Rnordman

It's standard to size a market by the number of widgets sold, but in the Internet of Things, which numbers sensors and devices in the billions, widget counts don't really matter. In part this is because the real money in IoT is not in the "things," but rather in the Internet-enabled services that stitch them together.

More to the point, it's because the size of the IoT market fundamentally depends on the number of developers creating value in it. While today there are just 300,000 developers contributing to the IoT, a new report from VisionMobile projects a whopping 4.5 million developers by 2020, reflecting a 57% compound annual growth rate and a massive market opportunity.

Start Making Sense

In the last 30 years we've created a fair amount of data, but it pales compared to what we've generated just in the last two years. Ninety percent of the world's data was generated in the last two years alone, much of it by machines. Such machine-produced data dwarfs human-generated data. 

In such an IoT world, devices are not the problem. According to Gartner, we'll have 26 billion of them by 2020. Connecting them isn't, either. As VisionMobile's report makes clear, however, "making sense of data" is the real challenge. 

It's also the big opportunity:

Just honing in on the middle column, Google acquired Nest for $3.2 billion, and just six days ago Google's Nest acquired Dropcam for $555 million. Dropcam's cameras upload more data every day than users put up on YouTube. That's a lot of data, and a lot of money.

It all comes down to developers, because it's developers and the companies they work for that are pulling intelligence from the data.

More Data Requires More Developers

Fortunately, we're about to get a huge crowd of developers actively contributing to IoT applications—4.5 million of them by 2020, according to VisionMobile.

As VisionMobile suggests, "the only way to make a profit in the Internet of Things is to build a network of entrepreneurs who create unique value on top of commodity hardware, connectivity and cloud services." Here's a more detailed explanation:

The key to being successful with developer-centric business models is to find a way to bundle your core product with the new demand generated by developers. Much like Apple bundles its devices with million apps in the App Store, Google bundles its online services with Android devices. Through these services, Google collects user intelligence and creates opportunities to expand its ad inventory. Amazon as well bundles its e-commerce services with subsidized Kindle tablets (and soon smartphones) to drive user traffic to its virtual store shelves. 

In other words, developers aren't the buying audience: they create the ecosystem that makes other buyers interested in buying hardware, cloud services or some other value. 

What Will They Build?

As much as we may want to fantasize about refrigerators talking to coffee machines, the reality is that we have no clue what meaningful applications will emerge from the IoT opportunity. As the report authors state, "Demand for IoT technology will not come from a single killer app, but from thousands of unexpected new use cases."

No single company will win in the IoT, nor will any one app. Such developer-driven demand "will create new Internet of Things markets that are several times bigger than the ones we could ever predict with a spreadsheet that extrapolates today’s market." The only thing we know for sure is that developers are fundamental to making IoT a big, profitable market, even if they don't pay a single dime for a single sensor in that market. 

Lead image by Flickr contributor Official GDC, CC 2.0

To be clear, I didn’t coin this phrase, but I certainly agree wholeheartedly that content may be king, but marketing is queen.

And, I’ve written about this before … the notion that content marketing, at its core, IS marketing.

Why marketing is queen

In a slightly dated study by AOL and Nielsen, 27 MILLION pieces of content are shared every DAY! In fact, we create as much content in 2 days as we did from the invention of writing to 2003! And, this metric is dated 2010. By now, we likely create as much content in a single day as we did from the dawn of time until 2003.

That’s a LOT of content and your little piece will go unnoticed unless you incorporate marketing into your content strategy. I mean, there’s a reason they call it content marketing.

Now, many firms hire journalists to implement their content marketing. And, journalists have many fine qualities and qualifications for writing content — they know how to research, how to write, how to interview, they’re relatively cheap ….

What journalists lack, however, is marketing backgrounds to aid with determining WHAT to write about, how to incorporate subtle influence and build calls to action (CTA), an understanding of the consumer decision-making process and how attitudes, beliefs, norms, social interactions, and other aspects of consumer behavior impact consumers, how to include customer support and build word of mouth, and other aspects of marketing. Don’t forget, content marketing ISN’T journalism, you’re creating content with the idea of stimulating some action — sharing, signing up, buying — that supports your market performance. You’re not creating content just to get read.

Unfortunately, many marketing folks lack skills necessary to effectively manage DIGITAL marketing tasks — they aren’t trained in SEO (keyword strategy), creating social media engagement, digital analytics, online consumer behavior, graphic design, rudimentary web design, … Of course, journalists lack these same skills.

Because content marketing, in fact ALL digital marketing, increasingly requires cross-functional skills, there isn’t a single functional area with the skills set required for effective content marketing implementation.

How to bring marketing into your content marketing

Whether you hire marketing folks or non-marketing folks to manage your content marketing efforts, here are some marketing tasks they’ll need:

Business intelligence

Content marketing isn’t just putting something up and hoping it has an impact. Monitoring performance of each piece of content in terms of intermediate results, such as view, sharing, etc. and market performance goals, such as lead generation, sales, subscribing, etc.

Content marketers need to understand metrics, be able to access and interpret reports from Google Analytics, etc, conduct A/B testing, and basically decide what’s working and what isn’t.

A critical aspect of business intelligence, as it applies to content marketing, is knowing WHAT to measure. Instead of focusing on vanity metrics, like Fans, Followers, metrics that impact the success of your content marketing strategy are necessary. That means evaluating both the success of your content — # readers, # shares — and its ability to drive market performance — drive visitors down the funnel toward achieving marketing goals.

Influence

While social media marketing ISN’T advertising, you still have market oriented goals — or should have. Every piece of content produced should work toward building your brand and influence prospective buyers to consider your brand.

Your content marketing goals should include being a thought leader in your product area, the place users turn to learn what’s going on in your industry. Or, you should be the source of interesting, helpful, fun information and stories.

Cialdini recently updated his seminal book on influence and uses the principles very effectively to subtly motivate markets toward action, including the Obama campaign. Knowing how to use these tools effectively is critical for effective content marketing.

Consumer behavior

Understanding how consumers behave, the steps they traverse in their product journeys, how they think and feel, how they behave in groups and are influenced by group members, what they recall and how they learn — all these aspects of consumer behavior help determine your content marketing strategies.

Knowing principles of consumer behavior is only the start, however, and having market research skills provides the ability to query your target audience and direct actions toward the most profitable actions.

While consumer behavior isn’t linear and predictions may not be entirely accurate, understanding consumer behavior suggests the most likely actions driving market performance.

Need help?

Whether you need a complete analytics strategy, some help with brand marketing, or some consulting to optimize your existing social media marketing, we can fill your digital marketing funnel. We can help you do your own social media marketing better or do it for you with our community managers, strategists, and account executives. You can request a FREE introductory meeting or sign up for my email newsletter to learn more about social media marketing.

The knowledgeable combination of Chris Muccio and David Burns brought about a sharp but easy to follow discussion on how to sell your business effectively.  If you’re looking for some great selling knowledge this interview is perfect for you.

Let’s drop in on their conversation.  Click here to listen to the conversation as well.

…Chris:         David, you’ve been involved with buying and selling businesses since the 1990s.  What has attracted you to that field and can you share more about your background?

David:  I became interested after I left my job at Ernst & Young, that’s when I started my first company.  After three years, I decided to sell it.  I went through the process myself.  Looking back at it I made a lot of mistakes.  But, the whole process of dealing with the buyers, collecting information and negotiating really attracted me to pursue it as a career.  That was the main reason I went back to Vanderbilt’s business school, I graduated and was very fortunate to work on Wall Street for Goldman Sachs.

Chris: Great story!  Basically, you learned from your mistakes and built a career around that.  Given your expertise and experience in this area, let’s shift the focus of conversation to the business owner who’s just starting off.  What are some of the biggest factors that they should be aware of when it comes to selling their business?

David:

1. Do I really need to hire somebody to help me sell my business?
2. Why can’t I do it myself if I feel like I have the type of business and background?  Really, I’ve got the gumption to try to do it on my own.

The two things that bifurcates that decision process are going to be if you’re business is doing less than $5 million in revenue.  You have a pretty good shot to sell that business yourself and avoid business broker type commissions.

You’re always going to be your own best advocate of what your business can do.  If you think about it you’re selling your business, that’s really just the last sale that you’re ever going to make in that type of business.  So you view your buyers as your last customer.

Now if you’re doing more than $5 million in revenue, I would suggest to hire some type of intermediary.  I would consider using an investment banker.  They have access to private equity buyers that, as an individual, you’re really probably never going to be able to get to.

That’s how I would address the questions of, “Hey, can I do this myself or should I go and hire a professional to guide the process?”

Chris: Very Interesting. How do I, as the business owner, know when the right time is to sell my business and how do I do that in a way that helps me maximize my return?

David: There’s really no right time to sell your business.  When you wake up in the morning and you’re having your cup of coffee and you think, “I really don’t want to go in the office today,” that’s probably a telltale sign that you might want to think about exiting the business. If your heart’s not into it, all you’re really going to do is potentially damage the value as time moves forward, because you’re not committed to growing the business.  I think at that point, you’ve got to ask yourself, “How does my business look to the outside?”

If you’re on a nice growth path the buyers will identify that.  There’s really not a wrong time to sell, if things are going your way.

The biggest mistake I see people make is when they say, “Well gee, everything is going great right now.  There’s no sense in me selling.”  But then when things start to turn negative, they rush and say, “Okay, I want to sell right now.”

Most people buy stocks when they hear good news about the company.  You really don’t hear people running out saying, “Hey, go buy this stock.  Their revenue’s down 30% this year and it’s probably going to be down another 20% the following year.”

You’ve got to think like a buyer when you’re a seller.  If you want to sell your business, sell when things are going well, and leave some of the upsides to the next buyer, that’s what you’re trying to do and exit at the highest valuation.

Chris: Now let’s say that we are a small business.  I’ve got a lot of positives going on with the business, and I am thinking like the buyer.  I’ve got a great asset to sell.  What are certain steps I should take when moving that process forward and trying to sell my business?

David: There’s three key things that a seller needs to think about when they’re about to embark on this process.

The first one is time.  I think people get frustrated in the process when they want to sell their business because they have unrealistic time expectations and they’re completely unrealistic in terms of what the process may entail to get to that successful sale.

Don’t rush into it.  There’s a lot of preparation.  The analogy I use is it’s like building a house. You’ve got to get the foundation down before you can even attempt to try to sell the company.

Most peoples fear, as the buyers, is that they’re buying something that you know is wrong; they’re buying a ticking time bomb.  Get the buyer comfortable, that you’re exiting for reasons that aren’t related to the business, that you want that buyer to say, “Hey, I see.  It looks like you’ve got a lot of good sales in the pipeline.  It looks like growth is good.”

The single most important piece of advice that I can give people who are contemplating selling: make yourself completely invisible to the business.

I’ll meet with a company that’s a terrific business.  The problem is, the owner or the CEO or the founder, they’re the entire business.  The buyer comes in there and thinks, “Wow, once he/she leaves, I’ve got to rebuild the whole office.”

You have to make yourself look like you’re not part of the business, because then the buyer doesn’t feel like when you walk out the door, all the business is going to follow you.  I think people underestimate how important that is to the process.

Most importantly, if I want to sell my business I need to not be viewed as integral to the business going forward.

Think Fast!  July 1st marks the initiation of the new Canadian Anti-SPAM Legislation (CASL) and lead generation companies across the globe are pulling their hair out debating, “Do we or don’t we stay in Canada?” The Top Tier of Legal, Sales, Marketing, and Engineering Teams all gathered around the table debating: how do we become compliant, do we want to be compliant, how will that impact our business, how much business do we even do in Canada? Who’s Canada?  

What is CASL anyway… the Canadian version of CAN-SPAM? No big deal? Yes, very big deal!

The Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) will be enforced starting on July 1, 2014 and is applicable to anyone who makes use of commercial electronic messages (CEMs). This means if you have an email address in your database that you suspect belongs to a Canadian, or if anyone opens your email in Canada, this law is applicable even if your business is based in the U.S. or any other country outside of Canada.

CASL blows CAN-SPAM out of the water. CASL doesn’t follow the “you get one chance to contact a lead” motto. CASL follows the “you get no chance until consent is given to the Sender” motto.

There are two types of consent, Express and Implied.

Express Consent: explicit opt in language identifying who, what and where (i.e. NetLine, free eBook offers, by email). Clear messaging that the subscriber can opt out must also be included – and most importantly the checkbox CANNOT be auto toggled to ‘yes’. Once express consent is obtained and documented, it will never expire, unless the user opts out.

Implied Consent: (This is where it gets fuzzy!) Existing business relationships, existing non-business relationships, contracts, disclosed addresses, etc… If you have implied consent you must then request express consent. Implied consent expires ranging from 6 months – 3 years post acquisition.

It is very important to distinguish between the two types and determine what type of consent you have received (if any) – AND you must be able to prove it. Auto-subscriptions assigned to new leads for your company and your partners are a thing of the CAN-SPAM past.

How Does My Company Get #CASL Ready?

Well… first you need to determine how CASL will affect your business model, database, and campaigns. Experts have dedicated hours to this new legislation and you should too. You will find three excellent and easy to read CASL resources below. Work with your legal team to determine next steps.

3 Important Questions to Think About:

1. Do you have the data to distinguish Canadian leads in your database? And are there Canadian leads that have not given consent to your company? (i.e. purchased or rented lists)
2. Does your company’s current lead generation and communication strategy follow CASL regulations for obtaining consent and sending CEMs? If no, how quickly can they be updated? If yes, do you have proper documentation to prove this?
3. What percentage of your business is from Canada? What are your future goals for generating business in Canada?

The good news…. While the July 1st date is right around the corner and certain business decisions need to be made before the cutoff, you can change the direction of your sails at anytime. The important thing is to make sure you have eliminated all risk before moving forward. Get #CASL Ready!

Top 3 CASL Resources: (plus bonus infographics from the Canadian Government!)

• Government of Canada: The Law and Regulations
• Make sure you’re CASL-ready: 3 Steps to CASL Compliance 
• Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) Campaign and Database Compliance Checklist

NetLine Corporation is dedicated to providing exceptional results for clients and guarantees CASL compliance in B2B qualified lead generation.

*This article is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as legal advice.

Smart materials and computer modelling are revolutionizing how projects get built.

WASHINGTON – Buy American provisions are back, and the Canadian government is sounding off in frustration.

Canada staged an intervention this week over new allegations of U.S. protectionism, with federal officials producing a list of fresh grievances during a meeting at the World Trade Organization.

The government is now airing its frustration in public over American trade measures that have received little attention so far.

“Canada is very concerned with recent legislation in the United States which reflects repeated attempts to impose domestic content requirements for products purchased by federal, state and municipal-level governments within the U.S.,” International Trade Minister Ed Fast said a statement Friday.

“Canada’s focus is on eliminating trade barriers, not erecting new ones. Protectionism is bad policy, and bad for businesses on both sides of the border.”

Protectionism had receded somewhat as a bilateral irritant the last few years. The Keystone XL pipeline dispute has become the hot-button issue, ever since a 2010 procurement deal calmed earlier tensions over the domestic-procurement provisions in U.S. stimulus legislation.

But the Canadian government has a list of new concerns.

It points to a clause in a major water-infrastructure law just passed by Congress; a transit bill proposed by the Obama administration; several state laws and proposed laws; and a plan to hike inspection fees at the border for agricultural products.

Those irritants were raised at a WTO meeting in Geneva on Wednesday.

Federal officials singled out:

—The multibillion-dollar Water Resources Reform and Development Act, signed into law this month by President Barack Obama. Section 608 of the infrastructure law stipulates that, to be eligible for one of the funding programs, all of the iron and steel products used in a project must be produced in the U.S.

—The new Grow America Act, legislation proposed by the Obama administration, which might not pass Congress. The bill is the administration’s attempt to avert a looming crisis: the expiry of funding for U.S. highways. The plan also funds public transit, and one clause stipulates that to be eligible for funding vehicles must be built with American components. The percentage of the required American content would grow each year, from 60 per cent next year to 100 per cent by 2019.

—An administration plan to increase the inspection fees for agricultural goods entering the U.S. The Canadian government estimates the move would increase the cost of inspecting a container to $8 at land borders, up $2.75. It estimates the measure would cost the Canadian trucking industry $15.5 million in new border fees.

—State bills over the last two months, passed in Minnesota and being studied in New York and Massachusetts. The Massachusetts bill pertains to general procurement, while the other two refer specifically to steel.

“These state initiatives raise several systemic issues of concern to Canada,” said a Canadian brief presented during a WTO meeting.

“Even though many of these new initiatives may not pass, the reoccurring threat of new forced localization requirements discourages foreign suppliers from investing the time and energy in developing new opportunities in foreign public procurement markets….

“Uncertainty — in and of itself — has the potential to undermine market access.”

One protectionism complaint that has been aired publicly the last few years involves country-of-origin labelling for meat, which has prompted a court dispute as well as a challenge by Canada and Mexico at the WTO.

The Americans have their own irritants when it comes to trade. U.S. pharmaceutical companies, for instance, accuse Canada’s political and legal system of being lax in enforcing drug patents.

The U.S. embassy in Ottawa referred questions about the Canadian complaints to the United States Trade Representative in Washington, which said the U.S. takes its trade obligations very seriously.

“While we continue to engage with Canada on its concerns, would emphasize that all of the measures identified by Canada are fully consistent with U.S. international obligations.”

The post Protectionist ‘Buy American’ provisions back, and Canada’s not happy appeared first on Canadian Business.

If you’re selling into the Enterprise, remember that most enterprises prefer to buy though the established channels as they have prior relationships with them.

Happy Canada Day! For a different perspective on the country this year, Maclean’s went to the maps. Drawing on a variety of sources, from government statistics to various online databases to tweets, here are some maps to illustrate Canada as you’ve never seen it before.

More Canada Day coverage:

18 reasons why it’s great to be Canadian

The Canada Day Quiz, Pt. 1: You vs Canada’s Smartest Person!

Mapping Canada: View our full map series

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It’s been said many times that hockey is Canada’s religion. Inspired by this, we asked FullDuplex.ca to do some data-crunching. Drawing on a year of tweets geotagged to specific cities, they tracked the number of references to “church” and “hockey,” and we compared them to see where people tweeted the most about one over the other. (Cities where there was a balance between the two topics aren’t shown.) It’s by no means scientific, but the results make sense. A core of hockey tweeters exists in Vancouver surrounded by B.C.’s Bible belt and, after the Canadiens’ Stanley Cup run, Montreal had one thing on its mind. As for church-tweeting Leafs fans, well, they have endured a championship drought of Biblical proportions.

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For the next map, to find out where Canadians cursed the most, we also asked Full Duplex for assistance. The company analyzed a year of tweets to find in which cities the F-word appeared most frequently. Given its massive population, Toronto, of course, came out on top. But even after factoring in different population sizes, T.O. Twitter users still swore the most. Using Toronto as the base, here’s how the frequency of F-words breaks down across some of Canada’s biggest cities.

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It’s always a surprise when people first learn that the very tip of southwestern Ontario is at a lower latitude than parts of California—which got us wondering: How do other parts of the country line up with the rest of the world? Here are the results, using Earthtools.org. Most of the cities on this map, and their global counterparts, lie within less than 50 km of each other, latitudinally speaking, of course. Only Quebec-Ulan Bator and Fort McMurray-Moscow are a full degree apart.

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What to say? Canada is a land of contrasts. It also offers up a bounty of clichés.

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According to a report last year commissioned by Motion Picture Association-Canada, in 2011, the film industry generated $20.4 billion in GDP for the Canadian economy and employed 263,000 people. So yeah, it’s big. Drawing on a list of movies filmed in Canada, and inspired by this, we pulled together a breakdown of genres filmed in Canada’s movie hubs.

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Ok, let’s be serious for a second. The recovery since the Great Recession of 2008 has not been even, as shown by this map, which captures the last five years of employment growth. There’s still a lot of red in Ontario, representing cities where there are fewer jobs now than there were in 2009.

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When Canadians aren’t talking about hockey (or church), they have weather on their minds. These are the reigning best and worst record titles for each province.

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As John Maynard Keynes wrote, “In the long run, we are all dead.” And the No. 1 cause of death in Canada is cancer.  Number 2 is heart disease. But after those two causes, each province and territory is slightly different, when it comes to ranking their remaining leading causes of death. We’ve highlighted the one that most disproportionately affects each province, compared to Canada as a whole.

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Clearly, baby-name maps have become something of a thing. Here’s ours.

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Back to hockey. QuantHockey.com boasts a thorough database of NHL players, where they’re born and their performance. We sifted through the numbers to show which provinces generated the most players last season, and took it a step further to show the average points of players in each province.

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Delving into the detailed crime statistics for each of the provinces reveals some odd disparities. Below, we picked one type of crime for each province that was at least double the national average. As always, there are caveats: Some high numbers could be an anomaly for 2012, the most recent year for which comparable data is available, perhaps because of a police crackdown; other categories are small, so a coincidental event—or two or three—can skew the numbers. Regardless, they offer a peek at how certain crimes are disproportionately worse, depending on the province.

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Canadians are fast catching up to our American neighbours, when it comes to our ever-expanding waistlines, but some areas are bulging faster than others.

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We know Jimmy Kimmel has a thing for Rob Ford. But is everyone so obsessed with Toronto’s buffoonish, crack-smoking, scandal-plagued mayor? It all depends on where they live. Once again drawing on geotagged tweet data compiled by Full Duplex, here are those cities—outside of Toronto—where people can’t seem to get enough of Ford (we’re looking at you, Ottawa and Vancouver) and the ones where people apparently have something better to dwell on.

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Here’s a different way to look at Canada’s population. The circles represent the relative population density of each province. And yes, we know people do live in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, but there are so few of them, and their geographies so vast, that you’d have to go a couple of decimal places before they’d register.

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There’s a lot of focus at the moment on incomes and inequality. We wanted to see where Canada’s wealthiest households live, so we asked Environics Analytics to drawn on its CensusPlus database for the answer. This map shows those census regions where at least 30 per cent of households took home $150,000 in 2011.

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The flip-side of the wealthiest households map, of course, are those on the other end of the spectrum. This map shows those places where at least half of all households earned less than $40,000 in 2011. You’ll notice there’s considerably more coloured areas on this map than the one above.

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Ever felt like there are more women than men where you live, or vice versa? You may be right. Canada’s distribution of males to females is anything but even.

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In 2011 there were close to 6,000 centenarians living in Canada. Here they all are.

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While we’re on the topic of age, here are those parts of the country that skew oldest (red) and youngest (green.) Another name for this map could have been Canada’s young north.

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#cdnpoli is a hub for political chatter on Twitter for elected officials and enthusiasts alike. But which Canadian cities are the most vocal when it comes to poli-tweeting?

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Which Canadian political leader boasts the highest number of Twitter followers, by province? With the help of FullDuplex.ca, we crunch the numbers.

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What kind of footprint would Canada’s cities occupy if the entire country moved in? Factoring in the current density of Canada’s major cities, we consider how large they’d be if our entire population relocated there.

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More Canada Day coverage:

18 reasons why it’s great to be Canadian

The Canada Day Quiz, Pt. 1: You vs Canada’s Smartest Person!

Mapping Canada: View our full map series

The post 22 maps of Canada as you’ve never seen it before appeared first on Macleans.ca.

What do an inflated surgical bill, a fuming real-estate developer, and a dreaded performance appraisal have in common? All can be mitigated with one simple gesture: a request for advice.

We seek advice on a daily basis, on everything from who grills the best burger in town to how to handle a sticky situation with a coworker. However, many people don’t fully appreciate how powerful requesting guidance can be. Soliciting advice will arm you with information you didn’t have before, but there are other benefits you may not have considered:

1. Advisors will like you more:  Arthur Helps sagely observed, “We all admire the wisdom of people who come to us for advice.” Being asked for advice is inherently flattering because it’s an implicit endorsement of our opinions, values, and expertise. Furthermore, it works equally well up and down the hierarchy — subordinates are delighted and empowered by requests for their insights, and superiors appreciate the deference to their authority and experience. James Pennebaker’s research shows that if you want your peers to like you, ask them questions and let them experience the “joy of talking.” This is especially important because research shows that increasing your likability will do more for your career than slightly increasing competence.

One of us (Katie) recently put this to the test while dealing with a real estate transaction. After several phone calls to indifferent or discouraging county officials, Katie visited the Planning and Zoning office in person. Rather than pester the official with what would and wouldn’t be permissible, Katie asked for her advice on how she would handle the constraints. The official provided a bounty of insider information and guidance that Katie never would’ve obtained on her own. When Katie thanked the official for her invaluable insights, the official confessed that she was burnt out by constantly impeding people’s aspirations and dreams with zoning roadblocks.  Katie’s humble request for the official’s expertise was revitalizing, and she in turn helped Katie deftly navigate what otherwise would’ve been a very difficult situation.

2. Advisors are able to see things from your perspective. Think about the last time someone came to you for advice. Most likely, you engaged in an instinctive mental exercise: you tried to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and imagine the world through their eyes. Our research has identified the extensive benefits of perspective-taking — it facilitates understanding and increases the odds of finding creative agreements in negotiations.

In another study, we simulated a performance appraisal and found that underperforming employees who asked for advice were able turn their bosses into better perspective-takers.  This shifted the tone of a hostile performance appraisal towards cooperation and nearly doubled their chances of being recommended for promotion (31% vs 58%)!

3. Advisors become a champion for your cause: A third benefit of soliciting adversaries for advice is that they become your champions. When someone offers you advice, it represents an investment of his time and energy. Your request empowers your advisor to make good on their recommendations and become an advocate for your cause.

One of our favorite illustrations of this comes from one of our MBA students, Clara, who received a shocking $18,000 bill for a surgery that was performed at an out-of-network surgical center (even though the surgeon himself was classified as in-network). Detailing her strategy for negotiating the bill, Clara wrote, “I called Fran (the nurse). Deep down, I really believed this was her fault. But instead of approaching it that way, I asked for her counsel and guidance with the mess. Knowing her personality (interested in having control over her domain and running the show), I enlisted her to help me with the personnel at the Surgery Center. This made her feel important and she took the ball from there.” Thanks to the championing efforts of the nurse, Clara was able to negotiate not just a reduction of her bill, but a complete waiver!

This approach captured all three benefits of seeking advice:  First, the nurse was flattered to have her authority acknowledged, quickly transforming the conversation from an argument to be won to a problem to be solved. Second, she was able to see Clara’s perspective and became sympathetic to her predicament. Finally, she felt empowered and committed to facilitating a resolution.

This same approach works in job negotiations. When one of us — Adam — negotiated his first professorship, he asked for advice from one of the professors he’d met during the interview. The professor immediately shared vital information (the university’s reservation price on salary!) and worked back channels with the dean to give Adam more research resources.  The professor become such an advocate that he even adjusted his own teaching schedule to accommodate Adam’s desired teaching schedule.

Whether it’s a high-stakes monetary negotiation or winning support for a proposal, the simple gesture of soliciting advice can make you more likeable, encourage your counterpart to see your perspective, and rally commitment. The beauty of this approach is that it costs so little.  So as you plan your next negotiation, consider how a targeted request for advice could turn an adversary into an advocate.

Ben Golub isn’t surprised that his startup Docker’s take on container technology has caused this much of a buzz throughout the tech industry; it just happened a whole lot sooner than he thought.

“Before the printing press nobody wrote because it was a pain to produce content,” said Golub, CEO of the four-year-old company. “I think Docker in a smaller way is enabling developers to be able to put all their energy into creating amazing applications, rather than worrying about the minutiae of how they are going to run and how they are going to scale and it is a beautiful thing.”

Docker’s rise from a middling Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) company once known as DotCloud to its current status as a much-heralded container management system that is used by Google, Spotify, Red Hat and others is one that highlights how having the right kind of technology and a large open source community can jump start a company into the spotlight even in a crowded enterprise space. Containers, which are similar to virtual machines, allow developers to isolate their applications from other applications that operate on the same host server. What has people so excited is that containers don’t have their own operating systems; they instead share the same OS as the host server, thus saving a lot of overhead.

In the beginning, there was DotCloud

After cutting his teeth in the enterprise world at companies like Avid Technology, Verisign and Plaxo, Golub got a taste of the open source world when he joined the online storage company Gluster in 2010; Red Hat eventually acquired the company in 2011. Since then, he’s been attracted to open source companies because of the lack of institutional overhead that oftentimes burdens the core technology aspect of a company, such as having to deal with a huge sales and marketing staff.

For Golub, embracing open source principles creates an alternative way to penetrate the enterprise market because of the community that is usually attached to such projects.

“You can be a proprietary company as a startup and hope to have customers or you can be an open source company that has a million users of whom ten percent pay you,” said Golub. “I know which one I like.”

In 2010, the roots of Docker were planted when current CTO Solomon Hykes and Sebastien Pahl (now a systems engineer at CloudFare) founded DotCloud, then located in Paris. Back then, Hykes was running with the idea of building a PaaS company in which developers could build and deploy applications, said Golub, because there was an obvious business model: DotCloud was different than other PaaS companies in that it was a multilingual PaaS, which means that users were allowed to select different development components and languages that could run on the company’s platform.

The predecessor to Docker’s container technology allowed DotCloud to deal with all the complexity running on its infrastructure. Because users did not want to be tied down to a single platform and be forced to use certain frameworks and tools, DotCloud had to deal with a “matrix from Hell” that no single person could manage, Golub said. The system that Hykes created to manage the mess, which uses containers, turned out to be the inspiration for Docker.

Although DotCloud was already gaining traction in the development community in 2011 — the year the company won Gigaom’s Structure Launchpad contest in both the People’s Choice and Judge’s Choice categories — Hykes saw the value of the framework he created to run DotCloud, and he wanted to ditch the PaaS service the company was offering altogether and concentrate on further developing his container management system.

Hykes then decided he wanted someone with open source managerial experience who could lead the company and its new ambitions, and so he contacted Golub through Benchmark Capital, which had invested in DotCloud.

When Solomon invited Golub to come look at what DotCloud was doing before he was ready to release Docker, “it was clear to me that this was going to be something revolutionary,” Golub said. Rather than continue on as a PaaS, which Golub said at best could only hit a single, the two decided that focusing on container management would allow them to hit a home run.

Why developers dig Docker

Modern software development tends to revolve around assembling together loosely coupled components that may be scattered around various cloud servers. This can cause headaches for developers, as managing the application building process can be quite a burden.

Enter containers and the Docker ecosystem. Containers have existed in various forms since the mid-1990s, said Golub, and they can be found in all sorts of different technology today. For example, when you download an app to your Android phone to play Angry Birds, you aren’t downloading a virtual machine that houses the application, Golub explained; you are downloading a container that keeps the application isolated so it doesn’t mess up other apps on your phone, like the address book.

However, the containers of yesteryear were not able to move across different environments, and only specialized teams tended to use them.

While Google has been public in how it uses containers, Golub pointed out that the company hadn’t historically used containers as a way in which developers could build apps — it was primarily used by IT operations. Additionally, the Google container couldn’t be pushed out to a Linux server or an Amazon server. What Docker did, Golub said, was make it so a container didn’t have to be locked down to a particular place.

As Golub explained, “There weren’t tools to hook them together. There weren’t tools to move them and there wasn’t a high ecosystem around that gave you the ship, the truck and the train.”

The Docker Hub is essentially a container content management system that allows people to pick base components from Docker’s library and craft unique components from that library. Using the Docker Hub, a developer can wrap up their applications — built from their own source code — into individual containers that can be loaded up to run on Linux machines and the environments of cloud service providers.

“Docker relies on a lot of the capabilities of the Linux kernel to provide lightweight isolation and resource sharing,” said Golub. “But Docker itself is the platform; it happens to sit well and run on lots of other platforms and integrate well with a huge number of different tools.”

If an organization has 100 applications that are only slightly different from each other, it doesn’t have to spin up 100 virtual machines to house each application, thus saving a ton of overhead that comes with spinning up so many operating systems.

Depending on the situation, using containers can result in workloads that are 20 to 80 percent lighter than an equivalent workload using only virtual machines, according to Golub.

From word-of-mouth interest to capturing the attention of the tech giants

As the Docker platform spread via word of mouth in the development community, the company’s popularity rose.

Today, the company currently has 42 employees and 460 community members that it scours for potential new hires. If you visit GitHub, you would see over 6,500 Docker-related projects. The developer community also has managed to help contribute to the now 15,000 Dockerized applications in the company’s hub registry, said Golub.

While those Docker users don’t generate a lot of money, Docker benefits from the insights into what companies like Baidu face when running Docker, because those companies are testing it out at a massive scale.

With developers in many different organizations taking to the Docker platform and using it within their own infrastructure, it was only a matter of time before their higher-ups started taking notice. That led to Docker’s first conference in early June, where it unveiled Docker 1.0 among a group of companies that detailed in public just how they use the platform.

And although Hykes decided he wanted to originally ditch the PaaS model, it’s the PaaS category where Docker’s presence is actively being felt, as Adrian Cockcroft, technical fellow at Battery Ventures and former Netflix honcho, explained last week at Structure.

“What it does is it takes the lead that Cloud Foundry has built up and sort of disaggregrates and does an end-run around them,” said Cockcroft. “And now everybody can do PaaS by sort of adopting different pieces of Docker.”

As the company continues to grow, can it hold onto its open source ethos as it faces competitors and bigger organizations? To ensure that Docker’s management doesn’t devolve into the political madhouse that characterizes the open source cloud framework known as OpenStack, Docker has been working on a way to govern its actions without having the company with the most money affect its policies.

Docker’s governance advisory board includes three members from Docker and twelve members from the broader community in which four seats are reserved for the top individual contributors, four seats reserved for the top contributing companies — Red Hat, Google, Rackspace and IBM — and four seats for users who don’t contribute code but need to demonstrate that they have implemented Docker at scale; in this case companies like Spotify and Groupon are nominees. The Docker community then gets to vote to determine who gets accepted to the advisory board.

“I would say Solomon (Hykes) is a sort of benevolent dictator but we know that 95 percent of the people working on Docker don’t work for Docker Inc. and a large number of the top maintainers who decide which contributions make it in don’t work for Docker,” said Golub.

Golub also said he believes Docker is set up to be a financially viable company, and right now the company makes money like Red Hat: by offering commercial support. He expects in the long run that Docker will make the bulk of its money providing tools that make it very easy to manage and monitor and set policy around containers.

Of course, this is easier said than done as Docker will be competing against companies that build upon its platform, but Golub welcomes the challenge and said that the competition will cause Docker to have to make better services.

“I would much rather be an ubiquitous platform and face competition on how to manage that platform than to be a stand-alone tool, both proprietary and unknown,” said Golub.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock user Hellen Sergeyeva.

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Twitter is social media’s conversation hub. Chatterboxes and lurkers can harness the platform to share—and absorb—a wealth of information in record-breaking time. In 140 characters (or less) marketers are empowered to share compelling, stories.

Writing attention-grabbing Tweets is an art. What’s even more important, however, is the ability to drive web traffic and conversions.

For small businesses, Twitter presents a significant business opportunity to engage with customers—for brands and audiences to communicate directly and authentically. A 2014 report from Twitter and brand research firm DB5 found that:

• 57% of respondents say that they’ve discovered a small business on Twitter
• Respondents, on average, follow around 21 small businesses
• 60% of surveyed users say that they have made a purchase from a small business after discovering the company on Twitter

In this post, we’ll cover 5 critical techniques for making the most out of these valuable conversion opportunities. Let’s get to it.

Tip #1: Know What Goals You’re Driving

The ROI of social media is far from straightforward. The fact is that audiences aren’t necessarily in the mood to shop when they’re checking Twitter from their phones—or during brain breaks on boring conference calls.

To accurately capture the value of social media, marketers need to look beyond direct sales opportunities. Conversations are a critical step to driving sales, which is why your brand should focus on quantifying natural, social behaviors—76% of respondents in the Twitter/DB5 survey say that they’ve tweeted directly at a small business.

HubSpot’s Pamela Vaughan created a comprehensive guide that details what to measure on Twitter:

• Month-over-Month Follower Growth – This metric will help you quantify your brand’s word-of-mouth presence and influence.
• Twitter visitor to lead rate – This metric will help you ensure that you’re steering the conversation on a path towards sales.
• Web traffic to blog content - Content marketing can help audiences discover your brand, and Twitter is an invaluable channel for getting them there. This metric will help you optimize that traffic flow.

Optimization starts with laser-focus on a precise set of goals. Small businesses don’t have the flexibility to throw darts in the dark. Choose to optimize metrics that are most aligned with long-term sales goals.

Tip #2: Experiment with Images

Twitter states that they see 2x engagement on posts with images. Test whether a specific type of image creates more engagement over another.

Instead of specific images, test out the impact of different image types, like images with people versus no people. Models versus just product. Test the impact different images have on different social networks. What drives shares and likes on Facebook may not perform as well on Twitter.

Running a small business, you probably have a close connection with your customer base. If you’re brainstorming ideas for images, then interview a few of your key shoppers. What value proposition resonates with them? What compels them to buy? The answers to these questions can help your marketing team craft high-impact experiments.

You can come up with a way to quantify success by categorizing images based on qualitative traits. Track how each of these categories affect the performance goals from Tip #1.

Tip #3: Test Timing of Posts

There is no consensus in the world of social media about the time of day or day of the week a post will reach maximum exposure. Your audience is unique, so there’s no way to standardize times of days for tweets to be shared.

When in doubt, test relentlessly.

Dan Zarella, social media scientist at HubSpot, is a champion of this commitment to testing. He did a study that found afternoon Tweets had higher click-through-rates. In another study, he found that the best time to Tweet for retweets is at 5pm.

Take a look at Zarella’s studies, and replicate this methodology for your specific brand and marketing goals. Always have a hypothesis for your experiments. Examples include:

• We expect web traffic from Twitter to peak at 8AM because followers are likely commuting to work.
• Conversions from Twitter will likely peak at 6:30PM because audiences will be finished with work and will have the attention to devote to learning more about a brand.

Many SMB-friendly social media measurement tools like Sprout Social and Buffer will track timing for you. If you don’t use one, then you can use unique URLs based on the time of day. You can track these unique URLs with your analytics software.

Tip #4: Test CTA Language

Language and length are two factors that go into crafting a call to action in a social post. Testing how you position an action is a way to gauge what interests your audience. Run a controlled campaign for a few weeks on each of your main channels and track how the usage of direct CTAs vs. absence of CTAs impacts engagement.

You may find, for instance, that audiences are equally interested in “re-tweeting” or “learning.” Take a look at how these varying CTAs impact the goals that you identified in Tip #1.

KISSmetrics tells people directly to “learn more”. The arrows to the link add emphasis on the link.

CTAs are invaluable tools for small businesses. Testing will help you figure out what your ‘ask’ should be.

Tip #5: Experiment with Targeting for Promoted Tweets

The competition for audience attention is fierce, with Tweets yielding a notoriously short shelf life. Promoted tweets can help increase the lifespan and reach of a Tweet that may otherwise remain unnoticed. As a small business owner, however, you don’t have infinite ‘branding’ resources to test. You need to make every invested dollar account—otherwise, your PPC budget may slip through your fingertips.

Even if you’re tweeting the world’s most awesome message, you need so make sure that you’re reaching the right audience. Which groups are likely to be the most receptive and engaged?

When in doubt, test some potential answers to this question.

Here’s an example of a promoted Tweet from Lincoln Motor Company that is targeted to people searching for “Audi”.

Promote the same update to different audiences and measure which ad has the best engagement. Make sure your audience experimentation is controlled. Change one filter at a time to see if/how that difference in audience impacts success of your campaign.

You can even test different ad variations (i.e. image and text) to see which ones generate the highest response levels. On social platforms, click-through rate can be heavily influenced by images. Test different/contrasting colors, people vs. products, male vs. female images.

Test to your heart’s content, and keep track of how audiences respond.

Your Thoughts

We’ve shared an initial list of five optimization ideas for driving Twitter conversions.

Now it’s your turn to weigh in. How have you positioned Twitter as a conversation optimization tool? What awesome experiments have you run, and what have you learned? Share your thoughts and feedback by leaving a comment below.

Social networks do not drive a lot of e-commerce sales directly (see chart, right), but they do influence shoppers by helping them discover new products to buy. Now some retailers are leveraging that influence to drive sales in stores. 

Nordstrom recently announced that it's installing video monitors in more than 100 of its stores to display products being shared on social shopping app Wanelo. "It's a purely customer-driven strategy," said Bryan Galipeau, Nordstrom's social media director, in a press release. "We take a snapshot of that trending category once every week, and we will then match that up against our inventory and what's available in those stores so we're providing a good customer experience." 

Brands such as Sephora and Lululemon are now using Wanelo and other social networks to keep tabs on women's fashion trends. A recent report from BI Intelligence noted the following stats about how social drives sales:

• Facebook influences 30% of American women when deciding what professional clothing to buy. Pinterest influences 22%, according to a joint study by Netbase and Edison Research. 
• When it comes to clothing for a special occasion, Pinterest influences 28% of American women and Instagram influences 17%. 

In the BI Intelligence report, we analyzed the data and spoke to leaders in the social commerce space to understand how their companies are adding value at different stages of the retail and e-commerce "purchase funnel," the long process that ultimately leads to a retail sale.

Some of the latest trends include building social networks around e-commerce platforms, partnering with brands, and otherwise transforming social commerce's strengths for Pinterest-style digital window-shopping. The report looks at the most important way retailers are leveraging social engagement to drive purchases. 

Access The Full Report, Graphics, And Data By Signing Up Today >>

Here's how social commerce companies are driving sales: 

• It's not about click-to-buy: Social commerce is not simply transactional — it's not just about offering a click-to-buy link next to an offer on Facebook. Social commerce will never be what some have wanted it to be, an "Amazon killer." 
• What will help social commerce grow as a sales driver? The key is to help connect the funnel end-to-end, or to connect different mediums — say, social media and TV — to help coax a consumer down the funnel. 
• There are a few ways to encourage purchases: Retargeted advertising may be one missing link. It enables social commerce to connect the sales funnel from end-to-end by serving ads that remind users of products they have browsed across the Web but have not yet purchased. Facebook has made huge strides with its retargeted efforts.
• Also: Clever merchandising and user interfaces allow for sticky merchant-to-consumer relationships that can help nudge a consumer toward purchase over time. 
• Finally, referrals shouldn't be discounted: Another solution is for social commerce to develop as a sales referral engine, and take a cut of the sales. If social commerce sites have a large enough audience, even a low referral and conversion rate will result in a good revenue stream.

In full, the report: 

• Explains how time-sensitive offers on social media can motivate users to snap out of casual browsing or social media-grazing and into a buying mood
• Includes interviews with three social commerce industry leaders
• Discusses why Twitter has a unique opportunity at the bottom of the funnel
• Looks at Pinterest's prospects as a top-of-funnel platform
• Reveals average order values and order volume for a leading social commerce platform
• Breaks down the share of social media-generated e-commerce sales for each social network
• Looks at the demographics of social commerce consumers
• Compares Twitter, Facebook and more traditional digital methods of retail customer acquisition such as search engines

To access the report and BI Intelligence's ongoing social media and e-commerce coverage — including charts, data, and analysis — sign up.

 

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Savvy hiring managers have honed their ability to ask the least amount of questions yielding the greatest depth of information. One way they do this is by asking seemingly simple questions that get you to reveal information you may have been trying to conceal. In other words: questions designed to trick you.

"To uncover areas that may reflect inconsistencies, hiring managers sometimes ask these tricky questions," says Tina Nicolai, executive career coach and founder of Resume Writers' Ink.

Lynn Taylor, a national workplace expert and the author of "Tame Your Terrible Office Tyrant: How to Manage Childish Boss Behavior and Thrive in Your Job," says they use these queries to break through the "traditional interview noise and clutter," and to get to the "raw you." 

"While some of these questions may seem as if they're designed to put you on the defensive, the intent is usually to evaluate candidate responses on multiple levels — not just at face value," Taylor explains. "Hiring managers can discern a great deal about job seekers with thought provoking, challenging questions. If they cross the line by being too tricky, unfair, or irrelevant, they can easily lose excellent talent."

How would you describe yourself in one word?

Why do they ask this? The question is likely being asked to elicit several data points: your personality type, how confident you are in your self perception, and whether your work style is a good fit for the job, Taylor explains.

What makes it tricky? This question can be a challenge, particularly early on in the interview, because you don't really know what personality type the manager is seeking. "There is a fine line between sounding self-congratulatory versus confident, and humble versus timid," Taylor says. "And people are multifaceted, so putting a short label on oneself can seem nearly impossible."

What response are they looking for? Proceed cautiously, warns Taylor. "If you know you're reliable and dedicated, but love the fact that your friends praise your clever humor, stick with the conservative route." If you're applying for an accounting job, the one word descriptor should not be "creative," and if it's an art director position, you don't want it to be, "punctual," for example. "Most employers today are seeking team players that are levelheaded under pressure, upbeat, honest, reliable, and dedicated. However, it would be a mistake to rattle off adjectives that you think will be well received. This is your opportunity to describe how your best attributes are a great match for the job as you see it."

How does this position compare to others you are applying for?

Why do they ask this? They're basically asking: "Are you applying for other jobs?" "The hiring manager is first trying to figure out how active you are in your job search," Nicolai says. Then, once you open up, they want to see how to speak about other companies or positions you're interested in — and how honest you are. 

What makes it tricky? If you say, "This is the only job I'm applying for," that'll send up a red flag. Very few job applicants only apply to the one single job — so they may assume you're being dishonest. However, if you openly speak about other positions you're pursuing, and you speak favorably about them, the hiring manager may worry that you'll end up taking another job elsewhere, and they won't want to waste their time. "Speaking negatively about other jobs or employers isn't good either," she says. 

What response are they looking for? It is appropriate to say, "There are several organizations with whom I am interviewing, however, I've not yet decided the best fit for my next career move." "This is positive and protects the competitors," says Nicolai. "No reason to pit companies or to brag." 

Can you name three of your strengths and weaknesses?

Why do they ask this? The interviewer is looking for red flags and deal breakers, such as inability to work well with coworkers and/or an inability to meet deadlines. "Each job has its unique requirements, so your answers should showcase applicable strengths, and your weaknesses should have a silver lining," Taylor says. "At the very least, you should indicate that negative attributes have diminished because of positive actions you've taken."

What makes it tricky? You can sabotage yourself addressing either. Exposing your weaknesses can hurt you if not ultimately turned into positives, she says. "Your strengths may not align with the skill set or work style required for the job. It's best to prepare for this question in advance, or risk landing in a minefield."

What response are they looking for? Hiring managers want to know that your strengths will be a direct asset to the new position and none of your weaknesses would hurt your ability to perform. "They are also looking for your ability to self assess with maturity and confidence," says Taylor.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

We spend about a quarter of our time at work sifting through the hundreds of emails we send and receive each day. 

And because every minute counts in the office, nobody wants to waste their time reading unnecessary emails. 

That's precisely why you should think twice before you bombard your coworkers with email blasts.

Yet, if it's absolutely necessary that you get the attention of all your busy colleagues, a company-wide email may be your best (or only) option — but only if you do it right.

“You want to be one of those people who shares information that’s appropriate, timely, and shared in a way that’s understandable,” says job coach Lea McLeod. Sending memos too often or about trivial subjects will make coworkers less inclined to pay attention to what you’re saying, if they open it at all, she says.

Follow these five steps to keep your emails effective and constructive, and to ensure they don’t get deleted before they're ever read: 

1. Write a specific subject line.

The subject line will determine if workers open and read your email or ignore it, says Caroline Ceniza-Levine, a career coach with SixFigureStart. A clear, compelling subject line will entice people to open it, while a boring or generic one will get lost within a flood of other messages. Ceniza-Levine advises to also include any deadlines in the subject as well, so coworkers know how urgent the information is.

Another tip: limit the subject line to 10 words or less.

2. Include a clear objective and any deadlines at the beginning. 

Concisely state the purpose of the message and any action items needed from the get-go. Make it easy for your reader to understand exactly what this message is asking of them, whether it requires merely reading to the end or responding with additional information. "A lot of people will write like the story is unfolding, and it actually should be the inverse, because by the time I get to what I need, they've exhausted their attention span," Ceniza-Levine says. 

3. Use bullets.

Once you've stated your purpose, write the bulk of the information as easy-to-digest bullet points. Break up any complex background information into smaller chunks to keep things as simple and organized as possible. "Keep in mind that people get hundreds of emails a day," McLeod says. Don't take up more of their time than you need to.

4. Highlight important points.

"The actual action steps, the deadline, and if there are specific items within the background information that people need to perform the action — you need to bold and underline those," Ceniza-Levine says. Making important information easy to spot allows people to skim the email, yet still understand the main points if they're short on time.

5. Double-check the recipient list. 

Only send office-wide emails when absolutely necessary. Know exactly who needs to receive the information and only send it to those people. If you constantly bombard the entire staff with information that doesn't apply to them, chances are they'll become less inclined to pay attention when you eventually do need a response. "If it's an FYI message and there's no action, you can include other people, but really think about what's the value added to them," says McLeod. If there isn't much, take them off the list. 

SEE ALSO: 9 Things Not To Do On Email

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Right now Argentina is in danger of a calamity, the likes of which the world hasn't seen since 2001, and it's all because of one hedge fund manager's tried and true strategy to make money off of distressed debt.

That's right, bringing a country to its knees is a "strategy."

According to a U.S. court's ruling, if Argentina does not pay a group of hedge fund managers over $1.3 billion worth of bonds by July 30, the Republic could go into default. If it goes into default — investors lose faith its capacity to pay, interest rates on its bonds surge, and the country is forced to print money to pay creditors — its economy could tailspin.

Then again, if Argentina does pay this group of hedge fund managers over $1.3 billion worth of bonds by July 30, it opens itself up to lawsuits from other investors who also own those bonds — lawsuits that could cost the country up to $15 billion. That's over half the money it has in its central bank.

So what's a country to do? And how did it get to this desperate point?

The bonds in contention in this case are Argentina's sovereign bonds issued in 2001, just as the country was collapsing.

That collapse, to hedge fund manager Paul Singer, looked like an opportunity to use a common strategy: distressed debt investing.

Here's how it works.

• You (the investor) buy garbage — securities that have defaulted and are essentially worthless.
• Why? Because you're making a bet that the entity issuing the securities will eventually get their house in order. As that happens, the value of the securities will increase and you (the investor) will get paid.
• In the meantime, debt issuers can also restructure debt as they struggle back into the black. That means negotiating with creditors to pay less. Creditors, thinking they would rather get some money than none, are usually willing to do that.

But not Paul Singer. No sir. And that's where this got complicated.

Singer is the man leading the group of hedge funds (known collectively as NML) in their effort to collect 100 cents on the dollar for Argentina's debt where other investors have taken a 70% haircut on their payout. To the Republic, that makes NML "vultures." Creatures that wait for other animals to hunt and eat the carrion left behind. It's not a nice thing to call someone.

But Singer couldn't care less; he has done this before. In fact, he's the king of this strategy.

In 1995 Singer bought Peruvian bank debt for $20 million and then sued until he got a $58 million payout. In 2002 and 2003 Singer made over $100 million in interest alone from buying $30 million worth of debt owned by Congo-Brazzaville.

Compared to Argentina, both those investments were a cake walk for Singer.

No one kicks or screams louder or harder than President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. She is a master of political theater — "they'll come to understand the strength of our national posture," she once said in a speech, "we will not pay by any means necessary."

That, combined with the horrific memory of Argentina's past defaults, makes this very sensitive to Argentines.

So for the past decade and change Singer has had to sue the country into oblivion, citing a pari passu clause in Argentina's bond agreement and arguing that it had a right to go after Argnetina's money wherever it may be according to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.

Here's what that means:

• The pari passu clause essentially means that the Republic cannot pay some bondholders and not others, which is what it had been doing.
• The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act is the law governing how foreign countries can be sued in America. To get his money, Singer has chased Argentina's assets all over the world, arguing that even if he couldn't take them based on a U.S. court jurisdiction, he could try to sue the Republic in whatever country he found their money.
• Argentina disagreed with all of that and appealed the matter up to the Supreme Court and lost.
• While all that was happening, Singer showed the entire world what he could do in limbo. He basically pirated one of the country's ships sitting in a Ghanaian port. And based on a 2013 investor letter, it sounds like Singer had fun with it:

... Argentina continues to thumb its nose at the international community by picking and choosing at its own discretion which laws it will observe and which ones it will ignore. As reported in our last quarterly investor letter, in early October we obtained from a Ghanaian court an order detaining an Argentine naval training vessel in order to secure judgments against Argentina rendered in the U.S. courts. Argentina appealed to the Tribunal for the Law of the Sea Convention (yes, there is actually such a body) in Hamburg, which in mid-December ordered Ghana to release the ship. Before the Ghanaian courts could even consider whether the Tribunal’s ruling should be given effect in that country – a question as to which there was considerable doubt, given that Ghana has enacted no substantive law providing that orders of relief from this body supervene the decisions of the Ghanaian courts – Argentina grabbed its ship and skipped town.

• So where are we now? Argentina lost its appeals on both parts of the case and has said that it will negotiate with NML. Based on the a lower court's ruling, though, it has until July 3o to pay all its bondholders. Until then, the Republic has tried to a get a stay on payment reinstated to buy some time. That didn't work.

• Thursday night Argentina's Finance Minister Axcel Kicillof tried to get away with paying some bondholders and not NML. A New York Judge then sent that money right back where it came from.

"Mr. Kicillof suggested Argentina would go to the international court of The Hague to demand the sovereign immunity the US Justice rejected to grant," Deutsche Bank wrote in a note Friday morning. "Within minutes, NY Second District Judge Griesa confirmed the stay will not be reinstated and holdout lawyers asked the Judge to hold Argentina in contempt for ordering restructured bond payment excluding holdout debt. Simultaneously talks have continued between the Republic and the holdout representatives guided by the special mediator named by the court. In our view, the Argentine authorities are aware of the terrible implications a default would create, and they also know that a debt swap to local debt is not a solution to the existing legal/technical challenge. However, the authorities seem to be willing to use all available political and legal means to gain time and negotiation space. Therefore, although the Argentine government continues to show willingness to pay all creditors, negotiations to settle a proper formula might take time and likely prevent full debt service next week."

And that is how an investor can take a country to the brink of disaster.

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Email marketing can be extremely effective when done correctly, but you need to make sure that your messages stand out from the crowd. Every single day billions of emails are sent out and consumers are flooded with special offers, newsletters, and spam. Most emails are deleted without even being opened, so what can you do to make sure that your efforts are not wasted? There are several mistakes responsible for poor email marketing performance, but before you even worry about those you need to create catchy titles that will result in a high open rate. The other stuff doesn’t matter if your emails aren’t even being opened.

Imagine the average email inbox. It is packed full of advertisements, spam, genuine communication, and lead follow up emails. You need to create email subject lines that stand out and command the attention of the recipient. Think about your own email inbox for a moment. How many emails do you receive daily that you simply delete without even opening?

Here are some suggestions to help you create subject lines that will result in a higher email open rate.

Include Your Brand in the Email Subject Line

You will achieve a much higher open rate if your use your brand name in the subject line. A consumer is much more likely to open an email if they know who it is from. If your subscriber has signed up for your marketing list they are expecting your emails. Our marketing newsletter is a double opt-in, so our subscribers are aware that it will be in their inbox every week. We include our company name in the subject line to bring immediate attention and get that high open rate week after week.

Include a CTA Emphasizing Value

An effective subject line will also let the individual know what they get out of opening your email. What do they get out of opening your email? Is your email a special offer? Does it include a discount coupon? Is it a newsletter? Let the recipient know by including a call-to-action in the email subject that explains the value and why they should open your email. You will also need email marketing calls-to-action that drive website traffic within your email copy as well.

Use Your Space Wisely

You are limited to a very small space for your email subject, so it is important that you don’t clutter your subject line with useless words and phrases. Every single character in your email subject line needs to provide value, and work to help deliver the message and generate an open. Read your title back and put yourself in the shoes of the recipient again. Does your title get right to the point and encourage an open? If not you need to adjust your wording and eliminate the fluff.

Short & Sweet Titles

As mentioned above, space is short, but that doesn’t mean you need to use it all. The average person is going to open their email and scan their inbox to see if there is anything important that they need to address. During their scan you want them to notice your email. A short title is easy to read immediately and it will stand out in a sea of email spam and offers with longer titles. Also, with so many people using tablet and mobile devices to access their email you want to make sure that your title is fully displayed on all devices to generate a high open rate.

Don’t Demand an Action

How many times have you seen an email that has a subject containing phrases such as, “Open now,” “Your response required” or similar demanding titles? Any email subject that comes off as pushy or forceful is going to end up in the trash without being opened. You want to encourage an open, not demand it.

Value Your Recipients Time

Your email isn’t the only one in an inbox. The average person will scan an email first, rather than reading it fully. Your recipient should know what your email is about just by reading the title. Use it as a way to summarize the email. If the title does a good job at explaining what the email is about there is a better chance that they will read the email body fully and not just skim it over.

Use these tips to make sure that your email stands out and receives opens, rather than a single click to the trash. If consumers took the time to go through and read every email they received it would take up their entire day. Also, put yourself in the shoes of the consumer and read every email subject that you compose. Would you open it if it landed in your inbox? Be your own critic and watch your open rates rise!

“The important decisions, the decisions that really matter, are strategic. They involve either finding out what the situation is, or changing it, either finding out what the resources are or what they should be. Among these are all decisions on business objectives and on the means to reach them.” (Peter Drucker, “The Practice of Management”)

Strategy. A term used in the theory of games to describe the set of choices a player will make in each possible set of circumstances. (A Dictionary of Economics)

How an organization interacts with the stakeholders in its business environment through its current and planned portfolio of products in large part defines its business strategy. (Robert J. Thomas, “New Product Development”)

From these varied definitions we see strategy as something that involves identifying where resources are and where they’re needed, and the art of deploying those resources favourably; deciding on business objectives; and above all it is certainly about choices.

My clients have all been able to grow their businesses and in the early years, a lot of this growth is tactical and not strategic. That is, most business owners work very hard in their businesses to drive growth, and they’ve been a key part of that growth.

At some point though, every entrepreneur needs to stop and consider if that is how they wish to continue working and growing their business.

When do business owners mostly start thinking about strategy?
• When they have to make more decisions about resources
• When they have to decide whether to pursue new opportunities
• When they need to make decisions about how big the company could be
• When growth in the business has reached a plateau
• When they’re in trouble
• When they’re overloaded
• When they’re confused
• When they want to fast-track their progress
• When something significant changes their life
• Sometimes, it’s when they have an ‘Aha!’ moment

Challenging circumstances lead most business owners to think about strategy, and then strategy itself can be challenging!

When you’re ready to start developing you business strategy, you need to look at the process from several different aspects:

• Know what stage you’re at and the priorities you need to be focused on at that stage

• If you have a well-established business, it will help your planning focus if you know what is important in building a high-value business

• Know how to select a best-fit marketing strategy, that’s right for now and right for your business (not someone else’s)

• You should be very clear, particularly if you have a relatively new business, on which business model will optimise growth, suit your lifestyle & give you leverage

• Know what skills & structure you need for ongoing growth

Strategic planning starts with questions, as well as gathering information about your own business and clients, your competitors, and the market in which you operate.

To expand your thinking and your options, try asking ‘what if’ questions, for example, ‘what if we wanted to grow five times our current turnover in the next two years…what would need to happen in order to make that possible?’

What-if questions are an extremely powerful tool to shift your perspective and create a whole new set of options and potential growth strategies.

Consumer purchases are often impulsive and emotional – how often have we bought a product we didn’t really need? Maybe we liked the branding, saw a persuasive advertisement or were seduced by a special offer or promotion.

B2B purchases, by-and-large, are different. These decisions are often made by groups of people rather than individuals, meaning they generally take longer to make. They’re also firmly rooted in value – emotion and impulse are much less important. Inevitably, a great deal more thought, research and deliberation take place prior to a buying decision.

In recent years, outbound B2B marketing has become expensive to the point of near impossibility. Spam filters, ad blockers, caller ID’s et al have combined to greatly diminish the success rates of the old techniques. In their stead, we’ve seen an increased reliance of inbound methods, exemplified by the explosion of Content Marketing. In fact, 93% of B2B marketers are now ‘doing’ Content Marketing – a huge number, which makes it one of the most widely used strategies out there.

This guide to B2B Content Marketing is designed to help get you started – we’ll talk about why you should embrace it, the different forms it can take, and how you can start rolling it out across your own business.

What is Content Marketing?
For the uninitiated, Content Marketing simply refers to the creation and distribution of branded content pieces, which are designed to engage with your target market. This can take a number of forms – blog articles, videos, infographics, e-books, Slideshare presentations, podcasts and many others.

So what’s the difference between B2B and B2C Content Marketing?
We’ve touched on how important emotion is in B2C transactions, so, as you might expect, this also tends to be at the heart of B2C content marketing. B2C content tends to be fairly light-hearted, focusing on entertainment, emotional resonance and brand perception. It’s rarely product-led.

B2B content on the other hand, while entertaining in its own way, tends to be much more grounded in reason. It’s less ‘fluffy’ than B2C content as, ultimately, it’s aimed at professional people who are making cold decisions regarding whether or not to make business purchases. Light-hearted and frivolous B2C content does nobody any harm, but B2B content must be valuable, it must be useful and it must have a clear purpose.

Why is it so useful?

1. It helps spread the word
When ‘done right’, content can be amazingly effective, simply because it has an interest factor and shareability that other techniques just can’t match. This means that, without spending excessive amounts of money on advertising, you can position your business in front of a potentially huge audience.

2. It engages decision makers and improves your image
Awesome content grabs the interest of the reader, and adds great value by providing useful, helpful information. The impact your content makes – allied with solid, consistent branding – immediately gives your business a head start in lead generation. By helping the decision maker before you’ve even met them, you’ve already established a valuable sense of trustworthiness and authority in their mind.

3. It’s more engaging than traditional ads
Of course, there’s still a place for traditional advertising. But, particularly online, we’ve developed a certain immunity to it. Business decision makers are generally much more likely to digest a piece of content that educates, informs and interests them than they are to engage with an obvious advertisement. Content pieces are also, by and large, much more substantial than adverts, giving you more scope to make the case for using your service or product.

4. It’s good for SEO
If you do a really good job on your content, you’ll find it starts to be shared and picked up by other outlets. Not only does this help to raise your brand awareness, it also builds valuable back-links that are a huge win for your site’s SEO performance. This is a big deal; studies suggest that 9 out of 10 business buyers will ‘find you’ when they’re ready to buy, and 81% of these people start that with a web search.[source]

5. It’s long-lasting
Once you’ve created your content, it stays created! It doesn’t slip away or become redundant. It’s ‘out there’ ready for your target audience to find and can continue to help your business years into the future.

Do decision makers consume content?
Yes! This is one of the big plus-points of making content the cornerstone of your B2B Marketing strategy. For example, a KnowledgeStorm survey revealed that, of technology decision makers:

• 90% watch videos
• 80% read blogs
• 80% read Wikis
• 69% use social networks
• 53% listen to podcasts

Not only do decision makers consume content, they do so perhaps even more than the average person.

What makes great B2B Content?

A good place to start when planning your own content is to isolate your target customer, and identify what stuff they want, or need, to know about. What are they interested in? What are the issues they’re facing? What will they search for on Google? And what information could you use to help educate them, while subtly steering them towards your product or service as the solution?

For example, check out the ebook we produced for our great friends at AmeriCommerce, ‘21 Tips to Thrive in Ecommerce.’ AmeriCommerce’s target market is business owners who are looking to sell more in their online store. This piece of content not only assists the brand’s existing customers, it targets people who don’t yet use AmeriCommerce. It provides genuine value and tips, free of charge, to help people grow their business…but it’s also comprehensively branded.

So, let’s say John is thinking about quitting his job and starting an online business. He finds the AmeriCommerce e-book through Google. He reads it. He digests it. He finds it useful. He’s looking for an Ecommerce platform – it’s a no-brainer. AmeriCommerce has an immediate headstart.

What sort of content can I produce – and how?

• Write a blog
  Blogs are great because they’re extremely widely consumed – a whopping 77% of internet users regularly read one or more. And, even better, they’re easy to setup and maintain. Anyone can do it! You can set up a blog for free on WordPress.com, or alternatively download WordPress’ simple back end CMS at WordPress.org. You can plug this directly into your website, and even download themes to make it look amazing without any coding whatsoever. In terms of content – write about what you know. You’ll be surprised how much expertise you might be able to impart. Each article you write is a potential search engine result that can help guide a potential customer onto your website.

• Write and publish an ebook
  This is one of those things that sounds a lot harder than it really is. Once you’ve got some writing experience through your blog, it’s simply a case of choosing a niche subject and writing ‘more’ about it than your typical blog article. Ebooks aren’t really books – they’re PDFs, which you can either design yourself, or have a professional designer do the job for you.

• Create an infographic
  Infographics are visual representations of data and knowledge, and they’re phenomenally popular. Search volumes for infographics have increased by over 800% since 2010!

• Make videos
  Video is an awesome medium for B2B. Forbes research suggests that 75% of executives watch business related videos every week, of whom 65% subsequently visit the marketer’s website, and 50% go on to make a purchase.

Wyzowl’s Content Marketing Agency

Here at Wyzowl we’re really excited to be at the hub of the Content Marketing revolution! We have an in-house team of copywriters, illustrators, animators and marketing gurus who can plan, create and promote all your content. Click here for more info!

Social networks, social business, social media, social strategy, and social communities. After a while these terms become blended within an organization, especially for those people who don’t focus on these tools and strategies every day.

One of the largest areas of confusion is the difference between large public social networks, like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+, and smaller private online communities, like online customer communities, partner communities, and member communities.

While there are similarities in the interface and nature of connecting with others online, the differences in strategies, functionality, and how they are used by your target audience are vast.

14 Must-Know Differences Between Public Social Networks and Private Online Communities

Both large public social networks and private online communities are important. However, they serve very different purposes, behave differently, and provide a different experience to customers, partners, or members.

While “social is social” on surface, the differences can appear nuanced with only a little digging. How can you explain how your organization can leverage both public and private social networks to increase engagement and value?

It starts with being able to articulate these differences. The following are fourteen of the major ways that public social networks and private online communities are different.

The Basics

Cost

Public Social Networks: These platforms are mainly free to participate in and create a central profile or page for your business or nonprofit organization. Some public social networks have a tiered pricing model, as we see with LinkedIn’s premium accounts. However, that mainly provides more access for individual use, rather than for your organization’s presence on the network.

Private Online Communities: Private online community software does have a cost associated with them. Most business-grade platform license and service agreements range from $20,000 to over $200,000 annually.

Where Members Are

Public Social Networks: According to PEW Research’s Internet Project, over 73% of adults use public social networking site. Many organizations initially view it as an advantage that a large portion of their target audience is already using the major social networks. It makes joining the community easier and the familiarity of the interface lends itself to creating a comfortable environment for new community members to take steps toward participation.

Private Online Communities: Businesses and nonprofit membership organizations that launch private online communities must create, staff, and execute processes to grow awareness of their community, market the benefits of joining, and turn new members into lasting contributing members.

How Members Use It

Public Social Networks: According the research from LinkedIn and TNS, there are two mindsets when it comes to the large social networking sites – personal and professional. Personal social networks are used to follow friends and family, get information on personal interests and hobbies, and for entertainment. Facebook is commonly in this category.

On the flip side, in professional social networks, like LinkedIn, people see themselves as investing their time to network to advance their careers, get updates on brands that they might do business with, and stay up-to-date on industry current events.

Private Online Communities: Private online communities are focused on helping people become more successful in their jobs, industries, or with particular products. People join and participate in private online communities to:

• Build personal brands within a niche
• Help others
• Get answers and support
• Stay informed
• Access exclusive information
• Find partners
• Ask experts
• Have a voice in the future direction of a company
• Get job or career advice

Structure

Walls vs Groups

Public Social Networks: Networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn follow a decentralized model where individuals (and organizations) connect to each other to form the network. Aside from lesser-used functionality like LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, and Google+ communities, discussions take place on the “walls” or timelines on the profiles of the individual members of the networks.

Private Online Communities: Communities are designed to bring people together around specific topics, issues, and shared values. While each community member maintains their own profile and can follow and connect with others in the community, the primary discussion areas are centralized groups, rather than the timelines of individual members.

Learn more about whether you need groups or “walls” in your online community.

Data Ownership

Public Social Networks: The large social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ own all of the profile and activity data on their networks. They have full rights to analyze and leverage this data for advertising and targeting purposes. Information on public social networks cannot be exported.

Private Online Communities: Your organization owns all of the data in your private online community and it can be exported for integration, reporting, or other purposes.

Control

Segmentation

Public Social Networks: Continuing with the theme of minimizing complexity, public social networks provide little ability to segment your messages, content, discussions, and community members. While LinkedIn is experimenting with message segmentation by profile data, like industry, location, and seniority, organizations can’t target engagement based on specific customer segments, member types, or other attributes of their target audiences.

Private Online Communities: Online community software platforms allow organizations precise control over who sees what. This helps keep community members engaged and getting value from the community by providing highly relevant content and conversations to each individual member. Private online communities commonly segment groups by committee or board membership, customer or member type, which products customers use, and geographic location.

Group Management and Moderation

Public Social Networks: A few of the public social networks, such as LinkedIn groups, permit the creation of subgroups for divisions like members-only, chapters, and special interest groups. However, access to these groups must be managed manually. This means that a member of your staff will have to manually make sure that each group’s membership matches the data in your CRM or membership system on a regular basis.

Given the limited types of engagement opportunities on public social networks and the length of time that they have existed, these platforms have all of the moderation tools that you need to report spam, delete user activity from your timeline, and block repeat offenders.

Private Online Communities: Private online communities are designed to give business and membership organizations maximum control over the structure and management of their community.

Most online customer or member communities have several sub-communities where access is driven by data from a central CRM system or membership database. This integration enables permission settings to be managed dynamically based on real-time customer or member data, rather than have access to specific groups, files, and content be managed manually every day or week.

When it comes to moderation, private online communities give organizations control over the platform’s terms of service. Community managers can then use the full suite of moderation tools to address inappropriate content or behavior according to their community governance policy. Online community software also includes listening tools that alert you when specific terms are used in forum discussions, documents, or other areas of community.

Branding and Uniqueness

Public Social Networks: Each public social network has one or two images that you can you can customize with your own brand elements. However, aside from those aspects, your organization’s page, group, or community will look and act like every other organization on that network.

Private Online Communities: Business-class online communities have the flexibility to match your website’s design and branding. Private online communities also have a broad feature set that enables your organization to create a community that fits your specific strategy and target audiences.

Strategy

Usage and Results

Public Social Networks: The primary strategies behind large public social networks involve broadcasting content and ideas. The goals here is to increase the reach and awareness of your organization. Companies on the advanced side of the spectrum and with plenty of resources are also able build and maintain relationships with people in these public arenas.

Private Online Communities: For businesses, private online community strategies drive customer engagement and retention, increase the number of advocates in the market (including those people active on public social networks), and lower support costs.

Increasingly, online customer communities are being utilized to drive innovation and product improvements. These platforms provide a secure environment where product ideas are shared and customers provide feedback on the problems that they would like solved.

Nonprofit membership organizations, like associations, leverage private online communities to improve the value of their member benefits package and increase ongoing member engagement.

Targeted Engagement

Public Social Networks: While some social networks allow you to target posts by demographic data, like job function or company size, companies can’t restrict messages by your organization’s natural segmentation – by customers vs. non-customers, by partners, by product usage, or by committee involvement. Also, most interactions occur inline, meaning that your target audience must be using that social network on their laptop or mobile device to see the update.

Private Online Communities: Along with profile and demographic information, online community software enables organizations to send targeted email messages to community members based on specific segmentation data, group membership, discussion participation, event attendance, and other online social behavior.

Message Penetration and Competition

Public Social Networks: In public social networks, your information and discussions are competing with content and interactions from your audiuence’s personal and professional lives. It is up against everything from consumer brands and entertainment to updates from friends past and present, sponsored posts based on personal/professional interests, and family wedding photos.

Private Online Communities: While often private social networks are checked less frequently than public social networks, the content, discussions, and people are much more relevant and focused. Both social activity from peers and from your organization have very little competition in reaching community members.

Functionality

Media Types

Public Social Networks: Most public social networks allow you to share text updates, links, photos, and video.

Private Social Networks: Along with sharing text discussions, links, photos, and video, private online community platforms enable community members to share documents and other files, audio, and presentations.

Engagement Opportunities

Public Social Networks: To keep things simple to attract as many users as possible, public social networks tend to have fewer options for engagement. They usually consist of status updates and photo/videos, as well as comments on those features. While in the past the large social networks have had more options either built-in or through plug-ins/apps, they have largely been discontinued.

Private Online Communities: Private online community platforms provide an array of engagement opportunities for organizations to select from when they are rolling out and growing their community. These include discussions, polls, surveys, idea submission, video libraries, file and document libraries, event registration, member directories, blogs, and social networking.

Like forum discussions, many of these engagement opportunities, such as idea submission and resource libraries, enable community members to engage by both submitting new entries and commenting on existing postings from other members.

Analytics

Public Social Networks: The reporting model for public social networks is built around how people engage your content, updates, and visual media. Aside from the tracking of “likes” over time, the central metrics involve statistics about which social media is getting people to interact with (“like”, comment share, etc.) your post and which is not.

While this is useful for content planning, the anonymous nature of this data prevents you from using the information to optimize your communication for specific community members, address the issues of specific customer groups, or leverage the data in additional analysis.

Private Online Communities: Private online community software provides detailed analytics on social activity and member-specific participation, as well as reporting on membership, events, and revenue. These reports and dashboards can be customized to fit specific business requirements.

This data can even be pumped into your CRM or association management software. Private online community reports can also be automated, scheduled, and delivered at a specific frequency to stakeholders’ inboxes.

Public Social Networks vs. Private Online Communities Takeaway

While it is important to know differences between the large social networks and private online communities, it is especially important to be able to articulate these differences in a business context for stakeholders throughout your organization.

The bottom line is that developing your public social networking and community-building strategies should not be a “either/or” discussion. There is a very strong business case to invest in both platforms.

It’s much easier to market to existing customers and get them to buy more than to spend the time, money, and energy nurturing new leads that might not end up converting.

Here’s how you can provide more value to existing customers, turning them into lifelong fans of your brand and increasing your overall sales.

1. Knock Customer Service Expectations Out of the Park

Lucky you. Customers have very low expectations when it comes to being served through your customer service department. Chalk it up to long hold times for phone service and incompetent service reps.

Go beyond expectations to provide fast and effective service. Wean your customer service reps off that canned script and empower them to solve customers’ problems. Consider adding social media or chat to your channels so customers can contact you in the ways they’re most comfortable.

2. Delight them with Gifts

If you’ve ever received an unexpected token of appreciation from a company you do business with, you know the pleasure you experienced. Don’t you want that for your customers? The item doesn’t have to be expensive; it could be anything from a handwritten birthday card to a box of cookies at Christmas. Even an anniversary discount email can work.

3. Give Them the Content They Want

Everyone’s looking for content online, and it’s exhausting trying to find it sometimes. But as a brand, you have the opportunity to provide additional value to your customers by offering free white papers, blog posts, ebooks, and more. HubSpot is well-known for free white papers and research, and you don’t even have to be a customer to access them!

4. Send Emails They WANT to Open

Think about the hundreds of branded emails that flood your inbox each day. Which ones do you actually open, and why do you open them? I’m willing to bet they deliver some sort of valuable content that you care about. The rest is just noise. Knowing who your customers are and the types of content they want can help you deliver more value…and keep them coming back for more.

5. Leverage CRM in a Meaningful Way

There’s so much rich data in small business CRM, and it’s there for the taking. You can use this information to track customer data as well as their behaviors online so that you can respond and take action. If you see a customer recently acquired another company, you can be first in line with your congratulations. If you see a customer talking to your competitors on social, you can step in and see why they’re considering switching providers and potentially nip it in the bud.

7. Be Personal

It’s easy to just lump a company into…well, a company. But your company is made up of lots of interesting people. Customers are people, not companies. Make sure all your messaging, from social media updates to emails, is personal. It’s perfectly acceptable for Sally in customer service to talk about her shared interest in Hunger Games with a customer. When Sally relates to the customer on a personal level, she leaves a far more positive impression of your business.

8. Ask What They Want

What better way to find out how you can effectively market to existing customers than to ask what they want? Send out a survey asking what features they’d like added to your products, or what they would improve about your company if they could. You’ll get valuable feedback you can use to improve your brand.

9. Bundle Products

If you know a customer buys the same product every month, consider sending her a special offer where she can get that product plus an additional one for a slight increase in cost. This is a fantastic way to sell some of those items that aren’t moving out of your inventory and get customers to try other products.

10. Help Your Customers Succeed

This is especially valid in the B2B world, where sometimes customers come to us for one product but don’t realize what else we offer. When you have conversations with customers about their big-picture needs, you often find other ways you can help them. If you can’t help directly, you can bet they’ll appreciate a recommendation to someone who can.

Perceived value goes far beyond just price. People are willing to pay more for your products or services when they see they get more benefits and superior customer service from you.

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Image credit: www.ericsson.com

Today you need to see through all the hype of Big Data and know truly what is important and what is marketing mimics. To help solve this issue I want to put a creative twist on the traditional 4-Ps of Marketing with some context around Big Data. Specifically, I have coined the following concepts as the NEW 4P’s in Marketing to help folks clearly understand why they care about Big Data in their marketing programs.

The 4P’s in Digital Marketing and Big Data

The 4P’s in digital marketing was conceptualized by Digital-Warriors in order to help growing businesses to learn how to manage the big data influence in their decision making process involving the digital market. With the analytics and big data combined, digital marketers have the powerful tools to build an empire out of their business. By starting off as a small business, data analytics can help companies grow their database that can help them establish more predictive behaviors in the industry that can help them become more competent in building their business as one of the key players in the competitive world of the digital marketplace. The 4P’s in the digital marketing and big data era are the following:

1. Performance

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Gone are the days that entrepreneurs have to endure the constraints of time in understanding how to capture more predictive behaviors of their customers to influence their decision making process. The emergence of big data and analytics help marketers capture vital, relevant, and useful data that can help them make real time decisions without doing the guessworks. With the big data explosion, digital marketers are dealing with numbers and accurate measurements and statistics to help them revolutionize the performance of their business.

Big data provides a real time information to entrepreneurs in helping them use as real time treatment engine that can drive their business to better productivity. This boost business intelligence in terms of digging important attributes of customers that they can use in order to build better up-sell and conversions for business. With the use of big data analytics, it is easier to acquire valuable information that can influence an internet marketer’s ability to make more accurate and precise decisions in terms of making their business performance responsive to the needs and desires of their customers.

2. Personalization and Preference

This aspect of the 4P’s in digital marketing constitutes the technique of focusing the growth of your business by building a more personalized relationship with your customers. A more personalized-driven marketing approach is the trend these days owing to the emergence of mobile applications and modern devices that make business and shopping more convenient on the cloud. Big data is a valuable resource to draw out the more intelligent approach in connecting personal relationship with your customers through technology and mobile marketing. What makes big data valuable in optimizing the personalization of your business services is that it creates a more intimate relationship between your customer and your business which is tied down through personalized offerings tailored to your customers’ preferences.

There is a growing emergence of online businesses, fostering a digital marketplace for the consumers where product recommendations make shopping easier and highly convenient. It is amazing for online stores to be able to predict the preferences of their customers with product selections. The predictive behavior of the customers’ preferences is forecasted using big data solutions for digital marketing.

3. Prediction

Image credit: www.atkearney.com

The prediction aspect of digital marketing and data concept revolves around expediting the process of acquiring, processing and analyzing data for better business service enhancements. Gone are the days of meticulous and painstaking process, not to mention a more costly approach of gathering massive volume of data for business analytics. The emergence of big data analytics in digital marketing has replaced the traditional means of data collection that left many loopholes in the data gathering process. With big data analytic tools, it is easy to automate the process of data gathering and correlating data in order to create a more structured data management process to see the bigger picture in internet marketing, that is the acquisition of intelligent data structure that will help businesses predict the needs of their customers and making their services highly responsive on what they actually want. The predictive behavior is the measure of data analytic tools that can correlate data and information that used to be unimaginable in the world of marketing.

4. Privacy

The idea that businesses now has the capability of acquiring data and information about their customers can make the consumers uneasy about the idea. This concept area of the 4P’s is designed to help prevent the chilling effect of raising the privacy issues regarding the integration of big data analytics to digital marketing techniques. The consumers keep an open mind about the innovative means of businesses in improving their services and performance in the competitive world of the digital market but they also value their privacy. The inability of businesses to protect the privacy of their customers can have a negative effect on the trust level given by the consumers to their business.

Among the major concerns of the consumers about their privacy is that some digital marketers are requesting for private information that are more than necessary to disclose for the purpose of asking them. This can induce a two-tier areas of concern involving both business companies and the consumers. With the growing privacy concerns of the consumers, a business trust is likely to decline which is not good for businesses. On the other hand, the reluctance of the consumers to share their personal information to business marketers can also cause a fluctuating availability for big data analysis that can be used for optimizing business performance.

Image credit: s1.ibtimes.com

 

In order to resolve the privacy issue using big data analytics in digital marketing, it is best for digital marketers to frame the terms and conditions that will disclose to the consumer information on how their private information are used, the tools that are used for gathering them, and how the process is undertaken with great care in protecting privacy along the process. Lastly, give the consumers better control on how they can share their private data for your business.

I recently got this cold call:
D: Hi. I’m David, with Keller Williams. I’m calling to inquire about your property. Are you still looking to sell your place?
SD: Do you have a buyer for me?
D: Possibly. How did you determine your sale price?
SD: How do you know what price I determined? What is the context of this call please? Are you looking for a listing? Or do you have a buyer?
D: As I said, I’m David, from Keller Williams. I just want to know about your place.
SD: But before we discuss my place, I need a context. Are you seeking a listing or a property for a specific buyer?
D: I just want to know about your place.
SD: And I just want to know why you’re calling.
D: Obviously you’re not interested in selling. Good bye.

This guy either had a script or was trying to get data without disclosing his intent. He certainly ignored the rapport bit.

It’s possible to make cold calls to facilitate buying decisions. When I taught Buying Facilitation® at Wachovia the small business bankers started cold calls like this:

“Hi. My name is John. I’m a small business banker at Wachovia. I hope this is a good time to speak. I’m wondering how you’re getting your financial needs met when your current bank can’t get you the resources you require.”

37 out of 100 calls asked us to visit; we closed 30 within 12 weeks. With 100 cold calls asking for appointments to introduce new products we got 10 visits and closed 2 in 11 months.

If you make a cold call merely to get your own needs met – i.e. appointment, pitch, ‘understand your business [so I can pitch to you]’, prospects won’t respond. I regularly get calls that say: “Hi. Can you please get me to the person who handles X in your company?” Why would I take someone’s valuable time so a stranger can….. can do WHAT? Take care of their own needs?

Using cold calls to push solutions, or find folks with ‘needs’ won’t get you to the right person or get you answers, and you’d only speak to one of many people necessary to define a need. If you get an appointment you’d be wasting your time speaking with a prospect already talking to your competition or they wouldn’t have seen you. Use Buying Facilitation® at the beginning of every call and begin helping prospects consider the change they’d need if they sought excellence using your solution. Then gatekeepers will bring you in and get you to the right people.

Contact me to teach your folks how to get to the right people and find more prospects with cold calls: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

Cold Calls Can Be Effective, But Not Like This is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

A major lawsuit is about to take place in the Netherlands, dragging the issue of the resale of digital media back into European courts.

On Tuesday this week, a local startup called Tom Kabinet opened the virtual doors on its secondhand ebook bookstore. At the moment, it is generally accepted that ebooks cannot be resold, as is the case with music, movies and other digital media.

However, Tom Kabinet is pointing to a 2012 ruling by Europe’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union, in the case of UsedSoft v Oracle. That case was about reselling licenses for downloadable software, and the court ruled that – even when the software license explicitly forbids resale – the buyer should have the right to resell that licence, just as they would be allowed to resell a boxed software copy.

“The publishers have asked us to stop operating with a deadline of today at 2pm [5am PT],” Tom Kabinet co-founder Laurens van Hoorn told me on Friday. “We’ve let them know that we won’t put the site on black – they basically asked us to take the site offline but we won’t do that.”

“We expect that if they don’t shut their activities down, the next step will probably be a court case in the very short term,” Martijn David, the secretary general of the Dutch Publishers Association (NUV) told me.

Honor system

The NUV sees Tom Kabinet as aiding piracy – it says it is easy for people to illegally download ebooks then sell them for profit. Tom Kabinet says it wants to fight piracy, and the publishers should be working with it to do so.

“I think we’re on the same side of the table,” van Hoorn said. “Both parties are interested in fighting the illegal use of ebooks. We’re both opposed to piracy of ebooks and I think if we worked together we would make a much stronger case.”

Van Hoorn explained that Tom Kabinet tracks what is uploaded and adds a “watermark” to any publication passing through its systems, making it impossible for someone to sell an ebook multiple times.

However, there’s a flaw in the system that could hurt the bookstore’s defense. One of the key provisions of the UsedSoft ruling was that, in order for the transaction to be legal, the seller must “make the copy downloaded onto his own computer unusable at the time of resale.”

Tom Kabinet has no way of ensuring that this has happened, so it is easily possible for someone to both keep and sell the ebooks they’ve bought. The company can only run an honor system, asking people to confirm that they purchased the ebook legally and that they have deleted their own copy.

“If we could work together with the publishers, we would be even better able to judge if the content that is being offered to us is offered by the legal holder,” van Hoorn said. “It would be great if we could work together with the publishers to make the ebook market more healthy for them and for the consumer.

“In the end it would be the best situation [where] if you want to read the latest book you need to buy it new from the publisher, and if you can wait you can buy it from Tom Kabinet as a secondhand ebook for a little bit lower price. That’s the normal way of things and that’s the way it should be.”

“No approach”

However, David said Tom Kabinet only approached the publishers for the first time on Tuesday, as it went live.

“If you want to work with publishers, why start with illegal content?” David asked. “Why not start with, ‘Can we work together and join forces?’ … I haven’t heard of any publisher who has been approached a reasonable amount of time before they started operating.”

David’s belief is that the UsedSoft precedent doesn’t apply here because it was specific to software “and it doesn’t stretch out to any digital product” – in this regard, he pointed to a ruling last year in the German regional court at Bielefeld, which established just that. What’s more, he said he couldn’t see how any website could check that uploaded ebooks are legitimate, and that the whole idea was “market disturbance” that could harm the ebook trade.

“The market is developing and the last thing you should do is kill it,” David claimed. “Certainly in the Netherlands it is small but growing, and these kinds of initiatives don’t make anything better.”

David also complained that authors weren’t getting anything out of second or third sales. However, van Hoorn said the firm does have a “Friends of Tom” program for authors and publishers through which authors can get a “donation for work sold through TK.”

This is a very live issue over in the U.S. these days, with Congress soliciting opinions from the publishing and tech industries. Although most normal people probably expect to have the same rights with virtual goods as they do with physical books and CDs, that’s not actually the case – and in Europe, the upcoming Tom Kabinet v NUV case may finally help clear up the confusion for once and for all.

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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For the first time, Western stereotypes associating Africa with death, disease, poverty, and war are being replaced by the reality of demanding, brand-conscious consumers who happen to live in a challenging environment. For too long, “Africa” has been considered a homogenous mass rather than a multicultural continent of diverse citizens. The media-generated image of passive beneficiaries of international charity and financial aid is now giving way to one of active customers voicing their opinions on product performance, service quality, and advertising.

After all, the emerging affluent African consumer is as connected as the rest of the world, smartphone always in hand. As this untapped market captures global attention, it also offers marketers a chance to leapfrog the legacy of mass marketing and reinvent the field from the ground up. The insights that marketers currently rely on, such as what consumers value in a product price and how to best reach them, drawn from decades of consumer research and studies on buyer behavior, don’t necessarily apply to the fragmented African markets.

Take a look at what’s happening in Africa now: Kenyans on Twitter (#KOT) are among the most voluble and outspoken, directly asking CEOs why their customer service is not up to par and pressing for change during CNN’s coverage of their elections. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s statistics say 68% of Africans on Twitter rely on it for daily news – not surprising considering that the news of Malawi’s recent presidential shenanigans first broke as a tweet. And Ethiopian news reports the rise of Facebook as an increasingly important medium for everything from filling job vacancies to selling traditional dresses. African voices are clamoring to be heard, and now social media offers them control over their narratives.

This shift will play out most obviously in marketing communications and advertising. Television, the industrialized world’s traditional driver of mass-market brand awareness, has been trumped by mobile-driven word of mouth. But in Africa, a phone in every pocket has only scaled the way hyper-local and regionally fragmented markets were already communicating – through trusted referrals from family and friends, eyewitness stories, and first-hand experience.

However, a lack of formal retail distribution infrastructure and marketing support services, among other factors, means that conventional solutions for market analysis will not work effectively. Everything from estimating purchasing power of a market segment to the impact of conventional value propositions will have to be questioned and redeveloped from scratch. And as Ghanaian entrepreneur Bright Simons has pointed out, much of this new African middle class is emerging from the informal trade and services sectors, while university-educated youth still search for white-collar jobs. Understanding the values of this new emerging consumer class is crucial for developing successful marketing strategies. African market research consultant Vusi Vuma mentioned the challenge faced by Coca Cola when attempting to account for as much as 40% of their sales volumes in terms of final retail channels. How does one estimate the size and value of an opportunity when both the target audience and retail outlets are outside the documented formal economy?

More than 90% of retail transactions tend to be in cash, and this impacts everything from purchasing patterns and buyer behavior to retail inventory. It implies longer lead times for purchase decisions and seasonal variations in consumer demand and choice of payment plans.

Data shows that 96% of Africa’s rapidly growing mobile phone customer base is on prepaid or “pay as you go” payment plans. This does not reflect income level. Lower denomination airtime vouchers account for as much as 80% of sales in the mass market. Vuma says some subscribers in South Africa spend as much as USD $30 a month on airtime credit, but they purchase overtime in 50-cent increments.

Conventional pricing methods cannot be transposed without questioning the underlying assumptions (revenue generation or flexibility of the payment plan instead of utility value) from the established markets where they were first developed. For example, “The price is not the problem” was the most common refrain during an ethnographic study in Kenya of household energy consumption behavior for a solar product manufacturer (the now defunct Tough Stuff). And small business owners were more interested in the revenue generation potential of a high-tech mesh Wi-Fi router when surveyed for a pricing study.

Forward-looking marketers have the opportunity to build and experiment with new methods and means to create demand, reach their target audience, and develop offers that resonate. African consumer markets can provide the perfect laboratory for new solutions to the global disruption of traditional marketing.

Our last post introduced the science of sales enablement for sales reps and outlined the main variables in the formula: planning, preparing and engaging. Now it’s time to break out the steps and dissect the elements. So what makes sales planning tick? For starters, visibility.

Sales planning: VISIBILITY, analysis and prioritization.

It all starts with visibility. Your reps need clarity far and wide across the sales pipeline, along with a defined, in-depth snapshot of each opportunity. This unhindered insight opens the door to analysis and prioritization leading to calculated sales efforts that keep deals moving forward.

• “One of the top five strategic actions that contribute to effective sales enablement is to gain better insight into buyer engagement.” – Mobile Sales Enablement: Fulfilling The Promise Of Untethered Selling via Aberdeen Group
• “On average, enterprises will miss the equivalent of 10% of total annual sales in ‘lost opportunity’ revenue that could have been captured as a result of better visibility on sales activities and insight into target markets.” – Boosting Growth With Sales Performance via Gartner Inc.

The more awareness your sales reps have, the better. An elevated perspective reveals the entire sales landscape: What are the vitals of your pipeline and opportunities, how do buyers respond to your touch points, how consistent are you with your follow-up and process.

When planning the sales strategy, visibility matters.

Here’s how a Sales Enablement Platform uses visibility to catalyze sales success for reps:

Clarity with context.

• Get a clear picture of each opportunity and across the entire sales pipeline.
• See top opportunities with the most potential for return.

Activity, events and monitoring.

• See the complete timeline of all actions taken and materials sent or shared with buyers.
• Track events to view upcoming and historical events for each opportunity and lead.
• Gauge the success of your follow up actions, which resources are more effective

Pipeline urgency and top-opportunity reports.

• Recognize follow-up urgency with clear visuals presenting such variables as deal size, engagement strength, fit and opportunity velocity.
• Calculate opportunity strength and prioritize follow-up activities with help from specialized algorithms.

Engagement analytics and dashboards.

• Get real-time buyer behavior notifications – opens, views, downloads, shares and even “cold spots” where buyers lose interest – on all messages and content.
• Show the impact your sales team is making on the buying team.

Next element to dissect:
Stay tuned to examine the second step in sales planning: ANALYSIS.

As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others
-Bill Gates

People often read the work of sales development thought leaders who evangelize process and tools. They do a great job of promoting ideas but the ones that implement their strategies are sometimes overlooked.

They will help your sales team run smoothly. We know 5 such practitioners who exemplify sales development. Take a look:

1. Acquia’s Tom Murdock

Acquia is one of the fastest growing private software companies in the nation. And Tom is their Inside Sales Manager.

Their team is even featured in a case study by Aaron Ross.

In the first year alone, they added $6 million in qualified sales pipeline to an already fast growing team, exemplifying what sales development can do.

Follow Tom on Twitter @TomMurdock.

2. JJ Imbeaux from WhatCounts

JJ and his team are masters of prospecting.

They’ve shared some great insights, including a 7×7 cadence that outlines outreach to prospects. It lays out seven touches over seven days, including phone calls, voicemails, and emails.

You can find more invaluable information from JJ in detail in WhatCounts’ Sales Development playbook or follow him on Twitter @JJImbeaux.

3. Brandon O’Sullivan at PernixData

Brandon is currently the Senior Director of Corporate Sales at PernixData.

He works to motivate and grow the Corporate Sales team on the “Three P’s” …People, Process, and Performance.

His formula for success is based on hiring, developing, and retaining top talent, working leads, and opportunities using the same process, and delivering predictable, and scalable revenue growth.

His extensive experience is attributed in large part to his previous two leadership roles as VP of Corporate Sales at Appcelerator and Senior Director of Corporate Sales at EMC, where he managed a sales team that generated over $150 million in annual revenue.”

You can follow him @Brandono20.

4. Sean Kester from SalesLoft

Our very own Sales Development team lead, Sean was SalesLoft’s first SDR.

He put in place many of the practices our BDR team uses today, and has been wildly successful. Made famous within the office by sending a hippo picture to unresponsive prospects asking if he needs to call animal control, Sean’s creativity helps drive a strong sales development process.

Follow @TheSeanKester for the full experience.

5. Rivalry’s Jon Birdsong

The only person I’ve ever seen start a blog with a quote from Andre 3000, Jon isn’t afraid to take unique approach to what he does.

As CEO of Rivalry, Jon’s product helps nurture competition within sales teams (we use their leader boards ourselves).

Jon avidly writes content advocating the sales development process and uses specialization to drive Rivarly’s sales process.

He actively shares great sales content you can find by following him on Twitter @JonnyBird.

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Now you’re familiar with the some of the best sales development practitioners, stay connected by following and engaging with them.

Are you ready to add inbound marketing to your marketing mix but want to know when you’ll start seeing some return on your investment (ROI)? It’s a question that most people want to know when they decide to invest into anything.  So whether you want to see website traffic increase, your total lead count increase, or start closing deals, we’re able to track these elements and show the ROI.

Here’s a sneak speak into what I’ll be covering in this post:

HubSpot and MIT worked together to create an ROI report around inbound marketing.  According to the report, 69% of HubSpot customers saw an increase in sales revenue, 76% of which experiences this increase within 7 months of using HubSpot.

ROI timeline for seeing a jump in website traffic

Inbound marketers like to perform a website SEO evaluation and begin adding more content to your site to help boost website traffic.  Content is added to your site by blogging on a consistent basis.  HubSpot published a great blog post last year that I’ll be pulling a lot of my stats from, like this one:

“85% of companies using inbound marketing increase traffic within 7 months.”

If you blog on regular basis, we suggest 2 or 3 times a week, that timeframe would be less than 7 months. Potentially seeing website traffic increase anywhere between months 2 and 3 of inbound marketing practices.

ROI timeline for seeing your lead count pile up

With your website traffic spiking upwards the opportunity to turn traffic into leads will increase. You will increase your lead count by creating calls-to-action that drive traffic to landing pages. Putting calls-to-action on your most visited pages is highly suggested.  Now how long is it going to take until you see website traffic turn into leads?

“83.9% of companies using inbound marketing increase leads within 7 months.”

It’s always nice when you can see your investment working and it’s even better to see that in a short timeframe.  HubSpot goes onto say that only 1.79% of companies didn’t see their lead count increase until one year after inbound implementation.  That’s a whopping 98.21% of investors who saw their lead count increase in less than one year.

ROI timeline for closing sales

Let’s get into the real meat of this post.  When are you going to see some money?  How long into the inbound marketing investment can you expect to close some sales?

“49.7% of companies using inbound marketing increased sales within 7 months”

Now that number may not be in the 80s or 90s, but half of companies who implemented inbound marketing closed a deal within 7 months.  That number increases to 63% within the first 12 months.  Real deals. Real dollars.

So there you have it. You can expect to see your website traffic lead counts, and closed deals increase within 7 months from your inbound marketing investment. Does that seem a little short to you? Were you expecting inbound marketing ROI to come sooner or later than 7 months?

Email marketing is far from dead and remains one of the most valuable and cost-effective marketing channels available to marketers. But many companies are no longer seeing results, having never graduated from entry-level email programs and tactics they started with years ago.

The Direct Marketing Association cites email marketing as having an ROI of 4,300%. And while email is not nearly as en vogue as social media, a recent study from McKinsey & Company concluded that email is nearly 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter. But as with everything else in marketing, in order to realize results, you’ve got to have the right strategy and approach. And what might have worked in the past, is not likely to generate results today.

So if you feel like you’re still “doing” email marketing the same way you have been for quite some time, and if your open and click-through rates are less than stellar, it’s a safe bet that you need to consider graduating to the next level of email marketing. Here are 3 tactics to consider.

1. Segment your email marketing lists to boost engagement and conversion

Content is king, but not if context isn’t queen. Do you send your entire list of contacts the same email “blasts” all the time? Unfortunately, this approach creates what I call the “boy who cried wolf” syndrome. If most of your messages are only relevant to a segment of your list, not only will it lead to a high rate of unsubscribes, it will also cause your contacts to grow accustomed to ignoring your emails. This means when you do actually send them something valuable and relevant, they’ll ignore it because of your previous track record of sending them irrelevant emails.

So don’t make this sophomoric mistake! Instead, segment your email contacts to target different groups so you can send them more relevant information. At a basic level, you can segment based on profile attributes such as status (customer or prospect), industry, location, job title, product/service interests, etc. Even better is to segment by profile attributes combined with criteria of observed behaviors (specific web pages visited, specific content downloaded, particular event attended, etc.) and a specified time frame (last week, month, etc.).

According to research from Gleanster, 87% of top performing marketers say targeting campaigns to audience segments and individual consumers is the largest value driver, with 78% saying list segmentation is the #1 marketing automation capability they can’t live without. So ultimately, list segmentation makes your messages more targeted, personal and relevant, which will boost your opens and clickthroughs and ultimately lead to higher conversion rates (and happy readers).

2. Perform A/B testing to optimize your email marketing campaigns

A/B (split) testing is a way of comparing two different email options to determine which will be the most effective. The gist of the idea is that you send version A of an email to one group and version B of an email to a different group. After measuring the results of the emails (opens, clickthroughs, etc.), you can see which email was more successful and determine what factor made the difference. There is a lot of research out there for email best practices, but A/B testing allows you to test to see what works best for you. Mailchimp reports that people who A/B test their email campaigns get 11% better open rates and 17% more clicks.

By A/B testing an email with a small sampling of a segment, you can very quickly test the success of your emails before you send them to the entire segment, which allows you to optimize your efforts in real time. There are a number of factors that can greatly impact the success of an email, so the opportunities are endless for testing. Try testing different subject lines, “from” addresses, call-to-action buttons, shorter messages vs. longer messages and different layouts as well as different times of the day.

3. Utilize automation to enhance your email marketing programs

The impact of your email marketing efforts can be greatly enhanced by the use of marketing automation. It helps leverage prospect intelligence in order to create automated email marketing programs that send ongoing, context-driven emails and speak directly to the needs and interests of your prospects and customers.

Lead Nurturing Drip Programs – Leads captured on your website through a form or landing page should be entered into a lead nurturing drip campaign that sends a series of automated emails to prospects and clients at scheduled intervals. They educate and inform prospects as they move through the buying stages of the customer lifecycle. In addition to providing prospects the information they need at each stage of the lifecycle, they also keep your products or services top of mind. Prospects are rarely ready to purchase once they visit your website or fill out a form, so rather than letting a prospect forget about you, drip campaigns allow you to “nurture” the relationship until the point when they are ready to purchase. Research from DemandGen Report found that B2B marketers who have successfully deployed lead nurturing programs average a 20% increase in sales opportunities from nurtured leads versus non-nurtured leads.

Triggered Email Programs – These are automated emails that are triggered by a specific action or a time-related event. They acknowledge a prospect’s actions such as downloading an eBook or registering for a webinar. Examples include thank you emails or registration confirmations. According to the Direct Marketing Association, triggered emails score 94% higher open rates and 122% higher click rates than Business as Usual (BAU) messages.

If you are ready to graduate your email marketing efforts past a basic “blast” mentality, these 3 tactics will help you improve your efforts and achieve measureable success. They all work towards making your emails more targeted and timely, keeping your company top-of-mind as you nurture leads through the buying stages of the customer lifecycle while also strengthening relationships with current customers by sending them relevant email messages.

On average, one of your sales representatives will invest nearly half of their time practicing for upcoming meetings or presentations. Of course some preparation is necessary, but if you had more sales enablement- more time with a sales rep in front of a promising client- you would no doubt have more sales. Yes, practicing for hours a day may lead to a perfect pitch but that doesn't mean much if there is no sales enablement. With sales automation, sales enablement- face-to-face time with prospects- increases up to an average of 10 percent. Alone, that may not seem like much, but across an entire team, or a given span of time, a 10 percent increase in sales enablement leads to a much more efficient and profitable environment.

Over recent months and years, content marketing has enjoyed a phenomenal growth in popularity. It’s gradually become THE marketing strategy you need to embrace, and its growth shows no signs of slowing down.

Put simply, content marketing is all about the creation and targeted distribution of interesting and useful content, which can help build brand awareness, generate leads and support SEO. But which types of content should you be using, and how do you get started? We’ve identified the top 4…

1. Blogs
Blogs – a truncation of the term ‘web logs’ – have been around basically as long as the internet itself. They continue to be a powerful and expressive way to communicate with friends, family and, of course, potential customers!

Blogs are short-to-medium written articles which can cover basically any subject. They’re generally around 500-1000 words per article – although there’s no minimum or maximum length.

They’re great for businesses because they generate leads. In fact, B2B companies which blog have been shown to generate 67% more leads per month than those which don’t.

It’s not just for the ‘big guys’ either. Small businesses that blog get up to 126% more lead growth than those that don’t, and 69% of businesses attribute their lead generation success to blogging.

Those leads convert well into customers, too. 57% of businesses say they’ve acquired a customer through a company blog.

Each blog you post represents another page to be discovered by search engines, and – if you’re using appropriate keywords and creating high-quality content – blogging is fantastic for SEO. It’s been found to give websites 434% more indexed pages and a staggering 97% more inbound links.

This kind of organic back-link is invaluable in building the credibility and authority of your page, which is an essential component of search engine algorithms.

Blogging produces other benefits, too – perhaps less tangible, but every bit as important. It can really help develop an authoritative, trustworthy voice for your brand, and – if you’re really good at it – position your business as an industry thought leader.

We’re all consuming more and more content each and every day – it’s one of the most awesome things about the internet. Blogs are at the forefront of that content consumption; 77% of internet users regularly read one or more. Getting involved in blogging gives you access to a huge volume of potential new customers.

It takes a certain amount of time to create great blog articles, but if you’ve got that time, why not give it a go?

Getting started:
There are a number of different methods, but WordPress is probably our favourite. You can set up a free blog through WordPress.com, or visit WordPress.org to download and install WordPress’s back-end CMS system into your website. You can purchase professional themes which make your blog look amazing with no coding knowledge required. Once you’re set up, it’s all about creating great content…alternatively, you can let us take care of it!

2. Infographics
Infographics are visual representations of information, data or knowledge. Their widespread use is a fairly modern trend in online marketing, but their premise – that data is easier to understand when presented visually – has actually been around for as long as people have.

From cave paintings, to hieroglyphics, all the way through to more modern uses like Harry Beck’s London Underground map, infographics have always helped us distill large amounts of data – often either uninspiring or even incomprehensible as plain text – into a vibrant, colourful, engaging and understandable form.

That being said, there’s no doubt that infographics have enjoyed a quite ridiculous growth in popularity over recent years. Since 2010, infographic search volumes have increased by over 800%.

Why? Well, we homo sapiens are a visual bunch – it’s been said that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and we digest visual images an astonishing 60,000 times faster.The brain is like a sponge for visual content – and it’s no surprise, because as much as half of it is dedicated solely to visual function.

Infographics are, very simply, a fun and stimulating way to share and receive knowledge. The ones which feature cool, engaging content are really powerful because they help us learn and discover – without the hard work. Edutainment at its finest!

As such, great infographics tend to generate a high amount of shares and social engagement as we share that newly-acquired knowledge with our friends. And, because they generally carry your logo and branding, your brand travels wherever that infographic does, raising awareness and spreading your message far and wide.

With the continued explosion of the internet and social media, we now consume content in more volume than ever before, and visual content is at the cutting edge of this trend. For example, a high-quality infographic is a whopping 30 times more likely to be read than a text article. The potential audience for your infographics is, frankly, enormous!

And what’s the bottom line? Well…all this helps YOUR bottom line! Publishers who use infographics grow in traffic an average of 12% more than those who don’t.

Getting Started:
If you have an in-house design team, you can spend some time researching some stats around a subject of interest and then task them with creating a beautiful infographic. Alternatively, you can outsource it. Here at Wyzowl we’re proud to offer a full service – planning, creating and promoting infographics for you. You can be as involved (or uninvolved) as you like in this process!

3. E-books
The whole concept of producing ‘e-books’ strikes sheer, unadulterated terror into the heart of some marketers. I mean, they’re great to read – but WRITING A BOOK. Writing. A. Book! It sounds like just about one of the most arduous undertakings imaginable.

The good news is, it really isn’t that difficult! For starters, most marketing e-books aren’t really ‘books’ – they’re just PDFs that you can design and publish in-house, or outsource pretty affordably to a design studio like us!

They don’t even have to be particularly copy-heavy; many guides suggest that you aim for upwards of 5000 words, but, as with any type of content, we’d always suggest you focus more on quality than quantity. Some of our favourite e-books have been mainly image-based with just a few lines of text per page. Of course, in saying that, it’s important that your e-book is ‘weighty’ enough to justify your audience downloading it, or you can disappoint them and unnecessarily damage your brand.

We’ve found that the best way to use an e-book is to host it on a landing page and ask users to enter their e-mail address before they download it. You’ll find that most users have no problem doing this – after all, they’re getting free, useful content from you. This makes e-books an effective tool to help grow your e-mail list, allowing you to subsequently target a range of potential new users with offers, promotions, discounts or communications. What’s more, because you’ve most likely written on a subject area that’s close to your industry, you’ll know they’re at least a little bit interested in your products, so these are often really rich, targeted leads for you to work with.

On the subject of content, you’re probably wondering exactly what you should write about. It’s always a good idea to choose a subject you have a certain amount of knowledge about already, although you can always carry out research to plug any gaps. It’s good to find a niche to help you stand out from the crowd – check out this useful article to help you on your way.

An e-book is an exceptional way to add authority to your brand. There’s a certain gravitas associated with ‘publishing’ and marketing an e-book, and it’s that confidence in your knowledge that can help further position your brand as a thought leader.

Getting Started:
You can create the copy for your e-book using a simple word processing software like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer. If you have designers in-house, you can ask them to produce the PDF document, or, if you don’t, you can outsource this to a design studio. Of course, you can let us do the hard work for you – like all our content, we create e-books for a fixed fee with no hidden extras. Have a play with our Pricing Calculator to get a quote! Once you have the completed document, we can advise you on where to position it to get the maximum ROI, growing your e-mail list and developing solid sales leads.

4. Video
Ok, a disclaimer: we have to admit, video is a particular passion of ours – we’ve made over 1000 of them so far, and we still reckon video is the undisputed King of Content.

In a relatively short amount of time, video has gone from an online luxury to an integral part of basically all our online experiences. Every day, 100 million internet users watch an online video, and a THIRD of all online activity is now spent watching them!

Video is a really versatile thing, and you can choose from a number of different styles and strategies to get the best return.

Of course, for starters, you can get a website ‘home page’ or explainer video, which is basically a 1-2 minute elevator pitch about your business, service or product. Put simply, we think every business should have one of these – why? Because they increase people’s understanding of your product or service by 74%, make your website 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of search engine results, and because 80% of your online visitors will watch a video while only 20% will actually read all your content.[source!]

But, with online video being so widespread, it’s also a great idea to diversify your video output. For example, if you’ve created infographics before, have you considered turning them into videographics? For a deliciously affordable price you can have these graphics animated into a dynamic, engaging video piece to share on your website and beyond.

One of the major appeals of video is that it can be highly shareable – particularly when it entertains us and makes us laugh. Explainer videos are awesome for the reasons outlined above, but, because they’re fairly corporate, it’s not generally realistic to expect your users to share with their friends once they’ve finished watching. If you’re looking for your content to go far and be shared far beyond your target audience, why not consider doing something a little bit outside the box with your video output and make some fun, shareable videos? Speaking from experience, our series of ‘Useless Fact’ videos are pretty silly, and far from ‘salesy’ but they’re also some of our most highly viewed videos because they’re fun, short, and shareable – and every time someone watches it, they’re exposed to our brand.

Getting Started:
Identify which ‘style’ of video you’d like to pursue and take it from there; if you’re lucky enough to have the skills and software in-house to create awesome videos, then get to work and make it happen! Of course, if you don’t, we’re here to become an extension of your marketing team for as long as you need us!

Conclusion
There’s little doubt in our mind that content is not only the present, but the future of marketing too. It’s pretty easy to get started – but it takes time, determination, passion and expertise to create winning content and supercharge your business in the long run.A whopping 93% of B2B marketers are using content marketing right now…but only 44% of them have a documented content strategy.

Our newly launched Content Marketing Agency is all about bringing order to that chaos and making the process easier for you and your team. We take care of planning, creating and promoting your content pieces, working to fixed prices and set turnarounds. Essentially, we become an extension of your own team and help you create fantastic content while you concentrate on the gazillion other jobs you have to do! Why not get in touch with us for a friendly chat?