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As Amazon and Hachette’s contract dispute wears on, Amazon has had little to say publicly about it: The company released an unattributed statement on the Kindle forums at the end of May, but until now no executive from the company had commented. That changed Tuesday, when Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s VP of Kindle content, gave a few quotes to the Wall Street Journal.

Amazon has been criticized for tactics like turning off pre-orders on upcoming Hachette titles. Grandinetti told the WSJ that Amazon is working “in the long-term interest of our customers.” He also seemingly confirmed reports that Amazon is demanding a larger commission on ebook sales, up from the 30 percent it currently receives: “This discussion is all about ebook pricing. The terms under which we trade will determine how good the prices are that we can offer consumers.” Grandinetti seems to be arguing that if Amazon gets a bigger payment on each ebook it sells, it will pass those savings on to consumers.

This also means lower payments for authors: If a publisher makes less money on each ebook sale and the price of the ebook doesn’t change, the author takes home less. The article didn’t touch on that, though.

Separately, the New York Public Library hosted a panel discussion on Hachette vs. Amazon on Tuesday night which you can watch here. Over at The Bookseller, Porter Anderson has a good writeup. One oddity: Amazon declined to send an executive to speak but, Anderson writes, “”recommended that contract attorney and blogger (The Passive Voice) David Vandagriff be there. Vandagriff explained that he doesn’t work for Amazon but that he was flown to New York  by the company to be on the panel.”

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In a world of Excel spreadsheets and online tools, we take a lot of calculations for granted. Take breakeven analysis. You’ve probably heard of it. Maybe even used the term before, or said: “At what point do we break even?” But because you may not entirely understand the math — and because understanding the formula can only deepen your understanding of the concept — here’s a closer look at how the concept works in reality.

Managers typically use breakeven analysis to set a price to understand the economic impact of various price- and sales-volume scenario. Pricing matters. Having the right price for a product or service can boost profit much faster than increasing volume. Setting a price is, of course, complicated but breakeven analysis can help.

It’s a simple calculation to determine how many units must be sold at a given price to cover one’s fixed costs. You’re typically solving for the Break-Even Volume (BEV).

To show how this works, let’s take the hypothetical example of a high-end kite maker. Assume she must incur a fixed cost of $25,500 to produce and sell a kite. These costs might cover the software needed to design the kite and be sure it is sufficiently aerodynamic, the fee paid to a graphic designer to design the look and feel of the kite, and the development of promotional materials used to advertise the kite. These costs are fixed because they will not change with the number of kites sold.

The variable costs include the materials used to make each kite — special string for $3, the fabric for the body for $6, wooden dowels for $7, a special plastic handle for $4 — and the labor required to assemble the kite, which amounted to one and a half hours for a worker earning $20 per hour. Therefore, the unit variable costs to make a single kite is: $50 ($20 in materials and $30 in labor). If she sells the kite for $75, she’ll make a unit margin of $25.

Given the $25 unit margin she’ll receive for each kite sold, she will cover her $25,500 in total fixed costs if she sells:

Using the interactive illustration below, you can enter each figure and see the output on the right. Put the Revenue per Unit Sold slider (r) at $75, Variable Cost per Unit Sold (v) slider at $50, the Fixed Costs (C) slider at $25,500 and set the actual output at 0.

Note: It may be easier to fine-tune precise input values in the interactive illustration using the arrow keys on your keyboard.

You can see on the right-hand side that the Breakeven Volume is 1,020 units. In other words, if this kite maker sells 1,020 units of this particular kite over the lifetime of the operation, she will fully recover the $25,500 in fixed costs she invested in production and selling. If she sells fewer than 1,020 units, she will lose money. And if she sells more than 1,020 units, she will turn a profit. That’s the breakeven point.

This is the basic breakeven assessment. Now, using the interactive illustration, you can construct a number of informative “what if” scenarios.

What if we change the price?

Suppose our kite maker is worried about current demand for kites and has concerns about her firm’s marketing capabilities, calling into question her ability to sell 1,020 units at a price of $75. What would be the implication of raising the price to $90, which would increase the unit margin to $40? Using the interactive illustration(moving the Revenue per Unit Sold slider to $100), you’ll see that breakeven sales would decline to 638 units.

With this information, the kite maker could assess whether she was better off trying to sell 1,020 kites at $75 or 638 kits at $90, and price accordingly.

What if we want to make an investment and increase the fixed costs?

Breakeven analysis also can be used to assess how sales volume would need to change to justify other potential investments. For instance, consider the possibility of keeping the price at $75, but having a celebrity endorse the kite (think Mary Poppins!) for a fee of $21,000. This would be worthwhile if the kite maker believed that the endorsement would result in total sales of $46,000 (the original fixed cost plus the $21,000 for Ms. Poppins).

Using the interactive illustration, you can slide the Fixed Costs slider to $46,000 and see that it would be only be worthwhile if the kite maker believed that the endorsement would result in total sales of 1,840 units. In other words, if the endorsement led to incremental sales of 820 kites units, the endorsement would break-even. If it led to incremental sales of greater than 820 kites, it would increase profits.

What if we change the variable cost of producing a good?

Breakeven also can be used to examine the impact of a potential change to the variable cost of producing a good. Imagine that our kite maker could switch from using a rather plain $6 fabric for the kite to a higher-end $16 fabric, thereby increasing the variable cost of the clock from $50 to $60 and decreasing the unit margin from $25 to $15. How much would sales need to increase to compensate for the extra cost?

Adjust the slider to Variable Cost slider to $60 (and put the Fixed Costs slider back to the original $25,500 – our kite maker can’t afford to have nice fabric AND get Mary Poppins). You’ll see the switch to the nicer fabric would make sense if the kite maker thought it would result in sales of 1,700 units, an additional 680 kites.

You can use the sliders in the interactive illustration to adjust revenue, costs and output. The graph on the right side will display the output needed to fully cover the fixed and variable costs in that scenario. Using the sliders, you can see what happens when output rises above or falls below the breakeven volume. Or how changes in total fixed costs impact the breakeven point.

You likely aren’t a kite maker or able to get a celebrity endorsement from Mary Poppins, but you can use breakeven analysis to figure out how the various inputs on your product — revenue, costs, and output sold ­— impact your business’s profitability.

This post adapted and reprinted material from Core Reading: Pricing Strategy, HBP. No. 8203, by Robert J. Dolan and John T. Gourville, which is part of the of Harvard Business Publishing’s Core Curriculum in Marketing.  Copyright © 2014 by the Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation; all rights reserved.

In a world of Excel spreadsheets and online tools, we take a lot of calculations for granted. Take breakeven analysis. You’ve probably heard of it. Maybe even used the term before, or said: “At what point do we break even?” But because you may not entirely understand the math — and because understanding the formula can only deepen your understanding of the concept — here’s a closer look at how the concept works in reality.

Managers typically use breakeven analysis to set a price to understand the economic impact of various price- and sales-volume scenario. Pricing matters. Having the right price for a product or service can boost profit much faster than increasing volume. Setting a price is, of course, complicated but breakeven analysis can help.

It’s a simple calculation to determine how many units must be sold at a given price to cover one’s fixed costs. You’re typically solving for the Break-Even Volume (BEV).

To show how this works, let’s take the hypothetical example of a high-end kite maker. Assume she must incur a fixed cost of $25,500 to produce and sell a kite. These costs might cover the software needed to design the kite and be sure it is sufficiently aerodynamic, the fee paid to a graphic designer to design the look and feel of the kite, and the development of promotional materials used to advertise the kite. These costs are fixed because they will not change with the number of kites sold.

The variable costs include the materials used to make each kite — special string for $3, the fabric for the body for $6, wooden dowels for $7, a special plastic handle for $4 — and the labor required to assemble the kite, which amounted to one and a half hours for a worker earning $20 per hour. Therefore, the unit variable costs to make a single kite is: $50 ($20 in materials and $30 in labor). If she sells the kite for $75, she’ll make a unit margin of $25.

Given the $25 unit margin she’ll receive for each kite sold, she will cover her $25,500 in total fixed costs if she sells:

Using the interactive illustration below, you can enter each figure and see the output on the right. Put the Revenue per Unit Sold slider (r) at $75, Variable Cost per Unit Sold (v) slider at $50, the Fixed Costs (C) slider at $25,500 and set the actual output at 0.

Note: It may be easier to fine-tune precise input values in the interactive illustration using the arrow keys on your keyboard.

You can see on the right-hand side that the Breakeven Volume is 1,020 units. In other words, if this kite maker sells 1,020 units of this particular kite over the lifetime of the operation, she will fully recover the $25,500 in fixed costs she invested in production and selling. If she sells fewer than 1,020 units, she will lose money. And if she sells more than 1,020 units, she will turn a profit. That’s the breakeven point.

This is the basic breakeven assessment. Now, using the interactive illustration, you can construct a number of informative “what if” scenarios.

What if we change the price?

Suppose our kite maker is worried about current demand for kites and has concerns about her firm’s marketing capabilities, calling into question her ability to sell 1,020 units at a price of $75. What would be the implication of raising the price to $90, which would increase the unit margin to $40? Using the interactive illustration(moving the Revenue per Unit Sold slider to $100), you’ll see that breakeven sales would decline to 638 units.

With this information, the kite maker could assess whether she was better off trying to sell 1,020 kites at $75 or 638 kits at $90, and price accordingly.

What if we want to make an investment and increase the fixed costs?

Breakeven analysis also can be used to assess how sales volume would need to change to justify other potential investments. For instance, consider the possibility of keeping the price at $75, but having a celebrity endorse the kite (think Mary Poppins!) for a fee of $21,000. This would be worthwhile if the kite maker believed that the endorsement would result in total sales of $46,000 (the original fixed cost plus the $21,000 for Ms. Poppins).

Using the interactive illustration, you can slide the Fixed Costs slider to $46,000 and see that it would be only be worthwhile if the kite maker believed that the endorsement would result in total sales of 1,840 units. In other words, if the endorsement led to incremental sales of 820 kites units, the endorsement would break-even. If it led to incremental sales of greater than 820 kites, it would increase profits.

What if we change the variable cost of producing a good?

Breakeven also can be used to examine the impact of a potential change to the variable cost of producing a good. Imagine that our kite maker could switch from using a rather plain $6 fabric for the kite to a higher-end $16 fabric, thereby increasing the variable cost of the clock from $50 to $60 and decreasing the unit margin from $25 to $15. How much would sales need to increase to compensate for the extra cost?

Adjust the slider to Variable Cost slider to $60 (and put the Fixed Costs slider back to the original $25,500 – our kite maker can’t afford to have nice fabric AND get Mary Poppins). You’ll see the switch to the nicer fabric would make sense if the kite maker thought it would result in sales of 1,700 units, an additional 680 kites.

You can use the sliders in the interactive illustration to adjust revenue, costs and output. The graph on the right side will display the output needed to fully cover the fixed and variable costs in that scenario. Using the sliders, you can see what happens when output rises above or falls below the breakeven volume. Or how changes in total fixed costs impact the breakeven point.

You likely aren’t a kite maker or able to get a celebrity endorsement from Mary Poppins, but you can use breakeven analysis to figure out how the various inputs on your product — revenue, costs, and output sold ­— impact your business’s profitability.

This post adapted and reprinted material from Core Reading: Pricing Strategy, HBP. No. 8203, by Robert J. Dolan and John T. Gourville, which is part of the of Harvard Business Publishing’s Core Curriculum in Marketing.  Copyright © 2014 by the Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation; all rights reserved.

Frameworks for managing social media marketing When I first read Groundswell by Forrester, I really liked their social media management acronym POST. It gave you a simple framework to digest their approach to social, don’t just jump to the technology, …..

The post TALKING: A strategic social media management framework appeared first on Smart Insights.

In an age of marketing and business that is increasingly social, many businesses and thought leaders stress the importance of creating a culture that embraces social media inside and out. A social media savvy business encourages collaboration across teams, surfaces expertise from subject matter experts and can scale brand and community engagement by drawing upon the collective wisdom of employees and customers.

Few have been as passionate and successful at going beyond social business theory into action as Connie Bensen, leader of Global Social Content Strategy and Governance at Dell (Dell is a TopRank client).

A Top 20 Social Media Influencer and coiner of the phrase ‘Social Bizologist (The person responsible for guiding the integration of social media into the business functions of an organization) Connie’s session at the 2014 MNSearch Summit was jam packed with tips for companies of any size to socialize their business to improve collaboration, social advocacy and marketing.

Below are 5 key takeaways from Connie’s presentation:

Empower your people through training and development

Since people are at the center of any social business, it is critical to provide the necessary training and resources to empower your employees to be successful in social media. While most people today are at least somewhat familiar with social media from a personal perspective, there is a difference between using social networks to keep up with your Aunt Sally’s new baby and using the social web to help your company achieve business objectives.

Connie’s team runs several training and certification programs intended to turn Dell employees into social media power users, which collectively make up their Social Media and Community University. A broad range of topics are covered including how to contribute to the various Dell social communities, effectively engage with influencers and incorporate social media into live events.

Clarify roles and priorities

It’s important for any social business to clarify roles, objectives and key accountability metrics. This isn’t an easy endeavor for any company and is particularly challenging for one as large and complex as Dell.

Dell’s Social SME (Subject Matter Experts) program helps to ensure that Dell has a strong presence in social for each area of their business. The program is designed to help empower SMEs by providing social certifications, helpful tools, ongoing strategy, standardized target keyword lists and social media playbooks.

Be results oriented

In order be successful as a social business, you first have to identify what success means to your organization. After all, you won’t have much hope of hitting a target you don’t know exists. It’s easy to see that Connie is very results oriented and holds her teams to the same standard.

Connie’s team helps to ensure that the Dell social media program is firing on all cylinders by educating social media team members on representative success metrics for the areas they are working on, generating benchmark reports, and putting appropriate goals in place that are based on the level of experience of each team member.

To aid ongoing development, social media team members are graded via detailed scorecards which compare their performance against their goals and maintains both internal and external leaderboards (because a little friendly competition never hurts).

Encourage collaboration

Social media doesn’t happen in a vacuum and neither should your social business teams. Collaboration between team members can motivate everyone to do their best. To encourage collaboration, Connie suggests:

• Encouraging early adopters to share tips, techniques and best practices
• Sharing wins internally and publicly via case studies published to SlideShare
• Holding regular core team meetings

In addition to internal collaboration, Connie recommends making external collaboration an important element of your social media marketing, as your target audience and their influencers are often the best sources of insights into what’s working, what’s not, and where your biggest opportunities are. To make sure there is a venue for external collaboration, Dell facilitates regular discussions and think tanks with customers, influencers and even detractors.

Put the customer at the center of your content

Companies that only talk about themselves through their social media and content marketing efforts are seeing disappointing results because of it. In fact, according to research from Content Marketing Institute, only 45% of businesses who engage in content marketing report it to be effective.

Don’t be another brand adding more self-promotional noise to the social sphere. By empowering your employees to effectively engage directly with your customers on the most real time channel there is (social networks), your company will be in the best position to understand their pain points, provide real value and drive social business objectives. Understanding issues from the customer’s point of view helps inform content marketing and social content planning so your brand can provide the kind of information that customers actually want. Ironically, by talking less on social media channels about the brand and products directly, the more demand there will be for the brand. That is the essence of social business done right.

Most companies are aware of the tactical uses for social media marketing by curating and publishing content on social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and even blogging. But bringing the value of social media inside an organization to tap into subject matter expertise and the community of knowledge that exists within a company is a resource untapped for many organizations. Think about social media and networks as tools beyond marketing to tap into content and advocacy from within your company.

Here is the full presentation:

Is your company using social media and networks internally to empower employees and your business to be more social? What tools are you using?

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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2014. | Creating a Culture for Making Business Social – 5 Tips from Dell’s Connie Bensen | http://www.toprankblog.com

I was going to call this ‘why MINI’s social media strategy is maximum fun’ but as soon as you describe something as ‘fun’ it kind of stops being that.

Which certainly isn’t the fate that the 55 year-old automobile brand deserves. Its social media campaigns are huge amounts of… might have to dust off the old thesaurus for this one… lively hoopla?

Fine. Fun it is. MINI’s social campaigns contain some of the most playfully engaging, dizzyingly inventive and delightfully gratifying fun you’ll experience from a brand today.

Ford has an excellent social media strategy full of humour and creativity, now imagine how much fun a brand that’s half its age (and size) can have.

Instagram

I’ve been including MINI’s Instagram channel in my monthly round-up of best branded Instagram videos since I began doing it.

Mainly its thanks to its wonderful #asktheNEWMINI campaign which recently came to an end after nearly four months of brilliant output. 

Followers could ask the brand new model any question via any social channel as long as it carried the above hashtag, and the MINI would reply in a way that showed off its many new features.

This led to more than thirty increasingly creative videos, which used the brilliant social strategy of tailoring content to one specific follower but harvesting the rest of the spectators’ enjoyment through shares and engagement.

In this episode the Mini is asked “will you marry me?” The results are less disturbing than a certain Channel 4 documentary from a few years back.

May saw Mini really hit its stride...

With a boot-full of humour and charm.

Then came this final upload in the series in June, which wraps everything up beautifully. A campaign full of surprises, ingenuity, warmth and wit and now... a narrative arc.

NOT NORMAL campaign

As I discussed in six examples of automotive social media strategy, MINI’s NOT NORMAL campaign was a huge success, helping to reestablish its brand identity and connect with audiences as a friendly and innovative brand.

MINI scoured the internet looking for its most loyal brand ambassadors and discovered hundreds of images and videos on social media, that Mini then used for its campaign. 

Followers could upload a creation to its Tumblr hub or by sharing it with #MININOTNORMAL, then within hours could see it on a digital poster or billboard anywhere in the UK.

As reported in The Guardian, within six weeks 230,000 engaged with the campaign via social media. 2,217 pieces of consumer content were shared. 29,420 new fans and followers were recruited. Mini’s Twitter following tripled. 3,853 visitors to the campaign hub went on to look for a new MINI on mini.co.uk. 11% of which became qualified dealership leads.

Native advertising

As display and banner ads become less useful and only more annoying, the rise of native advertising is continuing apace.

BuzzFeed is of course one of the key players in the world of native advertising, it has 130m unique visits every month, 75% of which are from social media.

MINI was one of the first brands to partner with BuzzFeed in order to offer its own sponsored content back in 2012. 

In January 2014, the piece had achieved 1.3m social interactions in 16 months and at the time sat comfortably at the top of the Native Advertising Leaderboard.

Although that may not seem like a huge figure for the time period, ads like these have been placed on sites like Buzzfeed and other highly popular publishing sites, so therefore they can be considered ‘evergreen’. Bringing in a moderate amount of traffic but over a much longer period of time, perhaps even the length of the site’s existence, creating a much higher value for the brand than traditional display ads.

Facebook apps

MINI has taken great advantage of Facebook by building some brilliant apps to keep its followers engaged.

Its MINI Worldwide app gives a live count of how many global fans MINI has, with clickable links for each country’s respective Facebook pages. 

Each country has its very own page with its very own original content.

MINI moments is an app that highlights followers pictures of their MINI’s and other MINI related events.

This is a great showcase as often when a follower posts a picture on a branded page, the post gets lost amongst the noise.

MINI ART BEAT

August 2013 saw a MINI become a digital billboard as it drove around the streets of London for two weeks, broadcasting tweets, Vines and Instagrams from followers who use MINI’s Art Beat Facebook app, or #MINIartbeat.

There’s a great in-depth blogpost on the MINI space website that explains how the transformation took place.

And here’s one of the many videos taken from MINI’s Art Beat YouTube channel.

Pinterest

MINI is one of the few automotive brands running a fantastically up-to-date and visually attractive Pinterest page, that’s fully stocked with pins from around the world from its passionate devotees.

It’s also a great way to find MINI’s regular contests.

This one links directly to MINI’s community website MINI Space where the details of the interactive contest are held. Users can submit a photo, illustration or design based on the theme ‘open road’. As well as various prizes on offer, the illustrations can all be viewed on the site (subject to a brief vetting process) and will even be displayed as the background image of MINI space.  

MINI is again driving loyalty and commitment by putting its fans first, by offering them genuine treats and entertainment.

People and computers are coming together in all kinds of interesting ways these days. The right combination of human and digital smarts in chess will beat the top grandmaster, the best chess supercomputer, and the top grandmaster with the best supercomputer. At least one VC firm is giving an algorithm a formal vote on its investments. And robots (which I consider to be computers with a physical presence) are increasingly working side by side with people on factory and warehouse floors.

In some cases it’s clear what each party brings to the collaboration. Because humans still have greater manual dexterity they’re the ones picking parts out of bins in the newest Amazon warehouses, while Kiva robots bring the shelves full of bins to the people quickly and reliably. The VC algorithm, if properly constructed, will systematically and objectively take into account “prospective companies’ financing… intellectual property and previous funding rounds” in a way that might be hard for biased, pressed-for-time humans to replicate. And chess computers keep human players from some kinds of dumb moves — the ones whose negative future consequences should have been foreseen, but weren’t.

But alchemy between people and computers — combinations that are way better than either party could do on its own — remains mysterious. In particular, it’s not clear to me (and many others) how people continue to add value as technology races ahead. Computers are clearly better at brute force computation and search, and their pattern matching abilities are improving by leaps and bounds these days. So what are we better at?

That’s a surprisingly hard question to nail down. It appears that when the task is so wide open that searching through history or enumerating all the possibilities won’t work, our abilities are superior. In domains as diverse as playing the Asian board game Go and predicting how proteins will fold, the human brain is still the best tool available. In both of these cases, there are just too many possibilities for even a network of supercomputers to go through all of them.

So what do our brains do in such cases? How do they come up with better answers? As far as I can tell, we aren’t sure. But we’re clearly doing something that our best digital technologists have not yet been able to master. The same seems to be true, at least for now, in many domains that require taste, creativity, or an aesthetic or emotional response. Computers still can’t write a good short story, or design a beautiful computer.

Will they learn to? As Erik Brynjolfsson and I wrote in The Second Machine Age, the mantra we learned from studying many examples of digital progress is “never say never.” But I haven’t seen these things yet, which gives me hope that people will have important roles to play in our societies and economies for some time to come.

Let’s think about marketing campaigns: TV, radio, print … you can’t really develop a relationship with someone through any of those marketing channels, can you?

However, with social media, marketers are presented with a way to have two-way conversations with consumers. You can actually develop deeper relationships online … and it doesn’t matter if you’re B2B, B2C, ginormous, or teeny tiny.

The best part?

Compared to the traditional marketing channels social media is pretty low cost.

The Conversation Versus The Campaign

Why are we so hell bent on “Think Conversation, Not Campaign”? Simple. It’s encoded in our DNA to not want to be sold to.

Think about it: When you go to the mall, are you thinking, “Gosh, I hope one of those kiosk dudes rushes up to me and tries to sell me those little smell-good soaps”?

No. No you are not. And if you are … well, leave me a comment because I want to know you better.

But even if we don’t want to be sold we still have to buy stuff. And the more we know about the stuff we want to buy, the more we trust the person peddling it, and the better our buying experience will be.

And that’s where the conversation and education come in; it’s one of the fundamentals, or 5 Cs, of social media.

Storytelling Differentiates You & Your Brand

Let us not forget storytelling!

Savvy brands are already out there telling their story, and using emotional marketing to spark conversation (which then, ironically, becomes part of the campaign).

Storytelling sounds scary. I get that. Especially when you hear social professionals (like me) say over and over again that it’s totally icky to constantly talk about yourself.

Storytelling is different because it’s sprinkled into conversations and makes you “YOU”.

I’ll give you a few examples:

• I have a client who does AMAZING work with special needs children. While helping them with some re-branding and website design the client was explaining why they had dragonflies on their old website — and ended up telling me this amazing sotry about the day they decided to go into business and how this extremely large dragonfly was in their NYC apartment, umteenth floors up, buzzing around their apartment (she also has a dragonfly tattoo and dragonflies symbolize growth and harmony). Now THAT’S a story! I asked her why she hadn’t told it or weaved it throughout their marketing.
• Your vernacular (how you talk) is also part of your story. This sets you apart and can show off your personality – an important part of conversation. Fans of B Squared Media can tell you that we always say things like:
  • Awesomesauce = awesomer than awesome
  • Peeps = people
  • Dude = our lovable mascot
  • dude = that guy whose name you don’t know
  • dudette = that girl whose name you don’t know
  • LURVE = LOVE!

So while it’s not always about you, the story of YOU needs to be intricately woven into your online conversations.

6 Ways To Cultivate Conversations With Customers

Still not sure how to incorporate conversion into your online marketing? Try these six tips on for size …

1. First and foremost, let customers know you’re listening. Active listening means spending lots of time and effort on different social media platforms to see where your target demographics are voicing psychographics (opinions, thoughts, beliefs, values) as they pertain to your industry. In particular, it’s smart to listen to — and gather data surrounding — pain points your would-be customers are having with (insert a benefit of your product/service here).
2. Develop content that provides value and asks questions. By educating your consumer base on what your company does, and by giving away content that has extreme value, you are empowering your prospects to start building trust with you and your brand. Allow them to ask the hard questions. Let them tell you when they think you’re wrong. Heck, we approve plenty of blog comments that ask hard questions and even say we aren’t helping enough – that’s showing value, too.
3. Be transparent. No one is perfect. That, and everyone has their own opinion these days. As I mentioned above, the more transparent you are (“Sorry, we totally screwed up!” OR “You know, that’s not my area of expertise but I’d be happy to get you in touch with someone who can help you.” OR “We’re not experts, but we can certainly give you some customer data or pair you with a current client for a testimonial firsthand on how we do things.”) the more your communities will learn to trust you and the more they will see you as an actual authority in your space, and not just someone trying to sell them on their latest and greatest online training package.
4. Clearly show your communities where the conversations are happening. Unfortunately, having a few conversations over email isn’t going to cut it. Use ample avenues to have conversations with your prospects through the channels they prefer. And make sure you’re consistent with your availability. Don’t do weekends? Fine. But make sure it’s clearly marked that you’re only using social media as a customer service support channel M-F, or that you only respond once per day/within 24 hours (but at that point, should you really be using social media??).
5. Be consistent. Don’t start using G+ only to abandon it. Or perhaps you’re only posting to Instagram in sporadic spurts. Being inconsistent doesn’t help your customers build trust, and only shows that you’re unorganized and unreliable. Similarly, if you’re not using your social channels to interact and have conversations, your people WILL notice.
6. Be humble and be HUMAN. Ask for customer recommendations. Say thank you. Get consumer insights and then show how you took what those insights and used them to add value or change something for the better. Building a community is hard for those who think they’re above others, or who constantly put others down, or who jealous of the achievements of others. Admitting mistakes and saying sorry are a BIG part of this, too.

We’ve also got an oldie — but goodie! — post called 26 Reasons To Have More Online Conversations that may help you get brave and get out there!

Campaigns Boost Conversation

Now, before you get in a tizzy saying that I don’t believe in any sort of marketing campaign, let me say that we DO use campaigns and advertising for both our brand and those of our clients.

However, rather than conversations aiding the campaign, the campaign is intertwined with the conversation. In other words, the conversation is the main attraction.

So? What do you think? Are you having enough conversations? Are they fruitful? Do you use them strategically?

Let’s start our own conversation! Let us know what your thoughts on “Think Conversation, Not Campaign” (that’s our tagline, by the way!) in the comments section below.

See you in the social sphere!

So much emphasis is placed on accessing the latest news. Our kids witnes this in the way they text their friends and interating with sites like Instagram and Twitter.

In the workplace, marketing teams are asked to have a presence on social media sites, but the last few years have really showed that more and more people are broadcasting information regarding the news or retweeting the latest news.

My advice, don’t get caught up in a dialogue about the news. Try to writing with another focus.

Find a way to write sustainable content

Too many times as a blogger, I think like a news writer who wants to create new, exciting information that is focused on the most current trends. This type of writing can be done, but it is very hard to maintain. I have found that if I pick “niche” topics and create a deeper understanding of those topics, I am actually adding tremendous value to my readers.

The tricky part is keeping a mindset that uses information from the past and builds on it to create something that is dynamic.

How to write for the future

The best approach I have found, is to review some of the blog posts that I have written that have been received very favorably. I look for similarities with respect to these blog posts and start to see patterns. With these patterns, I am able to build on these topics. At my company, we have some seasonal testing which occurs at the same time every year for a period of a few weeks. During this time, I really try to write content that will bring out my knowledge by tying old concepts with new concepts. The combination of these concepts creates a concept that people can really relate to.

I have also looked at analytics in a whole new way. I am more interested in the types of articles that are being accessed and read versus the day-to-day readership. Through this process I am learning the following:

• Great content has more value over time and can be sustainable if it is written on a blog site that you can control
• Building search organically has always been my goal. Combine this with sustainability and you will not need to purchase pay-per-click advertising
• 1 – 3 years is typically the amount of sustainability I can expect. I have been blogging for 6 years.
• Writing for the future will keep your content in line with all the future Google Panda Updates. (It will also help you improve your writing)

Finally

Write material from your heart. I can’t say it any simpler. If you write from your experiences and you share those experiences with others, you will get noticed and you be adding tremendous value for your readers.

Social Media engagement has become the standard for most enterprise companies. If organizations have not built out a social strategy team, I can put my money on that fact that they are thinking about and investigating the best platforms to include.  The maturity and sophistication of social has grown significantly in the past year and brands are in a good position to expand their footprint across a multitude of channels but they need to continue to stay ahead of the curve to step ahead. Here are 10 rules brands need to eat, live and breath to conquer the social media world.

1. Outline Your strategy

Don’t take the first step until you have taken a step back and clearly outlined your company strategy. Be thorough with goals, objectives, platforms and internal sponsors to make sure everyone on-board is on the same page. This will help keep your objectives clear so you can meet your goals.

2. ROI isn’t everything

Measuring Social Media ROI can be daunting. The value of social media is around the conversations they instigating.  Your customers want to connect with people, not just a brand. Empowering your employees to join the conversation is a powerful position that can help push your company forward. If you are running a campaign across social just make sure you stay alert to what your ultimate end goals are. Sometimes taking a step back and listening can provide you real-time data to see what is working and what is not.

3. Be picky about your platforms

There are hundreds of social media tools out there.  Make sure you take the time to thoroughly investigate which tools will be best for your brand, your employees, your customers, your prospects.  Choose vendors who will make these integrations simple, easy and without hastle. Remember, sometimes the most-expensive tools aren’t the best. Due your due diligence. Run trials. Run pilots. Evaluate, then decide.

4. Focus is a must

Social Media Advertising works. But you can’t just spam your followers. Targeting the right people, with the right message is crucial to the success of such campaigns. Remember your target demographics, your ideal market, your ideal buyer and focus your advertisement in that direction.

5. Content is King 

Sharing is caring. Social Media platforms act as the perfect bridge for connecting people to content. Content that you share.  Content does not have to be brand specific. It can be light. Including an Employee Advocacy platform can help amplify this content to your employee’s social networks in a very easy, moderated way.  Give your employees the voice to share content on behalf of your brand and the amplification will come.  Your employees are already sharing content to their personal channels during the day, during work hours. So harness that and give them a platform that is fun to live in that allows to share content in a humanized, non-marketing kind of way to drive traffic back to your brand. You don’t have to be a content marketer to share great articles. You just have to be empowered and encouraged to do so.

6. Give it a whirl

Try new things. Some will fail. Some will win.  But continuing to try new approaches will help your brand find the groove that works best for your organization.  Test campaigns, test messaging, test hashtags, test audiences, test interests.  Take notes and apply the things that work, and throw away the things that don’t.

7. Encourage everyone to get involved

Your company is filled with people that value your brand, value their colleagues and value success. Give them that voice to participate. As mentioned in point 5, Employee Advocacy platforms can do just this. It’s important not to limit your social engagements to your marketing team. If you do, you lose opportunity to reach new pools of people. Social Selling is a concept that has been tested and it works. Encourage everyone within your workforce to get involved and active on social.

8. Cut the budget eaters

Cancel contracts on any tool or service that are not performing to top standards. It’s okay to start fresh and investigate new concepts/platforms that could bring you more benefits at same, less or more cost. But it’s important to weed and cut out the things that are mediocre or are not delivering to your expectations.

9. Keep it Bright, Keep it Light

Social advertising works. But you your message and creative needs to stay fresh and exciting. Refreshing this content continuously will keep things bright and light. Social media channels are the best platforms to test and try. Because if it doesn’t work, you can immediately removed it and do something else.  Repetition can be a good thing in certain parts of a business, but not when it comes to social. People expect their feeds to stay fresh, continuously populated with new information. Don’t let your message get stale or you will lose followers and fans and ultimately, customers.

10. Mistakes are okay

I wrote a blog recently about Failing on Social Media. The thesis of this post was that: People will make mistakes on social media. Brands will make mistakes on social media. And it is okay. You can’t move forward without taking a step back.  The moral of this story is, if something is posted to social or a mistake is made in a campaign or advertisement.

Step 1: Fix it.

Step 2: Document it.

Step 3: Learn from it.

So there you have it. A little booklet of social media rules to eat, live and breath by.

Did I miss one? Let me know!

However you measure customer service, making improvements is never simple.

Organizations who have moved from good to great and are delivering world class service have done so by implementing root-and-branch change of how they interact with customers.

Indeed, you could say that they’ve gone from customer service to customer care.

The two concepts are worlds apart. It’s one thing to serve customers, but it’s quite another to actually care for them.

We traditionally associate care with health, and the parallels are not wholly out of place. You can provide good service with healthcare, but that only implies the basics – welcoming, reacting, etc. When you care, you’re proactive, and you listen to the needs of the customer (or patient), or better – provide what your customer needs before they say they need it.

Customer care begins with learning to listen to customers

How well do you actually listen? John Cronin pointed out that listening isn’t as simple as we at first thought. In fact, when many people say they’re listening, they’re not – they’re ready to jump in to a conversation with their own arguments and points of view, irrespective of what has been said.

Effective communication is as much about good listening as good articulation.

So, learn to listen to your customers better. Don’t be ready with a standard chunk of pre-learned text, don’t be ready with flow-charts that dictate a conversation – actually have a conversation, and make it a two-way communication where you are listening in the customer’s context, not yours.

Secondly, learning to listen doesn’t always have to be in a conversation. Social listening is the Next. Big. Thing, at least according to the software industry, with large and small organizations investing heavily in ways to listen in to social conversations.

Look at Microsoft’s sudden investment in a field it had so willingly avoided for so long – partly in an attempt to catch up with Salesforce, but also because customer service and marketing teams have been floundering with the disintegration of customer interaction points.

When you show customer care, you’re proactive, you listen and understand customers, then deliver on needs before they even ask for it.

Listening socially means knowing where to look in the first instance, but it also involves human interpretation. You can automate all you like, but sentiment monitoring and scoring cannot always be done by computer.

Growing your customer knowledge

This social listening feeds into a wider view of the customer. We know contact details, purchase & product details, and we even log our one-to-one conversations, but are we logging sentiment? Are we logging those social conversations to which we are not even party?

Right at the heart of customer care is a technological issue that can only be solved by people. That sounds like a conundrum, but the answer is not technology – it’s how you use it.

First consider what knowledge would improve your customer care. What nuggets of information could move you up a level in customers’ eyes? Then decide how you’re going to pull that knowledge in to one central location (CRM, database, whatever) and how you’re going to interpret & use that knowledge.

If a prized customer has been talking to a friend on Twitter about how slow you are to respond, this isn’t an opportunity to jump in and dominate the conversation. It’s an opportunity to log that information against the customer, and ensure that all stakeholders in customer interactions know about it. Therefore, sentiment isn’t too good, and the customer needs quicker responses.

Growing your knowledge cannot happen without a method of centralizing and utilizing that knowledge.

Growing a culture of customer care

We can get hung up on metrics – customer retention, reaction times, NPS scores… but it’s only when we get everyone’s buy-in that these metrics actually make any sense. For a lot of people, they’ll just be figures that ‘management’ have imposed.

A greater understanding of why these metrics are being measured contributes massively to their value.

From there, a greater appreciation of how customer care has made a difference to the business can help ingrain more customer-focused attitudes into the workplace. For instance, celebrating great examples of how customer issues have been turned around, or better – celebrating great examples of how customer knowledge have been turned into customer success – can really enthuse people and get everyone thinking about how to ‘care’ for customers rather than just ‘serve’ them.

Encourage, enhance, then engage with customers

By firstly encouraging people – and then by giving them the resources and tools to proactively care for customers – you can develop a culture that puts customer care at its heart.

These, for me, are the three key elements of moving from customer service to customer care: learning to listen, interpreting your findings, and developing a culture of customer care. Those foundations – of learning, listening and interpreting – should flow naturally through an organisation. If everyone is bought in to the idea, if everyone sees what they’re getting out of it, everyone does better.

There’s always a lot of buzz about SEO (search engine optimization), SEM (search engine marketing) and of course, Google rankings.

Rightly so – each of those plays a role in how effectively your website can serve you from a marketing and sales perspective. Your website should be sales funnel shaped.

But I think most companies approach the web a little like the fable about the five blind men who were asked to describe the elephant that stood before them. The man who was near the elephant’s leg reached out, touched the elephant and announced that an elephant was like a huge tree trunk. The man who was by the tail, after feeling it, described an elephant like a bullwhip and so on.

While none of them were wrong – none of them were right either. That’s exactly where many companies are when they think about how to leverage their website. They’re not wrong but they haven’t got it quite right either.

Lets step back and take a more holistic view of the website’s purpose for being. You might have a website because it:

• Gives you credibility – it proves that you’re real
• Tells the visitor what your company is all about and why you exist
• Lists/show what you sell/do
• Educates your prospect on how you are different from your competitors and help them make an more informed buying decision
• Helps your customers and prospects by making them smarter/better in some way
• Is an information repository so your customers can access things like users manuals, support forums, case studies, testimonials or other forms of thought leadership
• Provides ways to start a conversation, ask a question or give you feedback
• May serve as a shopping portal and people can buy right there

But if we step back even a little further and take a look from the 30,000 foot level, we can see through all those functionalities, your website is the entry point to your sales funnel. For most organizations today — your website is the initial point of entry that could lead to a sale today or five years from today.

That doesn’t happen by accident. Getting them to your site isn’t the end of the game; it’s just the beginning. Now your goal is to move them into and through your sales funnel. You have to build your site and everything that happens on it with that intention.

Whenever I think of a sales funnel, I picture one of those plastic funnels people use when they do an oil change. The top of it is really wide and the bottom is a very skinny hole. The funnel coincides with the know • like • trust equation.

The top of the sales funnel – know

The top of the funnel is for catching all those people who have no idea you exist or that you sell anything they might need or want. This is where you are hoping they’ll get to know you.

The middle of the funnel is filled with all the ways you either keep them on your site or get them to come back. With repeated exposure, you’re hoping they’ll come to like you.

The smallest section of the funnel is where you’re hoping they come to trust you through repeated interactions, you continuing to be helpful and demonstrating a consistency in how you talk, behave and perform.

Once they’ve willingly squeezed themselves through that tiny little section of the funnel, they’ll be ready to buy. But not before.

Let’s look at the first stage of the funnel (know) and what you can do to catch the interest of your web visitors and encourage them to get to know you a little.

At the top of the funnel we have people who’ve never heard of you and may have no idea they need or want what you sell. They might discover you by clicking on a link in a blog post or after reading about you in the newspaper. They might have a problem and be Googling to find a solution and your site is listed in their search results. They may see a Facebook ad or type in your URL off your business card that they picked up at a trade show. But at this point, you’re a stranger. They don’t know, like or trust you. And we know we have to earn their trust before we can earn their money.

At that moment, your website has to be helpful or relevant enough in some way that they spend a little time on it so they begin to get a sense of you and how you might matter to them.

This is a do or die moment. If the visitor pokes around the site and then leaves, they might never return and you’ll never know who they were or if you could have served them. That’s how it works on most websites. If I asked you to show me a list of people who were on your website in the last six months, could you do it?

One of the appealing aspects of using the web to pre-shop is the anonymity of it. To get someone to introduce themselves to you — you have to either give them a compelling reason to keep coming back or better yet, you have to create the opportunity for an information exchange. You have to offer them something that is valuable enough that they’ll give you their email address in return. While it sounds simple – think of how many websites you visit and how few capture your contact information.

What does that look like? You want to offer something that’s a low barrier to entry. It doesn’t feel too intrusive. It could be any of these:

• Sign up for our Enewsletter or regular tips
• Get a copy of a how-to report, whitepaper or cheat sheet
• Take an online course via email
• Get access to unique content behind a firewall
• Join a discussion group/closed forum
• Be notified when new content/information is available
• Download an eBook or watch a short video series
• Sign up for a webinar or phone conference

Once you’ve done made that initial connection and you have a way to stay in touch – you can continue to be helpful which will keep the conversation going. At that point, one of two things is going to happen. As they get to know you/your company – they’re either going to decide they like you or they don’t. Both are great outcomes.

If they like you, they’ll stay in the conversation and get to know you even better. If they don’t like you, they’ll go away. Now you don’t have to waste any energy on someone who was going to be a bad fit.

The middle section of the sales funnel – like

To move someone from the start of the process into this section requires a mix of bravery and generosity on your part.

Keep in mind that most prospects are pretty skittish. Whether it’s in a retail store or online, they’re used to being chased around by over eager salespeople that pester the poor potential buyer until they flee. That’s one of the reasons many people do a significant amount of their shopping online. The anonymity allows them to browse without pressure.

That’s why you want to load up your website with lots of content that has no barrier to consumption like blog posts, testimonials and FAQs. Those elements will generate traffic to your site. The strategies we talked about last week – where there is an exchange of information (their email address for some downloadable tool or content) begins to thin the herd. The tire kickers will avoid the opt-in level, preferring to stick with your free content. And that’s fine. Until they move to the next level, they’re not ready to buy. Once they trade you their email address for some content, they’ve indicated that they are open to hearing from you.

I find it hard to believe I have to actually say this but I’ve seen time and time again that I do. There is absolutely no reason to collect email addresses if you aren’t going to actually send them something.

And that something cannot be a sales pitch. I’ve seen so many businesses stumble here. They didn’t give you their email address so you could hard sell them or immediately try to get an appointment or schedule a sales call. They gave it to you so you would keep sending them information that’s valuable to them.

That is your litmus test. Each and every time, before you hit send, ask yourself “is this going to be valuable to my audience?” Time for a re-write if your honest answer is no.

Assuming you keep producing helpful content and you actually send it out consistently – the prospects will let you stay in their in box. Week (or month or quarter) after week, you’re there. You’re teaching, helping and they are getting a little smarter and a little more comfortable with you each time they hear from you.

You should also use those regular emails (or however you decide to connect with them) to drive them back to new content/offerings on the website. Maybe you produced a demo video series or you’re hosting an educational event that you’d like them to register for.

While we are focusing on your website, it certainly shouldn’t be the only tool in your toolbox. Your sales funnel should be armed with both digital and traditional tactics. They work together hand in glove, each strengthening the other.

The days of your website just being an online brochure are long gone. Be sure your web presence is the sales workhorse it should be by building a sales funnel around the know • like • trust = sales equation.

The last section of the sales funnel – trust

Having the right timing matters. You don’t get to this part of the funnel after the first couple interactions. If I see one consistent mistake, it’s that people shift into these sorts of strategy way too early. It’s like meeting someone in a bar and proposing the same night. Odds are you aren’t going to get too many yeses.

I totally get it from a business’ point of view and have often felt that frustration myself. You’ve shared your expertise. You’ve answered their questions. Surely they should be ready to buy by now. They obviously like what you do enough to keep coming back. So why aren’t they buying?

In my thirty years of being in business, I’ve rarely met a buyer who is as anxious to make the sale as the seller. Sure, there are those customers who come to us in crisis, and we scramble to put out their fire but they’re not the norm. So what do we do? We hang in there, and we keep being helpful and we work to stay top of mind until they’re ready to move forward.

The other factor to remember is that while we are the ones who build the sales funnel, it’s the prospect that moves through it and they control the pace and direction. So while one prospect may linger in the getting to know you (remember our know • like • trust = sales model) or growing to like you section for years, another may whip through both of those and be willing to trust you enough for a trial purchase in a matter of a couple visits.

For your website to truly be an effective sales funnel, you need to offer different levels of engagement, so the prospects can move themselves through at their own speed. As we talked about in the last couple columns, that means free content (text and video if possible) and content that you’ll give them for an email trade. But what kinds of things should you have available for those who are ready to consider a purchase?

Believe it or not – one that many companies miss is having contact information on the site. Don’t make me look for your phone number or email address. If you have the capacity, live chat is great. But make sure I can contact you and give me more than one method. If you have a brick and mortar presence, be sure you list your street addresses as well, with a link to one of the mapping sites.

You can also offer the ability to schedule a call, demo or take an assessment that will require you contact them (usually by email) with the results.

Remember that most buyers want to be pretty sure they’re going to buy before they speak to a salesperson or company representative. When they do reach out, they may have some final questions but they’re very close to making a buying decision. Which means you need to be ready to respond quickly once they do trigger that next level of readiness. Test your site and all your internal systems to verify that nothing is going to get in the way of you finally connecting with this potential buyer.

Today’s consumers want to be able to shop us on the web. How well that works for you is completely in your control. Is your site ready?

P.S. I found the great graphic on a SocialFresh blog post.

In an ideal world, the sale of your product or service runs smoothly and with no objections from the prospect, but we all know that most sales are far from ideal. The reality is that handling sales objections comes with the territory of any sales cycle, so it’s best to know how to manage them.

When you adopt a scientific sales process, the best way to manage objection handling is by using psychology to help you connect and deepen your relationship with the prospect. Here are four ways to more effectively address sales objections so your prospect stays on track to a final close:

1. Use Empathy To Mirror And Match

The key to prospect empathy is be persistent in listening closely and assuring the prospect that you understand. As you listen, look for key indicators as to whether or not the prospect is actually going to buy, and try to get into the buyer’s mind in order to establish and build trust.

Pay close attention to his or her rate of speech, mannerisms (if you are meeting face to face) and attitude. Then, as you answer questions and address sales objections, match those mannerisms in your own communication. This approach reinforces that you’ve been listening and comes across as more relatable to the prospect.

2. Harness The Power Of The PEPC Method

Another tactic for handling sales objections is the PEPC method, as explained below:

Probe: Get as much information as possible from the prospect
Empathize: Put yourself in the prospect’s place
Present: Communicate your case in the best way possible
Close: Finalize on a firm commitment before the end of the conversation

The key to closing any sale is finding and removing all objections, so you need to first probe and empathize with a prospect to discover every objection he or she might have. Then, with a greater understanding of the prospect’s pains and fears, you’re able to more precisely address those sales objections in your presentation and close.

3. Look At The Bigger Picture

Sometimes, a prospect’s sales objections get lost in the intricacies and particulars of the deal, which have the potential to escalate into an endless debate that might lose you the sale. Instead of handling sales objections at this level of minutiae, reframe the conversation to look at the bigger picture for the prospect.

For example, if potential customers have an objection about a small price difference for your product or service, take the conversation a step back and remind them that you understand they’re looking for value and that your product or service offers better long-term value to their business in the following ways. This approach reminds prospects to look first to their organizational strategy and long-term goals before arguing over minor points.

4. Connect With A Storytelling Approach

Storytelling is the most powerful form of human persuasion, and it definitely plays a part in your sales funnel when it comes to handling sales objections. Stories (such as case studies, scenario modeling and metaphors) help you relate to customers and show them the proof that your solution works – particularly when you frame the story in their own industry lingo or jargon.

Analogies are one particularly powerful storytelling technique, because you have the ability to compare a prospect’s current choice between you and your competitor to another choice that he or she feels more confident in making. For example, if a prospect is only worried about your price, you might ask, “If you were buying a new car, would you only consider the upfront price? Or would you consider manufacturer, maintenance costs and safety features as well?” Then, demonstrate how your business is just like that reliable, safe car manufacturer (or any other useful analogy). Analogies are exceptionally effective when you make a comparison to the prospect’s own product, solution or industry.

Handling sales objections doesn’t have to be the hardest part of closing more sales if you use the techniques listed above. In fact, with the right approach to objection handling, you close more sales and retain more prospects in your growing sales pipeline.

Many companies aren’t utilizing the full potential of their lead nurturing campaigns.

They’re passing all lead nurturing responsibilities to marketing.

They’re separating the lead nurturing cycle from the sales funnel.

And they’re not aligning their departments for better conversions.

According to a study by CSO Insights, underwritten by Velocify, 42.3% of companies nurture leads by handing them off to marketing, who then engages and remains active with them through lead nurturing campaigns until they’re ready to buy.

However, when both sales and marketing share responsibility for lead nurturing, companies experienced a significant increase in conversion rates. In this study, 89.1% of companies that aligned sales and marketing lead generation efforts reported measurable increases in the number of leads that turned to opportunities as a result of continuous nurturing.

AG Salesworks’ new guide, Aligned Lead Nurturing for B2B Sales and Marketing, is designed to supplement your company’s aligned lead nurturing efforts. It offers new perspectives on aligned lead nurturing and includes specific steps for measurable and effective lead nurturing campaigns that involve both marketing and sales. With a list of key metrics to follow for lead nurturing campaign effectiveness, an explanation of sales’ role in the lead nurturing process as well as important tips for converting leads down the funnel, and an analysis of the future of lead nurturing, it provides value for professionals first applying lead nurturing processes, management interested in finding out more about aligning their departments, and sales and marketers looking to refine lead nurturing processes already in place.

To understand the state of lead nurturing today and better examine how aligned lead nurturing can impact your company, check out these important lead nurturing statistics:

1. 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the most common cause of this poor performance. (Source: MarketingSherpa)

2. 50% of leads are qualified but not ready to buy. (Source: Gleanster Research)

3. 65% of B2B marketers have not established lead nurturing. (Source: MarketingSherpa)

4. 46% of marketers with mature lead management processes have sales teams that follow up on more than 75% of marketing-generated leads. (Source: Forrester Research)

5. Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. (Source: DemandGen Report)

6. Companies that excel in aligned lead nurturing reduce the percent of marketing-generated leads ignored by sales (from as high as 80% to as low as 25%) (Source: Marketo)

7. Relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails. (Source: Juniper Research)

8. 34% of B2B organizations touch leads with lead nurturing on a monthly basis. (Source: MarketingSherpa)

9. 82% of prospects say lead nurturing content targeted to their specific industry is more valuable (Source: MarketingSherpa)

10. Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. (Source: The Annuitas Group)

To maximize your lead nurturing efforts, follow the techniques outlined in Aligned Lead Nurturing for B2B Sales and Marketing. This guide is more than just your standard how-to. Learn to apply these statistics to your company through mature and advanced lead nurturing strategies, and your will see more qualified leads, more conversions, and more revenue. Nurture across multiple channels, and link the sales funnel with the lead nurturing cycle.

Sales professionals tend to be lumped into one of two categories: you’re either a sales superstar or you’re not. As it turns out, most sales reps are not. They fall somewhere in the middle — that gray area between sales whisperer and weak link. And guess what? Those average performing “B players” are actually a company’s most valuable asset.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at the 20-60-20 theory. This concept of categorizing staff, notes that 20 percent of a sales force includes top performers and 20 percent are struggling, but that 60 percent are somewhere in the middle. Like any group of employees, a sales team is a set of individuals with varied skills, and therefore, varied levels of potential and motivation. Motivating only the top performers on a sales team is a flawed idea. It sounds obvious, but it’s a fact that sales managers all too often forget.

In fact according to research from Maritz, since the 60 percent core group is so large, by increasing performance by 5 percent from the middle, an organization can yield more than 70 percent more revenue than they can through a 5 percent performance boost among top performers.

We all know that when it comes to motivating sales reps, running contests around desired behaviors and results can enhance company sales by getting people focused and energized around a goal. Taking that one step further and tailoring those competitions to fit each performance level within an organization, especially those middle-of-the-road performers, is a strategy that can take a business to the next level.

Here are three easy ways to motivate the middle, which can be especially useful when paired with sales motivation tools:

1) Don’t keep your eyes only on the prize.

The prize is not what motivates. Of course incentives and perks help spark interest in employee participation. But the experience of the competition, and sales reps being able to see their rankings on a leaderboard via either a mobile app, computer screen or big screen monitors up around the office, creates an immediate call to action. Competition and the buzz in the office are what truly energize the team.

2) Create thoughtful competitions.

Managers can’t just throw a few competitions together, slap on badges here and there and expect to incentivize general sales performance. To run a gamification program that works, identify problem areas for each tier of the sales team. If a manager can measure it, they can motivate it. This is one of the grand visions of using CRM software; managers can measure their sales teams’ actions throughout the entire sales process. But what are you doing once you have those metrics?

Take advantage of the insight your CRM offers, and focus competitions on the activities that lead to sales. For example, trigger contest points for converting leads, or making calls, having face-to-face meetings, or advancing opportunities to key sales stages. But be particular about which areas you choose to motivate and careful not to reward too many things at once — oftentimes, the simpler the better.

3) Most importantly, remember: One size doesn’t fit all.

The beauty of sales motivation software is that managers can run multiple competitions simultaneously. Take advantage of that flexibility and create three separate contests, customized for each peer group (low performers, average performers, top performers).

This way sales reps are matched up against others with similar skill sets, which ends up raising everyone’s performance. No more contests where people at the bottom of the leaderboard just feel frustrated.

When it comes down to it, this is all about running competitions within groups of individuals with similar skill sets and performance histories. The types of sales behaviors that managers should motivate by performance group are as unique as each sales rep. So, figure out what that behavior should be for your middle-level performers and start motivating. They’re likely your most valuable asset.

Image via BigStockPhoto.com

Yesterday I wrote a case study post on ReadyTalk and how they worked with Influitive to work with all of their happy customers to market their brand.

In this case study, we learned that advocates are simply people who are happy with your brand. In order to get them to keep talking about you without getting burned out or feeling like their being used, you need to reward them.

Pretty straightforward, right?

Once we understand what an advocate is, where we can find them, and who exactly they are, the hardest part is yet to come – asking them to talk about you.

A Bold Marketing Claim

To get a more in depth look at advocate marketing, I talked to Mark Organ, Founder of Influitive.

Before starting Influitive, a platform designed specifically to serve as a hub for companies to house their advocate marketing programs in, he started Eloqua, which was acquired by Oracle two years ago. It’s safe to say this man knows his stuff when it comes to engaging customers… 

Mark claims that in 10 years, every marketing team will have an advocate marketer.

“Influitive is simply riding on the wave of a powerful force—the voice of the customer.” 

He says that advocate marketing will be as mainstream in a few years as email marketing is today. (tweet this)

I dig bold claims and I am a strong supporter of bringing customers in to the brand instead of treating them as an outside part of a brand, so I was naturally drawn to this topic.

More Control with an Organized Process

Whether it’s using a platform like Influitive or  setting up an internal process, having an organized advocate marketing strategy and reward system in place gives marketers more control over word of mouth than they’ve ever had.

Aside from keeping customers satisfied, WOM is generally out of your hands. However, implementing an advocate marketing program gives marketers a little more control over their program when executed well. For starters, you are creating and incentivizing a group to share brand recommendations and information.

Mark explained that the main difference between traditional WOMM and advocate marketing is that with advocate marketing “marketers can scale the voice of the customer across the entire organization while providing an ongoing mutually beneficial relationship for advocates.”

The fact that advocate marketing programs are opt-in-only and propelled with incentives gets rid of the whole “customer burnout” factor that results when you ask too much of your customers.

“We all have companies and products that we love and want to talk about but without a system that provides recognition for this effort, advocate activity tends to wane over time.”

Who are the Right People?

One of the most crucial components of outreach marketing is that marketers reach out to the right people at the right time. 

I asked Mark for advice on finding the “right” people to invite in to a program. I liked what he had to say:

“Every customer, partner and employee should be considered a potential advocate—they just need the right experience, relevant content and feedback to keep them engaged.”

Authenticity?

Some marketers may ask if incentivizing advocates to talk about you leads to inauthentic posts.

I think, when done well, an advocate marketing program can simply amplify sincerity in the voice of people who like your brand.

Scoring authentic brand recommendations comes from inviting the right people to be in the program in the first place. Find advocates based on the following criteria and you can’t go wrong!

Here are some ideas for finding the right people for your advocate program:

• Send a customer survey to your entire client base. Set a certain score that people need to rate you and consider these the “uber happy people” and invite them in to your advocate marketing program.
• Talk to your customer facing employees such as support and sales and ask them to recommend people who would be a good fit.
• Monitor the social world and invite people who write about you on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• Any customers who have participated in acts of advocacy in the past such as worked with you on a case study or recommended other clients.

Closing the Feedback Loop

Not only can advocate power be harnessed for the good of sales, but working with them closes the feedback loop as well.

It’s no secret that your customers have the best input on how to improve your product or service. However, getting this input can sometimes be tough especially if you’re asking the same customers over and over again.

Part of having a group of advocates that you work with in an incentive program is that you can also ask them product improvement questions and reward them for their input.

Mark explained that, “Advocate marketing gathers a large pool of stakeholders into one central location where they can be surveyed about almost anything at any time. Advocates can choose to participate in these activities according to their timeline, not the company’s.”

Do you think advocate marketing is the next big thing? Please share your input in the comments! Cheers to an awesome discussion!

It’s easy to think that a lot of today’s marketing is now happening online. That’s not just because of all the online ads you see or the prevalence of mobile apps. Generating targeted sales leads in the B2B market requires you to use more and more online resources as well. You blog to increase thought leadership. You use data in order to optimize your content. It’s even possible that you’re using cloud-based technologies as part of your CRM process!

Upon closer inspection though, the differences between some tactics of consumer and big business marketing could indicate something bigger: an answer to the growing internet hive mind.

Let’s look at exactly what really makes the two different. For consumer marketers, nothing spells success like viral. You get mass Likes on Facebook, mass reTweets, and crowds of people lining up at your stores because of you used social media to announce some big sale.

On the other hand, this type of mass marketing can easily convert into mass manipulation. Just recently on Forbes, Kashmir Hill reported that Facebook deliberately conducted this as an experiment, manipulating the emotions of over 600,000 unsuspecting users. The report goes as far as to cite the head researcher’s claim that emotions on social media can be akin to a psychological contagion.

That’s certainly an interesting way to describe how the internet can act like a hive mind sometimes. It’s also a scary way to show how bad that actually sounds. A few dangers of this type of hive mind include:

• Loss of information control – It may be better to be more transparent but putting control of information in the hands of an anonymous collective can come at the cost of facts too. Ever seen a game of ‘Pass the Message’? That’s how it can do just as much damage by mixing fact with fiction. Processing targeted sales leads helps you tackle each customer individually, one-on-one, with a stronger capacity to root out excessive popular opinion.

• Bigger angry mobs – Forget Anonymous, just look at what the Instagram community did to Adam Richman of Man VS Food. One slight misuse of a hashtag and bam, instead social media mayhem. What’s arguably more aggravating though is that it demonstrates how an angry mob of any size can blow the slightest hiccups out of proportion. To fix this, you need a sales process that can really hold this mob at bay and keep problems strictly between you and the customer.

• Too much anonymity – Speaking of which, handling your sales leads by the crowd (against handling them as single, targeted prospects) is like scooping up needless small fry when you’re supposed reel in the big fish. The former sounds easier at first but that’s only because you forget you still have to throw the small fry back into the water. Likewise, you need to manually filter out feedback that is truly worth it from what’s just plain noise from anonymous posters.

With all the high-speed communication that happens online, that might have come with the downside of having zero patience for actually evaluating a conversation. In this regard, looking to the hive mind of the internet to determine the fate of your marketing campaign is just asking for trouble. Use targeted sales leads to keep the conversation between yourself and an individual sales prospect instead of the hive.

If you are struggling to get attention from your target audience, more than likely, it’s because you are boring them to tears by talking about yourself, your products, your services, your awards, etc…

Well guess what?

Nobody cares. At least not yet.

Rule #1: Be Interesting

If you are going to attract visitors to your site, you need to think about them before you think about what you are trying to sell.

It’s time for some target audience analysis.

Who is your target audience? What are they struggling with? What are they trying to learn? What do they find entertaining?

If you don’t yet know your target audience well enough to answer these questions, step one is to thoroughly define your target audience. Once you know who they are, then you can start to focus on being interesting.

How to Become What People Are Interested In

Now that you know who you are trying to attract, becoming interesting is going to be quite a bit easier. Here are a few ways you can do that.

1. Study What is Already Popular

According to Neil Patel, founder of the popular blog KissMetrics, one of the very best ways to discover what your audience is interested in is to study the other blogs in your niche. What you are looking for are posts that have received a lot of comments and social sharing.

Whenever you find a blog post that has generated this type of engagement, you have found a topic or an idea that your audience is very interested in.

Now that you know this topic is interesting to your audience, all you need to do is to write an article that gives your opinion on the topic, as well as to add some additional value. In fact, you may even want to cite the original article in the post you are writing.

The easiest way to do this is to use a wonderful tool that Neil has created. Here’s how you do it:

Come up with a list of 5 of your competitors, take their URLs and plug them into the Quick Sprout analyzer tool.

What the tool will show you is all of the popular blog posts that your competitors have created from a social media aspect. You can then take the list and sort it by a specific social channel to see what post titles people like the most.

You can then generate your own version of that blog post with your own twist, so that way you aren’t copying your competition blatantly.

This will help you create more content that gets more social traffic versus writing blog posts that don’t get shared.

2. Create Content That Has Nothing to Do with What You Sell

Being interesting means being diverse. Every once in a while, it’s a very good idea to create (or find) content that has absolutely nothing to do with what you sell; yet will still be of interest to your target audience.

There are several ways to do this.

The first way is to spend time talking to the people in your niche to gain an understanding of current events, news, or industry trends. Once you have uncovered something that is of interest, put your reporter hat on, research it further, and then write an op-ed article about it.

If you do a good job on the article, people will share it and you’ll succeed in attracting new visitors to your site. If your site was build with conversion in mind, in all likelihood, 1-3% of these visitors will convert to leads. Once they convert to a lead, if you have a well designed marketing funnel, you will have all the time you need to start introducing them to your products and/or services.

The second way to be interesting is to find or create content that you think will be entertaining to your audience. To see what I mean, take a look at the two videos below.

Evian, “Baby & Me,” 90,487,249 views

This first video has been viewed 90 million times since it was published on Youtube back on April 19, 2013.

In case you are thinking, what the heck do babies have to do with Evian? Agency and client both pointed out that the babies aren’t just an advertising gimmick. They’re rooted in the brand’s history.

“The babies are true to our story and heritage,” Laurent Houel, global brand director for Evian, tells Adweek. “The love affair of the brand with babies started in France in 1935, when Evian was first recommended as a perfect water for babies. It is still today the No. 1 water used by mothers for their babies [thanks to its pH-neutral mineral composition]. So fundamentally, there is a true link, it is not a marketing trick.”

Houel adds: “BETC had the idea to go beyond this, and leverage the babies into a powerful symbol of purity and youth. This baby is a symbol of you and how you feel when you experience Evian, and a symbol of the purity of our water.”

DollarShaveClub.com – “Our Blades Are F***ing Great” 14,971,597 views

This next video has been viewed 15 million times since it was published on Youtube back on March 6, 2012.

The cost to produce the video below was just $4,500.

Below are some tips that Dubin shared for making a video viral:

1. “Think deeply about the problem you’re solving,” Mr. Dubin said. In other words, find the insights that will make people care about the video — which in this case were the same ones that made them care about the Dollar Shave Club brand. Razor blades — both the high cost and the inconvenience of buying them from the locked “razor fortress” in stores — are “an emotionally supercharged subject.”
2. “Identify a resonant shared human experience around it and then build your concept around that ,” Mr. Dubin said. “In just about every beat of the video … we’re talking about the business and the benefit of the business.”
3. Keep it brief. “The video is really really tight,” Mr. Dubin said. “This video is a minute-and-a-half long, and that ‘s really, really important. It was going to be a lot longer, and thankfully the director I worked with who helped me, who I also did some improv with in New York, she really helped me pare it down and keep it brief. Nobody wants to watch your five-minute video. Nobody forwards around a video they didn’t watch all the way through.”
4. “Don’t give people a video they could have written themselves.” Dollar Shave Club’s video may have been low-budget, but it was created by people, including Mr. Dubin, with years of experience both in improv comedy and video production, giving it considerably more punch than your average $4,500 production. “I would encourage you … to hire some comedy writers. Go down to the local comedy club and bring them into your marketing brainstorm. I studied improv for eight years at the Upright Citizens Brigade as a hobby and loved it. … A lot of my teachers are now on television and in film … and I always thought they were missing a big opportunity, which was to start their own agency.”

Converting “Interesting” into “Revenue”

As you might imagine, simply posting funny videos of cats isn’t going to cut it when it comes to generating revenue.

Hence my not using a cat video for my example *smirk*

Like I said earlier, if you have a well designed website with proper calls to action on each blog post (like the one below), it’s quite reasonable to expect 1-3% of your traffic will convert to leads.

Once you have captured someone’s contact information, the next step is to feed them more content and collect data on what they are interested in; a topic that I will cover at length in a future post.

For now, just know that that if you get this right, the natural result will be that some of the leads you capture will flow all the way through your funnel and become what is called a sales qualified lead. (meaning they are ready and willing to talk to your sales team)

Listen on iTunes, download (right click and “save as”), or stream it in the below player now:

This episode is brought to you by…you guys. To help keep this podcast going, please check out the Tim Ferriss Book Club, where, every 1-2 months, I highlight one book that’s changed my life. Here are the first four books.

Now, on to our guest…Joe De Sena.

Joe De Sena is the co-founder of The Death Race, Spartan Race (1M+ competitors), and more. Among other things, he has completed the famously grueling Iditarod dogsledding race…on FOOT. And what about the Badwater Ultramarathon (135 miles at over 120 °F/49 °C), Vermont 100, and Lake Placid Ironman? He did all of those in ONE WEEK. The man is a maniac, and he’s a very strategic businessman.

This episode covers his story, as well as his approaches to grit, endurance, and building empires.

Click here to subscribe/listen to the show on iTunes.
Click here to subscribe to the show via RSS (non-iTunes feed).

This show’s had more than two million downloads…but only 550 or so reviews!  WTF?! If you’d like me to continue doing these podcasts, please leave a short one here.  It will help the show tremendously, including my ability to bring on more incredible guests.

Show notes and links (e.g. mentioned books, resources) can be found below.

Enjoy!

If you’ve missed previous episodes, here are two you might enjoy:

Show Notes and Select Links from Episode 16

• The story of his entrepreneurial beginnings — pool boy to the organized crime figures of New York
• Becoming an expert in women’s clothing
• How he ended up on Wall Street, and why it led Joe to adventure races
• What is the Death Race, and who enters a race with a name like that?
• 3 races and a wedding (saying “yes” can get you in trouble)
• How the Spartan Race became a global phenomenon
• Behind the scenes of Spartan Up!
• Much more….

LINKS FROM EPISODE 16

• Visit the Tim Ferriss Book Club to find a new book each month (or so) that’s changed my life
• Death Race – “Every man dies, but not every man lives”
• Obstacle Course Races: Spartan Race
• The last great race: Iditarod
• EcoChallenge
• Learn more about the Badwater Ultramarathon
• Vermont 100 Mile Endurance Race
• Spartan Up! by Joe De Sena (the official website)

Books Mentioned in the Episode

• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
• Shogun by James Clavell
• The One-Minute Manager by Ken H. Blanchard
• Spartan Up!: A Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Overcoming Obstacles and Achieving Peak Performance in Life by Joe De Sena

Psychological pricing is a strategy that retailers can take advantage of, whether they operate online, offline, or in multiple channels.

When retailers tap into these pricing tactics, they are able to effectively boost sales and conversions.

There are a variety of pricing tricks and tips to entice shoppers to buy, so price intelligently to benefit from this phenomenon.

If you could have one superpower, what would it be? No need to say mind-reading, because knowing the tricks of psychological pricing will get you inside the thought processes of your customers.

Psychological pricing is a tool that retailers can use to subconsciously increase the chances that a customer will make a purchase, including:  

1. Charm pricing

Charm pricing is a strategy that takes advantage of relative and anchor prices to make a product more appealing solely because of its listed price.

This is not lost on anyone who has seen rows on rows of $0.99 candy bars in a convenience store. The number nine does a great job convincing customers they are getting a deal. Take a look below:

Even though it is not the cheapest option, the $39 dress sold best. This is because buying this dress makes customers felt they were getting a steal on a $40 dollar dress, whereas buying the $34 dollar dress felt like overpaying for a $30 dress.

Simply because $34 is closer to $30 and $39 is closer to $40, customers create those reference points to judge the value of their purchase.

That’s not the only way retailers can get cute with their pricing. Ever notice the difference in font size between the dollars and cents on the billboards promoting Burger King’s new meal deal? That “.99” is tucked up in the corner in a tiny font in order to make you forget it even exists.

Even if you do notice it, your eyes will fixate on the bigger number, and you will use that as the reference when comparing its value.

There are even a few other charm pricing techniques that do not involve the number 9. Random numbers like $1.64 make it seem like the retailer is selling it to you as cheaply as they can, while luxury brands embrace no-nonsense prices like $25.00 to convey they do not need to resort to charm pricing to make their goods desirable.

Know what you want customers to think of your product, and you can alter your list price accordingly.

2. Bundling to reduce purchasing pain

What I’m about to say may come as a shock, so brace yourselves: Some people do not like buying things.

It’s shocking, I know, but a good portion of people like spending their hard earned money as much as removing their own teeth with rusty pliers.

In order to get these customers to reach deeper into their pockets, bundling goods can be effective. Just ask McDonald’s.

Bundling is common outside of value meals as well, from three-piece suits to software suites (like Microsoft Office).

But in the end, selling in bundles is not far from selling in bulk. You throw in more products and offer a slight discount on the unit price in return. 

3. Flash sales

Flash sales can be very effective psychological tools, as they convey exclusivity in addition to urgency.

If a flash sale site, such as Rue La La, offers a popular enough sale, the inventory may not make it until the end of the designated time.

Customers know this too, and will leap at the chance to get a rationed good, let alone at 50% off. Retailers could even take this one step further by offering personalized time-sensitive coupons to some of their more loyal customers.

Keeping loyal customers happy+moving inventory+increasing traffic= that ever-elusive win-win-win. 

4. Anchored pricing

Anchoring is simply convincing customers into thinking they are getting a steal using relative value. By introducing a premium option to a standard product, customers will find the standard has more value when compared to a more expensive product with extra features.

Therefore, customers who don’t make the jump are more likely to purchase the original with the expensive anchor in the back of their heads.  

Software companies do this constantly. By offering a deluxe package with a bunch of features, the average consumer may not even be able to pronounce, the standard and cheaper option will look like a bargain in comparison.

5. Buy one, get one free

People love free stuff. They just cannot get enough. Amazon knows this, which is why the company has fought tooth and nail against France, the one country banning the free shipping of books.

It doesn’t matter if the purchase was $200 worth of vintage Pokemon apparel, if the shipping was free, consumers find that a bargain. Beware: even though free products are a great way to hook customers, they could lessen the perceived value of those products. 

Contributing writer: Jack Symington

Employees used to know just your name, your face, your business reputation.

Now they know your salary, your hometown, your connections on LinkedIn, how much your house is worth. They know more than ever, and you’re under pressure to share more than ever, too – 76% of global executives think it’s a good idea for their CEO to be on social media.

And along with this increased transparency, you’re held accountable for areas you know less about: new technologies, new markets, new cultures and geographies representing new stakeholders. It’s no wonder CEO tenure is declining.

Good leaders have always stepped out of their comfort zones, but converging global megatrends are putting more pressure on those at the top to navigate a faster, more complex, more integrated, and more transparent business world.

In our recent book, “Leadership 2030: The six megatrends you need to understand to lead your company into the future,” we examined the repercussions of the convergence of major forces like globalization, climate change, increased individualism, and accelerating digitization.

Among our findings is that leadership in the future will involve increased personal and business-level discomfort. Leaders will have to cope with the blurring of private and public life – and they will have to forge new relationships with competitors and employees. This requires new skills and mindsets. Ego is on its way out.

Technology alone offers several sources of discomfort. Leaders will increasingly be called to evaluate and implement new technologies they don’t always understand and can’t control, from the cost-benefits of data automation to balancing consumer concerns with data mining opportunities to gauging the commercial value of bitcoin and other new concepts. As connectivity-enabling technology and virtual workplaces change how people interact, leaders must engage employees across cultures and business roles through new mediums. Leaders must acquire digital wisdom, even if they lack digital knowledge.

The combination of digitization with globalization and consumer demands for personalized products will complicate the usual processes and relationships. Competitors will be recast as allies, as rival companies will have to work together to achieve more complex technical innovations. Such “co-opetition” will require leaders to maintain a difficult dual perspective – rivals must be simultaneously seen as both vital partners and market threats.

But possibly the biggest adjustment for leaders of today is a power shift that is requiring major changes to how they think and work. Many are accustomed to command-and-control, to fear over love, and to “lead, follow, or get out of the way.” But hierarchies are flattening as power moves away from top internal management and toward employees and a proliferation of external stakeholders. Companies must now appeal to a plethora of global consumer markets, each with distinctive attitudes and desires.

Leaders motivated by power over others will not thrive in this new world.We will see more “altrocentric” leaders, who understand that leadership is a relationship and will therefore primarily focus on others rather than themselves. Adept at engaging rather than commanding, they see themselves as just one integral part of the whole. Altrocentric leaders will be capable of long-term vision encompassing both global and local perspectives.

David McClelland points out that both emotionally intelligent leaders and their egocentric counterparts tend to be motivated by power; they enjoy having an impact on others.The difference is in the type of power driving them: Egocentric leaders tend to be concerned only with personalized power – power that gets them ahead. Altrocentric leaders, on the other hand, derive power from motivating, not controlling, others.

The altrocentric leader who is intrinsically motivated by socialized power, and who draws strength and satisfaction from teaching, teambuilding, and empowering others, will be able to handle the increased pressure of tomorrow’s business environment. They understand that they need not “have all the answers” themselves, and this mindset and willingness to turn to others for help better equips them to handle the stress of the uneasy chair.

All leaders will see life become more chaotic and overwhelming, and their struggles and management will be more visible than ever. Egocentric leaders will have a difficult time evolving, if they even can, and will be unable to thrive in such discomfort. Organizations need to develop leaders who are motivated by altrocentric leadership. They will be better prepared to succeed in 2030 and beyond.

LinkedIn makes twenty times more revenue per user than Facebook. 

Much of this is thanks to LinkedIn Recruiter, the company's $8,200-a-year product for headhunters. 

As Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Piskorski explains in his new book, "A Social Strategy: How We Profit From Social Media," this is one of the things that distinguishes LinkedIn from its peers: while friending someone on Facebook opens you up to their private life, making a LinkedIn connection doesn't avail that much more information about a person.

"LinkedIn is one of those sites where we form these connections and set these profiles," Piskorski tells Business Insider. "But people actually don't do a lot of communication on the platform with each other, relatively speaking." 

The value for users lies in searchability. 

"Most of the activity on LinkedIn is recruiters going and searching through your profiles again and again and again," Piskorski says. "That's where most of the action is." 

With that in mind, we were stoked to be sent the below infographic from British social media consultancy LinkHumans, which walks you through crafting a highly fetching profile. 

SEE ALSO:  What 12 Super-Successful People Wish They Knew At 22

Join the conversation about this story »

3 Steps to make the case for better call-tracking

I get it. You’re an online marketer. Equipped with the best there is to offer in web analytics, you save the day for client after client, letting them know what drives visitors to their websites. Clients want to know if visitors actually read the content on their websites? Done. Businesses enquiring on what sites visitors go to after leaving their website? You got it covered.

But what happens when these visitors you thought you knew so well visit your clients website then decide to pick up the phone? Even with a powerful tool like Google Analytics, you still need to be tracking phone calls.

I know… I know, this isn’t 1876, and you aren’t Alexander Graham Bell. You’re a digital savvy marketing pro, why should you worry your clients with something as old school as telephone calls?

Why you should be tracking phone calls

• A recent study conducted by comScore on behalf of Google, found that 63% of website visitors complete their purchases offline following their search activity.
• Another Google study, this one conducted by Ipsos Research, found that 70% of mobile searchers call a business directly from search results.

Without tracking calls, any data on how visitors converted over the phone after interacting with your client’s business online is lost. That’s why integrating call tracking with Google Analytics is a great option for marketers. If it sounds complicated, don’t worry  it isn’t, you’re just 3 easy steps away from never missing out on valuable data again!

Three steps to integrating your call tracking with Google Analytics

Step 1: Integrate your Google Analytics Account with a Call Tracking Service

Call tracking services, in a nutshell, provide you with unique phone numbers that allow you to track what campaigns and advertisements are driving calls to your company. When you use call tracking online, you can find out if your website drives phone calls, and get insight into caller behaviour.

To get the most out of call tracking, you’ll need to find a service that’s easy to use, and easy to integrate with Google Analytics. CallRail call tracking and analytics, gives marketers the ability to track calls from organic search and PPC ad campaigns, plus it’s easy to integrate with your existing Classic and Universal Google Analytics accounts.

Step 2: Reap the benefits of using Google Analytics with Call Tracking

Once you integrate call tracking, you can personalize your Google Analytics experience and get deeper insight into website visitor behaviour:

• Set up goals in Google Analytics for calls and track them as conversions.
• See phone call conversions along with other conversions your tracking, such as online appointment forms, newsletter signups, and CRM data.
• Tailor reports to a client or businesses specific needs and create custom segments to analyze the activities of callers.
• View a caller’s website activity before and after they call a business.
• Create customized reports using information from all of the sources you’d like to track, including calls, event data, and multiple other sources across multiple devices.

Step 3: Help yourself and your clients by showing the value of advertising

I understand your hesitation. It sounds good, but there’s a new marketing tool born everyday  what makes this one different?

Just ask Darren Carter, Principal at NYC SEM and CallRail client. Like many online marketers, he spends his day helping clients gain leads and make sales through optimization of their online campaigns. In his role, he constantly uses Google Analytics to help his clients better understand return on ad spend, and he couldn’t do it without call tracking.

‘The main thing that using Google Analytics with CallRail exposes for my clients is having an important conversion that’s measurable within analytics that can show the value of their advertising.

Once I installed call tracking, I could see our clients were underestimating the value of the advertising we were doing for them. For example, we have a company that sells a high-end product, one of their best customers may spend $30,000 after developing a relationship with them, but they need to be introduced to the brand first through advertising, then they pick up the phone.

People are calling before making large purchases. Even if they initially used search they may go back to the site and complete a sale, but you’d never know that the sale was related to the advertising without call tracking.’ Darren Carter, Principal at NYC SEM

Don’t you want to close the gaps for your customers, and show them the full picture behind their online advertising? Integrating call tracking makes that easy. Calls are an extremely important piece of the online marketing puzzle, so do yourself and your clients a favour, make the most of your marketing and get more out of Google Analytics by integrating call tracking.

Thanks to Erica Campbell for sharing her thoughts and opinions in this blog post. Erica Campbell is the Marketing Coordinator for CallRail, a call tracking platform that brings enterprise-level call analytics to businesses and agencies, making it easy to track which marketing sources and keywords make your phone ring. Connect with Erica on Google+ .

I was catching up with a business colleague the other day and I couldn’t remember what the exact time was. She had sent me a message, but was it on Whatsapp, Facebook, a text or an email? Eventually I did find that short conversation online and it was on Facebook!

That is the challenge today.

We have so many options, not only with how we communicate but market our brand and products. Content marketing is no different.

Some people will ask a friend’s advice on what to buy while others will start with a Google search. When they find you they may prefer a video to text or even want to listen to a podcast.

As they say it’s complicated.

The content marketing cycle

At the end of the day the sales and engagement funnel is not a 20 step scientific formula. None of us follow a straight path to purchase, its a circuitous and winding journey that is more an adventure then a clinical scientific process. But there are some key steps.

The content creation and promotion process starts with understanding your customer, creating a list of topics to produce and then creating the content. Here is one visual description of the cyclical process from the Lera Blog.

There are many ways to describe this from more detailed and complicated diagrams to simple and high level.

No matter how you visualize the process it is continuous and needs to be a constant cycle of content creation, marketing (paid or earned) and measurement. It’s about finding what content works and what doesn’t.

Never assume what content will be a winner

It means doing the basics right by understanding the customer as best you can and then creating content topics around that. Next is to”start” publishing. You will be surprised very often with what goes viral and gets shared the most and what doesn’t.

This is where the customer engagement begins, ends and continues. Creating and constant testing! But you need to start… to learn what content resonates.

The customer content engagement journey

The customer’s content engagement journey is part science, part creativity and some intuition. It’s moving them from not knowing who you are (or even exist) to raving fans or “advocates’ who will love what you do and will share your content with a passion.

But before your customer engages with you they have to know who you are . That is the discovery phase or as the diagram below from Social Fresh calls it “awareness”.

So where does it begin? How do you find your customer or how do they find you? It doesn’t need to be complicated.

Here are 4 simple steps to content marketing success.

Step 1: Finding the customer (or do they find you?)

Often in the past the only tactics to finding your customer was with “outbound marketing”.

For many businesses acquiring a customer was cold calling, letterbox drops and fax broadcasts. For the consumer focused business or B2C brands it was mass media including TV, radio and print.

Today the customer finds you.

This is called inbound marketing and content marketing is part of that process.

The tactics for customer discovery

How many ways can you be discovered? Here are a few tactics at the discovery phase that you may need to be “found”.

1. Search: Turning up on page one of Google is not something that happens on day one. So this needs attention from day one launch of your blog or website. But it has to be done. It’s called an SEO process and it is driven in part by content and social discovery.
2. Social: Turning up a Twitter stream or a Facebook share and news feed is another way of being discovered. As you can imagine this will only happen if your content is good and you have fans and followers sharing your content.
3. Paid. This includes Facebook ads and Google AdWords.
4. Email: They won’t discover you on email unless a friend shares your content by forwarding the email.
5. Word of mouth: This is powerful way to be discovered because someone thought you were good enough to be recommended or mentioned.

So you have been discovered and now the engagement adventure begins.

Step 2: Engaging the customer

So they have found you! You have turned up in a search engine whether you have paid for it or earned it.

What next?

This is where the compelling contagious content kicks in.

Content that engages

In essence you have four media category choices for creating engaging content; text, images, video and audio. Then there are the flavours:

These include: Blog posts, white papers, ebooks, photos, photoshopped images, infographics, YouTube videos, short form videos on Vine and also podcasts.

So what engages “your” customer? That is something that only hitting the start button will discover. You will need to create, publish and measure to find out.

Social media is one of the best places to experiment and fail fast often and cheaply.

From average to great

How good is your content?

• If it’s average, they “may” read it. It’s skimmed and scanned
• If its good it could be shared once.
• If it is compelling, then it’s shared many times on multiple social networks.
• If its memorable, resourceful and useful then it is included in someones’ blog post and they may even “hyperlink” to your site.
• If its beyond memorable and is insightful and thought leading… then it’s mentioned at a dinner party. You can’t measure that.

The power of content to engage viewers, readers and customers is where the magic happens. It even happens on Twitter!

Engagement in search

They found you on Google but now comes the harder part. Can you move them from viewing to “clicking”?

So on the “search engine result page” or “SERP”, Google produces only three elements; the headline, description and the link . But there are two tactics that you can control and requires some attention and optimization.

1. Great headline: This is limited to only 74 characters. Make sure it is compelling and not cut off!
2. Tempting meta description: This has a 156 character limit and needs to tempt them to click

Engagement on social

On social it often means you have needed to create something visual to get that first glance.

Some visual tactics

1. Publish an image or infographic on your social media channels that may take them to longer form content such as a blog post or video.
2. Embed a video on Twitter, Google+ or Facebook.

Engagement on your website and blog

Appealing customer engagement on your website and blog means many things but some key elements include:

1. Headline
2. Opening sentence and paragraph
3. Structure, including sub-titles and bullet points.

It must be mentioned. Walls of unbroken text are often the death of content engagement.

So viewing and reading and engaging them are essential but the next step is to keep coming back so they don’t forget you.

Step 3. Calls to action

The social web provides easy ways to follow people on multiple social networks. Social media is often the light engagement. If they subscribe to your email then it’s getting a little more serious. That is saying “you can keep in touch with me”.

This means you need to move beyond just free content engagement to “calls to action”.

Tactics for calls to action include email and social:

Some email “call to action” tactics :

1. Subscribe
2. Download

They look like this:

Some social “call to action” tactics

1. Follow
2. Connect
3. Share
4. Retweet

They look like this:

Step 4: Convert to customers

The ultimate goal for content marketing is to turn those followers and subscribers into buyers. This happens with the continuous commitment to content creation and sharing that builds trust and credibility. It means always bubbling to the top. It’s also about not being forgotten.

Fans and advocates may not always become customers and may just enjoy your content. But they will be brand ambassadors that will continue you to share your content. This is when the crowd sourced content marketing becomes a very large amplifier of your brand.

Don’t underestimate this. It can be 99% of your content creation.

What about you?

How good is your content? Is it compelling enough to share? Are you including calls to action?

Look forward to your insights and feedback in the comments below.

Image via Influitive.com

The folks at ReadyTalk, a web conferencing platform had their work cut out for them in marketing their brand against big names such as GoToMeeting, WebEx, and join.me.

Not to mention, this bootstrapped company didn’t have a huge budget to grow off of.

What they did have, though, were happy customers. 

They needed a way to give these customers a voice and reward them for their word of mouth brand recommendations. They didn’t want to go right out and say, “Hey, thanks for being our customer. Now will you please talk about us more?”

That just doesn’t seem like good manners, does it?

Goals

To get an inside look and better understanding of how ReadyTalk worked around the awkwardness of asking happy customers to say good things about their brand, I asked their Marketing and Communications Manager, Bo Bandy, a couple of questions. Bo gave some awesome insight in to what worked.

Because customer referrals led to the highest rate of closed deals, ReadyTalk knew that they wanted to base their marketing on working with brand advocates. As with any new tactic or strategy implemented—the best place to start is writing down your goals before defining a strategy. ReadyTalk defined the following:

• Increase lead generation
• Build a community of engaged customers
• Solicit product feedback from customers
• Increase sales effectiveness through customer referrals
• Increase “marketing with customer” tactics such as guest blog posts, case studies, testimonials, etc.

How!?

To achieve these goals, ReadyTalk first partnered with Influitive—a platform that focuses only on advocate marketing and serves as a hub for an entire advocate marketing strategy. 

ReadyTalk and Influitive worked together to develop and implement the Summit Club. Only customers who were considered “brand fans” were asked to join the Summit Club.

Once a “happy person” (or brand advocate if you want to call it that instead) joined the club, they were given different challenges and ways to earn points. Points could be traded in for different rewards, incentivizing the customers to continue the word of the mouth recommendations and most importantly, establish a relationship that was mutually beneficial.

What Makes an Advocate Anyway?

An advocate for this project was defined as: A customer who had a non-financial investment in ReadyTalk but was happy with the brand.

In general, an advocate is someone who is happy with your brand and willing to talk about it—many marketers just give it the fancy name.

ReadyTalk reached out to customers who fit any of the following criteria:

• Customers who hand given them an NPS score of 8 or higher on the yearly customer satisfaction survey
• Customers who previously participated in advocacy activities such as case studies
• Customers who talked positively about ReadyTalk in social forums
• Customers who expressed brand satisfaction and were uncovered through customer facing employees such as sales and customer support

An Extra Gold Star: Product Feedback

The product feedback that ReadyTalk gathered from their Summit Club members was an added bonus to their advocate marketing program.

“The product feedback has been tremendous and, in all honesty, probably worth more than the leads that are coming in. We’ve been able to launch a Customer Insight Team, which is a group of 60 customers who agree to speak with us for an hour at least once a quarter and, in the interim, they provide feedback on product features and ideas.” - Bo Bandy

Results

In just 4 months, ReadyTalk had a network of 470 opted-in brand advocates which led to 190 qualified referrals! These results were incredible for Bo and the team.

Caution Areas

It’s important to remember that not everyone is right for your advocate programs. Don’t invite just anyone who would want prizes to join.

Likewise, don’t invite people who aren’t already customers or who don’t already love your brand into the program. Even if you find people who have a lot of traffic or a contextual affinity, consider putting them in a nurture program and contact them when they’ve done things to trigger “advocacy status.”

You only want to incentivize and work with people who are genuinely happy with your brand. These are the word of mouth recommendations that are sincere and authentic. The rest is just noise, and yes, insincerity can be picked up in tweets and blog posts.

Don’t overwhelm your happy people. “We aim to send formal communications every two weeks. We might send a digest of hub activity, a custom newsletter, or a note about a specific challenge,” Bo shared. “It hurts our email rates if we over-communicate, so we try to be sensitive to that.”

ReadyTalk won the BAMMIE Advocates Unite! award last year for their Summit Program implementation and results.

Have you implemented any type of advocate marketing program or strategy in to your marketing toolbox? Please share in the comments!

Do you have an awesome outreach marketing case study to share? I’m always looking to collaborate so email me at kristen@grouphigh.com!

According to a recent research, over 50 percent of businesses need to rework their social media strategy. This does not mean that so far they’ve been doing it all wrong; it just means that their present social media marketing strategy isn’t in line with their audience on social media platforms.

Undoubtedly, social media is huge, and is only getting bigger and if your marketing strategy is not updated as frequently as the changes come in, you’re definitely missing a large chunk of your targeted audience.

Contrary to the common perception, a social media marketing strategy is not something that can be perfected. What sales and marketing managers have to be diligent about is closely following the change in the trend adoption and audience behavior on an almost daily basis and then adjust their strategies accordingly. For instance, while your content calendar may have a particular theme set for the day, you have to leave room to deviate from the plan to accommodate breaking or viral news. This is a very simplified example, but you get the point.

Additionally, if you are using social media for marketing without any substantial results, then perhaps you are doing it all wrong and have to rework your strategy completely. If you don’t know where to begin, read on, and see whether your social media activity shows signs of these symptoms. Targeting the Wrong Audience:

The sole purpose of using social media for marketing is to get in front of a highly targeted audience. These are people whom you know and understand completely in relation to your services and can connect with by fulfilling their needs. And you don’t have to look too much farther than your existing analytics.

If you don’t know your audience or are targeting an entirely different group, then you have to rework your strategy completely and start all over again. You’ll notice a gap in your targeting if your KPI’s like engagement rates, referral traffic from social media and the reach of your posts don’t perform well or lag behind considerably.

Several social monitoring tools, such as Facebook Insights, Brand Monitor and Google Analytics Social Reports allow you to get all the information you need about your audience and campaign performance.

Lack of Value

If content is fire, social media is a highly flammable fuel. Hence, you have to work on ways to ensure that you provide high quality content to your audience that offers them real value that further entices them to share your content or sign up for your services.

If your content does not add any value to your audience, they will be less likely to engage with it, regardless of what you post. And although it can sound like an ambiguous word, “value” can be anything, such as discounts, special offers or knowledge shares , and if done correctly, it can prove to be a short-term investment with long-term results.

If you feel like you might be lagging behind with content, make sure you rework your strategy and create engaging and value-centric content that your audience can easily consume and digest. Be right there with your customers throughout their way to purchasing and ensure that your brand comes to their mind first when they need what you offer. Be creative and get there first.

Response Time Lag

Unlike other forms of advertising and marketing where the advertiser speaks and the audience listens, social media marketing is all about two-way conversations where the consumer can interact with a brand, raise their concerns, and request further information. Consumers are less likely to purchase products from a brand that does not communicate with them directly.

If you are not communicating with your audience at all, you will end up losing all your connections and followers, consequently making the, chances of higher social media acquisitions quite slim. Hence, the only way out is to rework on your strategy, start all over again, and ensure that you interact with your audience in the quickest and the best possible way.

Make sure that you have a team that is quick to respond to the issues of prospective clients, provide solutions to their problems and generate targeted leads, which you can convert into sales later.

Not looking beyond the giants:
Undeniably, Facebook and Twitter are two gigantic social networking websites that collectively have billions of users from all parts of the world. However, as enticing these social networks might seem initially, chances are there that they might not suit the type of products or services you offer.

Hence,  if Facebook and Twitter are not helping you achieve your targets, you should immediately start looking for other social networks that your targeted audience is using. Pro tip: don’t forget about blogs!

There are several industry specific social networks in operation – like Glassdoor and deviantArt – where you will be able to share information with a highly targeted audience and get more refined statistics and data.

Ignoring the Relationship between SEO and Social Networking:

Since the advent of Google+, everybody was talking about social media and its intersection with search engine optimization. Although they were right a couple of years ago, recent changes in search engine algorithms have made social signals an integral part of SEO.

At present, Google states that social signals, which include Likes, Pins,  ReShares and Retweets can help drive traffic to a website and generate quality backlinks, which further improves the overall ranking of a website.

If you have planned two different strategies, one for search engine optimization and another for social media marketing, it’s high time you completely rework and blend both these strategies into one perfect tactic that helps you achieve your goals.

Not Measuring Your Social Media Performance:

While digital marketing makes analytics a lot more accessible and measurable, it’s important to focus on which ones matter.

However, if your social media strategy focuses on getting more followers on your social pages rather than monitoring the benefits of that particular page, you are doing it completely wrong. Rather than simply creating shareable, readable and engaging content, you have to ensure that your content improves your bottom line.

Make use of tools that provide you complete information about the number of visitors directed to your website through social media, the specific piece of content that increased your referral traffic and the kind of content that your community did not appreciate. Understanding all these metrics will help you plan a robust social marketing strategy that will enhance your brand reputation and improve your bottom line as well.

No capital? No problem.

When I launched a few of my first ventures, we had to bootstrap everything. We had very little startup capital and needed to make our dollars go as far as possible. However, I also subscribed to the idea that people do business with people that they like. Often, to get people to like you, you have to do more than just sales meetings and conference calls. Face-to-face is still one of the most important ways to bond in business.

I knew I couldn’t compete against my peers that had huge expense accounts and bottomless Amexes but I didn’t even want to run that race. I thought there must be a better way to make an impact and to make prospects and clients feel valued and special besides dropping big stacks at the five star restaurants.

Their limited marketing budget doesn’t have to be a problem. That sign could probably be better, though.

Here’s what to do.

Make introductions. In business development, you’re constantly meeting people. These include people that might buy from you, people that might refer you, competitors, press, bankers and more. Whenever you meet someone new, think of who, down the road, you might be able to introduce them to. Making introductions is no cost to you but potentially invaluable to the two you are introducing. Nothing says “I care more about your success than just what you can do for me” than sharing your network with someone and expecting nothing in return.

Choose bars with personality. My dad always said that business happens on the golf course but I’ve found that a lot of business (or rapport that leads to business) happens in the bar. (This may also be because I’m a much better drinker than golfer but that is neither here nor there). Now, I’m not talking about after midnight bar moments but rather 5 – 7 pm happy hours. To save money on bar tabs when you’re treating prospects and clients, steer away from the hotel bars. Try to go somewhere that has more personality. This could be a bar that boasts 100 beers on tap or somewhere that is famous for their sangria. Chances are, your prospect is used to the typical $18 drink bar so they’ll actually welcome a more interesting environment as a breath of fresh air.

Lunch instead of dinner. Most good restaurants have a similar lunch and dinner menu, but you’ll find that lunch is far less expensive than dinner. You still get the benefit of the beautiful atmosphere and good food without the high price tag. Plus, most people don’t drink during a lunch meeting (or at least not that much).

[Side note: I did once take a guy that I was “courting” to lunch and he ordered several glasses of very expensive wine even though I was only drinking iced tea. That probably told me more about the guy than actually doing business with him. He was a dick.]

Share articles. Whenever you run across a great article or piece of content that you think one or more of your prospects would enjoy, shoot it over to them via email. It’s a good way to touch base without asking, “Are you ready to buy from me yet?” Articles don’t have to be just about your industry (but those are good too); if you know your prospect is a big USC fan, you could send something about the USC players going in the NFL draft and ask him what he thought.

Less popular sporting events. Getting tickets to the Super Bowl is not likely to be in the cards but you can still invite clients or prospects to a less popular sporting event. This could be early games in the season in college basketball, steeplechase horse races, Triple A baseball games (or even MLB games during the week depending upon your market). Don’t be too cheap here though. If you can’t afford good seats, you’ll look like a chump.

Clients won’t forget the 2015 Donkey Basketball Conference Championships. No one will.

Connect regularly. Sometimes what those guys with big expense accounts forget is that it’s not the BIG gesture of dinner at Nobu, but it’s the consistent connection and follow up that really makes an impression. If you show that you genuinely are interested in the person and want to earn her business, that goes a long way. No one wants to be someone’s 10th most important client but if, through consistent and authentic communication, you show that this prospect would be in your top 3, they’re going to feel more inclined to do business with you.

Thoughtful over expensive. Anyone (with money) can send a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. Not everyone actually listens during conversations and remembers that you talked about a book about creating habits. A personal note and book sent from Amazon that you recommend in the same genre would go much farther in being memorable.

Some homemade gifts are better than others.

Kill many birds with one stone. When I did business development in the hospitality industry, there were a few conferences a year that all of the big REIT CEOs, asset managers, and decision makers attended in various parts of the country. I concentrated my budget on these events because I knew that I could set up a lot of meetings with people that I would otherwise have to fly to various parts of the country to visit. The challenge was not just becoming one meeting of eight in a day but I would pair these quick conference lobby meetings with one of the strategies mentioned above to make more of an impact.

It pays off to do more than throw money at people.

Being more creative with my spending on prospects led them to think more highly of me and then, subsequently, believe that our company was a creative and up-and-coming force to be reckoned with. Most major company decision makers are used to being wined and dined so it’s become par for the course for them.

To make a bigger impact, think outside the Ritz.

So who to follow on Twitter? There are just so many great Social Media greats out there but who are the current top dogs? Following the people who have cracked the social media code can only help you, right? These guys are the best of the best. They give insightful advice and share great hints and tips. Keeping a close eye on what they do and emulating their style is a tremendous way to improve your social media marketing efforts. If you own a business and you don’t already follow some, if not all, of these guys then I suggest you get on it!

Listen to what they have to say, read what they write, trust me it’s all good. Watch how they interact with their peers and their followers. They share great insights and a wealth of knowledge. If you struggle with social media marketing then read up on what they have to say. Check out the great content they share from others. They are the Twitter social media royalty, watch and learn.

Mari Smith is known as the “Facebook Queen” but she kind of does OK on Twitter too! She has been named by Forbes as one of the top 20 influential women in social media and made her name in Facebook marketing. This busy lady is an author, speaker, trainer, mentor and marketing expert. Mari uses Hootsuite to automate her online marketing.

Chris Brogan is an advisor, business strategist and publisher for Owner Magazine. He is also the CEO of Human Business Works. He is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books and is also a keynote speaker. How does he find the time to tweet? Chris’s favorite social media app is Hootsuite.

Ann Handley is “Head of Content” for Marketing Profs and her mission is to fill the world with creative quality content. She is the author of Content Rules and a keynote speaker in content and marketing. Known as an authority in great writing for marketing she sure is one to watch. Ann likes to use the Twitter for iPhone app.

Michael Stelzner is the founder of Social Media Examiner, I probably don’t need to go on! He is one of Twitter’s go-to guys if you are looking for any kind of social media answers. He publishes great content, is an author and a speaker on all things social media and marketing.Michael’s favorite social media app is Tweetbot and he is also a big fan of Facebook.

Lilach Bullock is the founder of Sociable, a marketing and social media company. She is a super prolific blogger and made her name giving great advice on Twitter. She is a mentor, an author and a public speaker and has also been named as one of the top 20 influential women in social media by Forbes. Lilach’s favorite social media app is SproutSocial.

John Paul Aguiar is a blog marketing expert and number six on the Forbes Social Media Powers Influencers list of 2013. He is the owner and publisher of the Money Dummy Blog and regularly posts some fabulous Twitter guidance. He also provides FREE blogging entrepreneur courses, a good guy to know. John is a fan of the Android Twitter app.

Meghan Biro is the founder and CEO of Talent Culture and a contributor to Forbes, Huffington Post and Ent Magazine. She is an HR expert and career strategist helping global brands recruit the right people. A strong advocate of social media, she offers great insights into online community. Meghan uses Triberr.

Jeff Bullas is a social media strategist and blogger who works with companies to optimize their brand and social media presence. He is number eight on Forbes Social Marketing Talent list for 2014 and in Huffington Posts top 100 Twitter business accounts to follow. His blog gets over four million views every year, I am sure he is someone we can all learn from. Jeff uses SocialOomph for his automation.

Heidi Cohen is an expert in marketing and has been in the Social Media Examiner’s Top ten Social Media Blogs for two years running. Her blog the Actionable Marketing Guide, gives us great advice about marketing, content creation and social media across all platforms. Heidi is a Hootsuite lover.

Kim Garst is the CEO of Boom Social, a social media coach and consultant and a contributor to the Huffington Post. This clued-up lady in the top 50 Social Media Power Influencer on the Forbes list and in the top 20 women. She also provides social media training for small businesses to learn how to generate leads and make sales. Great advice for start-ups, small businesses and big companies. Kim is another Hootsuite fan!

My favorite thing about all of the above is that, for busy successful people, they are always approachable, helpful and friendly. Something we can all learn from maybe?

These are the people who will give you great advice on how to improve your social media marketing productivity. They have tried, or at least someone who works for them has, all of the apps, software and time-saving gadgets that we at GetApp adore.

Check out all the social media marketing apps head to head.

Whose success would you like to emulate? Who is your social media hero? Who else would you like to see being hailed a Twitter power-influencer? Let us know who would be on YOUR list.