying that they are interested in your content, cause, or company, which makes it highly unlikely that they’ll feel the urge to report your emails.

By choosing to opt in, your recipients are allowing you to send them information, and demonstrating their trust in you. At the very least, they know your messages aren’t spam. This helps your reputation, and a good reputation is the key to getting your emails delivered. If you send to a lot of non-opted-in recipients, your odds of getting complaints or being blocked go up sharply. When this happens, the receiving email server sees that you’re getting a bad reputation from complaints and blocks, and your email is more likely to get filtered or rejected. Over time, this creates more and more problems for you and your sender reputation. In the worst-case scenario, your sending addresses could be blacklisted – which means you would be unable to send marketing emails at all!

More options: double and confirmed opt-in campaigns

A “double opt-in” is one in which someone opts in, and the marketer then sends a confirmation email that requires yet another opt-in. (“Thank you for subscribing…please click here to…”) Double opt-ins are harder to get, but they are also proof of greater interest, which usually means a greater likelihood of closing the sale.

The “confirmed opt-in” goes one step further, giving the email recipient an explicit, obvious chance to unsubscribe at this point (beyond the usual legally required unsubscribe link often found in an email’s footer). This prospect not only opted in, but – pointedly – did not unsubscribe when offered the chance. This person is the most likely of all to want to receive your messaging.

The benefits of an opt-in campaign

Opt-in campaigns are an email marketing and deliverability best practice, which puts you ahead of the game. Following best practices is the key to success and can help prevent headaches down the road. These types of campaigns also require the recipient to give you the highest level of permissions (such as whitelisting), so troubleshooting any issues is much simpler when the lines of communication are open and unhindered by ISPs and other filters.

Many of us receive hundreds of emails a day. The last thing we want to do, the last thing we’ll spend our precious time on, is to sort through incoming emails from unknown senders. The biggest risk of not using an opt-in campaign is related to this. If the recipient has not opted in, they have no incentive to read, let alone open your email. They will be more inclined to report you as spam, and in this modern age, that’s potentially disastrous. Being tagged as spam once won’t hurt you, but those tags can add up quickly if you’re mailing to unengaged, non-opted-in recipients. And soon as you’re blacklisted, it’s game over; you have to begin your email marketing program all over again, with a clean (but cold) IP address. For some businesses, such a forced lull in marketing would mean game, set, and series over.

Although they’re slow to get rolling, opt-in campaigns save a lot of time and hassle in the long run. By validating demand for your email messages, you’re ensuring maximum deliverability and engagement, while decreasing the risks of rejection and a bottoming email reputation. An active, opted-in recipient base will provide you with much more success than a send-and-pray email blast to unknown addresses.

A final note: preference centers

The ultimate in opt-in campaigns is the preference center. Here you allow the person opting in to choose which of your communiqués they wish to receive, and on what schedule. This gives them fine-grained control over what you send them, and it’s another indication that they truly do want to hear from you.

Most companies using preference centers have multiple offerings, often in multiple channels. If you send only one email newsletter a week, you don’t need a preference center. But if you have even two choices (send X daily OR send a weekly digest), then a preference center is just one more way to service your readership – and to narrow your email recipients to those who are most likely to buy. After all, it is quality, not quantity, that wins in the end.

Get the big picture on deliverability; get Act-On’s Best Practices in Email Deliverability ebook.

A lot of CEOs are being shown the door lately. In the apparel industry alone, we’ve just seen the end of American Apparel’s Dov Charney and the ouster of Lululemon Athletica founder Chip Wilson – plus the installation of interim CEOs at Target and JC Penney following their previous leaders’ firings. These companies are in trouble, and their boards must select new CEOs under highly charged circumstances.

At least some of them are bound to make the mistake we’ve seen so many times: pushing ahead with a sense of urgency around their new CEO selection, and allowing their deliberations to be overtaken by strong wills and unexamined emotions.

Here’s what they should do instead. First: take the time to arrive collectively at a short list, not of candidates but, first, of criteria. An open and rigorous debate over CEO criteria is the most important step a board can take with succession. Then: commit to a process by which the potential leaders they consider will be honestly, consistently assessed against those criteria and a winner will emerge.

Why is the early narrowing of criteria so important? From the outset, it reinforces the reality that no CEO candidate is perfect. All of the available options will have noticeable strengths and weaknesses. The board’s challenge is to decide what deficits it can live with (usually because they can be compensated for by the rest of the leadership team), and which two or three criteria are non-negotiable must-haves.

The alternative, and unfortunately the usual route, is to compile a laundry list of laudable qualities. While none of them is easy to argue against, collectively they have no power, because the list doesn’t allow the best candidates to emerge. Worse, a list that calls for everything gives every director something to point to as they lobby for their own favorite. Someone prevails and others, eager to wrap up this sensitive and time-consuming process, capitulate. From the outside the process might look like solid work, following best practice. But the board has essentially abdicated its most important responsibility.

Consider the case of a specialty retailer whose CEO was retiring after a long, successful run. The retiring leader advocated strongly for an executive he had groomed for the job, in his own image. But the board recognized that the company’s environment was changing dramatically, thanks to global expansion, greater online competition, and customers’ evolving expectations of their shopping experience. Diligently, the board drew up all the criteria it felt it should consider.

Clearly it was time for a CEO who could handle omni-channel complexity, but on the board’s wish list, that was just one item among many. Among the others was merchandising experience, which the heir apparent, like his mentor, had in spades. Reluctant to oppose a leader who had dramatically increased shareholder value, the board folded under pressure and ratified the CEO’s pick. The result was disastrous, as the company suffered numerous missteps in rolling out new channel strategies and overhauling back-end systems.

When a board never engages in open debate over which attributes matter most, not only does it fail to connect succession to what the company most needs; it neglects to give the incoming CEO guidance about where to focus his or her own efforts and in what areas it might be best to delegate.

Boards, and companies’ governance processes, are idiosyncratic; exactly how to focus on what’s really needed in the next CEO will depend on the firm. But, at a high level, it is a three-part process:  Start with an exploration of likely scenarios for the company in the next several years. Get input from executives, high-potentials, and outside stakeholders on how those conditions will most challenge and create opportunities for the company. Then develop a profile limited to a few must-haves. This process is usually enhanced with the departing CEO’s involvement, as long as the board shows leadership.

Greater focus brings better results. A global energy company was struggling and seemed unlikely to survive the industry’s looming consolidation. With its CEO preparing to retire with a mixed legacy, the board at first generated a list of fifteen things at which the new leader should excel, ranging from expanding into new markets, to driving a Six Sigma-based culture of operational excellence, to getting a major facility project back on track. Rather than work from this list, however, the urgency of the company’s situation drove the board and CEO to debate which goals were most important. They narrowed the list to three: defining a visionary strategy to survive consolidation, driving a culture of accountability so the company could deliver on promises to investors, and developing a strong bench of executive talent. They consciously left out operational goals, because most directors agreed the CEO could rely on the existing business unit heads, and a capable COO could also be hired from outside.

That effectively ruled out the heir apparent, despite the fact that some directors had felt he was “owed” the job. While his strengths were significant, it was undeniable that the three key areas of need were weaknesses for him. The board hired an external candidate, who over the next few years made some transformational acquisitions, kept the company independent, and greatly boosted the stock price.

A/E professionals have historically distanced themselves from the term selling. The s-word is rarely mentioned in some firms. The industry clearly prefers the terms business development and marketing, even if those words are sometimes improperly applied. The widespread disdain for selling in our ranks is palpable.

What is it that we dislike about selling? When I ask A/E professionals, their responses can be boiled down to one primary reason—the seller's apparent self interest when we are in the buyer's role. We don't like the fact that salespeople seem to be more concerned about their own needs than ours. Various studies support this conclusion: The most common complaints about salespeople is that they don't listen, they talk too much, they don't seem to understand our needs, and their follow-up is inconsistent. These are all signs of self interest.

Given our dislike for these practices, surely we would be motivated to approach sales differently. Right? That's not my experience. In hundreds of sales calls with technical practitioners, what I've commonly observed is not listening, talking too much, not really understanding the client's needs, failing to follow up in timely fashion. We may not like traditional selling, but it seems that's the only model we know. No wonder it feels uncomfortable for most of us.

There's a better way! Start by changing your mindset from focusing on yourself to focusing on the client. I know that's what the majority of technical professionals think they're doing, but their actions suggest something else. I suspect that the process of qualifications-based selection entices us to feature our qualifications in sales conversations. But don't be fooled—clients are more concerned about their needs and their priorities.

The best way to sell is to not sell in a conventional sense, that is, putting yourself front and center. Instead, you want to demonstrate that the client's interests are what you care most about. Here are some suggestions for doing that from the beginning of the sales process:

Don't think that merely introducing your firm is reason enough to call upon a prospective client. That's not to say you won't get the appointment. I scheduled numerous sales calls over the years by offering nothing more than "to introduce you to our firm." The client may agree to meet with you, but that's a poor exchange for his valuable time. Instead you should always offer your "entree," which typically is information or advice that is helpful to the client.

Do your homework; come in knowing something about the client and their needs. In the age of the internet, it's just plain lazy to meet with a prospect you know hardly anything about—that's so 1980s! Clients today expect you to have a basic understanding of their business or mission. Ideally you should know of at least a need or two that's relevant to your expertise and experience. Simply showing up and asking questions is not being client centered, especially when you didn't take the time to get more informed ahead of the meeting.

Spend very little time up front talking about your credentials, unless the client asks. It's common in the initial sales call to feel you need to present an expansive overview of your firm and your qualifications. Don't. It's like saying, "Let me start by telling you about the most important thing—me." A better start is to ask some questions confirming your understanding of what you researched in advance: "I was reading that your company was the first to manufacture gonzometers in the U.S. Are you still the market leaders?" Even if the client asks for an introduction to your firm, keep it brief. Let her ask for more detail if she wants it.

Mention your experience mostly in the context of talking about the client's need or project. It's always better to demonstrate your qualifications than to talk about them. For example: "That's been our experience. We've probably worked with 8 or 9 clients with that same issue, including the Big Blue Water District just down the road. What we've learned is that the best way to keep your costs lower is to..." Don't make case histories the focal point of your conversation; instead use that experience to illustrate some insight or option that's specifically relevant to the client's project.

Don't leave or send qualifications materials; provide something with information or insight specific to the client's need. It's best, of course, if your firm authored that resource. But don't hesitate to provide something from someone else if you think it would be helpful. Even competitor resources are worth considering if you're not competing with that firm for this particular client or project. This is a great way to show that you're focused on the interests of the client rather than your own.

Keep the focus on advising the client in subsequent sales conversations. If you continue to provide helpful information and advice, the client will want to continue meeting with you. And if that's the case, you stand a good chance of winning the job. Unfortunately, the value to the client of subsequent sales calls often declines, even if you made the effort to start well. Here's the secret to avoiding this problem: Commit to concluding every sales call with a mutually agreed-upon next step. This is easier when you've not only planned your current sales call, but the following one. Go prepared to offer something of value warranting a subsequent meeting. Even better, have a few options in mind since you can never be sure what will interest the client most.

Make your proposal client-centered. If you've worked hard to keep the sales process focused on the client, you don't want to reverse field at the proposal stage—even though that may be what the RFP is pushing you to do. I've written about the challenge of making proposals client-centered in the past. Yes, you want to be fully responsive to the letter of the RFP, but avoid being lured into making your proposal all about you. If you make the client the centerpiece of your proposal, including making it user friendly, the difference most likely won't go unnoticed. 

People have been asking my opinion of the new Amazon Fire Phone, but I’ve had a lot of trouble answering. My first reaction was overwhelmingly blah. I’ll be curious to try it, and maybe then I’ll feel better about it. But right now it seems to me like a bag of interesting features rather than a coherent product. (Quick, what do faux 3D imaging and a year of free mail order shipping have in common? Absolutely nothing.) Plus it’s available from only one mobile operator, and the pricing isn’t low enough to get anyone excited. I’m delighted anytime a major company tries to innovate, but I can’t imagine this phone having a huge impact on the market.

Many others are neutral to downright hostile. BGR wrote, “Amazon innovated in all the wrong places.” (link). And CNN said, “if you're happy with your iPhone 5s or Galaxy S5, there's no compelling reason to change” (link).

So why did Amazon build this product?  Ben Thompson made a good case that the phone is designed to strengthen Amazon’s relationship with its lucrative Prime customers (link). I’m sure that’s part of the motivation. But if that’s the only goal, wouldn’t you price the phone very low to grab more customers, the way you did Kindle? And as Ben himself noted, there are many other things you could do to more directly recruit Prime customers. For example, many of the Fire Phone apps could have been released separately for Android and iOS. Wouldn’t that be a better way to serve Prime customers? Rather than trying to rip people away from their iPhones and Galaxies, why not just co-opt them through some apps that run on their current phones? What Amazon’s doing is like selling your own line of sofas as a way to distribute slipcovers.

And so I go back to wondering why Amazon did it. Imagine you’re Jeff Bezos. You have a fairly stable relationship with Apple and many other phone companies at the moment; why turn yourself into their blood enemy for a product that that won’t move the needle in sales?

To me, the Fire Phone reeks of experiment. I think Amazon’s testing something, and the experiment is important enough to spend a ton of money and create a lot of competitive hostility. After thinking about it a lot and trying to look at the world through Amazon’s eyes, I think I can guess why the Fire Phone would be strategically important to Amazon. I believe it’s not about the phone market; it’s about the evolution of mobile commerce and the future of Amazon itself.

To explain why, I have to give a bit of background on mobile commerce. For online retailers, the single most frustrating thing about mobile technology, especially smartphones, is that it people using it don’t buy a lot of stuff. They’ll browse in your web store and use your shopping app, but when it comes time to buy they often don’t purchase. The industry rule of thumb is that a good commerce site on a personal computer will convert about 3% of shoppers to buyers (in other words, for every 100 online shoppers you make three sales). The conversion rate for smartphones is a third of that, about 1%.

In an industry that would kill to improve conversion by a tenth of a point, that drop from 3% to 1% is horrifying. Many commerce companies have spent years trying to fix it, and through incredible effort and careful experimentation it is indeed possible to increase the mobile conversion rate. In my day job at UserTesting that’s one of the things I help companies do. But it’s a slow process of incremental fixes, and in the meantime mobile web use is growing explosively. Here’s the nightmare scenario for an online retailer:

—What if the next generation of internet users moves to smartphones and wearables faster than we can figure out how to fix mobile shopping?

—What if, as people move to mobile, the conversion rate for our whole business drops from 3% to 1%?

—And most disturbing for a category leader like Amazon, what if the low conversion rate on mobile is a sign that the online store itself is not a good fit for smartphones? What if some new mobile technology or app makes online shopping obsolete, just as online stores have been making traditional retail stores obsolete? What if Amazon itself is the next big tech dinosaur?

Don’t laugh. Platform transitions in tech usually make the old category leaders obsolete. Read about Lotus Development or Digital Equipment Corporation if you don’t believe it.

That existential threat is the kind of thing I’d expect Jeff Bezos to worry about. It’s a huge change that comes from an unexpected direction and could cut the heart out of his business. What’s worse, by the time the threat becomes obvious it’ll probably be too late to respond to it.

So the time to act is now. Amazon needs to dive into mobile and figure out what the shopping experience would look like if you built it into a phone from the ground up.

If that’s Amazon’s motivation, then the Fire Phone is really all about Firefly, Amazon’s instant-buying technology. I think the question being tested is whether you can completely replace a web store with a properly configured phone. What if, instead of going to an online store to buy something, your phone itself became the store? What if, instead of searching for the thing you want to buy, you could just take a picture of it, or scan its barcode, or say its name? 

Amazon everywhere. Futurist Paul Saffo put it this way: “Firefly allows Amazon to invade every store in every mall on the planet and turn it into a de facto showroom for Amazon” (link). I’d go even further. I’d say Firefly is an effort to turn the entire world into an Amazon store.

If Amazon makes that phone first, it takes another big chunk out of Walmart and Target and eBay and every other retailer out there, physical or virtual. If someone else makes it first, Amazon itself is in mortal danger.

I think that’s why Amazon had to make a phone. It needs to test and tune the integration of mobile hardware and software in the purchasing process, and that would not be possible on someone else’s phone. It also doesn’t want to share the data it’ll collect with any other phone vendor (especially not one allied with Google), since that could be the key to the future of the whole company. 

From this perspective, the rest of the Fire Phone announcement makes more sense. You need to toss in a few sexy features, like the semi-3D screen, to attract some users. The price doesn’t have to be low because Amazon doesn’t want to sell a gazillion phones. One carrier in one country is enough because Amazon’s not pushing for world domination yet. It needs just enough users to give it a robust experimental base. Then it’ll observe, and it’ll learn, and it’ll tweak the experiment, and it’ll learn some more.

And then, when it gets the formula right, we’ll see the real Amazon phone. I’d expect it to be more aggressively priced and much more broadly available. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Amazon also release Firefly apps for other phones at the same time. By that point Amazon’s priority won’t be secrecy, it’ll be rapid domination.

Or maybe the experiment will fail. Maybe Amazon will learn that there is no magic way to turn a smartphone into a store. In that case it’ll quietly make the phone disappear, write off the losses, and move on to other priorities. Hey, it’s just money, and we all know how Jeff Bezos feels about that.


What it means for the rest of us

Do you remember back when Google was just getting started in smartphones, and there was widespread speculation that Google would give away a phone with free wireless service? The idea was that the things Google would learn from the user were worth more than the cost of a phone service plan. That idea faded away as Google focused on co-opting rather than destroying the mobile industry, and as it realized that it couldn’t make enough money from phone users to pay for the service.

It might be time to revisit that scenario. If anyone can figure out how to make a free phone pay for itself, it would probably be Amazon. Even if it can’t give away a phone for free, it might be able to offer steep discounts, putting the rest of the phone industry at a huge disadvantage. If you’re Google or Apple, you don’t have the sort of retail back end that Amazon does, so you can’t directly match that strategy (although Google might try). A better option is to team up with the other companies threatened by Firefly. Perhaps you create a Firefly-equivalent app and open it to connectivity with anyone else’s online store in exchange for some sort of revenue sharing.

That approach requires heavy skills in alliance building. Apple might be able to pull it off, but they tend to work exclusively with a small number of subservient partners. Google could try for a broad alliance -- it likes to do everything big -- but I doubt it has the focus and consistency to create a lasting partnership of equals with large numbers of companies. (In that vein, it’s meaningful that Google started on a path similar to Firefly back in 2010 with Google Goggles, but killed the product a few weeks before the Fire Phone announcement because it was “a fun feature, but also a feature of no clear use to too many people” link).

So Amazon’s potential strategy plays to the weaknesses of its biggest competitors.

I wonder if Apple might be willing to build a long-term partnership with Amazon, instead of competing against it. In addition to cooperating on mobile commerce, Amazon could help Apple with its portfolio of online services, a constant weakness of the company. Steve Jobs would not have done it; I think Tim Cook might.

If you’re an e-commerce company, you should investigate the Firefly APIs. It looks like you can plug into the Firefly system to make your own offers when a user scans an object. You’ll still need to convince users to install your plugin, but at least this will give you options. Besides, you need to learn how this new shopping paradigm works.

If you’re a bricks-and-mortar retailer, I think you shouldn’t waste time worrying about people using your store as a showroom for Amazon. You can’t stop that anyway. Instead, look at how you can enhance the shopping experience by embracing smartphones. To give one example, what if every product in your store had a QR code that took a smartphone user to your page for that product, with additional information, FAQs, and special offers? I’d love to have that in one of the box box retail stores where you can never find a sales rep. You’d enhance the shopping experience and maybe intercept shoppers before they turn to Amazon. Plus you’d get data on what people actually do inside your store.

I’m kind of surprised that Apple and Google haven’t already built a QR scanning app into their mobile platforms. It’d be a logical way to partner with retailers and get leverage against Amazon.

If you’re another mobile phone vendor, such as Samsung, you should talk with Amazon about integrating Firefly into your phones in exchange for a cut of the revenue. Better to embrace the company now than to risk competing against a heavily-subsidized Amazon phone in the future.

And for anybody who deals with mobile, the Fire Phone is a reminder that we’re just getting started. Although we talk of smartphones as a maturing market, we’re barely beginning to learn how mobile devices will change our lives. We stand in the foothills of the Himalayas. The biggest mobile opportunities, and the biggest disruptions to today’s businesses, are still ahead of us.

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 main 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.

 

Source

Really, who has the marketing budget Coca-Cola and Nike can boast? Smaller companies sit in awe of the glitzy commercials and celebrity endorsements and think, “I could never do that.” Honestly, without those monster marketing budgets, you can’t. That doesn’t mean you can’t make a big impact with the money you have, though.

To make the biggest impact, you don’t have to make a splash. You just have to be savvy and patient in equal measure. Not many campaigns will bring customers in droves overnight, but you can build a steady stream of leads through your inbound marketing efforts. Want to know how? Here are 5 ways to make a huge impact with less money.

Know Your Buyers

If you don’t know who is buying your products or services, you’ve already lost the war. A deep understanding of your buyers and their pain points is necessary before you can do anything else.

Sam Mallikarjunan of HubSpot explains, “Your company’s buyer personas do much more than give you a target audience for your content. These are fictional characters created to flesh out real customers to help you focus your efforts, yes. They’re also a direct reflection of your company’s goals and ideals.” How you solve their problems becomes your company’s identity. If you miss this mark, you’ll miss every other one that follows. Read on, and you’ll see what I mean.

Provide Quality Content

Your customers crave quality content, whether you provide text, videos, or images. They want information about your company, including how you plan to solve their problems. Creativity goes a long way when it comes to content, but sometimes just the facts will reach people, too.

The beauty of your content is that you can use it in several ways. Website content is, of course, very important, but not everyone will find you first through your site. Social media, newsletters, and email marketing all rely on the media you create, and none of that requires more than your time. Even if you can’t do it all on your own, you don’t need a pricey marketing department. Outsourcing to freelancers will save you thousands, especially if you work with a contractor who understands the tactics discussed here.

Focus on SEO

You don’t need to spend millions for television and radio spots. No one pays attention to those ads anyway, unless you’ve spent millions more on a catchy commercial. No, one of the main focuses of your marketing efforts should be your SEO.

Search engine optimization takes time, patience, and specialized knowledge, but it doesn’t cost a lot to take your place at the top of search results. A large part of SEO is knowing your buyer personas and how they’ll search for you so you can create content they’ll love. Keywords are only a small part of this, too, so don’t get caught up in stuffing search phrases into your website. Instead, focus on the quality of the content you provide and the pain points you solve for your customers. Google loves that kind of quality and will reward you kindly.

Don’t you want people to find you when they really need you instead of ignoring your commercials? That’s what I thought.

Segment Contact Lists

Knowing how to slice your contact list into relevant chunks will save you so much time and effort while also giving you the ability to deliver pertinent information to those who are ready to see it.

Why would you send the same offers and discounts to your loyal, long-time customers as you would to a brand-new lead? The buyers who don’t fit that particular message will toss the email in their trash. If you’re lucky, they won’t mark you as spam or unsubscribe. If you’re blasting everyone in your contact list with the same information, you’re spinning your wheels. And time is money you don’t have, right?

Use That Social Media

So far, these tips for marketing on a budget focus on behind-the-scenes work—those tasks that require patience and persistence. When you do want to make a splash with your branded content and get out there in front of your audience, take to your Twitter or Facebook accounts. Your social media is a great way to firmly establish your brand and reach out to a wider audience at any time. Many companies have successfully conveyed their identities through social media without ever once relying on “traditional” marketing techniques.

Before you sign up for every account out there, determine where your buyers are spending their time. Facebook is always a safe bet, but you don’t want to invest a lot of effort into Twitter and Instagram if your customers are high-level executives. LinkedIn is probably a better choice in this situation. If you do cater to a younger, trendier crowd, Instagram is a great way to share your company images, products, and activities—mostly because the platform is still completely free for businesses and doesn’t yet govern marketing efforts.

These techniques are a great start, but they still don’t cover everything. What would you suggest to reach your buyers without breaking the bank? I’d love to know your thoughts, so leave a comment to start a new conversation.

The post How to Be in the Top 5% of Bloggers: New Research Results appeared first on Copyblogger.

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I did a Google Search of “post and pray method” hoping to find some witty definition, but apparently the staffing industry has cornered the market (or at least the search market) on that phrase.

So I’ll have to take a stab at my own (hopefully witty) definition:

“The post and pray method is a favorite method of social media “gurus,” “ninjas,” and “mavens” whereby they don’t follow any sort of organized structure or content calendar for publishing posts to social media, and instead find cat memes or take quotes (from other authors) and make them “pretty” in Canva. These “experts” then post them, and pray the post(s) get interaction and engagement. In short, this method requires little to no social media or business strategy.”

Why The Post & Pray Method Doesn’t Work

Like any other business or marketing initiative, social media also requires a strategy. As I mentioned in, “What You Absolutely Need To Know About Content Marketing,” everything should start with your why. Without it, you’re risking running askew of the C-Suite (or whoever you answer to).

Besides that, the “spray and pray” method has been shown to “yield lower response rates and hurt your brand.”

Ideal content — especially social content — is specifically created with your target audiences in mind. And beyond that, it should fall into one of three categories:

1. Top of the funnel
2. Middle of funnel
3. Bottom of the funnel

Let’s break those down for a better look at a content strategy.

Top Of The Funnel

Your would-be customer knows they have a problem. They’re looking to fix it. YOU should be looking to fix for them by offering:

• Free tips/tricks
• Free cheat sheets/guides
• Free checklists
• Free whitepapers
• Free eBooks
• Free videos

Middle Of The Funnel

Your would-be customer (now prospect) recognizes that you have a solution for their problem(s).YOU should be qualifying yourself as the go-to company/consultant/person to buy from with:

• Free webinars
• Case studies
• Freemium service or free trial/sample
• FAQs
• Customer testimonials
• Product or service collateral

Bottom Of The Funnel

Your would-be customer is ready to purchase. YOU help them make the purchase with you by offering:

• Free trial/sample/demo
• Free consultation
• Estimates/quotes/proposals
• Coupons or specials

Keep in mind that today the funnel is a little less linear and that consumers can enter from the top, bottom or sides – all you need to focus on is having the content available to them no matter where they are in the buying pattern.

By looking at each of above funnel examples, you should be able to create plenty of long-form content for your blog, eBooks, or other downloadable pieces. And from there you should be taking snackable bites of tips, tricks and helpful content to place on your social platforms.

Sooooo, I can see about 16 reasons you shouldn’t EVER have to use the post and pray method.

What To Post

Furthermore, there are other places you can look to see what kind of content you can post for your social audiences. And there’s no praying needed since these tactics show you the tried-and-true data.

**Click on photos below for larger views.

Facebook

Check your Facebook Insights for three main things:

1. Under Posts, then Post Types: You’ll see the Average Reach and Average Engagement for each type of post you typically use on your page (in my example below, they’re Links, Status (text-only posts), and Photo). For my report you can see that while link posts (true to recent reports) are given more Reach by Facebook, Photo posts still get the most Post Clicks, Likes, Comments and Shares.

   
   

2. Under Posts, Post Types: Scroll down to All Posts Published and reconfigure your report to show you the best posts by Engagement (you can do this by clicking on Engagement in the menu and choosing Post Clicks or Likes, Comments & Shares). Here you can see that personal, branded, and behind-the-scenes content does best for us (for the date range given), and that the majority of those posts were photos. This info can help us carefully choose content that gets engagement (no praying required!) moving forward.

   
   

3. Under Posts, When Your Fans Are Online: This is one place we like to check every week to ensure we’re posting our snackable bites at the best time possible. Why “post and pray” with the times of your post when Facebook tells you when the majority of your fans are online?! As our example from the B Squared Media Facebook Page shows, the best timeframe is between 10AM-4PM EST — but we can get even more specific than that (and do!).

   

Twitter

For Twitter, we use Sprout Social to show us our best times to tweet (based on clicks). I know that’s not helpful if you’re not a Sprout user, so here’s a super post from Buffer on four ways you can find your best tweet times.

We also perform monthly (sometimes weekly) click audits to help us learn which content and hashtags are performing best.

Google Plus

Similarly, we use Sprout Social to configure our best times to post to G+. But you can also try Timing+, which takes a look at your last 100 G+ posts and gives you an optimal time for publishing your content.

You can also sign into your Google Plus Page, switch to My Business, and view all of your Insights for your Page.

They’re similar to Facebook Insights and are broken down by Visibility, Engagement, Audience, and Platform.

CircleCount is another cool tool to try.

LinkedIn, Instagram & Others

With sites that are harder to understand (no Insights, or API reporting) we usually track and monitor our stats within a custom Excel file (yet another reason to have a content calendar and publishing schedule!), and/or perform monthly click audits.

10 Steps For Posting With Confidence

By using the data on your social audiences you can — and should! — post with confidence. There’s no reason to rely on kitty cats, memes, and over-used quotes.

There’s no reason you can’t share some of your own original content to help would-be customers make their way through your sales funnel.

Follow these 10 steps to throw the post and pray method in the trash (where it belongs … PU!):

1. Know your business strategy & goals
2. Know your marketing strategy & goals
3. Engage in Content Marketing (create original content to nurture leads through your funnel/pipeline)
4. Create your social strategy & goals (tie into biz and marketing goals)
5. Break your original content down into snackable bites and place on social media sites
6. Create a content calendar or publishing schedule to manage content and keep on track
7. Use behind-the-scenes elements along with storytelling to humanize your brand
8. Review Insights and other metrics weekly or monthly to review, refresh and recycle content
9. Look for holes in your funnel and repeat steps 3-8
10. Be consistent!

Is this complicated? NO. Does it take time and talent. Heck yeah! If you can’t do it yourself I encourage you to look outside your company and outsource your social media efforts (hint, hint, wink, wink!).

Yes, posting is fluid and not written in stone, but the post and pray method isn’t being fluid – it’s being lazy, or flat out not knowing what you’re doing. And that’s a fact, jack!

Do you agree or disagree? Let me know in the comments section below!

See you in the social sphere!

 The article that follows is a reprint from my column in the July Top Sales World magazine, the one online magazine I never miss. The July issue includes a number of articles I found to be quite interesting including but not limited to:  Why Being a B2B Buyer Is Different – Consumerization is a Poor Comparison By Tamara Schenk, The #1 Roadblock to your Prospecting Success by Bernadette McClelland, and 5 Questions to Assess Your Impact As a Leader by Keith Rosen. Top Sales World will soon be published as a smaller, weekly periodical which will make it all the more timely and manageable. Click here to learn more and to subscribe.

With a large percentage of buyer’s now beginning their search for solutions on the internet, and with more and more marketing content being delivered to those buyers, sellers have a lot more inbound leads. At one point, it became neither possible nor desirable to have a salesperson follow-up on each lead for two reasons.

1. The sheer number of leads would require a large, high-cost sales force. This partly explains the fast growth in the number of inside sales organizations.
2. The source of inbound web “leads” is mostly from completed webforms. A completed webform doesn’t by itself signal a qualified buyer.  It signals an inferred interest at best.

These two factors paved the way for a new type of solution referred to as marketing automation. The process of qualifying inbound leads could now be automated.  Marketing automation solutions like Act-On and Marketo make it possible to create rules for scoring leads based on online buyer behavior along with buyer profile information. Those with lower scores get nurtured automatically by the system. Those with higher scores are routed to sales as Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs).

Because of marketing automation, Marketing is now able to nurture, score and route a much higher number of MQLs than ever before.

But what kind of automation is available for salespeople to effectively and efficiently move Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) through the funnel?

The time has come for the concept of a Selling Automation system. There are big breakthroughs in automating the flow of information to salespeople, as well as automating the prioritization and completion of tasks. For mobile reps, this comes in the form of innovative solutions like Badger Maps, Selligy and Clari.

Here, I’d like to talk about breakthroughs in the way salespeople can use content to capture the attention and motivate prospects—just like marketing is doing—but during the sales cycle.

Selling automation software allows sales reps to run their own interactive campaigns at a more personalized and direct level.

For instance, a solution by Tellwise allows sellers to reach out to potential buyers with content and, depending on how that buyer interacts with the content (did they click on it? ignore it? re-tweet it?), the system automatically alerts them that subsequent material is available. The tool tracks every conceivable metric with all potential customers and notifies sellers about how to proceed.

Selling automation technology drives down the cost of making a sale because reps prospect more effectively, communicate more efficiently and better understand their prospects’ interest and timing.

If you want to learn more about the concept of selling automation I highly recommend an informative whitepaper courtesy of Tellwise; “How to Use Selling Automation to Stay Ahead of the Game.”

There has been an influx of articles in my Twitter feed recently that look a lot like “X habits of happy/successful people.” So I’m hopping on the bandwagon a little bit here and I’m going to discuss what habits are essential for you as a CEO to have in order to be happy with your marketing team.

I know you have meetings to attend, phone calls to answer, budgets to approve, sales to close, and a million other things to take care of throughout the work week. So many things in fact that thinking about how to deal with your marketing department (whether it’s in-house or outsourced) might fall by the wayside. But in order to bring in the type of leads you want for your business, a good relationship with your marketing department is ideal. We need to understand what you want, how you want it, and when you want it in order to have the ideal relationship with you.

Have goals and faith that your marketing team can reach them

As a business owner, we understand you are always trying to grow your business and have goals you want to reach in order to do that. You’re marketing department is here to help you reach those goals but we need to know what they are first. Some things we’re interest in:

• Yearly revenue goal
• Number of sales needed to reach that goal
• What costs you would like to cut down on
• Any growth goal such as new employees, increased budget, new offices, etc.
• Customer acquisition and retention numbers

Those are numerical goals that we can help you reach, track, and analyze. But as your marketing team we want to try innovative ways to get there. A good habit to increase your happiness is to try new tactics. Granted, not all of these tactics will bring amazing results but you’ll never know until you try. We want to and will reach the goals you lay out, but we also have some of our own that we’re concerned with.

• Make you a thought leader in the industry
• Add value to your business
• Help you network (via social media)
• Find quality sales
• Keep up with customers
• Stay in touch with leads

In order to reach these more abstract goals, innovation is key. We’ll want to try different social media platforms like Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter; wherever your target audience is hanging out. We’ll want to spend money on paid search ads to help boost your brand and place your business in front of your audience. We’ll want to have a business blog to portray you as a thought leader in your industry. We’ll want to send nurturing emails to customers and leads in to build a good relationship and create qualified, educated leads for you. In order to do all of this we need you to be open and interested in going down different avenues and trying new ideas in order to stand out in the very large crowd and to reach both sets of goals!

Communicate content expectations and guidelines

As marketers, our job is to create content for you. One very large problem we tend to run into is that the CEO’s don’t give up enough control over this which can slow down the process. As I’m sure you’ve heard before, marketing doesn’t work without having content to market. A good habit to get into as a CEO is to communicate with your marketing team about what content you’re comfortable with, how much approval you want in the creation of it, and guidelines on how you want to approve it. Once the process is understood and set up, the rest will run smoothly.

Premium content and blogging is essential to your marketing strategy but we understand it requires input from you as the CEO. Each industry is different but you, or your marketing agency, has the ability to educate themselves and/or find writers who are experts in your industry and can knowledgably write about your business. Once you have a writer you trust you can allow your marketing team to take it from there as far as creating the content.

Other content like emails and landing page copy should be things that you trust your marketing team to handle. Yes, we understand you want to look over it and approve it, but we are marketers because we are capable of doing that. You have a business to run, we have campaigns to market. Working together is essential, but needing too much control over the content process will slow down efforts and not provide you the marketing results we promised you! Setting up these content expectations and guidelines is a great habit to get into.

Keep in touch with their marketing department

As much as we want control over certain things, we also want to hear from you. It’s our job to check in via email, phone, and meetings in regards to deadlines, analytics, reports, approvals, ideas, etc. But when it comes to actually getting that approval or going over reports we really do enjoy your input. After all, you are the CEO and we respect and learn from your knowledge and ideas. So keeping up with communication is always needed.

If you’re very “hands on” then let us know so we can set up a frequency of meetings that works with your schedule. If you’re more of a “hands off” type of person that’s fine too, just communicate with us from the beginning that you trust what we can do and prefer to let us handle what marketers are there for. Of course we’ll still communicate with you either way, just the frequency and type of communication might differ.

Have fun and connect with their marketing department

At the end of the day the best habit to have with your marketing team is a connection and hopefully a fun one at that! Marketing will help you grow your business and we will be more inclined to go above and beyond if we have a good connection with the person in charge (that would be you)! So make sure you’re reaching out to your marketing department and trying to show them that even though they are your employee, they want to enjoy their jobs just as much as you do. Pleasant, happy, fun, people are so much more fun to have meetings with too! :)

Today’s B2B buyers are social.

They no longer immediately call a sales rep when they want to learn about a product. Instead, they search Google or tap their social networks for proof that a product delivers results.

Case studies are a great way to demonstrate this social proof.

A hawkeye study revealed that 71 percent of B2B buyers in the awareness stage and 77 percent in the evaluation stage of the sales cycle cited testimonials and case studies as the most influential types of content.

Since B2B buyers rely on case studies in multiple stages of the sales cycle, developing customer success stories should be at the top of your “to do” list.

A classic case study is a two-page customer success story that describes:

• The challenge your customer faced before she started working with you
• How your customer found you and why she selected you over other vendors
• The process of implementing your product
• Any results your customer achieved after she implemented your product

When I write a case study, I start with this format, as it allows me to get the complete story.

However, not everyone is going to read a classic case study. Some of your ideal customers may not have the time to read one or may prefer other types of content – such as audio or video. You’ll reach a wider audience if you repurpose your case studies for different channels.

Here are some alternatives to the classic case study that can help you get more ROI from your content:

The “How-To” Case Study

This type of case study is a cross between a “how-to” article and a customer success story. It works well on blogs, as many readers find blog posts when they look for information on how to solve a problem.

A “how-to” case study starts by describing your customer’s key challenges and how she found you. However, the implementation section is replaced by a list of tips. These tips can be advice from your customer that will help others who are dealing with the same situation. For example, your customer can address:

• The steps someone must take when implementing a similar solution
• What to know before starting the process
• The top five things to consider before purchasing a similar solution
• What someone can learn during the process

One of the reasons I like this format is because it’s presented as one customer giving advice to another. Here’s an example of a “how-to” case study.

The SlideShare Case Study

If your target audience is visual, you can connect with them by turning your case studies into presentations. Check out this example from Influitive to see what you can do with a SlideShare case study:

Here are some reasons why I like this example:

• Influitive uses a lot of images and minimal text. You don’t want to overload your slides with text, as it can make your story boring and difficult to read. Using bold images and a few great quotes from your customer works well for this format.
• The presentation is fun and engaging.
• Leads can opt in directly from the case study. One of the benefits of using SlideShare is that you can embed lead generation forms directly into your presentations. This feature is only available with SlideShare’s PRO plans, but it’s well worth it.

Related Class: Engagement Strategies: The Digital Customer Experience Case Study

The Mini Case Study

A mini case study can be a condensed version of a full case study or a customer testimonial. You can use them in the following places:

• Your website
• Emails
• Your social networks
• Brochures and sell sheets
• White papers and ebooks
• Direct mail pieces
• Your phone system’s “on hold” music

The “Customer’s Voice” Case Study

In this type of case study, your customer tells her story in her own words. Here are some examples:

• Your customer presents her case study at a conference
• You interview a customer during a podcast
• You create a video of a customer telling her story

Here’s an example of a great video case study from GoToMeeting:

Ready to create your own case study example? In this Online Marketing Institute class, B2B Video Best Practices, you’ll learn how Cisco uses video online to reach their target audiences throughout the customer journey, and get best practices for corporate websites and YouTube. You’ll also see the lessons Cisco learned from creating over 1,000 marketing videos every year. Enroll today!

Marketing automation is invaluable.

It helps score and grade leads, run outbound email and drip campaigns, letting sales and marketing teams make educated decisions. It can also track links, build forms, and post on social.

All of which can help your business thrive.

But it was built for marketers.

At its foundation it is a volume based approach. Once you start a campaign, having full control over each and every interaction is impossible.

Sales development is focused on maximizing the response rate of a smaller group of targeted prospects. It needs to automate the manual labor, but leave room for tweaks before a rep hits “send.”

Here are five reasons sales development teams should use a dedicated tool:

1. Sales Development Demands Quick Adjustments

They need to be able to adjust any part of an email to a specific prospect before sending it. They need to add people to a cadence on the fly, and accommodate prospects who are out of the office.

A perfect sales development tool removes the manual labor and monotony of writing a new email to every prospect, while maintaining the ability to fluidly adjust an outreach scheme.

It’s maintains the balance between control and efficiency.

2. It Can Avoid Sending Through Transactional Servers

Cookie cutter mass emails end up in spam folders or promotional tabs that screams, “this is an email template.”

Sales development reps can’t allow that to happen. They need to send emails that build rapport, not ones that never get read.

3. Sales Development Is A Day-To-Day Process

SDRs build lists of targeted prospects on a daily basis.

Each and every day, SDRs are launching mini-campaigns to a very specific group of prospects.

Reps need to be prompted exactly when to send another email or make another call, otherwise they’ll spend all their time struggling to follow up strategically.

4. It Allows Higher Customization For Logging In CRM

As reps get responses and set demos, they’re able to log notes on an individual basis.

This helps smooth the transition between SDRs and Account Executives as reps’ actions can be mapped to specific methods for tracking in CRM.
Reps can have more focused follow-ups, simply by leveraging information that’s already been logged.

5. Features Are Based On Interaction

Next steps aren’t the same for every prospect. Sales development is reactionary, so it depends on when and how they respond.

While a great tools automates the process by providing reminders and suggestions, it doesn’t take full control of what’s been sent (like many campaigns).

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What sales development really needs, is a tool all its own. One that incorporates the strengths of marketing automation (like tracking clicks and opens), as well as addressing the nuances of the sales development process.

Sprout Social is a Chicago-based SaaS company that provides social media management, engagement and analytics tools. Founded in 2010, the company has recently completed a Series B funding round for $18 million, according to Crunchbase. By all accounts, Sprout Social has done well so far, with more than 10,000 customers including brands such as AMD, Nokia, McDonalds and Pepsi. Let’s take a look at how they do their marketing.

Brand Awareness and Reach

Sprout Social isn’t shy about getting the word out on search engines and social media. After all, it has some stiff competition from Hootsuite, Sysomos and a host of smaller SaaS startups in the social media management tool space. Sprout Social ranks third in Adwords, second in Google organic SERPs and third on Bing for “social media management software.” The brand averages around 30K visits a day and ranks in the top 10 on Google for about 1,000 keywords. It has more than 49K followers on Twitter, 37K Facebook likes and 20K Google+ followers driving almost 1 million views. Sprout is all over media as well—everything from marketing and social media conferences to TV and news outlets. A couple of months ago it was highlighted by Fox News Chicago for being a very cool place to work for millennials.

Content Marketing

The Sprout Social website features simple, benefit-focused messaging and a direct, up-front call to action to sign up for a free trial. The home page is optimized for “social media management software” and features a scroll-down approach to show the visitor what the software does, who uses it and user examples. While there is nothing ground-breaking about Sprout Social’s approach to website design or messaging, what it is doing is working. In particular, its content marketing program is operating at a high level, including making effective use of owned, earned and paid media, which undoubtedly drive both organic search and social media traffic to the site.

Sprout’s Insights section features at least one new blog post per day, and its posts offer insightful tips and thought leadership on the business use of social media. Individual posts typically garner 50+ tweets and good distribution on Google+ and Facebook, as well. Sprout’s own community managers share helpful content from third parties, in addition to their own content, and participate in online events, such as a recent #CMGRHangout Panel on the Habits of Successful [Social Media] Community Managers. Sprout Social also offers numerous helpful guides and thought leadership pieces, as well as press coverage in its Resources area of the Insights section.

Free Trial Experience

Like most SaaS companies, Sprout Social focuses on converting visitors into free trial subscribers as their primary call to action. You get an initial view of the pricing options, then an invitation to register for a free 30-day trial. Registration is simple, and Sprout leads you through the permission process for accessing your social media profiles. You are encouraged to add more team members throughout the process. This is smart, because it exposes more people from your company and may add a groundswell of support for subscribing to the service beyond the trial. It took a few minutes to grab my social profile feeds and update the main dashboard, so I wasn’t sure if everything was working, but after clicking my Messages, I could start to monitor my profiles.

One of the keys to success in SaaS free trials is the customer experience, especially when it comes to support. Is the software easy to use, and how easy is it to find help when you need it? Sprout Social does have a live chat feature for both Sales and Support, which is good. I received an email within an hour or so thanking me for the trial subscription and offering both new user support resources and contact information for direct support. This type of communication is essential to make sure new users have a positive experience with the trial. At the end of the email, they let me know more help is on the way:

“We’ll be in touch throughout your trial to ensure you enjoy everything we have to offer! – Team Sprout”

Overall Impressions

SaaS Marketers can learn a lot from Sprout Social’s overall strategy and execution. In general, the visitor experience is strong, and it’s easy to understand what the software does and why I should be interested. While there is plenty of solid, helpful information in the Insights blog, there is really only one call to action on the website, a free trial, so you’re either in or you’re out. Risky? Time will tell. The free trial itself seems to be easy and effective so far. I’m looking forward to seeing how the Sales and Marketing Team approaches me during the 30 days to convert me into a customer. Some things Sprout Social may want to consider going forward:

• Add some additional content-driven calls to action on the home page in the scrollable area to convert top-funnel leads that may not be ready for a free trial.
• Add a Support link in the main website navigation (right now it’s buried in the sprocket on the app itself).
• Elevate one or two case studies to the Home page to show how users are directly benefiting.
• Add some messaging on how Sprout Social differentiates itself from competitors.
• Add links to third-party comparisons and review sites mentioning the brand. Consumers want to know how Sprout compares to its competitors, and they appreciate transparency.
• Feature more real stories from Sprout users, not just a few testimonials—elebrate their successes and invite them to add more reviews and comments. This is what sells software today.

I look forward to following the progress of Sprout Social and getting a feel for how the company markets and sells to me. I’ll be updating this post in the comments section as things develop. I plan to take the free trial seriously, and I’m open minded about a possible purchase at the end of the trial.

What are your experiences with other SaaS companies and their marketing strategies?

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Content marketing and SEO go hand in hand. Great content attracts links and can rank highly, while good SEO means the content you produce brings searchers to your site. 

SEO should be a major part of your content strategy, and the best way to rank well and to survive algorithm changes, is to produce unique and valuable content. 

In this post I'll look at how we approach content and SEO at Econsultancy...

Content marketing and SEO

These are two disciplines which should work closely together, as one feeds off another. 

Getting the SEO basics right improves the performance of your content, while one of the best ways to improve search rankings is by producing unique content. 

Indeed, as our State of Search Marketing Report 2013 found, organisations are more likely to integrate content marketing with their SEO strategy than they are with any other digital marketing discipline. 

Nearly half (45%) of all companies say this area is ‘highly integrated’ with their SEO efforts, compared to just 24% for paid search marketing and 16% for mobile marketing. 

Q: To what degree are your search engine optimisation efforts integrated with the following digital marketing disciplines?

Quality before quantity

This is all important. While thin content created to provide fodder to Google's crawlers may have worked (in a fashion) years ago, it just doesn't cut the mustard now.

Besides, weak content churned out to make up the numbers will not work from a content marketing perspective. No-one wants to read that. 

Though we have expectations of our writers in terms of volume of output, this is far less important than the quality of the articles they produce. 

Indeed, one well-written article which is useful for our readers can achieve much more than a dozen quick posts. 

We do look to cross-promote our services on the blog, but the main focus is on writing articles for are interesting and valuable for us and our readers. 

Original content

Original and engaging content helps to set you apart from competitors and gives people a compelling reason to read and share your content. 

Google is looking for fresh and unique content, so give it what it wants.

Keyword research

Before you create a piece of content, think about what you are trying to achieve with it. What do you want to rank/be known for? Are you aiming for traffic and awareness or leads from specific visitors?

We look to rank for terms which are related to our paid research, events and training, so a little research before you write and publish goes a long way.

Make the most of the tools available. These include: 

• Google Trends is useful for deciding on the best wording for your posts. E.g. should I say delivery or shipping? Basket or cart? and so on. 
• Analytics will tell you what has worked before for whatever goals you want to achieve. Keyword data is almost useless for us now. thanks to (not provided) but we can still see which posts are popular, which have engaged readers, and which ones have been most valuable in terms of leads or conversions. 

  

• Keyword tools are very useful for generating ideas. This post shows five content tools which are worth checking out, especially the novel use of Google's keyword planner. 

Measurement

I place a lot of importance on measuring the results from the content you create, and I look at various factors. 

• Traffic. Pageviews and visits aren't everything for a business like ours, but they do give you an idea of what your audience is interested in. Also, as a writer, you like to know that someone is reading the fruits of your labour. 
• Conversions. Though we're more likely to generate awareness and leads, we like to show the rest of the business that we can make a few sales too. I have various custom segments and reports which can show transactions which followed on from from visits to the blog.
• Engagement. We want people who arrive on the blog to stay a while and browse the site. To achieve this we look to link to related and relevant content, paid and free. To measure, we can look at metrics like bounce rates, time on page, while I have some useful custom reports that look at visitors who viewed multiple pages. 
• Search referrals. Again, Google's attitude to referral data makes tracking exact keywords very difficult, but we can look at the volume of visits from search, while data on site search provides some useful clues. 
• Tracking rankings and keyword performance. We like to experiment with SEO and see where this takes us, so we track the search performance of selected keywords. You can do this manually, but I find that tools such as Moz Analytics save a lot of time and help to track and improve rankings over time. 

Headlines

Headlines are massively important. They should be descriptive and alluring, without overdoing it. 

So, 'Five valuable Google Analytics reports to improve conversions' is descriptive and gives people a reason to click, while 'Five Google Analytics reports that will save your life and make you millions' is promising a little too much. 

While there's a backlash from some against lists and numbers, thanks to the likes of Buzzfeed and those awful promoted articles on 'weird tricks to lose weight' the plan fact is that they work well. 

Headlines must be written for the web, something some traditional offline publishers have yet to adapt to. 

Take this recent example from the New York Times. I've noticed a lot of criticism of it on Twitter, and I can see why. 

The story is actually pretty sensational, but the headline is dull and undescriptive. Don't waste your writer's efforts by failing to sell the article as well as you can. 

Of course, you need to think about which keywords and phrases to use in your headlines. How will people find your articles? What do you want to rank for? 

Then there's headline length. We have a 65 character rule, which is applied to most posts.

This is because Google truncates long titles in search results. Given that headlines often become the title tag for a page, you want the full headline to be visible in the search results.

Internal linking

The creation of internal links is an important SEO tactic. Unlike external linking the site owner has complete control over internal links, so it's important to make the most of it.

There are a number of compelling reasons for good internal linking, some are SEO tactics, others are just about improving the user experience by making it easier for visitors to find what they want. 

I've explained internal linking in more detail previously, but here are a few compelling reasons: 

• It helps to distribute link equity. Some pages on your site may have more link equity than others, but internal links allow you to pass some of that onto pages you'd like to improve rankings for. 
• You can improve rankings for target keywords. Relevant anchor text helps search engines to index your pages, though anchor text should be varied to avoid sending any suspicious signals to the search engines. 
• Links help Google to crawl your site. Here's Matt Cutts on the subject. Among other things, he advises that descriptive anchor text helps Google to better understand your content. It's also useful for readers. 

• They send traffic to older posts. A good proportion of our blog traffic is generated by archive posts, and links help us to keep them alive. 

Evergreen content

This is the best long term SEO and content marketing strategy, and it's what we aim to do on this blog. 

Evergreen content is that which is still interesting and relevant weeks, months or even years after its initial publish date. It doesn’t date like news, and the value is that it can deliver traffic, leads, social shares and can occupy valuable search positions for a prolonged period of time.

For example. this post on Google Analytics custom dashboards was publish 12 months ago, but is still delivering traffic to the blog to this date. 

 

Having achieved just over 15,000 pageviews in the first week after publishing, it has amassed more than 130,000 views over the last 12 months.

An article like this, which is a useful resource over time, will attract the kinds of links and engagement metrics that Google is looking for, and can perform well in the search engines over a longer period of time.

It’s a virtuous circle too, as higher rankings means more visits, which leads to more links, and so on.  

For more, see our recent best practice guide, 100+ Practical Content Marketing Tips: A how-to guide for editors, writers and content creators which presents the lessons we've learned from ten years of writing for this blog. 

You’ve heard it ad nauseum, perhaps: Content is created to help your customers — not for you to talk about yourself. You should be focusing on their problems, not on your products. But if the ultimate goal of content is to drive sales, then how do you create content that promotes your product, speaks to your customers, and also helps you reach your business goals?

If you’re overwhelmed by the struggle to combine all of these factors, take a step back and ask yourself the four basic questions below. These are the beginning steps for documenting your content marketing strategy — a process that will keep you from haphazardly creating random content that isn’t relevant to your goals.

Step 1: Learn which audiences can help your company grow

Sure, you should develop buyer personas. But you can’t spend a lot of time targeting prospects who won’t open up their wallets for you. The question is, how do you know who wilI pay for your product?

Do your most promising leads have a particular job title, or work within a certain type of organization? A specific industry? Has sales pinpointed a specific account to target this year?

Once you’ve effectively refined your personas to focus on the target audience most likely to grow your company, you’ll be more prepared to create content that speaks to their needs.

This is much more relevant for B2B products or considered consumer purchases because in these cases multiple decision-makers seek out a wide range of content before deciding on purchasing. Your job is to figure out what content that is and deliver it to them.

For example, Crowe Horwath, a public accounting and consulting firm, decided to target C-level prospects in financial institutions with $1 billion or more in assets across the buying cycle. The company’s content marketing plan included 48 pieces of content in four different topic areas, with content marketing tactics including executive briefs, case studies, infographics, checklists, Q&As, and a video.

Below is an example of an infographic they created for this targeted high-yield market. The content homes in on one challenge the firm’s target audience is likely to be concerned with: understanding how to make sure they are in compliance with the latest financial regulations — a task that’s difficult to do, considering how detailed and involved these issues can get:

The results? According to Top Rank Blog, the infographic resulted in a 70 percent open rate and 778 engaged contacts — two of which ended up bringing in $250,000 in revenue for Crowe Horwath. The company even moved up in the ranks this year to the eighth place in revenue growth in the accounting industry (it had been ninth for several years in a row)!

Step 2: Research the relevant trends and spending habits of your target audience

It’s vital to have a detailed knowledge of issues your target audience members face, trends that impact them, and where they are spending their budgets when it comes to solutions. And if your market is very dynamic, expect to do this on an ongoing basis to make sure you are staying updated on your audience’s priorities.

Also, it may be helpful for you to read up on the lingo for your target’s field. If everyone in that industry is talking about a certain topic, your content should be able to present an informed conversation on it, too! If your content shows that your company is keeping current with industry needs, prospects in your target companies are more likely to listen to you as a trusted partner in the industry. And if your content shows them that you have an understanding of the challenges they currently face — and new ones that are likely to emerge, as a result of other changes on the industry landscape, they’ll be even more attentive.

Step 3: Determine your business’ unique value proposition (UVP)

Why should customers choose to buy your product over one from the competition? Is it easier to use? Faster to implement? Does it offer features that cater to needs their market currently doesn’t have a customized solution for? To learn the answers to these questions, start by checking out your competitors’ content. Thoroughly research how they are positioning their products in the market by analyzing both the format and the substance of their content marketing efforts:

• How do they tell their brand story through their content?: Do they use mostly text-based content, or are there a lot of visuals? Do they have their own blog, or do they mainly publish on third-party sites? Are they active on social media and do they allow their customers to help them tell their story, or do they simply provide one-sided conversations? Does their content use humor, or some other means of attracting attention, or is it more straightforward and serious?
• How well are they serving your audience’s industry?: Do they focus on key customer needs, or simply provide information on their own products and services? Are there gaps in the types of content they produce? Are there certain relevant topics or issues that they are failing to discuss or provide information on?

Armed with this information, you can start to decide how you want to tell your story in comparison. But even if your product has the same value of other products out there, don’t panic. Many products sit in similar fields, with similar solutions. The trick is to find one value that your company excels at, and to communicate it clearly and effectively in all of your content to generate leads and sales.

For example, web hosting is a crowded market. But WordPress hosting company Synthesis distinguishes itself by highlighting the add-on services it offers: content marketing and SEO tools.

Step 4: Use the information you’ve gathered to build your content marketing strategy

Combine the information you’ve learned about your industry with all the details of your UVP to create your key message: one that positions your product as a solution for major pain points experienced by decision-makers in your target audience.

From there, you can start to build your strategy around the specific techniques and tactics you will use to craft this message into content — and to deliver it in a way that your audience will find helpful when making a purchase decision.

To do this, you’ll need to learn where your prospects are looking for the content you intend to create, and how they prefer to consume it. You may even want to (gasp!) talk to real customers, asking them what types of content they think would help them most. An eBook? A webinar? White papers? Something else entirely?

Wrapping it up

After you’ve determined the fundamentals of your content marketing strategy, you’ll be ready to start creating content that serves the goals you’ve outlined, and executing on your plan for delivering it.

With this approach, you’ll be prepared to produce content that focuses on the needs of your best prospects, and drives home the messaging you want to deliver to them.

Want more instruction on how to manage today’s biggest content marketing challenges? Sign up for the Content Marketing Institute Online Training and Certification program. Access over 35 courses, taught by experts from Google, Mashable, SAP, and more.

Cover image by Ryan McGuire, Bells Design, via Gratisography

You did it. You made the sale. The paperwork has gone through and you’re ready to move on to the next prospect and close yet another deal. Little do you know, making the sale was the easy part, maintaining a mutually beneficial relationship with your new client is where things start to get messy. One […]

Aside from a looming U.S. crackdown, benefits of so-called inversion deals are often fleeting

Questioning is undoubtedly a valuable leadership tool. Asking the right questions can help business leaders to anticipate changes, seize opportunities, and move their organizations in new directions.

But how you question is critical. Questions can be great for engaging and motivating people , but they can just as easily be used to confront or blame, and can shift the mood from positive to negative. “We live in the world our questions create,” says David Cooperrider, a professor at Case Western Reserve University and a pioneer of “Appreciative Inquiry,” which holds that questions focusing on strengths and using positive language are far more useful to organizations than questions with a negative focus.

So what are some specific questions to avoid? Based on conversations with Cooperrider and several other leadership experts for my recent book, here are five examples of very common questions leaders may ask that can have the unintended effect of leading people in the wrong direction. With simple tweaks, the same questions can be used to engage people, rather than discourage them.

“What’s the problem?” Company leaders may often find themselves asking this question or some variation of it. “What’s the problem, what’s going wrong, what is broken, what is our biggest threat — that is, unfortunately, the starting point of 80 percent of meetings in management,” Cooperrider says. But he maintains that if a company leader asks questions that are focused on problems and weaknesses, then the organization overall will tend to be fixated on that — rather than focusing on strengths and opportunities. Instead of inquiring about what’s gone wrong or focusing on “the problem,” it’s better to use positive questions geared to leveraging strengths and achieving goals: What are we doing well and how might we build upon that? What is the ideal outcome and how do we get closer to that?

“Whose fault is it?” This question focuses attention on finding a scapegoat when in reality, there is usually plenty of blame to go around for any failure or problem. Keith Yamashita of the SY Partners consultancy says that when leaders ask about fault, they’re often trying to shift blame away from themselves. A better approach would be to ask, How can we work together to shore up any weaknesses? That identifies weak links and areas in need of improvement without focusing too much on blame.

“Why don’t you do it this way?” This question may seem like a mere suggestion, but when asked by a leader, it’s truly a leading question — a way of imposing your ways on others. (Even worse: When this question is asked after the fact, as in Why didn’t you do it this way? Now it’s also second-guessing.) The leadership expert Mary Jo Asmus with Aspire Collaborative Services says, “Asking leading questions such as How about if you do it this way? is just a stealth form of control.” She maintains that if a leader has hired well, he/she “shouldn’t have to control how the work gets done.” Better to allow people to figure out their own ideas and approaches, though you can sometimes help them along by asking, How were you thinking of doing it? What do you have in mind?

“Haven’t we tried this already?” Another, equally bad way of asking this is, Why do you think this would work when it hasn’t worked before? It’s not that a leader shouldn’t raise questions about proposed strategies — especially if something similar has been tried previously — but the tone is important. Phil Kessler of Vistage International, a leadership group for chief executives, points out that this version of the question comes off as condescending and even defeatist. It seems to suggest that everything has been thought of already, and that because something was tried once and didn’t work, it should never be considered again. This fails to recognize that some ideas may have come up short in the past because of bad timing or poor execution, not because the idea itself was wrong. Better to ask, If we tried this now, what would be different this time — and how might that change the results?

“What’s our iPad?” The consultant Dev Patnaik of Jump Associates notes that some version of this question tends to be asked when a panicked boss reacts to a competitor introducing a hot new product. The leader turns to his or her staff and asks, in effect, Why haven’t you come up with something like that? Get cracking! The problem is, this question is leading people to be followers—to think that their job is to imitate what the other guy is doing, as quickly as possible. Rather than put it in those imitative terms, it’s better to ask questions like: Why is our competitor having success with this product? What need is it satisfying? How might we use our particular strengths to do an even better job of meeting customers’ needs?

Looking beyond this list of specific questions, there are other tests you can use to assess whether the question on the tip of your tongue is a good one. In general, a leader should avoid questions “asked in a spirit of advocacy instead of inquiry,” says Tim Ogilvie of the management consultancy Peer Insight. Steer clear of questions “that come across like a parent talking to a child,” says Vistage’s Kessler. And lastly, Dan Rockwell of the blog Leadership Freak adds, “Never ask a question if you don’t want an answer.”

So you’ve a blog and you want to get more money from it.

You know that the most profitable way to do this is by selling products.

But you also know that you need the trust of your audience.

You want them to trust you. To buy from you because they know that you’ll give them great value.

But how to make your audience trust you?

How to make them be sure that you’ll provide great value for them?

The answer is Engagement.

The Secret Weapon To Build A Blog That Builds Business is engagement, not traffic and all this stuff.

Sure, traffic is essential to get people to your blog. But you don’t need thousands of visitors to build a blog that builds business.

Check out Yaro’s post How Much Traffic Does Your Blog Need To Make $100,000 A Year, to know what I mean.

You’ll be astonished to know that you need 200 visitors a day only. Check it.

After you know that engagement is the secret to building your audience and not traffic, the question now is…

How to increase the Engagement of your audience (And make them trust you)

The answer is very simple.

According to Danny Iny, my mentor and engagement expert, the best model for conceptualizing engagement is by increasing the feeling of commitment through rewards over time.

Simply put, reward your audience for every action they take. Keep doing this and you’ll have an engaged audience.

But how to apply this concept?

It’s very simple.

Ask your readers to take action and reward them for doing so.

Here are examples to help you understand what I mean:

• Ask them to subscribe to your blog and reward them with a simple ebook or a video.
• Every time you email them, reward them for opening your email. Give them cookie content as Sonia loves to say. You could give them a simple tip and so on.
• Ask them to reply to your emails with what they’re struggling with and reward them for spending their time by replying to them and helping them with their struggles.
• Reward them for checking your post with great tips.
• Reward them for reaching to the end of your post with a bonus to help them apply what’s included in your post and get results. It could be simple worksheet or actionable step by step guide. You don’t need to go mad on this.
• Ask them to comment on your blog post and reply back rewarding them for their time.
• and so on…

Did you get what I mean?

Ask them to take an action, even if it’ll help them, and reward them for doing so, because this will help you build your business at the end.

It’s very simple.

Actually, you do some of these without you know.

Return back and evaluate your strategy and try to include more actions for your readers to take and reward them for doing so.

You’ll be able at the end to get it and build the business you want.

Take action.

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The post How to Increase The Engagement of Your Audience (And Make them Trust You) appeared first on Blogging Tips.

If you are working in customer service you probably heard about the H2H (Human to Human) trend lately. While I generally agree with the idea that all transactions take place between people, I don’t think the difference between B2C and B2B customers should be ignored.

We established that whether working for a B2C or B2B company, you will have to deal with human beings. But it doesn’t mean that those human beings operate the same or have the same goals.

There are main differences between B2C and B2B customers that you have to take into consideration in your marketing, sales and customer service strategy.

1) They don’t spend money the same way

B2B customers generally buy more and spend more money.

I remember when I used to work for a small digital agency, they managed to thrive and start new projects because they took care of 2-3 very big and loyal clients. The main thing to understand here is that 1 contract of several hundred thousands dollars often kept the agency going for few months which doesn’t happen in B2C.

For the company it means that there is a lot to win (and a lot to loose) with each interaction they have with the customer.

Quick customer service tip: Don’t hesitate to give more attention to bigger clients. Regularly call and schedule meetings to make sure you are going in the same direction. Try to do some preventive service and find out about potential issues before they come to you complaining.

B2C customers might spend less money but don’t forget that contrary to B2B customers, they spend THEIR OWN money. The result is that they’re less willing to risk loosing that money.

A new laptop for example represents a lot of money for a B2C customer. Chances are they will do more research before making their final buying decision. They might only buy one laptop now but if you meet their expectations they will recommand you to their friends and bring business your way. To capture the true value of a B2C customer you have to think about all his and his friends future purchases.

Quick customer service tip: Don’t look at your client’s problem as “the company”, try putting yourself in their shoes. Someone’s broken computer might not be a big deal for you (as a customer service worker) but what if your personal computer broke down? See now you can relate! You just need to use that empathy to show the customer you are on their side and truly understand what they are goind through. Now that you created a bound between you and the customer, you can go back to your customer service rep uniform and provide him with a solution.

2) More people are involved in the decision making process in B2B

One B2B contract often involves more than one person. You have to take that into account and make sure you know from the beginning who you have to include.

It’s always a good practice to know who’s the decision maker and who’s part of the execution team. This way you will know who to go to with your questions.

Communication in B2B companies can sometimes look like a hot mess often resulting in a lot of unecessary CCed people in emails. Try to understand from the beginning who should and shoudn’t be included in your emails.

Quick customer service tip: Learn to tackle the delicate art of Cc recipients. The best way for you to know that you won’t make any mistake is to ask both your colleagues and your clients who you should Cc on your emails. Once you got those answers, the war is not over! You will then need to make sure everyone in the loop hits the “reply to all” button. If not you’re in for a new nightmare called “Forwarding”. That’s all technical details but it can quickly turn your work day into an emailing nightmare.

In B2C things are a lot easier and 1 on 1 conversation is possible in most cases. Problems often appear on the company’s side when several parties are involved and the customer is being transferred from one agent to the other.

Just keep in mind that your customer is (most of the time) alone in this and he doesn’t really think about the fact that his unique transaction involves a lot of people in your company. Customer service jobs can get a little harder in B2C for that reason but also because communication in the company is often less transparent and customer service reps get very little information about what’s going on in other departments.

Quick customer service tip: I know most problems coming your way were not results of your actions. In other words, it’s not your fault the customer is angry but he still has to come to you for help. Even if it isn’t your fault, always assume part of the responsability. Most importantly, never reject the fault on the customer. Try turning your call into a collaboration process, explain to the customer how you can fix his problem together.

3) They don’t have the same goal in mind

B2B customers are buying your product because it will benefit the company. They might have some personal reasons to choose one product over the other but since the decision usually depends on a group of people the ultimate decision doesn’t heavily rely on personal preferences.

When selling products or services to companies you need to consider that most people you will talk to actually have little to no say in the final decision. When selling an email marketing solution for example you would first have to convince the marketing manager that your product is easy to use and you’ll then need to help him convince his VP that the solution will be profitable.

Quick customer service tip: Always keep in mind that no matter how much the person you’re talking to likes your product, they will have to convince someone else to invest in it. Ask your clients if they need any additional information to give someone else in the company. If needed you can even offer to contact this other person yourself.

B2C customers are mostly looking at product that will benefit them personally. This is a good opportunity for you to get to know your final customer on a deeper level.

Just remember that people rarely buy products because they NEED them anymore. Most purchases are based on emotional reasons.

A woman might come to you saying she needs a dress for her wedding. However that won’t really help you select the perfect dress. For that you need to get personal and gid into her emotions. Ask her what she would like the dress to make her feel like. Does she want to feel like a princess? Does she want the wedding to be more casual? Does she want to stand out and have an original dress?

Quick customer service tip: Don’t stick to purely objective facts and questions. Don’t be afraid to get a little personal and bring up your own experience to trigger some emotional response from your customer. Once you created a personal bound, it will be a lot easier for you to find the perfect product and build a long term relationship with your client.

4) They don’t get angry or frustrated for the same reasons

B2B customers get angry just as much as B2C customers do. The main difference I saw is that they are usually a lot more polite in their anger. This is of course due to the fact that they are contacting you as part of their job, therefore facing consequences if they start insulting you.

That being said, it doesn’t make it more enjoyable to receive a call from an angry B2B customer.

One factor comes into play on both sides: STRESS. Your angry customer is yelling at you for one big reason: because he is stressed and probably has a whole management team blaming him for the problem. And since he’s being yelled at for something he didn’t do, he’s reporting his anger at you to release a bit of the stress.

Of course you also are stressed because it could cost your company money and you would have to face the consequences. It’s always easier to blame the person who “mishandled” the angry customer.

Quick customer service tip: Let the customer vent his anger on you. Carefully listen to what he is saying and try to offer a solution as soon as he is done talking. First apologize, then include your customer in the resolution process. Make him a part of the solution. Make him feel like he played a part in solving the problem. In other words, give him something to be proud about and to tell his managers.

B2C customers can be a little more vocal (and rude) when they encounter a problem.

You have to look at it this way: they probably have a job where they are also put under a lot of stress. Then they come home to relax and probably have to face more stress (paying the bills, taking care of the kids…). Of course that’s when your product decides to break down which adds just another level of stress to their life.

Since this time they don’t risk anything if they yell or are rude to you, they just let it all.

I am not saying that it’s normal for customers to be really rude at you. That’s just called being a jerk and no one should ever have to act this way. However, the only thing you can do is trying to help them the best you can.

Quick customer service tip: Same as for B2B clients, just let your customer talk, listen carefully and trying coming up with a quick solution. Use a calm tone of voice, stay polite and try to get the customer to calm down. Know that you can always call the client out on his language if he crosses the line. It will just remind them that you also are a person and you still have the right to a little dignity.

When I say that B2C and B2B customers should be treated differently I don’t mean that you should treat one better than the other. It just means that you should adapt your communication to their specific needs.

If you are a company catering to both businesses and individuals you should consider having separate customer service processes. Business customers are typically more used to establish personal contact with your company before and after they purchase. You can turn that to your advantage and build deeper relationships with them.

B2C customers might not contact you as often but you shouldn’t forget about them. Try to establish a relationship via a newsletter or special emails. Don’t hesitate to randomly check on them to remind them you care about their business.

B2C and B2B customers might not be the same but lucky for you there still are common customer service rules you can follow with both of them.

Photo Credit: Mike Bailey-Gates via Compfight cc

Most of today’s marketing organizations take what might be called the industrial approach to consumers: snagging demographic data, matching it with purchasing data, and segmenting customers into profitability tiers.

But are consumers just resources to be harvested for the next up-selling opportunity? Jill Avery of Harvard Business School, Susan Fournier of Boston University, and John Wittenbraker of the market-research firm GfK argue in the July-August issue that this view misses an important reality: that consumers are looking for certain kinds of relationships with companies. Some consumers might want to be treated as friends, others as colleagues. Some might want to be just fleeting or casual acquaintances. Because marketing organizations don’t get this, consumers are too often frustrated by companies’ inability to meet their relationship requirements.

Marketing organizations need to reorient themselves so that they can use their powerful customer-relationship-management technologies to capture and make good use of relationship data and, ultimately, become good relationship partners with consumers.

Global research into more than 200 brands in 11 industries, including hair care, airlines, cars, and media, led the authors to identify 29 distinct types of relationships, ranging from complete strangers to best friends and including both negative and positive types of connections. Companies not only need to figure out what kinds of relationships their customers have and want with the brand, they also have to figure out how much value each type of relationship offers, so that consumers’ ties with the firm can be managed intelligently. Ideally, a company should maintain a relationship portfolio that supports its long-term strategy.

Determining the value of various relationship types requires considering a number of trade-offs. One of them is whether a given type makes it easier or harder for the company to charge a premium. Another is whether a particular type can help a firm build market share. This chart shows where each type stands on those two dimensions.

Fling relationships, for example, are marked by passion, so the company can charge a premium when dealing with these customers, but a company with a lot of fling customers might not be able to build much market share. In a best friend relationship, the customer is looking for a close connection, so building market share with these customers is easier. But close relationships offer relatively low potential for charging premiums—in fact, a price increase can be seen by consumers as a betrayal of trust.

Having taught at five business schools over several decades and served as Dean of two, I have come to a conclusion: The educational institutions where our future business leaders are being trained must be recalibrated and transformed dramatically.

Business education today is anachronistic in both how it is conducted and what its content focuses on. Our brick institutions have in no way caught up with what today’s technologies make possible in terms of virtual learning and individualized, customized instruction. More importantly, business education needs to evolve once again, revising its goals to educate leaders of the future who have a new set of skills: sustainable global thinking, entrepreneurial and innovative talents, and decision-making based on practical wisdom.

Historically, business schools have so far been through two waves. As originally conceived, they were institutions of practical education. In the late 19th and early 20th century, successful businessmen like Joseph Wharton wanted to professionalize companies and legitimize working in business. The earliest business schools sought to provide the tools and teach the skills required to become a successful business person at the time, like bookkeeping, efficient manufacturing, and contract law.

But in the mid-20^th century the influential Ford Foundation and, separately, the Carnegie Foundation damned this approach. The Gordon-Howell Report in 1959, funded by the Ford Foundation, criticized the weak scientific foundation of business education, suggesting that professors were more like quacks than serious scholars. The curriculum was too narrow, simpleminded, and weak, and the caliber of faculty and students unimpressive. The Carnegie Foundation’s findings resulted in a thick book called The Education of American Businessmen, also published in 1959. Its message was equally harsh: Too much engagement with cases, too little research; too much practice, too little theory. Perceiving a need for a more cerebral breed of managers to preside over corporations of unprecedented scale and scope, both looked for models to the research-driven natural science fields.

The subsequent recasting of business schools 2.0 along the lines of serious academia served its purposes for decades, embedding a level of valuable intellectualism into business education. However, as every trend comes to lose sight of its need for renewal, we are now stuck with an academic system in which business schools are run as if they are deaf, blind, and dumb to a completely new emerging world. The combination of the tenure system and the publish-or-perish dictum is crowding our schools with “business scholars” whose main role is to perform original research to be published in so called A-level journals. This need to publish to make a career has led to increasingly obscure research of almost no value to real businesses, specialization that encourages silo thinking, and a serious disregard of the importance of teaching students to think.

Instead of focusing on real and practical problems of relevance to the business world today, “performance” has become the dependent variable in most management research and the root of delusions (to use Phil Rosenzweig’s term) that business scholars serve up to managers. Too many tenured professors have never worked outside academia; they are familiar with neither the day-to-day operations of companies nor the intricate processes of how decisions are made. This makes it only harder for them to see the value of real world experience as part of their students’ education.

In essence, the pendulum has swung fully the other way. Too much emphasis is now placed on theory vs. practice, ensuring that graduates are unprepared to deal with the complex problems of the world that companies actually inhabit. They lack meaningful, relevant business education that teaches them cross-disciplinary thinking, broad familiarity with humanistic and scientific trends, and, most importantly, Aristotle’s “phronesis” – the practical wisdom (also discussed in David Hurst’s blog Is Management Due for a Renaissance?) that teaches them to make decisions based on deep notions of what is good for the global community of which businesses are part.

What can and should we do? There have been many proposals for change and experiments in redesign in the past few years. My criteria for judging which are most worthwhile would be to stress five neglected qualities. The reforms we enact should make our schools more:

Humanity-Minded. We need to put philosophy and the humanities back into the core of our business education. Our future corporate leaders need to have the thinking skills necessary to appreciate the complexities of what it means to be human, as well as business’s role in sustaining an inhabitable, healthy planet. The scientific management emphasis on efficiency and profit at all costs can no longer take precedence over human values.

Blended. Technology is fast eliminating the need for students to spend the majority of their educational lives on campuses in huge halls, listening to dull, cardboard lectures. The economics of operating large campuses, and big faculties and admin staff are inflating the costs of business education beyond reason. Many government-supported universities are already cutting budgets. The growing trend of creating MOOCs (massive open online courses) taught by the world’s most skilled and talented teachers is already proving that the traditional classroom paradigm is passé.

Individualized. Students should be offered a range of options to customize their education to reflect their personal goals, ambitions, capabilities, and risk tolerance. Let’s have them work with a kind of advisor to structure their own program tailored to their passions and capabilities. Help them design an amalgam of classroom courses (both on their own campus and abroad), work in real companies, entrepreneurial workshops and startup weekends, MOOC courses (perhaps amounting to 20% to 50% of their classes), and other learning formats that contribute to their becoming intelligent and global business thinkers.

STEM-driven. We need to increase business students’ knowledge about science, technology, engineering and math andencourage them to expand their horizons of technology beyond IT and Angry Apps. Given that so much innovation happens in STEM-oriented industries, business education needs to help students bridge the natural and social sciences. Degree programs in Management of Technology and Industrial Economics exemplify worthy hybrid forms of education that bring these worlds together.

Hands-On. We need to merge business experience and academia far more than now. Schools need to begin working with corporations to create more meaningful internship and management training programs, designed to make the connection between theory and practice. They should also provide incentives for professors to engage more with the practical problems of everyday organizational life. For example, why not set up “Professors in Residence,” where professors live in organizations for a while, as a mirror-image to today’s Executives in Residence. In general, let’s promote more dialogue between companies and academia.

The organizers of the Global Drucker Forum have lately called for a “Great Transformation” in management, which Richard Straub of the Drucker Society describes as the best hope for advancing human prosperity. I throw my voice into this call for a radical new synthesis and approach to business in the world. But, as of now, I know that the majority of students graduating from our standard undergraduate programs and most MBA programs are unprepared for this future.

The business leaders who will succeed in the coming decade will be notable for their holistic thinking, global perspectives, international experience, multilingual capabilities, technological familiarity, entrepreneurial mindset, creativity, and ability to deal productively with complexity and chaos. Many corporations already say they cannot find the type of employees they need, so we must begin acting now to transform our business schools. It is our job as educators to produce graduates who can thrive in a radically changing world, and who can shape it in positive ways. We must educate a new generation of renaissance leaders.

 

This post is part of a series of perspectives by leading thinkers participating in the Sixth Annual Global Drucker Forum, November 13-14 in Vienna. For more information, see the conference homepage.

There’s a lot of talk about the importance of content marketing, what qualifies as content marketing and what strategies work best for whom—but so few think about measuring until after the project is underway. This article discusses the bare minimum metrics you should be able to pull and measure for your content marketing success. No fancy tools or behemoth budgets needed—just a little good ol’ fashion work.

First, we have to stress to not start any new tactic without the analytics support behind it. Ian Laurie of Internet marketing agency Portent Inc. shares a great advice on creating the right kind of digital strategy. Most important part? If it can’t be measured, it shouldn’t be done.

This means in order to measure even these core five outcomes you need to ensure Google Analytics is properly installed on your website. That’s it! So let’s get started on what you should measure and how to gather it.

Time spent on site

If you’re thinking of getting involved in content marketing for your business, most likely it’s starting with regular blogging. A blog can fuel the rest of your content, such as guides, video, presentations, tweets and more. But how can you determine if your blog is actually being read?

Time spent on site (or “attention minutes”) is the best indicator in Google Analytics—as more time spent on a page typically correlates to individuals taking the time to read it.

Here is an example from our own Bop Blog:

How Twitter Advertising is Beating Out LinkedIn in B2B Lead Generation – 2:16
5 Reasons Responsive Web Design Improves SEO – 1:00
What Is A Session? A Look At The Google Analytics Change – 00:08

Two minutes? 30 seconds? Seems like small potatoes overall, but when you consider that it takes an average adult one minute to read 300 words (and our blog posts average around 500 words) if a visitor is spending more than a minute on the page it’s a good indication they’re absorbing some of your writing.

Here’s a step by step on how to pull the metric in Google Analytics:

Pages per session

In addition to measuring the time spent on a particular page, it’s important to also track if the content on your page is enticing a visitor to explore more of your website. This could mean reading other posts, resource pages or your services pages.

A primary goal of content marketing is to build trust and credibility before trying to sell your products or services, so if a user is investing time in researching your business and understanding your brand—they’re becoming an interested prospect.

Here are some examples from Bop Blog posts:

Create A Better Editorial Calendar – 3.67 pages/session
5 Reasons Responsive Web Design Improves SEO– 1.62 pages/session
How Twitter Advertising is Beating Out LinkedIn in B2B Lead Generation – 1.58 pages/session

Note that two of the blog posts above that received some of the highest time spent on site fall behind in pages per visit. If driving visits to other pages on your website is more important, examine what blog posts are accomplishing this goal and figure out any common trends.

Here is how you can pull pages per visit on Google Analytics:

Social media engagement

If your business shares original content on social media (which you should at least focus on one platform, if not multiple), then discover what content is receiving the most shares and clicks on those platforms. These metrics shouldn’t be observed in a vacuum, as there is a lot of data showing that social shares don’t always equal high readership. Instead, pulling time spent on site and pages per session in conjunction with this social media determines if the blog posts that are being shared are actually being read.

For example, “How Twitter Advertising is Beating Out LinkedIn in B2B Lead Generation” is performing well in time spent on site and pages per session, but when looking at sharing through Twitter, the performance metrics are lower. Pages per session are at 1.29, but average session duration is 00:02. Pulling the data with social media as the referral source (instead of another website, direct or organic visits), can show you what content is of interest to your followers.

You can find find more in-depth social media measurement on SlideShare, but to pull this specific metric do the following:

Leads generated

This requires some big picture thinking and wrangling of multiple platforms. If you’re a B2B business that still conducts most sales over the phone, it becomes even more complicated.

A good place to start is your website. If you have important calls to action on your website that you want an individual to make—such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading a guide or completing a contact form—then track these conversions by setting up Google Analytics Goals.

Once all of these goals are completed, you can track the referral path of each conversion and determine if the referral source produces qualified or unqualified prospects.

Shortening of the sales cycle

A major pain point in B2B lead generation is the length of time it takes from discovery to purchase. Content marketing is a great tactic to shorten this process, most notably between the discovery and consideration phases.

This is another “big picture” and complicated metric to measure, but keeping the lines of communication open with your sales team and providing them with relevant content along the way will improve content long-term. To help, ask your sales team some of the following questions:

• Is the content attracting the wrong type of prospect (e.g. seeking different services, needs additional education, etc.)?
• Are there common misconceptions of our business among prospects (e.g. understanding of unique value proposition, service delivery or other)?
• What common questions are prospects asking that you need support answering?

These questions can pull information on what content is currently working and what new content needs to be delivered.

Take away

Measuring the performance of content marketing can become overwhelming with the many options (and tools) available. But the above five metrics are a good first step to setting a baseline and mapping out where your time and resources should be put moving forward.