The right advice can dramatically change your career. But to get that insight, you need to talk to the right people. Build a network of people with different roles and your professional life will benefit from diverse perspectives. Here are a few people you should regularly connect with.
In previous posts we discussed several cognitive biases you should know and use to increase conversion. Further more, understanding cognitive biases gives us a better understanding of our audience and what it is looking for.
Our brain is an amazing tool that is far more powerful than any computer currently available. However, amazing as it is it does have its limitations and obstacles. Quirks in our memory & calculation issues are 2 examples, but and another glitch our brain is subjected to is cognitive biases, those small “bugs” in our thinking patterns that cause us to make irrational decisions most of the time yet still have us believing we’re completely rational and thinking straight. To make is simple, Cognitive biases are tendencies of our brains to think in certain ways, they’re “unconscious” triggers that make different connections in our brain to help us make decisions that usually lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment.
The cognitive bias we’ll be discussing today is The Decoy Effect, this cognitive bias happens when we’re presented with more than 2 options which causes us to prefer 1 option over another option simply because it looks better, even when it might be the exact same to the second option or a worst option.
To explain the decoy effect, let’s examine Skype’s pricing page and then the Economist’s pricing page:
You’re on Skype’s site, debating how much credit to get. $10 or $25 credit. Which suits you better? What would you choose?
Reasons for choosing either can vary, from the amount of credit you currently have, your usage of the product, your current cash balance and other reasons. there wouldn’t be one distinctive offer that stands out and looks better than the other.
What if you were presented with a third option? The decoy effect states that consumers will tend to have a specific change in preference between two options when also presented with a third option.
Demonstrating the decoy effect perfectly is the Economist who differently from Skype, has 3 options. This great example of the decoy effect was found by behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely. While searching the Economist’s site he came to their pricing page and discovered the following structure:
If you take a good look you’ll notice that the economist was offering 3 different pricing modules, 1 module cost $59 and consisted of the online version only, the other for $125 which was for the printed version and the last was the same price – $125 for both offline and online versions.
As we’ve pointed out in several occasions, we (humans) do not know what we want and make our decisions according to the context in front of us. Meaning, the way things are presented to us has a huge effect on our decision making. Our entire decisions in life are in relation to other things, or as professor Dan Ariely points out – we don’t even know what kind of job we want until we see, hear or know someone else who is doing something which we think we should be doing. We need lights to show us where to go and direct us in the right path.
According to the decoy effect, while presented with only 2 options (either printed or online) people need to think, and make a decision. Trying to decide whether we prefer one or the other can be an extremely hard task, and so offering the readers of the Economist a third “no-brainer” option was an easy way out and a clear solution – both print and online together seem a better solution. The majority of people today may have felt fine with getting just the online version (I know I would), and though most people would not have chosen the offline option by itself (more expensive and not immediate), when presented with the third option they prefered it – it was an easy choice to make – 2 for the price of 1.
Similar to landing pages which have a testing strategy, so should your pricing pages. Pricing pages optimization is an important part of the funnel, and there are many elements to take into consideration.
Considering the decoy effect, make sure you offer pricing plans or modules that don’t just stand alone, but actually compliment each other and lead the customer to purchase the plan you would like them to. Circling a preferable plan and writing “recommended” is nice, but not enough. Heloing your customers chose the right plan for them is a huge part of your conversion optimization.
Take a look at intercom’s (if you’re not using their product by now, you should be!) pricing page for example, the clear plan to be chosen is clear (marked in blue) but other than that, it makes it very hard on the user to distinguish, why the ‘standard’ plan is better than the lite.
On the other hand, one of my favorite examples for pricing pages in Mailchimp. There pricing page has a great way of segmenting you and helping you decide exactly what category you’re in and what to choose. No need to guess why one is better than the other, you just know right away why one option suits you more than another.
Other elements to consider on your pricing pages are – the call to action button, Analysis Paralysis (giving too many options), the prices themselves and of course the emotional triggers the pricing pages create. You can also check out our emotional color guide which will give you an insight into what emotions your pricing page’s colors are triggering.
The key to optimizing and AB testing pricing pages is similar to landing page testing: testing a strategy. Small changes such as different titles or a color of a call to action button can present some interesting results but will be very hard to learn from. Once you get the results you’ll know what worked better, but you won’t know why. The “why” is extremely important as it helps you learn and understand your customers better and allows you to optimize your funnel on a larger scale.
The decoy effect can help customers complete your funnel with ease and increase your paying customers.
How do your pricing pages look like? We’d love to see and hear about them.
For professionals who have been in the workforce for a number of years, their first job may be irrelevant to where they are now in their career. They have held positions with greater responsibilities and more advanced skills that better reflect their current abilities. However, for developing young professionals, these experiences can make an impact on their resume and still hold value. Here’s why:
While your education shows that you have the skills and knowledge necessary for the job, including jobs you held during college, or perhaps even high school, it can show that you also have experience working in a professional setting. It shows that you are responsible and can take direction and work as part of a team to benefit a company.
Whether you were working in retail, food services, or an office setting, you are sure to have gained experience interacting with customers and colleagues. Highlight how you assisted customers, worked through problems, recommended improvements, or collaborated as a team. This reflects your ability to communicate, problem solve, and make decisions.
If you were in charge of any projects or assignments, include these examples along with their results. Training new employees or co-workers on various skills also demonstrates your leadership and mastery of procedures. Though it may not seem that important, showcasing how you stepped up in your role and made a difference can demonstrate your potential. It shows that you welcome challenges, are supportive of colleagues, and are able to take the lead on assignments and achieve results.
Balancing work and studies can be a challenge, but holding down a job while in school can reveal valuable time management skills. You were able to prioritize tasks and ensure that everything got done on time. Include instances where your timeliness paid off and led to positive outcomes.
Transferable Skills
These are all transferable skills that can convey your potential to an employer. Although you may not have a great deal of experience under your belt, capitalize on the experience that you do have by allowing it to portray your strengths and abilities. Employers recognize that new graduates and entry-level employees may not have a significant amount of relevant experience but are still interested in seeing what they have accomplished. Volunteer experience and participation in school organizations can also provide solid examples that demonstrate your abilities and achievements.
If you are a young professional still forging your path in the workforce, let the team at Chic Resumes help you position yourself as a stronger contender. We can help you to make the most of your education and experience on your resume to create a strong first impression on hiring managers.
Most of us have always known that an inextricable link existed between PR and SEO. Earning brand mentions and links from various websites—whether via guest blogging, earned media, etc.—has long been considered to be good for increasing your search engine presence. However, it wasn’t until very recently that we got actual confirmation and behind the scenes insight into how important PR truly is in SEO.
Word came out recently that Google filed a patent giving greater insight into the role brand mentions, links, and implied links play in measuring a site’s authority. The part that is particularly noteworthy for those of us in PR is as follows:
“The system determines a count of independent links for the group (step 302). A link for a group of resources is an incoming link to a resource in the group, i.e., a link having a resource in the group as its target. Links for the group can include express links, implied links, or both. An express link, e.g., a hyperlink, is a link that is included in a source resource that a user can follow to navigate to a target resource. An implied link is a reference to a target resource, e.g., a citation to the target resource, which is included in a source resource but is not an express link to the target resource. Thus, a resource in the group can be the target of an implied link without a user being able to navigate to the resource by following the implied link.”
So, what exactly does that mean in plain English? Simply put, any time your brand earns a mention in a story, even if it’s not linked back to your website, Google sees it as an “implied link” that affects your site’s authority and ranking. This directly demonstrates the value of PR in SEO. PR is about generating coverage for your brand, earning mentions and citations on trusted websites. Even if you don’t get an actual link for your hard work, the mention still sends a signal to Google that your brand (and website) carry authority, generate interest, and deserve to rank accordingly.
Now is the time to start focusing your PR efforts on starting more online conversations around your brand. You can bet that this is only the beginning and the importance of earned media will only continue to increase.
I heard a horror story the other day from a consumer packaged goods executive ranting about a meeting with a vendor. “I gave the guy an appointment, and he spent the whole time presenting his product,” she said. “[He] never asked me a thing about my situation, and what I needed.” Another exec chimed in, “Yeah, when I hear about an interesting new solution, what I need most is to sell it internally. I’m not getting the help I need from the vendors these days.” I am cringing. What is going wrong here?
Of course, my first thought was sales training. Clearly the reps in these situations need a training refresher—and stronger management, and possibly an improved incentive compensation plan—to handle the engagement more effectively.
But I also cringed at the marketing failure. We marketers should be helping with these sales opportunities to increase their chance of success.
So I set down a list of oft-forgotten B2B marketing imperatives.
I hope readers will comment on other imperatives for successful B2B marketing today.
LinkedIn is your personal professional blueprint. Yes. But from what started as a simple platform to connect with colleagues, former schoolmates, advisors, thought-leaders has morphed into a robust platform that allows any person to be a self-marketer and thought-leader. But how can you get to that status?
Building out your LinkedIn profile is crucial to the growth of your personal brand. Throw on your wizard hat and follow these simple tips to help supersize your presence on LinkedIn.
Showcase multiple forms of media
It’s not just about the connect button. Or “Who you May Know” LinkedIn is now a one-stop shop where people are residing to find quality, interesting, educational or perhaps even funny content. So what mediums does LinkedIn support? Oh you name it! URL’s, images, video, audio, presentations or even just a document. But yes, you will need to attribute these to a URL. So think Flickr, Slideshare, or a Marketing Automation tool. Keep your feed spicy with a variety of content.
Bring something ‘new’ to the table
Again LinkedIn is not just for professional development. Don’t be boring, be bold. Make yourself stand out among the masses by showcases content that is unique. Different. Exciting. Here is where you can pat yourself on the back and be a bit vain. Share awards you have won. Highlight articles for which you have been quoted. Post your blogs. LinkedIn is a great platform to really show your stuff, because at the end of the day, it really has the power to be a great “bragging” platform.
LinkedIn can be a blank canvas
We have all been there. You scan Forbes. You scan BusinessWeek. Mashable. And nothing is catching your eye. But you have the desire to share. You can’t close your browser without sharing…So open a google doc and start writing! Write about your interests. Write about a milestone in your career. Write about a significant event that has changed your life. Write about something disruptive happening in your industry. You may not get words on a page like Mark Twain but it doesn’t matter. Your followers are interested in what you have to say, so share it with them.
Don’t hold back, ask for that rec!
Throughout your career you have I am guessing more than once, have made someone else’s job easier. Your professional relationship has provided them something that at the end of the day they said: ‘Thank You!’ Maybe you got an email cc’ing your boss or maybe flowers or tickets to baseball game. Whatever the value, you received the praise. So take that to the next level and ask for a public recommendation. It’s not selfish, and honestly, as cliche as this may sound: everyone is doing it. So jump on the recommendation bandwagon and ask for those public praises. They speak volumes.
As you continue to grow your presence on LinkedIn, try and remember just because it’s a professional forum doesn’t mean you can take the chance to build out and supersize your profile. LinkedIn is now a place where you can promote not only what you do and have done, but more so: who you are and what you bring to the table.
Interested in learning more how employee advocacy can help build your brand? Let us know
One of the frustrations I find with the digital media industry is the plethora of people who feel it necessary to tell you how you should be running your website.
I'm going to add to that list.
However, rather than dictate to you what you should be doing, I hope to open your eyes to some of the things you need to be aware of should you be planning on launching or relaunching a website in the not too distant future.
I can speak from recent experience, as the website I work for has undergone a radical front end redesign and in my past life as a Product Manager, and general internet monkey before that, I have been in and around websites undergoing radical front and back end redesigns as well as some new product launches to boot.
Now for the truth. They're rather horrible experiences.
If the experience doesn't in any way feel traumatic to you, you either believe too much in yourself/your product and you don't care enough about your website.
The least traumatic of these possible experiences would be if you are launching an entirely new website from scratch. You don't have an existing user base and you have nothing that currently works to break.
But, somewhere you will muck it up. It is a given, it is as inevitable as an England World Cup failure.
How big an issue this definite error might be will be down to some of the factors that I will expand upon below, and how you deal with that problem will entirely be down to your processes you have put in place prior to the site launch.
Hopefully some of this sinks in and you can avoid unnecessary stress and strain.
One of the hardest parts of launching a new website will be knowing when exactly to release it out into the wilderness.
Just be certain that when the time is right, you will still never be 100% happy with your website.
If you are completely happy with your website, you are in the wrong job.
Working on a website should be full of doubt and unhappiness at the state of your site. If you are striving daily to improve your website in some form or other, then you are in the right job. You cannot simply stand still.
So with that mindset, knowing when to launch becomes difficult. There may be that button that irritates you, or even a bug that has somehow slipped through the net and is irritating you to the high heavens.
You need to weigh it up. Nobody can say "you should expect x amount of bugs and x amount of formatting issues". Launching should be entirely qualitative.
These things may be so irritating to you that they make you want to pop to the toolbox and commit severe harm on your computer screen. But take a step back. one man's irritant is another's ignorance.
When launching our recent redesign I had a set goal that I wanted the basic functions of the site to perform to a satisfactory standard. Which is about as ambiguous as you can get, but also realistic.
If I could purchase a product through our website, thus completing the registration process at the same time, and found that it worked with minimum agitations from start to finish, then we were ready to go. Obviously it wasn't that simple, but it sums up the thought process.
I am fortunate enough to say all of this sitting on a throne of digital luxury, not at one point did I have anybody apart from myself putting pressure on the job being finished.
The crowning glory to this is that I also had no other departments to contend with. Usually in these processes there is a sales team or an editorial team crunching their knuckles and rubbing them menacingly in your vicinity making sure that their issues are dealt with before launch.
These factors can really make a product launch incredibly difficult and I don't envy anybody who is contending against these issues. The ability to manage multiple expectations successfully is a true gift, and if you have it please bottle it up and put it for sale on your brand new totally satisfactory, stress-free website. I'll be the first in the queue.
You need to have a clear objective for what you want from your relaunch or launch and be realistic with it. You can't have it all from the outset, it is definitely best to launch with a base to build upon.
I managed this by maintaining a simple spreadsheet of what issues were pre-launch or post-launch fixes based upon the fact that I wanted a purchase to be as easy as possible. It is such a simplistic methodology, but it puts things into black and white and makes you a bit more severe with what issues can wait.
There was a time when I worked with the MoSCoW method where a list of fixes are distributed to all relevant departments and each issue allocated a value of Must, Should, Could or Would.
It doesn't take Gary Kasparov to work out how that one ends up.
Each department assigns any issues relevant to them as musts and shoulds. Anything involving external parties tends to be allocated a could or would.
Finally, a big meeting occurs where nobody leaves happy, the digital team have too many musts and every department feels they need more.
Funnily enough the best advice I got during the whole thing was right near the end when a friend of the company (a retired mechanic from Italy, in his 70s) summed it all up in one simple sentence.
Old vs New:
"If it's better than the old one, then what are you afraid of."
How right he was. In the digital world we often get too wrapped up in the tiny detail of it all.
You're probably expecting me to say that there is no excuse for launching a website with any bugs, but that would be impossible (if you have achieved this, please place for sale on the same page as the managing multiple expectation tonic).
What you should be aiming for is to launch without any bugs that you don't know about. This goes firmly hand in hand with Step 1. Bugs aren't always critical, if it doesn't affect the main goal or goals of your website, then it can wait.
It seems ambiguous to say you should know about every bug, but if you have tested your site as thoroughly as you should then you should be aware of most of them.
If you employ a QA to test your site, don't rest on your laurels, a QA is generally a technically minded being who doesn't necessarily understand the day-to-day business of your site. You do. Therefore you should be testing too.
One of the toughest things to contend with in the testing stage is the huge amount of diversity in web accessible technology. Pick those that are relevant to your users and test against all the significant combinations.
If you don't know how to find this information then please get yourself stuck further into your analytics package - don't expect to know it off by heart, but use it to help make testing decisions.
Knowledge of browser user and popularity can make your job easier. If there is a bug you find in testing that you feel could hinder the launch you can refer back to the amount of users it would affect and potentially downgrade it to a post-launch fix.
We had a predicament with Chrome on mobile devices, initially it was disruptive to the purchasing process and panic set in as it seemed large enough to affect launch.
A quick bit of investigation into our analytics showed that we were looking at a really small set of our users, and further investigation found that this issue was actually already occurring on the current site.
From there we decide a quick fix of CSS changes and some relevant wording in case of the issue popping up were a sufficient solution in the interim. Rather than delaying the launch we actually managed to create a workaround to an old bug and park it for a later date.
It is really important that you don't go into testing thinking that Internet Explorer 10 covers testing for your older/newer IE version users.
Sadly, older versions of Internet Explorer can throw up completely different results to each other, a massive oversight from Microsoft in not making upgrade compulsory.
If you want evidence of this fact I'd like to hazard a guess that your IE10 user base is much smaller than your IE11 userbase, the first time automatic upgrades came into effect.
In summary, if you aren't sick of doing the same processes on your new website then you haven't tested it hard enough. I can now purchase switches and sockets in my sleep, but thankfully its helped avoid the nightmares.
Take a look at this custom browser report for Google Analytics to help you spot how influential each one is for you.
When I see mistakes on other new sites I tend to be much more understanding in the early stages, however find it baffling how large companies (hopefully with large digital teams)do not spot them sooner, and if they stay unresolved for a while, why somebody isn’t fixing them.
Homebase is a really good example, they have a new website which is clearly geared towards the 2014 school of flat, responsive design.
A huge flaw I spotted on first use of the website is that the page navigation on product listing pages is extremely temperamental. Sometimes I can get to a different page of results from the first page, sometimes not and even when I’ve successfully gone from the first page to another I can’t get back again.
I’m not to know the inside workings of Homebase, somewhere a decision has either been made to fix it at a later date or the issue hasn’t been picked up on yet.
There could be a multitude of reasons for this not being fixed yet, but to me it screams of a lack of knowledge of the site and a lack of testing as it is enough of a barrier to sale for a launch delay.
Nice new site, malfunctioning new navigation.
Think of it this way, you have 50 products to sale in a category and the user can view only 25 of them. You’ve halved potential sales already.
Throw in the fact that a user has a high chance of exiting your site. They’re trying to navigate further because they haven’t found what they’re looking for. They may as well navigate to a competitor who can provide them more choice.
Initially I tested this on an Apple Mac. If we were to have an issue like that on our site, then we'd be running the risk of that bug affecting 90% of Apple Mac users on our website.
Surprisingly they only make up 10% of our users, however they also make up 20% of our purchases and are our highest converting users. This trend isn't a surprise.
Frighteningly after further testing I found that this occurs on Chrome on Windows 7 too. You can safely assume that, after some quick and easy testing, at least 25% of users can't navigate through product listings pages sufficiently.
Homebase has roughly 330 physical stores, this is the equivalent of going to 83 of these stores to find you can't see half of their products.
When finishing testing, if you're not sick of doing the same processes on your new website over and over again then you haven't tested it hard enough. I can now purchase switches and sockets in my sleep, but thankfully its helped avoid the nightmares.
Obviously in your head you know everything, whilst the second statement still applies.
When it comes to site design you really don’t know anything until it gets released.
I know nothing!
Of course you will need to use hunches and common sense, and if you are relaunching you must be decision making based on data from the current version of the site. If you are building an entirely new being then that becomes much trickier.
Until the product is out in the wild you cannot be vindicated, or proven wrong, until the users have had their say.
As a product owner the more diplomatically you can convey this fact, the easier your job becomes - and the more development friendly too.
If you have the resources then you should be testing with a select group of users before hand, but even that comes with its pitfalls.
On an old project we set up a group from the community to test a mobile website, from their feedback at the wireframe stage went and developed the tangible product in beta form.
Only then did they suggest that it wasn’t right and not very user friendly. They were absolutely right, but there was huge frustration from that fact not being picked up at an earlier stage.
We were led to believe that the product was suitable for the hardcore users of our website when the reality was different.
I personally feel that this was down to the face-to-face interaction during the first stage of testing, we learned some valuable lessons but we didn’t get that honesty we got once users were back behind their screens. On a positive note we had the guts to start all over again and get it right.
Before this latest refresh, when asking for feedback internally I was brutally honest - you know nothing, I know nothing, we will only have answers once the product has gone live and our users have spoken.
It may sound like passing the buck, but the users are the ones you are building the website for, there is no point pandering to internal pressure to make it the way somebody perceives the right way of doing something.
It is also a fantastic kill switch for those “i think this button should be a bit redder” kind of requests that come up.
This is isn’t really a survival tip for launch, but good preparation for the difficult and tense period just after deployment. You must have analytics tagging on everything, everywhere.
If you can’t find out the answers to any possible user interaction, then think about holding off with deployment. These kind of jobs are always the ones which development teams see as minor and manage to push to the back of the queue for larger tasks.
If you are to develop and grow your website in the future you cannot do it based on guesswork and fingers in the wind. Analytics tools are your friends, and they should be your best friends, because your best friends don’t keep secrets from you.
Moving from an old iteration of our website, which to be fair was tagged to a good standard, allowed me to tag up some areas of the website we had never previously tracked.
Take our homepage slider, which in development took up a large segment of time owing to its prominence and screen real estate.
The sensible option here would’ve actually to have spent the couple of hours it would have taken to add tagging to the current (now old) home slider and learned about its importance to the user. It harks back to my point before, I clearly know nothing.
Now it is all tagged up the reality is that interactions are minimal and the real estate and prominence don’t influence traffic to those highlighted areas as I would’ve hypothesised.
It doesn’t mean that I wasted time, it just means that we need to think about that area of the site and its use in the future. Something we would’ve known earlier had we tagged it up earlier...
By the time you have reached this point I imagine you think that I’m merely going mad and repeating myself. I'm not.
Knowing what time to launch isn't simply about ticking a load of boxes.
Once you have gotten to a stage where you are only slightly irritated by the imperfections you need to have a serious thought about what time and day you should deploy.
This is a very simple one. Research which day and time will cause the least disruption to your users.
Please don’t think that launching at your busiest time will be the best idea because you can really test the capability of your site against the severest of conditions.
Whilst you want to scream and shout about your new website, most people really won’t care about it. Especially your new visitors as they won’t have a clue what the old website looked like.
Our best time for launch was 10pm on a Friday night. We made sure that traffic was at a minimum and we hit the big red button (which we had to picture in our head as we couldn’t source a big red button in time).
This allowed us a couple of hours that evening to fix things we had put at the top of our post-launch fix list, and the grace of Saturday morning to fix even more.
I have touched upon the unsuccessful launch of a previous product before, with that we had the ignominy of launching just before lunch. The busiest time of day with thousands of active users live on the site.
Its a lesson in bravery and is fantastic for weeding out as many bugs as possible in the quickest time possible, but that’s not actually what you want. This helps to create an unmanageable situation.
Add to the fact that the site was hugely unpopular externally, something to do with the extremely partisan users, and was also functionally poor at first launch it really was a rather stressful situation to be involved in.
Fortunately, at second launch mistakes were still made but we learned a hell of a lot from the first experience and managed to come out of a throughly difficult time.
If you are in charge of a digital team, I seriously advise you to allow them days in lieu to work through the quieter periods and launch then. Pizza also works well.
You’ve followed as many “10 tips on launching a website” articles and read this one through and hopefully taken heed of some of the points.
It’s still going to go wrong somewhere.
Even if you have tested, tested again, started over and tested all over again.
You can never recreate every possible user set up, you are competing with the fact that there is so much diversity in hardware used to access the internet, let alone the actual browser possibilities that are even harder to mimic.
Add to the equation settings differences, extensions and add-ons, then it becomes a lot easier to understand why you or your digital team didn’t spot something first time round.
For example, on one relaunch we found that people using ad-blocker weren’t seeing images for products for sale on the site, simply because we included the word advert in the image filename. None of us used ad blocker internally, and we only found this post launch.
For a simple extension to be able to cause such issues causes an almost impossible replication scenario.
On this launch we were made aware of an issue with payment where our mobile friendly number input for security codes managed to remove a leading zero in cases where the security code began with zero.
A frustration as it affected the most important part of the site - the bit where we take our users hard earned, but understandably missable and something we still couldn’t replicate. Thankfully the internet is full of benefactors of knowledge, and people who have shared experiences, and we managed to resolve it easily.
That’d actually be a good title for this mammoth piece.
In all seriousness though, if you release your website and are sitting back thinking that you’ve done your job then you are seriously wrong.
A product launch or a site relaunch should be seen as a base to advancing towards bigger and better things.
At the start of this blog I suggested that if you are 100% happy with your site then you shouldn’t be. That extra percent of doubt or unhappiness is what you should always be striving to complete, whilst knowing that you will never achieve it.
I didn’t particularly plan on redesigning the website initially but we had some outside help from a company friend who offered to mock up a potential new look for our ageing website.
At this time I was A/B testing on the old platform and decided to pack it in entirely. This was because I knew that with the redesign I’d have a better base to test from.
You should always be thinking of how you can develop your site further.
Sitting still gives the competition an edge, honing what you’ve got keeps you in touching distance of the next site just like yours that is either launching or refreshing. You must A/B test. It’s a wrench because you’ve spent so long designing and developing your site only to go away and change it again - but the site isn’t yours, it is your users. Do it for them!
If like me you are working on an e-commerce site then you have it easy, we have that one simple KPI of selling products to keep us going.
People who have advertising revenues and editorial targets to think of have a much more difficult job. From experience in this scenario I'd say please don’t rush into adding a huge range of new sections to your website, develop what you have and make them the top of their pile.
Hopefully you've made it this far and digested some of the suggestions.
I'm fully aware that there are many mitigating factors in every single website launch or redesign, and many things to compete with. I also know that whilst I profess all these maxims I am running a website which contains many flaws.
But that's how my website needs to be, if I've got nothing to improve upon then I may as give up now.
What stands in the way of our being more satisfied and productive at work? That’s the fundamental question we sought to answer in a survey we conducted with HBR last fall. More than 19,000 people, at all levels in companies, across a broad range of industries, have so far responded to the questions we posed.
What we discovered is that people feel better and perform better and more sustainably when four basic needs are met: renewal (physical); value (emotional), focus (mental) and purpose (spiritual). This isn’t surprising news, of course. Is there any doubt that when we feel more energized, appreciated, focused and purposeful, we perform better? Think about it: The opportunity and encouragement to intermittently rest and renew our energy during the work day serves as an antidote to the increasing overload so many of us feel in a world of relentlessly rising demand. Feeling valued creates a deeper level of trust and security at work, which frees us to spend less energy seeking and defending our value, and more energy creating it. In a world in which our attention is increasingly under siege, better focus makes it possible get more work done, in less time, at a higher level of quality. And finally, a higher purpose – the sense that what we do matters and serves something larger than our immediate self-interest – is a uniquely powerful source of motivation.
What’s surprising about our survey’s results is how dramatically and positively getting these needs met is correlated with every variable that influences performance. It would be statistically significant if meeting a given need correlated with a rise of even one or two percentage points in a performance variable such as engagement, or retention. Instead, we found that meeting even one of the four core needs had a dramatic impact on every performance variable we studied.
For example, when employees at a company perceive that any one of their four needs has been met, they report a 30% higher capacity to focus, a nearly 50% higher level of engagement, and a 63% greater likelihood to stay at the company. Even more interestingly, there is a straight dose effect associated with meeting an employee’s core needs – meaning that the cumulative positive impact rises with each additional need that gets satisfied. For example, when all four needs are met, the effect on engagement rises from 50% for one need, to 125%. Engagement, in turn, has been positively correlated with profitability. In a meta-analysis of 263 research studies across 192 companies, employers with the most engaged employees were 22% more profitable than those with the least engaged employees.
Interestingly, meeting three needs seems to have nearly as great an impact as meeting all four on most performance variables. The exception is people’s reported stress levels, where meeting a single need prompts only a modest 6% reduction in people’s stress, but meeting three reduces stress by 30%, and meeting all four leads to a 72% drop, The message to employers is blindingly obvious. None of us can live by bread alone. We perform better when the full range of our needs are taken into account. Rather than trying to forever get more out of their people, companies are far better served by systematically investing in meeting as many of their employees’ core needs as possible, so they’re freed and fueled to bring the best of themselves to work.
In practical terms, it’s possible to start making a considerable improvement without a lot of effort or expense, addressing one core need at a time. Consider the most basic performance variable, renewal, and its effect on people’s capacity. Only 20% of respondents said they were encouraged by their supervisors to take renewal breaks during the day. By contrast, those who were encouraged to take intermittent breaks reported they were 50% more engaged, more than twice as likely to stay with the company, and twice as healthy overall. Valuing and encouraging renewal requires no financial investment. What it does require is a willingness among leaders to test their longstanding assumption that that performance is best measured by the number of hours employees puts in – and the more continuous the better — rather than by the value they generate, however they choose to do their work.
Video landing pages exist to capture emails. You can sugar coat it with ebooks and free downloads, but marketers are all after email signups. It’s ok – email signups rock.
The problem is, now more than ever, people guard the keys to their inbox like the golden ticket that it is, and with stats like, “84% of all email traffic will be spam,” by the end of 2014, it’s easy to see why.
Stop wasting your (and everyone else’s) time emailing spam folders. Use video landing pages and get email addresses that people actually use.
Email is Not Dead
New research from McKinsey & Company, shows that “email marketing is 40 times more effective at attracting new business than Facebook and Twitter combined.”
Consumers make more purchases from email:
Share more content:
And interact more directly with brands through email than through any other digital medium.
It’s the only thing that most people use every single day, so stop ignoring the power of your email list.
The Problem is Trust. The Answer is Video
People don’t know you or trust your product, but their obviously interested in your solution if they came to your landing page. Video landing pages bridges this gap.
A study by eyeviewdigital.com shows that “video on landing pages can increase conversion by 80%.”
Well-produced video not only engages users (while explaining your product), it creates a connection. Video differentiates you from all the ebook wielding spam bots, and people will relate to you, not just what you’re selling. That’s when real sign-ups occur.
I know I’m just a marketing nerd, but there is nothing sweeter than seeing a “gmail” domain sign-up for your list.
The greatest part about using video to build your email list is that once you cross that trust threshold, people actually look forward to your emails. You just have to keep up your end of the bargain.
Email is a Relationship
I love Austin Kleon’s emails.
Once a week he sends me a curated list of thought provoking links to “interesting things.” Yes, many of these links direct me to posts on Austin’s website – but not all of them – and no matter where the articles are hosted, they’re a guaranteed great read.
What I respect most about emails from the likes of Austin Kleon, Seth Godin, and James Clear – and what keeps me subscribed – is that they treat my inbox like the goldmine it is by delivering valuable content. I talk about their products and articles, and have no hesitation doing a lot of the marketing legwork for them. That’s ROI you can’t measure.
People purchase from brands they trust, even if they don’t do it right away. Rand Fishkin from Moz says that he doesn’t even want customers that haven’t been to his domain at least seven times! Gone are the days of clicking on banner ads to buy vacation packages.
People purchase from brands they know. Video is how you introduce yourself, especially on a landing page.
Video landing pages build active email readership, but respect for those readers is paramount. If you don’t deliver great content, or spam an account, no amount of clever video marketing will save you.
However, if people do unsubscribe, video might just be the thing to bring em back. At least Groupon thought so…
As companies develop buyer-centric communication, one of most important questions is - how do we effectively group buyers into segments? We perceive that somewhere between the one-size-fits-all dinosaur and the unicorn-like "market of one" exist segmentation strategies that work better than others. But which ones? The secret is discovering self-identifying groups.
Have you ever bought a product or service where you were excited about your decision to buy (maybe after a rigorous buying process), only to be very disappointed by the delivery? It happens all the time. Buyers deal with a great sales person, but delivery is slow, installation sloppy, customer service doesn’t solve problems and/or accounting doesn’t understand what the customer is trying to communicate.
Any dissatisfaction your customers experience could be due to the smallest issues that are easily resolved. To identify any issues or “friction,” you can use a customer touch point map to analyze your customers’ experience.
The customer touch point analysis is an easy exercise that can provide amazing results. This analysis allows you to scrutinize all the points at which your company touches customers and assess how you perform on each touch point. The objective is to identify any touch points that cause friction (problems) for the customer and resolve the friction.
The biggest challenge in doing this analysis is in being open and honest about what is really going on and acting and solving the problems. It’s easy to defend your business practices. It’s hard to open up and say, “Hey, what are we doing wrong?” “How can we fix it?”
So, be brave. Open up and ask the question, “How can we do it better?” Involve your employees and get their feedback. You’ll be surprised. They will appreciate you for including them in the effort, and you will get information you may not have known before.
Customer Touch Point Maps can take the form of a simple text list or a graphical representation of touch points, as shown above. It’s an exercise that any company can and should do, with the goal of improving the customer experience.
Recently I worked on a customer touch point map for a department at an institution that was founded in 1891. The particular department had been operating for over 40 years and was known for excellence in education. They had lots of customers, many years of touch points. Even though the department provided an excellent product and customer service, we found some touch points that needed attention. The primary reason for the friction was that customer expectations and behaviors had changed over the years and my client’s delivery needed to change meet them.
For example, customers would travel from all over the country to attend classes at the institution. We found out that some customers had a hard time finding the building where the classes took place even though they had the address and used maps and the directions we provided. This is a very small part of the entire customer experience, but it caused friction and could be easily resolved by providing a picture of the building in customer registration materials. We also realized that sending the registration confirmation via snail mail was limiting in today’s world. Many customers never received the materials because they traveled so much. We changed the process to send confirmations by snail mail and email to ensure delivery.
Have you done a Customer Touch Point Map? What did you find? Were you able to improve your customers’ experience?
[This blog post was originally posted on Jennifer Beever's B2B Marketing Traction Blog.]
In the software sales industry, it’s a constant battle. You’re trying to protect your software’s market share against the influx of competition, yet you’re also trying to grow and advance your market share at the same time.
And, in that battle, you’re always faced with this same sales process dilemma. Do you focus on new customer acquisition? Or do you focus on maintaining your current base of customers and increasing your share of wallet through upselling and cross-selling?
It’s an age-old question of new lead generation versus old customer retention – and it’s not a question with a one-size-fits-all answer. To best determine your company’s approach, ask yourself this key question: What is the opportunity cost for your revenue generation when pursuing new customer acquisition versus increasing your share of wallet with existing customers?
For many businesses in the software sales industry, long-term customer renewal on subscription-based software is a much more lucrative opportunity. With that in mind, how do you keep the top of your sales funnel full of new sales leads?
The answer: outsourced lead generation.
When your sales team is already focused on renewals and upselling, you need an outsourced lead generation partner that keeps the top of your sales funnel full without wasting your time or budget. Here are the top five reasons your business software firm can’t ignore the benefits of outsourced lead generation:
When you outsource lead generation for the top of your sales funnel, you don’t have to reallocate your entire sales team or increase your own overhead and administrative costs for more sales staff members. At the same time, you still hit all of your growth targets. When you work with a software sales partner, you’re able to adjust your necessary bandwidth and funnel size to perfectly fit your business and never miss your growth numbers again.
Working with an outsourced lead generation partner doesn’t just improve your quantity of new leads, but also the quality of sales leads. Together, you agree on the specific factors for qualifying leads so that you’re working only with the perfect prospects. In turn, your lead conversion rate increases, helping you stay one step ahead of the competition.
Hiring a brand-new internal sales team takes time and money that you don’t necessarily have, but it also requires you to feel out each new salesperson’s strengths and weaknesses and then experiment accordingly to find the right niche for each person. This whole process could take a year or more before you finally hit your stride – meanwhile, the market may have shifted entirely. When you partner with an outsourced lead generation firm instead, you work with someone who has proven results and seasoned sales staff, without the waiting and the yearlong ramp-up time.
When some business leaders think of outsourced lead generation, they imagine nothing more than an appointment time, a spreadsheet and some quick notes. However, with an expert software sales partner, you get meaningful, actionable analysis on each new lead and appointment. In addition, you receive further identification of your targeted customers with information like which industry converted the best, who the key buyers are and whether or not your list source offers robust leads.
While an internal salesperson might not follow up with customer order fulfillment or thoroughly qualify a lead, the right outsourced partner delivers the best experience possible for your prospective and closed customers. An outsourced lead generation and sales partner always wants to demonstrate its value to your firm, so you’re more likely to get quality leads and better customer satisfaction.
In the software sales industry, you need to play to your internal sales team’s strengths. If client renewals and upselling are opportunities too critical to pass up, you benefit greatly by connecting with an external sales partner. As you consider the course of action for your own sales team, keep these five reasons in mind as to why your company can’t afford to ignore outsourced lead generation.
Navigating the world of software sales means you always need to be on top of your game when it comes to new customer acquisition. Click below to download a free tip sheet from Invenio Solutions and sharpen your lead generation and sales process skills today.
Selling business software is no longer a straightforward task, especially since your prospects are more informed than ever. In this new era of buyer behavior, you need a software sales process that adapts to the way your prospects are searching for their next software solution.
When you tap into this new buyer behavior, your sales team is able to influence prospects to convert into new sales leads – and potentially more closed sales. Use the following steps to adapt your sales cycle to the new buyer behavior and start converting more of your prospects into solid sales leads.
Marketing automation software is a powerful tool for tracking and responding to every new prospect in your contact database, and you definitely need to use it in the software sales process. Start by determining who your ideal buyer personas are (and whether or not your prospects match those personas) and then determine where each of your prospects is in the buying cycle for your business software.
Also, use your marketing automation software to create a lead scoring model that fits with the rest of your sales process. A lead scoring model tracks your prospect’s buyer behavior and website activity to judge if he or she has the right level of interest in your software and if he or she matches the desired demographics of your buyer persona(s). If the prospect is a good match, you know you have a solid marketing-qualified lead to send to your sales team.
New buyer behavior demands that you offer more customized, helpful offers to your prospects before they are likely to progress in your software sales cycle, so use the insights you’ve gained from your marketing automation software to determine your prospects’ more specific needs and questions.
With this information in mind, stay in touch with your software sales prospects by offering them more content offers or event information they might be interested in. These consistent touch points help develop a long-term relationship with your prospects (and future customers) that ultimately results in higher revenue once you’ve closed the sale.
Once you’ve established contact with a prospect over the phone, it’s important to remember the linear nature of every business software sale – and to keep your sale moving along that track. The three main components of the software sales track are: dial, pitch and objection management.
The first two components of the sales track (calling the prospect and pitching your software solution to him or her) have been covered elsewhere, but not many thought leaders address objection management. While you listen to and probe your prospect’s objections, it’s critical that you discover your prospect’s key pains as they relate to your software. And, it’s just as important that your prospect discovers how your software solves those pains. One particular tactic that works well is to ask yes-or-no questions that drive directly to the answers you’re looking for.
Stop thinking of your business software trial as just another way to lure prospects into a purchase, and instead shift your paradigm to see the software trial as an opportunity to help answer a prospect’s questions. In your sales conversations, allow the prospect to envision his own solution to whatever problems he’s facing. Then, with that vision still in your prospect’s mind, finalize a free software trial for him to test out. If his vision and your software are a good match, the connection becomes obvious to the prospect.
When you confirm the details of the software trial, ask your prospect if he or she would like to receive an immediate follow-up to answer any questions he or she might have. Once you’ve answered those questions or quelled any further objections, it’s the perfect time to send the prospect a quote for the final sale.
When you employ these tactics to help convert your contact from a browsing prospect to a committed sales lead, your software sales process is more responsive to the reality of today’s buyer behavior. And, when your sales cycle adopts this more customer-centric paradigm, you’re certain to close more sales and acquire more delighted customers.
Need ideas on how to adopt your software sales process to the new realities of today’s buyer behavior? Click below to download a free tip sheet from Invenio Solutions to get started with generating warmer sales leads and more robust software sales cycles.
A growing number of companies are awakening from their long, outbound marketing slumber. A comfortable sleep where companies could leverage the power of media to interrupt what consumers were interested in and shout marketing messages at them. And for a long time, it got dreamy results.
People have always hated being marketing to. And in recent years they have been able to tune out more and more unwanted marketing messages.
These days, consumers can avoid a lot more marketing messages than before. For that we can thank DVRs, satellite radio, MP3 players, Caller ID, Do Not Call Lists, Do Not Mail Lists, CAN-SPAM legislation, Internet ad pop up blockers and RSS readers.
And the trends for outbound marketing are not good:
Newspaper revenues in 2012 dropped to 1950 levels. And they’re not coming back.
The growing effectiveness of inbound marketing is because it responds to the changing way that people want to research purchases and buy.
In years past, when a buyer was researching a purchase, they had to contact the seller in order to research the product, pricing, options, guarantees, etc. For instance, when someone wanted to buy a car they had to make a trip to the dealership to get most of the information. At that point, the sales person could influence more of the sales process since they had the leverage of information.
Now, thanks to the Internet, buyers can research the product without having to first go to the seller. Before visiting a dealership, the car buyer can research what options are available, the selling price (and the dealer’s price), reviews, safety data, etc. The buyer can also use social media to get the opinion of friends and even strangers.
In a B2B buying situation, a study by the Corporate Executive Board found that buyers are now 57%-70% through their purchase before they first contact the seller.
Does inbound marketing work? According to HubSpot’s annual State of Inbound Marketing Report, companies who are increasing their inbound marketing budgets are enjoying a lower cost per lead, shortening their sales cycles and increasing their sales close rates. And, marketers are moving more of their budgets to inbound marketing from outbound marketing.
So if a company has awakened and is now smelling the inbound coffee, how quickly will they see results? Not right away. In fact, it could be anywhere from 6-9 months. Not every company is going to see results within that time frame. There will be some companies that see results before or after those 6-9 months.
One of the key reasons that inbound marketing generally takes longer to show results than the old days of the quick, outbound marketing “hit” is that you’re building relationships. That’s why inbound marketing is often compared to a marathon, not a sprint. But once you’ve built up momentum and stay with it, inbound marketing is like compound interest – it continues to pay dividends.
There are also a number of things that have to happen in order to crank up your inbound marketing machine such as:
The preliminary steps alone can take a few weeks to a few months depending upon the “marketing readiness” of a company, and how long they have been in a cultural slumber of outbound marketing.
Similarly, depending upon the marketing competitiveness of your particular business category, it takes time for your content to get discovered, shared and move its way up the process of getting found online by your prospects.
One of the most effective ways to speed up results with inbound marketing is to increase your activity, particularly blogging and premium content. Based on HubSpot research, the more of both you do, the more traffic and leads you should get, assuming your content is good and properly mapped to your buyer’s journey.
The more blog posts you have, the more leads you will get.
The more premium content behind landing pages you have, the more leads.
Rand Fishkin, in a Moz Whiteboard Friday, talks about the “SEO Slog,” i.e. the timing, investments, frustrations and expectations when doing search engine optimization work. He refers to that startup/transition period as the “Delta of Disappointment.”
A company making the move to inbound marketing goes through similar timing and emotional throes. “The Slog” is when all the stakeholders are impatiently waiting for the leads to come rolling in right after having done so much work.
“The Slog” is that period of time when the powers that be (clients, bosses, boards of directors) are sweating and wondering where the ROI is. Getting to the point where you see returns from your efforts takes time.
While some marketing automation software salesmen might give you the impression that all you need to do is inbound marketing, don’t fall for it.
Inbound marketing should become the core of your marketing efforts, but for it to work, you should not eliminate other activities that contribute to your overall lead generation.
You may still benefit from (gasp!) advertising, trade shows, speaking events, direct mail and public relations just to name a few. But in time, you might be able to do less of those other marketing tactics.
Your turn: what are your timing expectations for inbound marketing to produce results?
photo credit: pj_vanf via photopin cc graphic credits: HubSpot, Corporate Executive Board, MOZ 
Email marketing is still very effective when done correctly, but many businesses are watching their open rate tank because of careless mistakes. A low open rate produces a low click through rate, and that ultimately results in a low conversion rate.
Low conversions mean low revenue, so it is important to make sure that your business is not making these five common email marketing mistakes.
If the body of your email message is littered with links there is a very good chance that it will trigger spam filters by many of the service providers and this results in a very low delivery rate to begin with. Not only will multiple links likely trigger spam filters, but the recipient will often view an email filled with links to be spammy as well. Using email marketing to drive your audience to a specific page on your website is fine, but make sure you just have one link with a clearly defined call to action in the email.
If you send emails that are overly promotional or exist just to convert sales then it will ultimately lower your open rate. Your recipients will stop opening your emails and then eventually unsubscribe from your list. Once you switch from promotional emails to useful information you will experience a consistent growth in your open rate because the list begins to see value in your emails and will open them rather then ignoring and trashing them.
We just touched on not blasting out promotional emails, so let’s discuss what a good email should include. We have a weekly newsletter that includes a breakdown of important stories and news in the world of online marketing. This is something that anyone can register for on our website. Our subscriber list is constantly growing and our open rate is extremely high because our list knows that they are being provided useful information. Every business is going to have different “useful” information, but this can include news, tips, or how-to tutorials.
You may think that a fancy email message with graphics and images will provide better results, but the opposite is quite true. Many email providers disable HTML and then the email appears to be broken, resulting in a high delete rate without even reading it. A plain text email with avoid spam filters, but it will also give the reader a better experience. With so many individuals checking their email on mobile and tablet devices a plain text email ensures that your entire list will be able to read the email regardless of the device and email platform they are using.
Your emails should be very easy to read through and digest. They shouldn’t require someone to spend five minutes reading. If you are trying to elaborate on a specific topic use a short intro to capture the readers interest and then direct them to a specific page on your website to read the full information.
For example, our newsletter sometimes will feature topics that we cover in our blog. In that situation we will just touch on the subject and then direct those that are interested in reading about in more in-depth to the original blog post. Keep it short and sweet for the best interaction.
Email marketing will always be a key component of an inbound marketing strategy, as it is a great way to engage with current customers as well as potential customers. It can keep customers engaged while also nurturing warm leads. Make sure that your email marketing effort isn’t making the common mistakes listed above and you will see the true power of a well thought out and executed email marketing strategy.
Beginning a career in B2B inside sales is a great way to build job experience and fine-tune your professional skills. If you are a recent graduate with a background in sales or marketing and are looking to get your foot in the door of the business world, inside sales may be the career for you.
Both young and experienced sales professionals must have the drive to learn, grow, and perform in order to succeed in inside sales. AG provides new hires with extensive training and support throughout their transition into the inside sales role. We give our reps the tools and support they need to succeed. With experience, the sales reps also gain valuable skills specific to the inside sales world.
Here are the top 4 professional skills that B2B inside sales will help you master.
1. Autonomy: An inside sales rep position requires employees to complete many different tasks and assignments by specific deadlines. They are responsible for upholding client obligations as well. At AG, reps are expected to complete 100 activities per day, which includes a combination of phone conversations, voice messages, and email efforts. In addition, reps are expected to attain a certain lead volume each month. Successful inside sales rep must be able to stay organized in order to manage all job responsibilities in a timely manner. With autonomy, they have the freedom to make choices within the inside sales role about different approaches to these responsibilities, such as specific messaging, social selling, and more. Creative inside sales reps can bring their ideas to managers. Because they have the inside knowledge of what is working and what is not working for their client, they may suggest new messaging in hopes to provide actionable value to customers.
2. Independence: Whereas autonomy is the freedom to make choices within the inside sales role, independence is the ability the act on that autonomy and carry out those tasks without the reliance of others. Inside sales reps must know how to work well in teams, but they must also have the ability to work independently. After meeting with managers and directors to ascertain goals for the month, inside sales reps will be expected to achieve them and complete additional tasks on their own. The best inside sales managers will not micromanage, and instead will focus on intrinsically motivating reps to work smarter, not harder. Inside sales is not the profession for those who need be closely monitored. B2B inside sales reps are trusted to complete the tasks set in front of them and to continuously innovate their approach to selling. With great freedom comes great responsibility, however. Only inside sales reps who are motivated to work independently and direct themselves will succeed in the profession.
3. Flexibility: The role of an inside sales rep also requires flexibility. Depending on your specific client or the types of accounts you’re calling into, you have to consider that every company operates differently. Your job responsibilities may adjust based on your project, and this requires you to be open to change. If you aren’t seeing results when you prospect a company, you may need to change your messaging, your channels, or your approach. For example, many inside sales reps at AG will change their work hours to accommodate their prospects’ timezones.
4. Communication: Through teleprospecting and email marketing efforts, inside sales reps are able to mold their written and verbal communications skills, which are often labeled as “soft skills.” Many hiring managers believe that millennials lack these soft skills because they grew up around screens. Inside sales reps form these skills and inevitably strong inside sales reps become great communicators. As aforementioned, a sales rep at AG is expected to complete 100 activities a day. These activities are a combination of phone calls and emails. On top of that, our reps will also attend and participate in weekly client meetings where they discuss their progress as well as any challenges they may be facing while prospecting leads. These activities give reps the opportunity to develop their interpersonal skills by gaining feedback from sales managers on their messaging and by constant experience in the field.
There are many benefits to starting a career in B2B inside sales. Inside sales reps are tough-skinned and independent. They are committed to finding the right fits for their product or service. Whether you’re starting a career in inside sales, hiring a new inside sales rep, boosting an existing inside sales team, or considering outsourcing your inside sales team, know that these professional skills learned through teleprospecting will help inside sales reps increase your qualified opportunities and also succeed in their sales career.
SAP has come a long way since it launched the SAP Business Trends space nearly three years ago. Our unique process of cultivating employee brand journalists on this thriving space and broadcasting the “best of” stories to our sister sites, SAPVoice on Forbes and theSAP News Center, is now recognized as an “elite” industry best practice (See recent Contently piece: “No Great Speeches to Empty Rooms: Inside an Elite Content Distribution Strategy).
Judging from the reaction of recent events I’ve been asked to participate in, the industry-at-large is surprised by our success and curious to learn how we create killer content.
On a recent episode of “Marketing Matters”, a SiriusXM Satellite Radio show hosted by The Wharton School of Business, I was asked to chime in on the latest trends in native advertising and how SAP became a pioneer in this burgeoning space. I made it clear that I have a tremendous talent pool to draw from at SAP – which is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, there is no shortage of content. And on the other hand, well… there’s no shortage of content. How do we manage the deluge?
“Quality, not quantity,” I told our Wharton hosts who were eager to learn more. Diving deeper, I explained that employee brand journalism is about authenticity. Who better to tell the company story than employees? Ghost written “assets” aimed at chasing “top of the funnel” leads is not a sustainable content marketing strategy. Prospects don’t want to be led down a funnel, they want to be entertained and learn something fascinating about your business. This is how content goes viral and conversations begin. The Wharton hosts invited me back to join a future radio segment to highlight some of these eye-opening “pull” outcomes of SAP’s employee brand journalism efforts (the focus of my next blog).
But is employee brand journalism an all-or-nothing proposition? Not necessarily. In my interview with E-Marketer titled, “SAP Sees Native Ad Space as the Industry’s ‘Kumbaya Moment’” I make it perfectly clear that publishers, marketers, advertisers and journalists are merging together whether we like it or not. As a result, collaboration is unavoidable in today’s bold and calamitous content landscape – and that’s a good thing. Brand journalists and marketers can learn from each other.
This collaborative vibe was definitely present during a recent Business Marketing Associationpanel I participated in, hosted by Forbes. The topic of the panel was “Building a B to B Brand Newsroom: How Thought Leadership Content Marketing Drives Sales.” The audience asked many tricky questions around collaboration like: How do we manage expectations with stakeholders? How do we measure success? Are the terms native advertising and content marketing misnomers and diminish the quality work that comes out of employee brand journalism efforts? Regarding the latter question, one of my fellow panelists, Larry Levy, CEO, of Appinions made a plea to the audience to “stop publishing crap” which elicited a few chuckles from the crowd. Levy believes quality content, not quantity of content, provides the “brand lift” companies need to stay one step ahead of competitors. I couldn’t agree more.
While brand lift is one of the primary benefits of employee brand journalism, it is sometimes hard to capture and quantify. I was honored to help add some clarity around this thorny topic as a panelist on “C-suite Perspectives on Content and Branding”, hosted by Margaret Molloy, CMO, Siegel+Gale. Quoting myself from that panel:
“Look within your company to find sources of content. Ghostwriting won’t capture the spirit of your brand appropriately. It will boost the quality of your content tremendously if you look for the right talent internally.”
Stay tuned for part two of this series where I will reveal how employee brand journalism drives real results.
Last week, I posted a bit about my thoughts around measuring the ROI of PR by estimating the value of the audience PR creates. In case you missed it, the short summary of how to estimate the ROI of PR works like this:
At the bottom of every funnel is revenue and sales. It is the responsibility of sales professionals to generate revenue from leads.
In the middle of the funnel is the domain of marketing: Lead generation.
Leads are drawn from the audience a brand has, and through the use of marketing tools and tactics, those parts of the audience who are interested in potentially doing business self-identify (or at the most aggressive shops, get cold-called) by raising their hands.
At the top of the funnel are the audiences and loyal fans that brands have, the people who are becoming aware of the brand via all of its communications.
These audiences come from the addressable markets that a brand can potentially serve, and it’s the job of public relations and advertising to build those audiences and to identify and cultivate those loyal fans of your brand. How do you compute ROI on that?
Let’s recall that ROI is a simple math formula: Take (earned – spent)/spent = ROI. You know what you spend on PR, presumably, so the question is, what did you earn?
One way to determine this is to infer the value of an audience member.
For example, let’s say you sell very expensive coffee for $100 a cup at your coffee shop. You know from experience and measurement that it takes 10 people inside your coffee shop for even one of them to consider buying a cup of coffee, so your conversion rate from lead to sale is 10 percent.
Thus, if you average out the sale revenue over the number of leads, a lead is effectively worth $10. So far, so good.
Next, you know from measurement and experience that it takes 10 people to walk by your coffee shop for even one of them to come in the door. Thus, in order for one sale to occur, 10 people must be inside, and therefore 100 people must walk by.
If you take the value of a sale and average it across your audience, across those 100 people, then the effective value of an audience member is $1. You now have a dollar value per audience member that you can use in an ROI computation.
If every audience member is worth $1 and your coffee shop has a revenue target of $100,000 this month, then you know you need 100,000 new audience members. If you spend $50,000 this month on PR to earn $100,000 of revenue, then your ROI is 100 percent.
That’s how you begin to compute the ROI of PR.
Jodi Echakowitz pointed out that while this is an interesting way of doing ROI, it is technically in violation of what’s considered the gold standard of PR measurement, the Barcelona Principles. Established in 2010 by PRSA, the Barcelona Principles outlined seven core “rules” for measuring PR:
1. Goals should be as quantitative as possible.
2. Media measurement must be qualitative and quantitative.
3. Ad value equivalence is not a valid measurement of PR.
4. Social media can and should be measured.
5. Measuring outcomes is preferable to measuring media results.
6. Business and organizational results should be measured where possible, including metrics such as sales and revenue.
7. Transparency and replicability are paramount to sound measurement.
Where the method of measuring PR ROI by audience value – and by this I mean audience value at the top of the sales and marketing funnel, not media value in terms of impressions – falls afoul of the Barcelona Principles is primarily around Principle 6. By stopping measurement at the top of the sales and marketing funnel – the equivalent being new unique users in Google Analytics – instead of going down funnel, the method would seem to fail Principle 6.
However, I debate this in these two examples. First, imagine you have a coffee shop. It’s got salespeople at the registers, the environment is optimized for marketing with the right music and decor, and you run a PR campaign to make people aware of it and come walk in. One day, you forget to open the coffee shop. The PR campaign is still running, bringing people to the front door, but the door is locked. In this simplistic example, if you measured all the way down the funnel, the ROI of your PR is zero because you made zero revenue. You weren’t open. PR did not fail to do its job.
Here’s a more realistic example. Say you’re a B2B company with a complex selling process. You sell expensive products like software to finicky buyers. You have a stellar PR program that gets people to your virtual or real door. Your trade show booth is always mobbed. People love you. Your marketing is doing a great job. Lots of people are raising their hands, downloading white papers and attending your webinars. You’re a rockstar by every marketing measure there is.
But… in the back room is Lazy Larry the Inept Salesman. Lazy Larry doesn’t return calls or emails. Lazy Larry forgets appointments constantly. Lazy Larry’s closing rate for sales is roughly about the same as the chances of you being hit by lightning. The only reason your company stays in business is because the most dedicated prospective customers find their way around Lazy Larry.
This is why Barcelona Principle 6 is intentionally broken in our PR ROI model: if you were to assign revenue as a goal of PR, you would essentially be tying the performance of PR and marketing to Lazy Larry’s performance as a salesperson. One of the cardinal rules of good management is to never make someone accountable for something they cannot control. PR and marketing have no way of controlling or changing Lazy Larry’s performance.
While this is an extreme example, it’s not uncommon in any environment that involves a complex sale. To hold PR people accountable for what the salesperson does is as illogical as holding customer service representatives accountable for what the PR people do. Measure what you can control! It’s the best way to ensure that you’re getting optimal results.
Everyone today has a smartphone. And it’s forcing a shift in lead generation similar to what marketers experienced the last two decades with the Internet.
The Internet forced marketers to go digital, using new online strategies (email, banners, and PPC ads) in conjunction with traditional offline advertising (TV, radio, direct mail, and print) to drive prospects to a web address to fill out a form or make a purchase. As businesses spent more in pursuit of web conversions, marketers began implementing tools like marketing automation to track the results, manage the leads, and optimize ad spend. We are seeing a similar shift today thanks to smartphone adoption.
People today use smartphones to find and research businesses. 25% of searches take place on mobile devices now, and that number is growing at such a rate that it should surpass desktop search this year (BIA/Kelsey, 2014). It’s important to understand that when these mobile searchers find a business, they aren’t filling out web forms to become leads – they’re calling:
Clearly having phone numbers in your mobile search ads and landing pages is critical. But smartphones are also affecting other types of marketing:
Thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, phone calls have re-emerged as the most effective channel for generating leads and closing business. 30 billion sales calls were made to businesses in the U.S. last year, and that number is expected to reach 65 billion by 2016 (BIA/Kelsey, 2014). It’s why businesses are now in a race to adopt solutions to measure and control calls the same way they do web leads. These solutions, called voice-based marketing automation, include capabilities such as:
Businesses that optimize marketing based on accurate data have a competitive advantage. Most marketers that embraced marketing automation technology to manage web leads understand this; they are among the ones adopting voice-based marketing automation to do the same for calls. Others should ask themselves what the impact of ignoring their most valuable and fastest growing lead source – inbound calls – will have on their business. Because as smartphone adoption continues to increase, it will only get worse.
My first job out of high school was selling cars. At that time, I remember my sales manager telling me and the other salespeople to make our daily follow-up calls. Some salespeople would say they completed their calls, even when they hadn’t. It became a constant battle. Apart from not making the calls, these particular salespeople were notorious at finding ways to cut corners and cheat the system. While this may not be the norm, how do we hold our salespeople accountable for their daily, weekly and monthly activities?
In today’s dealership, 80% of the leads received come through the phone and/or Internet. That means that 80% of their business is dependent on the salesperson’s ability to schedule appointments that drive people into the showroom. CRM utilization becomes critical when managing these processes. CRM allows salespeople to achieve new levels of production with unsold and repeat customers, thereby increasing their personal incomes. CRM enables salespeople to work more efficiently, be better organized, and better manage time and relationships. Managers now have access to reports that enable them to monitor all activities, and can help coach and motivate each salesperson.
Accountability was low at that dealership because the managers were not monitoring the daily actions of the salespeople at the dealership. What they thought was being done in the dealership, often wasn’t. They had no concrete way to show that it was or was not happening.
In order to improve accountability, utilize reports to track the number of new opportunities that your salespeople are entering into the CRM. Nothing is worse than seeing someone take multiple customers without entering those customers into the CRM. One common rule from dealers is: “If it isn’t in the CRM, it didn’t happen.” If data is not entered into your CRM, it throws off your marketing and ROI reports.
The second key metric is phone calls. It is important that your CRM is integrated with your phone system in order to track outbound phone calls. Having salespeople mark all of their calls completed is one thing, but it’s even better to have proof that the call was made, and how long they were on the call. The top salespeople are constantly those who take the time to make the most calls. If your state allows it, record your calls. This is great for managing quality and training.
Make sure to monitor inbound calls as well. Most customers are calling multiple companies, and this is often the first contact the customer has with your business. If your salespeople don’t handle inbound and outbound calls correctly, it will ultimately affect your conversion rate.
Email and web lead tracking is also important. You need to know how many emails the salespeople are receiving and sending out, as well as how long it is taking them to respond to their web leads. Salespeople love people that come in and buy, but what about those that don’t buy, or those who are hard to get in touch with afterward? Make sure you are looking at reports that reflect this data.
Pipeline management is key for success. When salespeople get busy, the first item taken off their plate is prospecting. When salespeople stop prospecting, the pipeline eventually runs dry. Make sure that as part of tracking calls, you know the type of calls the salespeople are making. Ensure there is always a focus on prospecting. Salespeople also have a tendency to move people to “lost”. This is a way to get the CRM follow-up to stop or to hide those customers that didn’t work out. Do you have a review process in place for a manager to look at each “lost deal” and try to “save a deal”?
Some CRM tools have a daily activity report or check out report that shows everything the salesperson has done for the day (opportunities, appointments, calls, talk time, emails, etc.). When I worked at one dealership, I noticed they had a problem with accountability, so they instituted a new process. Before a salesperson left for the day, they would print out a report and give it to their manager to check out. The report told the manager everything they had done as well as all of the calls they didn’t complete. Quickly, managers were able to see what had been done and what had not been done. Often, the manager would send the salesperson back to make more calls before they left. Salespeople began to feel ashamed when they handed in their sheet that showed low call volume. It motivated them to make more calls. The dealership drastically improved their follow up process and began to see an immediate increase in their sales.
Having a plan and setting goals are essential parts of improving accountability. It is crucial for salespeople to establish a set of daily, weekly and monthly benchmarks that help them measure and manage their ultimate goal. If the goal of each salesperson is to sell “X”, don’t focus on the end goal. Monitor the activities that will help them reach that goal. It also helps if the salespeople are included in setting the goals. If you do this, they should have a personal stake in the outcome. Without inclusion, salespeople will figure out the best excuses in the world about why they can’t meet their goals.
If you have a salesperson who isn’t taking responsibility, then you may need to mentor them individually. Focus on their behavior and the issues at hand. They need to be held accountable for their actions, which can include low prospecting activity, not meeting sales targets, or low margin sales. As accountability grows, your salespeople will form a good habit of doing the things they must do on a regular basis. With a few changes, you’ll help them get on their way to becoming a top producing salesperson.
Image source: flickr.com/autohistorian
Looking for a way to inject some charismatic magic into your sales material? Look no further than the widget behind the curtain: the wizard. Put your sales reps on the fast track to masterful asset management, intricately customized content and sales kits that kick sales enablement into high gear.
An undeniable leader amongst sales tools, wizards are incredibly easy to use: Just answer a few questions, and out pops your targeted, tailored sales kit. All your reps have to do is drop in appropriate buyer names and contact info where necessary, and they’re armed with powerful sales presentations with personalized pizzazz.
Your sales team needs some help.
Let’s face it: Your reps need a little pep in their step.
THEY’RE FAILING THE EXAM.
“Sales-driven cultures can really differentiate you from the majority of your competition. That doesn’t mean being salesperson oriented, just sales oriented: winning deals, smelling the blood and going in for the kill.”
– Josh James, CEO of Domo
Today’s buyers want quick responses and relevant, personalized information. Sales reps need the right resources at their fingertips to quickly assemble precision-targeted, custom-tailored presentations, documents and sales kits that best fit each unique sales opportunity.
EFFICIENCY HITS THE FAN.
“40% of a rep’s time is spent creating sales presentations, customizing messaging and preparing for pitches.”
– CMO Council Study, as quoted in Firebrick Consulting’s Why Sales Doesn’t Use Your Presentations
Sales reps are spending way too much time digging through resources to find what they need, and even more time cobbling together sales kits, presentations and documents that are relevant for their buyers. This means less time interacting with buyers and less time selling.
RESPONSIVENESS GETS SLAMMED.
“Sales studies consistently show that anywhere from 35-50% of all sales go to the agent who makes first contact.”
– Joel York, Chaotic Flow
Reps must respond quickly and accurately to buyers, whether from desktop or mobile, and seize opportunities as soon as they arise. The ones with fast, easy access to sales resources, plus the ability to quickly assemble the relevant material for buyers, have a clear competitive advantage.
*Sources for all aforementioned numbers: MarketingProfs’ “State Of The Sales Rep” infographic, MIT and Harvard University studies and a survey conducted by Ifbyphone. [h3:]
Let the wizard work its magic.
Your sales reps need to make the grade. They need to be efficient. They need to be responsive.
That’s where the wizard comes in:
It’s easy to get frustrated with Google. It’s hard to keep up with what is currently acceptable to the Webmaster Guidelines let alone try to remember the name of the cute animal that is currently devouring the SERPs. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother and want to crawl back into a hole somewhere and become a web developer.
Then I remember why: I like being creative. I love finding new solutions. I enjoy trying new things. What’s fun about doing SEO is that something is always changing and there’s always something new to learn.
After I left a recent pity-party I took a look at my clients and asked myself, “so what are you going to do now?” Clearly Google can’t hold it against me if I put good content on my websites- that’s what they recommend, anyway. So what makes good content? Timely information that people want to know. Okay, cool, I can do that. The problem is- even if I have the best, coolest content on my site it doesn’t really matter if no one can see it. That means I have to build some links to it. But Google says I can’t build links (or, at least, it feels that way sometimes).
Then I realized something — good content and links don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Good content is inherently about links. If I build my content in a creative way, I can set myself up to get links. This all sounds good in theory- here’s one way I go about it.
There are a couple good ways to find this kind of information:
Of course, not every company has a sales team or PR department. Also not every client will give you access to their leads or phone calls. If you don’t have anywhere else to go- or you’ve exhausted your internal resources- try looking on Q and A sites like Quora, Yahoo! Answers (yes, there’s more than just spam there), Askville (Amazon’s equivalent of Yahoo! Answers) or even Topsy (a great social media aggregator that can help you identify some experts in your field who might be able to offer some great questions as well).
Once you’ve identified a couple of questions you can pause here to write something on your website that answers a question. If this is all you do it would provide some value to your site: good content that addresses a question that people are really asking. If you’re lucky, you might even get some organic links as people refer to your answer. If I were you, however, I wouldn’t stop there. I’d take a step deeper…
Look in some leading industry blogs and see when the last time someone answered questions about your topics. Even better: use Google. Do a search for your topic on Google (or even better Google’s Blogsearch) and select a date from a year ago to only show older articles.
I’ve written a content updating worksheet that will show you these opportunities in a Google Doc spreadsheet, if you don’t want to have to bother and change your SERPs.
With these opportunities you could pause here, again, to write some new content for your website — answering questions with updated information. If you did that you’d at least be a helpful repository of up-to-date information. That content, like the content you might have previously written, could also prove to be link worthy and attract some good, healthy organic links. If I were you, however, I wouldn’t stop there. You’ve already made it this far, why not take this a step further and…
I know, I know, “Guest blogging is dead.” I think you’re misunderstanding me here. I’m not suggesting you continue the “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” practice of, “I’ll give you content if you give me a link.” This is connecting with someone who has out-of-date content on their website and offering to help.
You might be able to help just by pointing out that their content is out-dated, pointing to the content you’ve written on your website as a more up-to-date resource. Perhaps they will update their article and link to your website as a resource. You might be able to help provide some updated insights in an article on their website. The point is: don’t just put this good stuff on your website. Promote it to people who have already shown an interest in your topic.
If you’ve created some content on your site using these steps, even if the people to whom you pitch this content nofollow, obfuscate, and completely disable any link that points back to your website, at least you’ll be engaging your potential customers with helpful and recent content that addresses questions they’re really asking.
Links are a whole lot harder to get than they used to be but don’t attend the pity-party. With a little creative thinking we can continue to help our websites connect with the customers looking for their products and services- which is what SEO is all about.
There are a lot of totally obvious reasons to watch a big game until its conclusion. You saw it during the NBA Finals. You’re seeing it again in this year’s FIFA World Cup. Big games like this are one of the best examples of how the start of something doesn’t necessarily reflect its conclusions.
Ever had the same thing happen to your B2B leads? A customer looks interested, they were eager to talk to your sales reps. But gradually, things start looking difficult. Unexpected problems arise. The next thing you know, your sales rep failed to close it.
What’s funny is the tendency to see it from just the perspective of the start or the finish. This is not the best way to analyze the quality of B2B leads. Just as the most exciting games are those where competitors are neck-in-neck, your best marketing experiences are those that leave you analyzing every single step.
This problem is more prevalent than you think. How often do you see salespeople reaching bad conclusions about prospects before they’re qualified? How often do they misjudge a process based solely on its conclusion? In times like that, it helps to remind both the reps and the B2B marketers than your sales process is longer and guaranteed to be more complex. There’s plenty of room for mishap in the middle so why aren’t your eyes on that instead of the start or the finish?
There’s nothing wrong with being results oriented or in being optimistic after a good start. What’s wrong is if you base the quality of your entire lead generation process just on that. A lot can still happen and that is why you still need to watch the rest of the game.
People on the elephant’s side of the political spectrum are all out with torches after former IRS official Lois Lerner was reported to have lost important information in the form of emails.
How’d she lose that data? A bad hard drive. So if the likes of the IRS aren’t immune to these kinds of controversial accidents, what makes you think you’re safe from losing your telemarketing leads in just the same way?
Potential prospect information may not be on the same level as, say, compromising messages from inside federal agencies. (The latter is just too dirty!) What’s not different is the fact that even something like a corrupt hard drive is enough to make a mess bigger than it already is!
But of course, it’s not just a hard drive any more for B2B lead generators. (Oh no. Thank you Lois Lerner for proving that point!) For them, you can’t beat a reliable CRM database. This (and other systems that should come with it) isn’t just for storing emails. They’re for storing everything a salesperson needs to do well at their job (and not get fired)!
It’s more than just the CRM though. Jokes aside, the IRS is just one form of proof that you need heavier measures to gather, store, and make use of the information you need to generate new customers. This goes for all areas of your lead generation and appointment setting process, not just the part where you store the data:
If you’re not a fan of the IRS, this might be another reason to keep on hating. But for all your hating, make sure you don’t make the same mistake. Do more to gather and store the vital information in your email and telemarketing leads.
For her first week on the job, Debbie Pryer, Program Manager, Siemens Healthcare, arrived ready to accept an intimidating challenge: Bring Marketing and Sales together for one common cause – generating quality leads.
According to Debbie, the process in place had been corrupted and broken by a system of incentives to drive lead volume with little check and balance in place for assessing lead quality before the handoff to Sales. The end result was a sales team overwhelmed with unqualified leads, 65% of which were tossed out.
“I had a roadmap of what was wrong,” Debbie said. “I had to figure out how to make it right.”
At MarketingSherpa Lead Gen Summit 2013, Debbie’s presentation “Lead Generation: How to empower your program like Siemens Healthcare” took the audience on a deep dive into some of the challenges Siemens Healthcare faced in its lead gen process.
One of Debbie’s key goals was to re-establish a long-broken trust between Sales and Marketing.
Suggestions were made about what could solve this dilemma. Although many brought up automation, Debbie knew that by bringing in more technology as a solution, she would simply be “automating the problem.”
Challenge your process
Debbie explained that returning to the first love of the company – the patients and the hospitals that serve them – was an ideal starting point for building a lead process that put prospect needs first.
Her solution was to “slide the leads into what they were already doing” in the sales funnel, rather than pushing unqualified leads into the funnel.
With this strategy, Marketing delivered higher-quality leads to Sales, and the two teams started to (slowly) restore trust.
You may also like
Email Summit 2015 Call for Speakers [Have interesting insights to share like Debbie did? Apply to be an Email Summit speaker.]
Marketing Research Chart: Most widely used lead gen tactics [MarketingSherpa Research Chart of the Week]
Lead Generation: How to get funding to improve your lead gen [More from the blogs]
Local B2B Marketing: 150% boost in lead generation [MarketingSherpa case study]
The Complex Sale: Lead scoring effort increases conversion 79% [More from the blogs]
B2B Marketers are asked, more than anything else, to generate leads for sales to pursue. But what kind of B2B leads do we want Marketing to generate?
named prospects who meet your ideal client profile?
buyers who have shown interest in a topic you write about or a category you sell?
buyers who have shown they are troubled about the problem you solve better than any other?
buyers actively looking for solutions like yours?
What goes into the Amazon marketing strategy secret sauce? Our business case study explores Amazon's revenue model and culture of customer metrics, history of Amazon.com and marketing objectives In the final quarter of 2022, Amazon reported net sales of over …..
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I am one of the last generations that will be able to remember what it’s like to not have technology in school.
We didn’t text. We passed notes. Our really crappy handwriting scrawled across lined paper that was folded so small we were convinced the teacher couldn’t see it as we threw or passed it back and forth. Rumors, quizzes, and small talk would whiz around the room until class was done. Then, the written conversation was over until tomorrow.
If we wanted to research something we did one of three things: asked someone else or begged our parents to tell us so we wouldn’t have to do option number three—look it up in the dictionary or the library.
Today’s generation will never know what that’s like. Texting means they will never experience the overwhelming terror that washes over you when the teacher threatens to read your note out loud to the entire classroom. They will never understand the frustration of trying to look up a word they don’t know how to spell. Faced with a choice between a library and Google, let’s face it, Google is way easier.
Libraries aren’t the only organizations feeling the impact from our increasing preferences for online information. A study by Accenture Interactive recently reported that digital marketing is predicted to account for 75% of CMOs budgets over the next five years. And yet 79% of them don’t believe their businesses will be ready.
Stop and think about that for a minute. An overwhelming majority of C-level executives don’t think their business will be ready for the vast majority of their marketing to be digital, meeting the information consumption habits of their consumers. How on earth do they expect to attract and engage them?
At the inaugural Minnesota Search Summit in Minneapolis, our CEO Lee Odden gave the opening keynote to an audience of search marketers offering advice to that 79% on how to break free of SEO and SEM silos and approach digital marketing strategically. Here are 12 lessons from that presentation outlining the transformation TopRank Marketing has made from search to digital marketing agency and how to develop an approach that optimizes for customers vs. search engines.
1. Strive to Continually Learn
One of the first things Lee said about how he evolved his thinking from Search to Digital Marketing was, “I’m eternally curious, and I am an eternal student.” He advised the audience to set objectives and goals to learn something new every single day. And what better way to learn than to connect with people? Talk to those who are solving similar or different problems than you, attend lectures, read forums—whatever it takes to consume as much information as you can. The more you consume, the more you can leverage.
2. Focus on People, Not Bots
For some SEOs it can be easy to focus on search engine bots—it’s really easy to know what they want. Make sure your keyword use is good, pages load quickly, attract high quality links, and they’ll be relatively happy. But bots don’t pay your bills. They don’t purchase your product (yet). People do. Digital marketers have to shift perspective to be more customer centric—focusing more on optimizing for customer experiences than for search engine bots.
“Rather than just thinking about the most popular keywords somebody might be looking for at the end of the buying cycle and creating content for the 50 derivatives of that keyword, think about what the other paths might be,” Lee advised. “Consumer’s don’t all search and convert. They may research multiple sources before committing to a purchase.”
Create personalized content. Take the hub of your hub-and-spoke model, and make derivative versions of it for different channels to expand visibility of your company in the places where your customers are. Give people information in formats they prefer, and everywhere they go. Coordinating visibility in organic search, paid search, organic and paid social media, industry publications, via email and even offline, you then start to create a congruent experience that can help them towards a conversion.
3. Be The Best Answer to Customer Questions & Queries
So what kind of content should you create? Answers. Helpful, actionable answers.
Your customers, and potential customers, are asking questions. Sometimes they’re to your sales team, other times they’re in the form of a search query—but they are being asked. Create content to help them. Check the internal searches conducted on your website to see what your visitors want more of (or are struggling to find). Survey current customers to find out how they’re searching, what types of information they prefer, and where they’re looking. Analyze forms that are being filled out. Whatever it takes to understand what your audience is looking for.
Then, create content that answers those questions. Each time your company solves an information problem for a prospect or customer, you help lead them to the next step closer to purchase or even advocacy.
4. Put Yourself in Your Customer’s Shoes…Or at Least Understand Their Journey
The buying journey is different for customers based on what they care about and their preferences for finding, consuming and acting on information. Not everyone searches the same way, uses the same social networks, or values the same topics or formats of online media. Some will start with search, others will take to social to ask a trusted following. Identifying and understanding the different journeys your customers are taking is essential for successful digital marketing.
Once you know how your customers discover information on the web, the content formats they prefer and what will inspire them to take action, you can create a content road map to identify the questions people have at each stage of their journey. Then architect a content plan that addresses those questions/concerns. Essentially, you’re creating a plan that allows you to be there for them every step of the way – to be the best answer, wherever customers are looking.
5. Develop Dynamic Personas
Lee recommended that regardless of which tool or strategy marketers use to create personas, they focus on making them dynamic. “The web is dynamic and so are consumer behaviors, you don’t just create [personas] and say ‘ok that’s it we’re going to create content for that for the next year’. You have to keep coming back and seeing how things are changing because seasonality, pop culture and fundamental changes about a audience segment can happen.”
6. Think of Search and Social as Being Hand-in-Hand
“Social is a remarkable discovery channel, search is a powerful validation channel,” Lee told the keynote audience. Using an example of asking his social following where he should take his ten year old (at the time) son in New York, he showed how a social query turns into a search query when users want more information. “Someone can tell you to go to this restaurant on social, and most people won’t run right out and go there. They’ll want to know more information like price, location, hours and go to a search engine to find out.”
It’s essential to digital marketing efforts to not see search and social as silos, but as two channels that reinforce and augment the other. Viewing content discovery and consumption from the buyer’s point of view helps marketers create and promote the kind of content that will best inspire them to take action – interact, share or buy.
7. Then Think of Digital Marketing like a Subway Map
Even though search and social play huge roles in digital marketing, they’re definitely not the only players in the game. Gartner recently published an image that showed how digital marketing was like a subway map. Dozens of different activities—from crowdsourcing, analytics, and search retargeting to mobile messaging/commerce, email marketing, and advertising—weave together to create a complicated network that achieves an overall goal.
Don’t become so focused on one or two elements of digital marketing (like SEO and PPC) that you forget the rest. We need all of the elements to get us where we’re going, just like a subway needs all of those stations and streets.
8. Hone your Digital Marketing Skills
Lee identified 5 key digital marketing skills and elements that are key for search marketers:
9. Know How Your Content Contributes to a Conversion
Look at everything leading up to the conversation as an assist. Interactions with content like ebooks, SlideShare, social network updates, blog posts, articles…they’re capable being an assist to a conversion. Not everything that you’re publishing will universally be a conversion or an assist—it will depend on the person that finds, consumes and acts on the content.
Calculate a percentage of contribution to the overall conversion. That way, you can identify the value of the content you’re creating, and determine the contribution to leads, sales and revenue.
For a great list of content marketing case studies that include revenue performance, check out this post.
10. Overcome Analysis Paralysis and Learn from the Data You’re Collecting
Some of Lee’s favorite ways to learn more about consumers other than talking to them directly include:
It’s a combination of those things, but ultimately talking to your customers is the most insightful and beneficial from a digital marketing standpoint.
11. Think like a Scientist: Create a Hypothesis and Experiment
One thing Lee heavily advocates for is experimentation. He recommended that marketers find ways to experiment using resources they have, such ash their own social networks and blogs. Play with length, messaging, tone, structure, offers…the list is endless. Analyze those real world reactions and bring the insight into your marketing recommendations.
12. Takeaways for Search Marketers to Become Better Digital Marketers: Optimize!
Search isn’t dead. SEO isn’t dead. And content marketing certainly isn’t dead. It’s the silos between them that need to fade away towards a more integrated approach to digital marketing. This was the key message from Lee’s presentation and what we aspire to in our work at TopRank Online Marketing.
Understanding what’s important about your customers–from who they are and what their titles are, to where they’re searching and what they’re searching for–can help you map out buyer journeys so you can create meaningful content that’s easy to find and share. Search, social, and content play huge roles in the optimization of buyer experiences, and can help build a solid foundation for the rest of your digital marketing efforts.
Believe it or not, these 12 lessons are just a slice of what Lee presented at the MnSearch Summit. Here is the full presentation on Slideshare: “Where Does Search Marketing Fit in the Digital Marketing Mix?”
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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2014. | Where Search Fits in the Digital Marketing Mix – 12 Lessons from Lee Odden Keynote at MnSummit | http://www.toprankblog.com
