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The single greatest source of traffic for many of my websites continues to be Google. This really shouldn’t be all that surprising, as Google is by far the largest search engine on the web today and it is used by people all around the world every day to seek out the information that they need. If you want to get in front of that audience, you’ll want to rank well in Google for your target search terms. And for that, you should know how you’re doing.

It can be incredibly time-consuming to hop onto Google yourself, type out each of your keywords, and see where your website is ranked. This is especially time-consuming if you have dozens or even hundreds of keywords to track and that’s why you should use an automated tool like KnowMyRankings instead. The utility here is straightforward in its approach, but it does offer some robust features to aid in your search engine optimization efforts.

Know Your Rankings

The fundamental idea behind KnowMyRankings is obvious enough. You plug in the URL of your website (or webpage) into the appropriate field, type out the keyword phrases that you’d like to track, and produce the report.

KnowMyRankings will then show the current rank for that URL for each of your keyword phrases. That’s at its most basic level, displaying only your current ranking and this is what you get when you request the sample report. It’s generated on the spot for your viewing in a matter of moments. However, KnowMyRankings goes much further than that.

The Detailed Reports

After you sign up for an account with KnowMyRankings, you can then keep track of as many URLs as you’d like with the number of keywords that you desire. For example, I quickly put together a rank report for bloggingtips.com using five possible keyword phrases. As you can see here, our website currently ranks first for the term “blogging tips” but it is beyond the 100-rank range for “make money blogging.” If the latter is important to us, it means that we may want to spend more time, attention and effort on improving that rank.

Now, I’ve only had access to this account for a few days, but if you take a look at the sample report, you’ll see that the data goes further than just your current ranking for each keyword. You can also access quite a bit of historical data for your keyword phrases.

A similar line graph is produced for each of the keywords in your account, allowing you to look over different time periods. You can see the changes over the course of the last week, for instance, or you can look at the the year-to-date, last six months, or even all-time. The quick stats also show your current position and your highest ever position. If you keep track of your SEO efforts in a similar fashion, you can gain better insight into what strategies are working best.

The Pricing Scheme

When you look at some other SEO tools that seem to offer a similar kind of functionality, you may find that they limit the number of URLs you can track. Such is not the case with KnowMyRankings.

Instead, pricing for KnowMyRankings is based purely on the number of keywords that you’d like to track and you can scale up or down based on your needs at any time. These keywords can be spread out over as many URLs as you desire. If you subscribe to 100 keywords, for example, you can have 10 keywords for 10 URLs, 20 keywords for 5 URLs, and so on. It’s totally up to you.

Plans start at $9.00/month for ten keywords, scaling up to $33.50/month for 100 keywords and $58.50/month for 200 keywords. They increase in increments of 10 from 10 to 50 keywords, and in increments of 25 beyond that. If you need to track more than 200 keywords, you’ll need to contact the sales team to work something out.

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Dan Levy, Facebook’s director of small business, recently reported more than 30 million Facebook pages are classified as active small business pages. Small businesses turn to Facebook because it does a great job in engaging customers and allowing them to promote themselves effectively. As a small business owner, you can learn some lessons from Facebook that will help you make your own site just as interesting for customers and profitable for you.

Leverage the Power of Multimedia

When you look at your Facebook feed, is your attention attracted to images and video clips? If the answer is yes, then you react like most people.

According to Sprout Social, people remember only 20 percent of what they read, but twice as much — 40 percent — of what they see visually. And since video is shared 12 times more than links and text posts combined, viewers spend 100 percent more time on pages with videos. So this is a great cue to take from the social network for your website.

If you want your site visitors to get interested in your content, make sure to use plenty of images and videos that will capture their attention and linger in their memory.

Let Your Customers Speak for You

The power of online reviews cannot be overestimated – 79 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Facebook has done a great job adding the ability for customers to share and request opinions about your small business on business pages.

Each review or remark has a lot of influence on potential buyers and should not be ignored by your small business. To display something similar to this on your website, integrate a web form for leaving comments, or even a Facebook comment box so your web visitors can share their great experience with your product or service.

Integrate Facebook Elements into Your Website

Facebook allows you to integrate many business page elements directly into your website. Perhaps one of the most important elements is the “Like” button, which allows people to share your website on their Facebook page in a single click.

More importantly, it shows them if they have any friends who have liked your page. An endorsement like this by a potential customer’s friends or family is powerful and encourages trust, which can ultimately lead to more sales for you.

If you regularly create engaging content, you might also consider integrating a Facebook comment box into your website. This not only gives your customers more access to your content, but also any comments made on your website may show up under your customer’s activity feed. This means anything they post gets pushed out to their entire Facebook network, resulting in a lot of great (and free) exposure for your brand.

Maintain Consistently Fresh Content

Your small business needs to take the spirit of content creation and sharing from Facebook and implement it into your website in the form of a blog, news page or any other section that is continually updated. Using some of the space on your website to provide frequent updates to visitors gives the impression of a lively and busy business, which attracts buyers and increases their confidence in your product.

There are many affordable tools available today specifically designed to create websites which are tightly integrated with your Facebook page. These will help you automate a lot of the steps suggested in this article. A quick search will help you uncover the tools that will get you on your way to a website that rocks like Facebook.

As you go through the process of improving your website and engaging more on Facebook, make sure you think of these marketing efforts as continuous and try not to get bogged down with the specific possibilities and features of different platforms. Remember, you’re dealing with customers who use many different platforms to get their information, so make sure they can find you on their favorite platform, and that they get all the information they want with one easy click.

Part 1 – Are You Keeping Score?

Keeping score is as old as time. 

Let’s face it, money is really about keeping score. As human beings we have a genetic makeup that makes us competitive. It is part of our survival of the fittest mentality.

We continually are trying to get ahead in life and make sure that we provide for those around us.

Score doesn’t necessarily need to be kept by money; it can be possessions, the number of friends you have, or, of course, the team’s numbers in a sporting event.

For the purposes of this article I am going to challenge you to look at things a little differently considering keeping score.

I think that everyone would agree that we live in one of the busiest times in history. While we have more technology than ever to keep our lives simple, it appears as if expectations have increased and even exceeded our capacities to get everything done.

The interesting part of this is that everyone is on the same team here. It has led us to the point where prioritizing our time has become more important than ever. Keeping this in mind, we all prioritize our days, our workloads and even who we spend our free time with.

It is much the same with marketing.

With the marketing technologies now available there has been a shift in the traditional roles of both Sales and Marketing. With these new technologies it is now more important than ever to use your Sales team’s time to engage leads that are truly interested and have the potential of eventually buying.

Lead qualifying has progressed to a new level and marketing teams have new tools to ensure that the leads they give to their sales team are the most qualified possible.

As marketing platforms like HubSpot allow you to progressively profile to learn more and more about your potential leads, it becomes essential that your leads are prioritized.

The best way to prioritize your leads today is by Lead Scoring. And your new scorecard includes many things, including a lead’s source, their level of engagement and the lead conversion forms utilized on your website’s landing pages.

WHAT IS LEAD SCORING?

Lead scoring is a marketing methodology used to rank your prospects. This ranking system scores each prospect based on their perceived value to your organization. A potential lead’s score represents several factors:

• The information you have obtained about them
• The stage they are at in the sales funnel (also called the Buyer’s Journey)
• At which point a lead will be handed over from the marketing team to the sales team

The important part of defining Lead Scoring is that both sales and marketing agree on what a qualified lead is and communicate to each other their needs about different roles in the marketing and sales process.

Our marketing partners at HubSpot have identified the basic stages of The Buyer’s Journey. Scoring your leads depends on how your business, your product and your ideal customer all fit together within the buying process. Keeping score is different for every business, every product and for each potential customer.

WHY IS LEAD SCORING IMPORTANT TO CUSTOMERS?

As I mentioned previously, we are all very busy.

Here’s the part that I think most marketers haven’t really considered yet; your potential leads want to be profiled and want to be scored. It saves them time as well.

One of the most important facets of inbound marketing includes attracting your ideal customer. These people are using their most valuable resource, time, to look for a solution to their problem. This can be a service, a product or just knowledge that helps them in some way.

If I am searching for something on the Internet, I can very quickly determine a couple of companies that can meet my needs. But finding out the subtle differences between the companies and their products can be time consuming. Then I need to figure out whether or not their product is what I need. 

Let’s face it, if I am at the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey where I am just researching my options, I do not want to receive a phone call from the sales rep. It is a waste of both of our times.

However, if I am at the decision stage of the buyer’s journey, the company who reaches out to me, shows me the best customer service, and who addresses all of my concerns will most likely get my business.

Less than 25% of new leads are at the decision stage and consequently if you are having your sales team call on all of your leads, you are wasting 75% of their time.

This is a huge mistake that companies continue to make. They have a mentality that keeping the pipeline full of leads is the way to succeed.

What they don’t consider is that they are more than likely alienating their customer base by not being respectful of their time.

According to MarketingSherpa, 79% of market leads never convert to sales. With Lead Scoring, you can greatly increase this statistic.

WHY IS LEAD SCORING IMPORTANT TO BUSINESS?

When I defined Lead Scoring, one of the key word phrases was that sales and marketing agree on the formula by which both the sales and marketing teams rank the leads.

For the marketing team, Lead Scoring helps:

• Provide feedback concerning the quality of leads
• Determine which campaigns are working
• To Identify which areas need tweaking
• Consistently increase and produce higher quality leads

Likewise, Lead Scoring helps prioritize the leads for sales.

• They can identify which leads need their attention first
• They can accurately forecast what is coming down the pipeline
• They can develop ways to identify real closing ratios of each lead

When sales and marketing begin to work together to score leads, instead of keeping score against each other, the result is improved effectiveness and overall efficiencies on the fulfillment side. You can better adjust staffing levels and ramp up or down based on changes in the market.

So at this point you may be asking if you need Lead Scoring (true, it’s not for everyone). You might also want to know what are the best practices in Lead Scoring and how can we roll this out ourselves? We will start to cover all this in detail in part 2 of our blog. As always, if you have any questions, please let us know in the comments.

Till then, check out our e-Book on lead generation for your business. It will give you some practical tips and advice on how to get started with generating leads for your business using inbound marketing.

Photo Sources:

FreeDigitalPhotos.net – Stoonn

Focus on User Experience 1st & Design 2nd

Over the last two plus years we have audited over 400 websites. These audits have been performed for prospects who have different things in mind:

• They need SEO help
• They’re interested in our inbound marketing services
• They may be contemplating a website redesign

Whatever their reasons, they don’t believe their business website is performing to their expectations.  Through most of these audits we find three glaring errors that are very common. These common website errors lead to poor results. I am going to share these with you today and how to correct them.

Before you scroll down to the 3 Mistakes You Might Be Making, I would highly recommend that you truly understand what your goals are for your website.

What is the end game that is going to drive

more profitable revenue for your business?

WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS FOR YOUR BUSINESS WEBSITE?

Most people just want more phone calls or to have more people to show up at their business location to buy a particular product.  There is a problem with this mentality though, and that is an old way of doing business.

Today’s website visitors want information and they want it quickly. They are comparing your information to that of your competitors. Many times this happens before they even look at your pricing.

So, if you are looking to improve your website think about this:

• How can you turn a website visitor – a stranger – who is not ready to purchase into a lead?
• Further, how do you get that lead into your sales funnel so you can convert them to a customer at a later date?.

This is the new way of thinking and a competitive advantage especially if your in an atiquated industry. Do you have a sales funnel? Do you even consider your website visitors to be leads?

DESIGN AND BRAND STANDARDS

Mistake #1: Putting Design First

This is usually the first and only step that a buisness owner thinks about when they are contemplating a website redesign or a site for their new business. Rightfully so. A company’s brand is very important, but it is our job as marketers to understand there is more to a website than just design.

Before you start down the path of creating a new website you first must layout your branding standards. Also think forward to the conversion pathway, as you will need to design CTA’s (call to action buttons), landing pages and thank you pages in order to nurture your leads through the sales funnel.

The design choices should be left up to the graphic designer or the business owner.  All parties involved should conduct research with existing customers, the sales team, and a marketing agency to obtain feedback. The decisions you make about your design and branding standards now will spill over from your website:

• Into your marketing and collateral materials,
• Onto your sales team,
• In your company culture, and
• Most importantly these choices will affect your existing customers and prospects.

As an example we have done quite a few website redesigns and audits for limousine companies over the last couple of years. The vast majority of them have a black background with white or gray text. Even though the limousine industry utilizes black cars and their chauffeurs dress in all black suits, we would not recommend using a black background because this makes it very difficult to read the text on the site and therefore increases your bounce rate.

You could easily use black as a secondary or accent color and use a light gray as the background color with a back Arial or Serif font to make the text easy to read for the visitor.

This is exactly why you need to let data and your customers assist you through the design process.

 

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Mistake #2: Relying on Your Web Designer for SEO

What’s the point of having a website if no one can find it?

Most web designers will tell you that your site is designed for SEO. They might think that it i. However, it usually isn’t and that is why your rankings are suffering. It’s not the designer’s fault, so please don’t hold it against them.  They just aren’t focused on the area of search engine optimization which requires constant education.

Your designer wants the website to look awesome.  That’s why you hired them right?

Well, what happens when the images they have used on your website are not compressed and your page load speed is slow? Your bounce rate increases because visitors don’t want to wait for 4-5 seconds. Google also takes notice of pages with slow load speeds.

Here is a list of basic SEO items to address with your site, but keep in mind this is basic…

• Image size – As mentioned above your page load speed is very important to the user experience.  The majority of your images should be less than 100kb which means they need to be compressed before they are uploaded to your file manager.  This can be done via Yahoo’s smushit.com for free.
• Clean URLs – Your URL structure needs to be clean and designed not to duplicate.  Many designers like to use a structure like www.abc.com/php/home.  This is not a clean URL. It should be www.abc.com/home.  Secondly be sure to use – and not _ for your longer URL extensions.  Lastly, if at all posible, use your pages primary keyword in the URL for each page, just be sure to keep it relevant to the on-page copy and, once again, don’t duplicate.
• Duplicate Content – This is a big issue in WordPress. Many designers are using the built in tagging system for each page and not just for blog articles.  Here is an example of how duplicate content is created by a bad URL structure – www.abc.com/news/i-love-abc. The www.abc.com/news is hosting the content on a page and the www.abc.com/news/i-love-abc is also hosting the same content on another page creating duplicate content. Duplicate content is not good and needs to be removed. It weighs down your website and Google frowns not only upon heavy websites, but duplicate content as well.
• On-Page SEO – I am going to put all of this under one heading because this is very basic stuff that every designer should know.  It all starts with your URL and then migrates to your Title tag, and then onto your Header tags. Ideally, your website should have one (1) H1 tag per page using a keyword phrase.  Then, you should have up to six (6) H2 tags per page using a keyword phrase. Every image on your website needs to have ALT Text so search engine bots crawling your site can see the image and also provide SEO for Google image searches. All of these items factor into the keyword density for each page.  keep your keywords below 5% of the total word count per page so you don’t get slammed for keyword stuffing.
• Meta Description – Even though there is little to no SEO benefit to meta descriptions any longer these are crtical to “sell” the person conducting a search to click on your link. This is your “elevator pitch” for each page so be sure they are powerful and unique to entice a visitor to click.
• Schema Markup – Schema is critical for search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing to better understand the content on your website. It is relatively new for designers, but experienced marketer’s and SEO’s know exactly how to implement a schema map.
• Name, Address, Placement – Referred to as NAP by SEO’s, include your local address, local phone number, and a link to your local address on Google Maps on each page of your website. This can easily be added to the footer of your website. It’s also a good idea NOT to use an 800 number or add a company that builds duplicate landing pages from your site for lead generation. Different phone numbers and company names will not only confuse your search results, but your visitors.
• Local Links – If you’re trying to rank locally then be sure to create links to local businesses that have a high page authority.  This will help with your local placement as the search engines will see these local citations.

All of the factors are basic for us, but all to often overlooked by designers. The most important thing to keep in mind is that each page needs to be unique all the way from the URL to the content and meta description.

Think of your website structure as a filing cabinet and the top drawer is your homepage.  Inside the top drawer are the green tabbed folders that all contain a unique label.  Inside of the green folders are manila folders (internal pages) with unique labels (URLs and Header tags) and inside of the manila folders is your paperwork (text and content).

If your files are labeled with unique names that are easy to search and relevant to the content inisde of the manila folders then you won’t be able to easily locate the document you need.  This same structure needs to be implemented on your website for good SEO.

CONVERSION PATH

Mistake #3: Not focusing on the User Experience and Conversion Path

The most important page on your website is not the homepage, but the 2nd page that a visitor clicks to. This is why optimizing the conversion path is extremely important to a well designed website. Keep in mind in the design process that you only have 5-8 seconds to convince a visitor to click a link to take the next step. So make it as clear as possible.

Optimizing the conversion should really start when you layout your site map prior to starting wireframes. This can be done in a spreadsheet or graphically.  The key to success it determining your most important pages and making sure they can be reached within one click.  These could be landing pages, product pages, squeeze pages, or even informtational pages.

There is no right or wrong selections for your “2nd page conversions”, but there is better or worse.

This is where your sales model comes into play. If you have a sales team or the ability to nurture your leads then you may want tp focus on landing page conversions.  If your an ecommerce company then driving visitors to highest margin or most popular products would be a good choice.

With our site, we use our blog pretty heavily to send visitors to landing pages. (Notice above we have included two CTA’s to landing pages.) We have tested both long format and short form landing pages over the years and our metrics dictate that we have an average conversion rate of 32% on short form versus 19% on long form, so we now try to consistently use a short form for all of our landing pages, unless we are running an A/B test with a new landing page.

Focusing on the user experience should be the first step then you can focus on design to surround this path.

Things to think about…

• Where will your primary CTA be placed?
• Will a CTA be placed in the header or will we be using Hello Bar?
• What are your top 5 entry pages to the site?  Do you have CTA’s on these pages? If not, where should they go?
• How many pages can a visitor access from the top entry pages?
• Is your primary navigation easy to use and understand for customers?
• What are your top 5 exit pages and how can you optimize them better for the user?

Now that you have these questions. Answer them then take one more step and go to Crazy Egg and invest in at least a one month subscription to drop heat mapping software on your website. Crazy Egg will give all the metrics that Google Analtyics doesn’t from Heat Mapping to Scroll Maps.

Now, sit down with your designer and discuss your new layout, conversion path, and then enlist an SEO to conduct an audit of your old site and your new, prior to launch.

I get a very small kick out of marking unsolicited PR and commercial emails as spam:

I never knew what this actually did — indeed, I would often continue receiving emails from a sender I marked as spam — until this weekend when I spoke to an email marketer at a big corporation. It turns out it's a very big deal for email marketers, and too many spam reports led to a major campaign getting shut down at her company. 

Specifically, an account will be locked if above 0.5% of emails from it are marked as spam, according to email marketing company Campaign Monitor.

Here's how companies keep track of that number:

SEE ALSO: Why The Spammers Are Winning

Join the conversation about this story »

Amazon announced the Fire phone, its first ever smartphone today. 

It has three big features that make it different than other phones on the market:

• The Mayday button, which gives a user instant access to video help support. 
• Firefly, a dedicated button that lets you scan objects and then buy them through Amazon.com. 
• Dynamic Perspective, which creates an illusion of depth on the screen, allowing you to see more things on the screen as you tilt it. 

Those are all fine, but the thing most people are talking about right now is the phone's price. 

Amazon, which is known for low-prices, is charging a lot for its phone. 

Without a contract, the Amazon phone is $649 for the entry level Fire phone. The average selling price for an iPhone in first three months of the year was $596. That means, the average iPhone is cheaper than the cheapest Amazon phone. Nobody expected Amazon to be more expensive than Apple. 

Further, Amazon's phone is only going to be on AT&T. Amazon didn't announce a plan for international carriers.

As a result, the snap reaction to Amazon's phone is "huh?" Why would Amazon release an expensive phone on one carrier? This thing is destined to be a flop.

And, we tend to agree with this snap reaction! This Fire phone will not sell well. At this price, with these features, on that carrier, there's just not enough to make it more compelling than the iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy S5. 

But, Jeff Bezos is a pretty smart guy. So, there has to be some method to his madness, right? We don't know what Amazon is thinking, but maybe it's not as crazy as it seems for Amazon to charge a premium price for its phone. Perhaps Amazon is intentionally stifling demand early on. 

One of the great tricks Apple has pulled on the world is making it think that cranking out 50 million brand new iPhone models on a quarterly basis is easy. It's not! Apple and Samsung are the only companies doing it. 

Amazon, which has no experience in mass manufacturing of smartphones, can't start with a $0 phone and expect to keep up with demand. It has to start small, then grow its line. 

But, you might say, Amazon is all about thin margins, why charge a high margin price? After all, Jeff Bezos famously said, "Your margin is my opportunity." The implication of that quote is that he's willing to make less money than a rival to take market share.

We once spoke with a high-level executive who makes hardware products. We can't remember if it was on background or on the record, so we'll just keep him anonymous. Anyway, he told us that no matter who you are, the first hardware product you do is going to lose money, regardless of the price, because there are startup costs associated with building an entirely new product. 

Therefore, Amazon might still be losing money, even with a premium price. By selling a limited number of phones, it loses less money.

There's another reason to charge a high price. It may be willing to start at a high price to limit users to a select group that really wants the phone. It can use the early people as a controlled experiment. It can fine tune the product based on the actions of the people that really want to buy the phone.

Over time, the price will drop. Don't forget, seven years ago, Kindle was $400. Today, you can get one for $70, or less. Eventually the Fire phone will be super cheap, and at that point, Amazon will be ready to handle the demand. 

Every year, Bezos sends shareholders his original shareholder letter which has this sentence: "This is Day 1 for the Internet and, if we execute well, for Amazon.com." This is a big theme for Amazon. Its buildings are named "Day One" — that's how much he believes in that. He's a long-term thinker.

The Fire phone will be a dud in the short term, but that doesn't mean it's going to be toast in the long run. Bezos is relentless, and he's not going to give up. 

So, snort all you want at the price today. In a few years it will be cheaper, and then we'll see if Amazon can make a difference in the market.

Join the conversation about this story »

A new initiative from online education resource Udacity and AT&T may actually help high-school graduates without college degrees get skilled tech jobs.

For $200 per month, users can enroll in a six- to 12-month program that gets them a "nanodegree," proof to job recruiters that they have successfully acquired a certain skill.

The initial offerings, beginning this fall, are in front-end web development, back-end web development, iOS development, and data analysis. Udacity has said another offering will be for Android development, and many more are planned.

AT&T is making up to 100 paid internships available to top applicants with nanodegrees, and will offer full scholarships for worthy candidates who could not otherwise afford a course.

It has invested $1.5 million into the initiative.

Udacity says it plans on working closely with other companies to develop courses and application programs similar to the one they collaborated with AT&T on.

Cloudera, salesforce.com, Autodesk, Technet, Silicon Valley Leadership Group, sf.citi, and the Business Roundtable have already agreed to recognize nanodegrees as valid job credentials.

While college-level online courses have been available for awhile now, research has shown that those who don't really need them — professionals who already have at least a bachelor's — are the majority of those using them.

A 2012 McKinsey report said that the world is on track to having a shortfall of as many as 85 million high- and middle-skilled workers by 2020.

"Research tells us that 65% of U.S. jobs will require some form of post-secondary education by 2020, yet fewer than 40% of Americans are educated beyond high school today," Jamie P. Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation, told CBS MoneyWatch last year.

If more companies like AT&T help develop these talent pipelines, nanodegrees could provide entry to good-paying jobs without the investment of increasingly expensive four-year degree programs.

SEE ALSO: 19 Websites That Will Make You Smarter

Join the conversation about this story »

America's job market is ripe for vocationally trained individuals. Federal education funds are going disproportionately to higher education, despite a greater demand for jobs that require skills-based education.

“We don't need to do any additional market research with patients,” I told the CEO of a large dental practice management firm.

We were concurrently conducting research with his patients and staff to try to understand what was most important to patients.  “So far, the information we are receiving from your dental hygienists and dental assistants is exactly in sync with what patients are telling us. Let's save you some money and cancel the rest of the scheduled patient research.”

Yes, the front-line staff, who directly interact with patients day-to-day, had very accurate insights into what their patients cared about. The dentists we interviewed were much less clear about patients'  needs and wants, and the company's corporate executives had, relatively speaking, poor insights into what patients were thinking.

I have seen this pattern repeated many times. Front-line employees are deeply in tune with customer interests and needs, and as you move away from the front lines, up the executive ranks, you see much bigger disconnects between assumptions about customers and reality.

And, of course, we all know where the marketing and product decisions that affect customers happen. Hint: It's not on the front lines.

You need to take advantage of this valuable employee knowledge.

Do you ask your employees what's going on in your business?

Do you encourage them to speak up?

Do you welcome their insights?

Your customer-facing employees work in the best research laboratory you have, gaining insights from the daily encounters they have with real-life customers. The experience they gain from these encounters gives them perspectives that workers living in the home office bubble can't possibly acquire.

Here are some questions I recommend that you ask your front-line employees, in order to engage them in conversations that will help you improve your business. (With the obvious requirement that you assure them that it is safe to talk and share their insights.)

So, what do our customers believe about us?

Your front-line employees know when and where you make customers happy, and when you don't.

Ask them to imagine what customers are saying to their friends about your company. Ask them how customers would complete this sentence about your company: “It sure would be nice if…”

What’s right, and what’s wrong, about the experience we create for our customers?

You're guaranteed to get some surprises here.

Front-line employees witness the details of the interactions between your customers and your company. They will, inevitably, see things that you can't see from your desk, giving you an opportunity to improve your customer experience in meaningful ways.

If you had a magic wand, what would you change about our company?

As insightful as front-line employees can be, they often don't feel empowered to use those insights to suggest changes in the way your company operates.  If you encourage them to share suggestions for improvement, and if you listen carefully, you will discover important ways to improve your organization.

What would you like to do differently in your job to deliver a better customer experience?

Most employees will follow the procedures that have been outlined for them, and all employees have ideas for improving those procedures. It's not surprising they would have these ideas, since they spend so much more time doing their work than the people who created the procedures ever did.

Your front-line employees know many things you don't know.  Think of what can happen if you tap into their knowledge.

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When the Huffington Post was sold for over $300 million, it was a signal that news was never going to be the same again. Websites that at first glance look like blogs on steroids have now become the new and fast emerging global news channels. Their home pages are dominated by list style posts.

These include:

• 29 signs You’re Not a Cat Person
• 25 Very Real Struggles Of Making New Friends As An Adult
• 20 Things Only People With Cold Hands Understand

Love or hate them “list posts” work.

Buzzfeed by the numbers

Buzzfeed is one of these new generation social network driven websites that are making the traditional players sit up and take notice. What started as an online laboratory called “Buzzfeed Labs” in 2006 (which was an initiative to create, test and measure viral content) is now evolving into a more serious long form journalism site.

Today the site publishes 378 posts a day which are sourced by staff, syndicated content and external contributors. To put some perspective on its popularity that has the traditional players such as the New York Times worried, here are the latest traffic numbers for the last month according to Quantcast.

• 162 million unique visitors
• Over 106 million mobile visitors
• 394 million page views
• Ranked as the 11th largest site in the USA

Despite its humble and seemingly superficial beginnings, the impact of a website driven by data scientists and social media cannot be ignored.

The New York Times takes a hard look

The New York Times is a 150 years old. So you don’t expect it to be nimble. It is struggling to reinvent itself. But it did decide to review this new landscape and take a hard look at the fast emerging publishing landscape and have an honest review of itself and its competitors. These include not only Buzzfeed but Mashable, The Guardian, Vox, First Look Media, The Atlantic and Politico.

The revelations from the recently leaked report into their challenges of facing upstarts and competitors is a compelling insight into publishing and also content marketing.

Content is the weapon of choice to gain attention traffic and advertising revenue in a digital world.

Content marketing lessons

One observation from the report that surprised me away was that they didn’t use social media for marketing but for measuring!

Here are some insights into how companies need to adapt in a digital age with publishing and content marketing. I have also included actual excerpts from the report.

1. Experiment

Just like Buzzfeed started a “Buzzfeed Lab” to find what went viral and why, brands need to be experimenting all the time to find what works and what doesn’t. As all of us have become online publishers we need to be constantly learning about what content resonates.

Coca Cola’s content marketing strategy is built upon a 70/20/10 investment principle. 70% is low risk content, 20% should innovate off what works and 10% is high risk ideas.

2. Repackage your content

The New York Times discovered that original content that was repackaged into Flipboard became the best read collection in the history of the paper.

So take your content and turn it into videos, images and even presentations and podcasts. Everyone has different media consumption habits and preferences.

3. Re-use old content

They discovered that resurrecting old content could generate significant traffic. They tested this with videos related to love and articles about sex trafficking.

4. Create content templates

Buzzfeed has perfected the template model so that they can quickly create new content without having to custom build from scratch as bespoke content. Publishing content quickly is important on the social web that doesn’t tolerate the old 24 hour news cycle. Content marke

5. Continue to innovate your platform

Innovation is not just about the content. First look Media were found to have provided modern tools and templates that elevated and motivated the content creators. Journalists and writers.

The platforms need to consider analytics, optimization and testing frameworks. This builds a moat around your brand and is difficult to replicate

6. Content marketing is not just about “publishing”

Writers and content creators have often put marketing a very distant second to the art of writing. You need to hustle your content.

Everyone is a marketer whether you like it or not.

7. Your content creators need to be socially savvy

The savvy publishers and content marketers realise that the content creator (reporters and even editors) to be socially savvy and fully fluent in social media. Often writers are chased down by even traditional publishers because they have large social networks!

8. It’s not just about the headline but social

Pushing your content onto social networks is important to accelerate sharing. It’s not just about the headline anymore.

9. Don’t forget search engines

On an integrated web search engines are still vital. They discovered at the New York Times that doing some SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) increased traffic by 52 percent!

10. Build best practice into search and social

The New York times has realised that it’s competitors have been following best practice for digital marketing for years. At the Huffington post a story can’t be published unless it has the following ready to go:

• Photo
• Search Headline
• Tweet
• Facebook update

11. Email is a very important marketing tool

Content marketing is not just about the new shiny toy of social media marketing. The New York Times, despite having an email list of 6.5 million still used email marketing as an afterthought!

12. Use your social channels for experimentation

Social media, due to its low cost of publishing is a perfect tool to use as a hotbed of experimentation. The high cost of print didn’t allow you to do that and receive data and results back in real time

13. The brand content creators need to be part of the marketing

They discovered that Reuters Digital made sure its web editors were tasked with identifying influential online communities to seed and amplify their content.

Sometimes called influencer marketing.

14. Tap into the power of user generated content

User generated content is free and a very powerful marketing tactic and its free. Octoly provided some research that revealed that some brand content creation just on YouTube alone was 99% of all brand conversations.

15. Use an email marketing platform

Using your email list is one thing but having a “proper” email marketing platform is another for efficient work practices in a digital world.

The report revealed that the New York Times had to manually pull it from registration data. This revelation is scary!

16. To content marketing at scale you need a “marketing platform”

The digital media world is many moving parts and splintered tactics. The only way to do it “at scale” is to have a “marketing platform”

17. Fail fast and learn

On the fast moving web you need to fail fast, often and learn.

18. It’s a team effort

Content marketing is a team effort. It requires skills across writing, technology, products, user experience and marketing.

19. Need to know what success looks like

A content marketing strategy needs to outline what the metrics that measure success look like. Is it traffic, brand awareness, conversions or sales?

20. Leaders need to “unlearn”

What used to work doesn’t now Many executives and CEO’s were born in an era of fixed phones, traditional media and suits and ties being the dress standard for every office. They built huge companies with what worked then. But it is now. Amazon has redefined retail. Apple has disrupted the music industry (just to name one) and Kodak missed the digital camera boat.

The old business models are being shaken to the core. Only before the old habits are unlearned can new content marketing habits be embraced.

21. Think “digital” as a priority

After the leaders have unlearned then the requirement is to ensure “digital first” as a mantra. Content marketing is not just about digital content but it’s now the “big” part!

What about you?

What has surprised you the most about these content marketing lessons, insights and revelations from the New York Times?

What could you implement today?

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

Blogging is a serious business for companies willing to go the extra mile when it comes to online marketing. For starters, a well-formed “business blog” allows you to climb higher on search engines, give site visitors more material to read through, and populate social media channels with original work. Sounds easy, right?

Business blogging is a bit more complicated than it sounds. These writers are representing a company as either outsourcers or internal marketers; either way, it’s challenging to grow interest in a business-branded blog. To help, here are 20 tips to grow your readership and lock down customers:

Blog Design

1. For smaller companies, we recommend using a pre-made WordPress theme. Choose one that is easy to manage, looks professional, and allows you to customize sidebars and other elements.

2. Keep sidebars and widgets to a minimum. Clutter distracts readers and may give off a negative impression to them.

3. Ensure that your blog has noticeable social media buttons for immediate sharing on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and other platforms.

4. When writing, put just as much emphasis on the format of the posts as you do the content. It’s much easier to mess up an image or video link than it is to get it right.

5. Businesses should consider using a news-brief style blog roll. This is when recent posts appear on the main page as snippets. For the reader, it is much easier to hunt for topics of interest than scrolling down an endless page.

Content Writing

6. No matter what, your posts should strive to be original, entertaining, and informative. You can meet this goal by following the following tips…

7. Don’t worry about post length as much as the wealth of information and opinion within the content. If it’s good, a reader will read the entire thing.

8. Stick to writing topics related to your industry to maintain the professional feel of the blog. Try some of these tips when brainstorming topics:

• Find questions that customers might ask about your products or industry and answer them.
• Link in trending news articles that are related to your business and add commentary.
• Focus on the “10 Tips” and “How-To” formats that are popular and expected of blogs.

9. Don’t be overly promotional in your content! The goal of your blog is to let people find you — the actual website should sell itself.

10. At the most, add in a call-to-action at the bottom of your posts to convince readers to learn more or check out a solution by your company.

Marketing

11. You may have a big group of social media followers who follow you on multiple platforms. To avoid bothering them, space out “Check out this new post on our blog!” updates so they don’t overwhelm newsfeeds.

12. Sharing is caring in the social media world, and often the best way to do this is to retweet or link into an external (non-competitor) blog. The goal here is to use someone else’s following to boost your presence.

13. Consider paid Facebook and Twitter promotion for your big-hitter content. It’s cheap and a good way to build up a readership foundation.

14. Be active in your blog community. For WordPress users, this is as easy as skimming through your WordPress Reader, finding similar blogs, liking their content, commenting, and mentioning popular posts by other people in your own content.

15. Don’t be afraid to use trending topics. These are things people look up on Google for more info. Why not learn more on your blog and how some issue relates to you?

Must-Follows

16. Consistency counts in the blogging arena. Make sure to post and update your blog regularly to appear on newsfeeds and syndication sites.

17. Never post something if you’re not proud of it. One bad apple spoils the bushel, after all.

18. Always edit, revise, reread, and re-edit your content before publishing it. As a professional blogger, it’s essential to publish professional-grade content.

19. Don’t go in blind! Look at what other businesses within your industry are blogging about and reinvent proven strategies.

20. Ask for help! We are always managing business blogs and helping writers become better bloggers. For guidance, some advice, or content, just visit our site.

There are dozens of computer programs out there for editing images and creating art, but you probably wouldn't guess that Microsoft Excel is one of them.

We don't blame you — Excel is typically associated with bland spreadsheets, crunching numbers, and boring charts.

But Tatsuo Horiuchi, a 74-year-old man from an area in Japan called Nagano Prefecture, has discovered how to make stunning works of art using Excel spreadsheets.

Horiuchi's art has been circulating the web over the past several years, so we decided to round up some of his best work in one place.

Horiuchi began using Excel to create art after he saw others using the program at work, he said to PC Online.

But Horiuchi never actually used Excel for office purposes, as it's intended to be used.

"I saw other people neatly drawing graphs, and I thought it seemed like Excel could be used to draw art," he told PC Online.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

We've already begun seeing how the Internet of Things (IoT), the tech industry's term for computerized consumer devices (e.g. thermostats, light fixtures, home alarms), can change our lives for the better, both in the consumer market with companies like Nest, and in the enterprise.

The connectivity, analysis, and management that IoT will provide promises to make our lives easier, more efficient, and even longer if companies like Apple continue pursuing health-monitoring products.

But IoT isn't without its challenges. If the Internet of Things is going to really take off, here are the obstacles it will have to overcome:

1. Signaling

In order for smart devices to have a meaningful impact on our lives they have to be able to connect to and communicate with each other. These connections have to be consistent and reliable, otherwise the data is only going in one direction and is considerably less useful. If the IoT is going to succeed, devices will need to be connected reliably 100% of the time.

2. Security 

Security is probably one of the most obvious challenges to the IoT. We've already seen smart devices used to attack businesses. Recently hackers used a smart refrigerator to send malicious emails to thousands of businesses. In order to secure these devices, IoT companies will need to ensure that they can only be accessed by their designated users, that their data is encrypted, and that the devices aren't vulnerable to just anyone online.

 3. Presence Detection

In order for your smart devices to work collaboratively, you need to know that all your devices are online and be able to fix any that come off of your network. The ability to monitor smart devices' connectivity in one place will be crucial to keeping them at their maximum efficacy and value. What good is a smart thermostat if it stops working but you don't realize it?

4. Power Efficiency

Having multiple devices online and communicating with one another simultaneously uses a lot of energy. Considering that one of the main appeals of the IoT is reducing our overall power consumption through monitoring our behavior (this is the main selling point for products like the Nest thermostat), it's important that smart devices not hog electricity and render themselves completely counterproductive.

5. Bandwidth 

In addition to power, smart devices also consume a lot of bandwidth (because they're connected to the internet constantly). Having the networks to support all of our devices will be crucial to the success of the IoT overall.

With 5G mobile networks about a decade away, we may have to wait a few years before our internet can fully support the services the IoT has to offer. Until then we'll have to experience the Internet of Things in its piecemeal glory.

SEE ALSO:  The 'Internet Of Things' will be bigger than the smartphone, tablet, and PC markets combined

Join the conversation about this story »

There’s been some new stories recently about a report eBay did last year claiming that paid search for large brands was pretty much worthless. Many of these stories are focused on the fact that online advertising is not living up to its promise. Obviously this caught my eye because I oversaw digital marketing for eBay – a team of over 300 people back in the day when we built our own systems. This was a question we constantly studied in a number of different ways during my 5 year tenure in the role. We even tested it more explicitly by completing turning off Google for over 10 days during eBay live back in 2007. :)

This quote stood out from the study: “We find that SEM accounted for a statistically significant increase in new registered users and purchases made by users who bought only one or two items the year before. For consumers who bought more frequently, SEM does not have a significant effect on their purchasing behavior. We calculate that the short-term returns on investment for SEM were negative because more frequent eBay shoppers are accountable for most of paid search sales.”

It is important to keep in mind every advertiser on paid search is not like eBay. In fact, very few businesses in the world enjoy the brand awareness and penetration eBay does. However, there are two other factors to keep in mind when looking at this data.
1) The importance of understanding user acquisition and CLV? Too often search marketers get the value of the transaction and not on the value of the acquired user. Notice the part of the statement above that discusses new users. It is important to understand that paid search is a great acquisition channel. When considering the ROI of your advertising spend it is important to attribute some percentage of the Customer Lifetime Value to the acquisition channel. We did that very early on at eBay and it had a large impact on our ROI. This was the right move. However, a company the size of eBay has less Americans to acquire and more of the paid search activity becomes retention related. It is at this point that pure transaction value may not meet certain ROI hurdles when compared to other channels.

2) Search now has a way to solve the retention vs. acquisition problem? With the recent introduction of Audience buying in search through Google’s RLSA feature, this problem can now be solved. Google and companies like Marin allow you to create audience segments for search and adjust bidding and creative appropriately. In the case mentioned above, create a segment for “frequent ebay shoppers” and bid appropriately. We have customers at Marin who create segments for loyal users and choose to bid them down in search knowing that they will find their site directly or through some other organic channel like SEO. This approach can be applied rather simply to brand terms and then you can expand it from there. I know eBay has the capability to identify these users very easily. If you don’t want to risk abandoning your brand terms for fear of competition, you might want to change the creative to take advantage of an upsell opportunity. In the case of eBay, I know the CLV of an eBay user increases when they buy in more than one category. You could go so far as segment frequent users per category and only show them ads when they are looking for something outside of their normal category of purchase. There are many ways to break down this challenge to drive more efficiency in your advertising spend.

Back to the promise of online advertising. Its alive and well. The same tools and techniques that made search advertising such a promising medium have been transferred to other channels. Advertisers now have the ability to combine the intent data of search with the audience data from various sources to move us closer to the goal of true personalization in advertising. While we don’t quite have the ability to fully solve Wannamaker’s conundrum, I feel we are getting closer every day.

Free time and productivity. These are often the two things business software firms promise their customers. But oddly enough, you don’t often see them pitching one alongside the other. At best, you can learn about how free time can be opportunities to be more productive. At worst, you can get into a small debate about whether free time is more or less valuable than current productivity.

This is a big deal because summer is usually the time of year when you’re stuck in the office but your mind’s shifting to vacation mode. To make matters worse, maybe several of both prospects and key sales reps have already gone ahead and booked a few days leave. So what do you pitch in your new software lead generation strategy? More free time or more productivity?

There’s something to be said about how people see free time as a chance to unwind and how it can also be seen as a chance to do more stuff. And as history will tell you, technology has always been the gateway to freeing up time as a resource. Are prospects who approach free time in one way better or worse than the other?

Not exactly. What is important is that you can tell the two apart and understand what they’re trying to achieve. Let’s start by turning these into customer personas and giving them names: Mr. Efficiency and the Surfer Guy.

Mr. Efficiency

This is the guy who thinks free time should only mean more time to focus on tasks that generate higher value for the business. They’re the types who research and come up ways to be productive during summer. No technology is ever convenient until it takes their minds of dull tasks and onto sharpening them in more meaningful ones.

However, there’s a fine line between efficiency and workaholism. It’s not healthy to constantly look up new ways to keep working without actually taking the occasional breather. You don’t want B2B customers listing stress as part of your product’s ROI.

Surfer Dude

“Surf’s up! It’s time to parteh!”

Party animals are plenty (especially among Millennials). This doesn’t automatically mean they’re lazy. It could just simply mean they’ve been working long enough and summer’s their chance to finally let loose.

That makes your technology indispensable when helping them get the job done and still give them the time to pack up their boards. Naturally though, you want to make sure they’re really entitled to that Honolulu trip. Plenty of technology firms have already heard the cries of demand when it comes to tools that measure productivity. Don’t be the ones playing deaf to it and understand how this demand interacts with the desire to earn some extra days off.

So whether it’s free time or more productivity B2B markets have both in demand. Stop focusing your lead generation campaigns on whether or not one makes for a better batch of customers than the other.

It’s no secret that executive compensation has risen much faster in recent decades than wages, particularly in the years since the Great Recession. But a new report from the Economic Policy Institute points to another trend: CEO pay is rising even relative to compensation for the top 0.1% of U.S. earners.

Throughout the 1980’s and early 90’s, CEO pay was roughly three times as high as that of the top 0.1% of earners overall. That ratio spiked in the dotcom years, as CEO pay rose even faster than the stock market. But post-bubble, CEO pay seems to have settled into a “new normal” of 4.5 to 5 times that of top earners. In other words, CEO compensation has risen faster even than other “superstar” earners, a group composed mostly of lawyers, doctors, financiers, and other C-level executives.

The report suggests that, “The large discrepancy between the pay of CEOs and other very high wage earners also casts doubt on the claim that CEOs are being paid these extraordinary amounts because of their special skills.” That may be. The data does suggest that rising CEO pay can’t simply be explained by the broader increase in returns to highly skilled labor.

There’s no understanding CEO pay without noting the dramatic increase in stock options as a share of executive compensation; less clear is whether this explains the change relative to other top earners, or whether they are likewise are increasingly paid in stock. (The numbers from EPI include wages and realized income from stock options at the time they were exercised, but do not include unrealized stock options or other investment income; this may affect the numbers for financiers especially.)

But another explanation is that the value of good CEOs appears to have increased over time, according to recent research.

Less is known about why CEOs seem to matter more — it’s even possible markets just mistakenly think they do. But in any case, the impact of CEOs on companies’ performance has never been higher.

A final point of interest from the report concerns the distribution of pay between the top-paid CEOs and the rest. Contrary to all the talk of “superstar” effects and a winner-take-all labor market, between 2012 and 2013 it was the least-well-paid CEOs who saw the greatest increase in compensation.

Rightly or wrongly, shareholders believe that CEOs matter more than ever, and they’re willing to pay their top executive accordingly.

If you do any B2B marketing, then you should try LinkedIn Ads.  Here are a few pointers from my experience to help you get started.

I'm sure that almost everyone who reads this blog is active on LinkedIn.  

You are 'linked' with all of your business contacts and friends, you have filled out your profile, and you may even be active in a group or two.  But it's quite likely that you have not used the ad platform.  

Or if you have, that you have only tested it and perhaps you stopped after not getting the results you were after.

Well, if that is the case, and you do any B2B marketing, then it's time to take another look at LinkedIn Ads. 

Why?  

Well, if you're in B2B marketing then you need to get the attention of professionals. 

LinkedIn can help you do that because:

• It's a social network specifically for professionals
• It delivers business-focused content for its network
• And, surprisingly, LinkedIn only gets 25% of its revenues from advertising (Q4 2013).

(Note that 90% of Facebook's revenue for the same period was from advertising)

So, should you be looking to deliver a message to a business audience, it's got everything you need - the right network with the right context, and less competition than other platforms for your targets’ attention.  

But like all social platforms, LinkedIn does have its quirks. And many advertisers have been put off by just how different the platform is from Google and Facebook. 

Last year I worked on accounts which spent approximately $100k on LinkedIn ads alone and I learned a lot about what works well on the platform and what is still challenging.

Overall, though, I think that the benefits of advertising on LinkedIn outweigh the challenges, so I’ve provided some tips which can help you navigate the platform and get started advertising on it.

The Good

Let’s start with the good stuff.

Targeting

Hands down LinkedIn has the most accurate targeting of any ad platform. Sure, Google has wider reach and Facebook has more categories, but for pure targeting, nothing beats LinkedIn. This is because LinkedIn users input the targeting data themselves; if they work in a bank, they put in their profile that they work in a bank.  

There is no algorithmic guesswork by the platform like for Facebook Audiences or Google Affinity Segments.

And targeting is not limited to broad categories. You can target very specific attributes:

• Their industry
• What company they work for
• What skills have they been endorsed for
• Their title
• Or even groups they belong to.

So if your target is, say, employees of major banks in European countries, you can configure your ad to be delivered to that audience and be reasonably sure that they will be the ones who see and click your ad.  

Audience sizing

Now this is cool. When you're building your ad - before you have even paid anything - you can see exactly how big the ad audience is going to be (if it has over 1,000 people).

For example:

• How many people work in software in the USA? (1,158,055)
• How many employees does Bank of America have globally? (151,556)
• Or how many work in HR in Asia? (813,867)

I can only guess at how hard it was for the product visionaries to get this feature into the platform, so be thankful we have such great information and use it where you can. I mean, you can even size a target market when you’re advertising elsewhere.

Self-service tool

LinkedIn does not have the most sophisticated ad engine (both Google and Facebook have more functionality), but it does the job.  

You can put multiple people on one account, collaborate on ads, and easily do multiple versions of an ad in one campaign.  

They also offer a dashboard to keep an eye on ad performance and a button to turn both ads and campaigns on and off.

The Not-so-good

Now the challenges - and how you can get around them.

The ads

The first complaint for those who start using the platform is the ad size. You are strictly limited to a 25 character headline, 75 characters in the body, and a 50x50 image.  With a bit of work, though, it is certainly possible to deliver an effective ad within those constraints.

Here’s what you need to do:

1) Identify your audience.  

Although you are reaching your intended audience with your targeting, the reader doesn’t know that so you have to let them know that what you’re saying is for them. And it’s best to do this in the headline.

2) Tell them what you do.

You only have room for one value proposition, so spit it out.  And remember, B2B audiences have very different priorities than B2C.

3) Make an offer

In a recent podcast on The Lede, Joanna Wiebe talked about a button being like a closed door.   And closed doors cause anxiety, which leads to people not clicking.  Your ad is also like a closed door.  And not knowing what you offer also leads to inaction. So, help them out. Let them know what’s on the other side, what you offer.  And you'll get higher click-throughs for sure.

4) (Optional) Tell them exactly what to do next.

When you have room, tell them to click.  In my experience, it converts better when you do.

5) Use a face for the image

You only have 50x50 pixels, so it's recommended that you use a face.  It’s the only thing which we can’t, no matter how hard we try, glaze over.  By all means experiment, but my non-face ads have had terrible CTRs.

Managing a large number of campaigns

The self-service tool was clearly designed for the small-scale advertiser in mind.  It handles your every need until you reach about 50 campaigns, and then the problems start.

For one, every time you go to the ad tool you see every campaign - even those you have hidden. Clicking ‘Show all but hidden campaigns’ at the bottom solves this - but when you use the tool many times every day this becomes tedious.

Also, spreading your campaign info across multiple pages makes getting a quick overview hard - and sometimes the ‘next page’ links don’t work.

Finally, the absolute worst aspect of the self-service tool is ‘Duplicate Campaign.’ For some reason, LinkedIn forces you to pick the campaign to duplicate in a pop-up with a randomized list of all previous campaigns - with four campaigns per page.  It's awful. And sometimes it can take so long to find the campaign that you end up redoing it from scratch.

Third-party LinkedIn ad management is available from Adobe, but for those without enterprise software an ad management tool will soon be available from AdStage. (I can't wait to get on the beta program...)

Cost 

And finally, the biggest issue marketers have with LinkedIn is its high minimum CPC (US$2.00) and daily minimum per campaign (US$10).

For those in the branding world, that may not seem high, but many small business marketers are used to running dozens of campaigns with at a buck a day to test different strategies. And these prices make that quite difficult. 

But this can be overcome as well. Although, you cannot change the minimums you can run your ads with a $2 CPM. Then, a click through greater than .1% will start bringing down the cost below $2 per click.

Also, you can stop/start the ads manually for when your audience is likely to be on so that you’re not spending money when you're targets aren't awake.

Oh and don’t pay any attention to the suggested minimums. Always use the absolute minimums of $2 per CPC or CPM.

TL; DR  

So hopefully this guide has helped you come up with some ideas for how to use LinkedIn Ads to promote your business. 

In brief:

• The targeting is great for B2B.
• The self-service ad tool is adequate.
• And although the ads are small and cost are high, there are ways to use it effectively - even on a tight budget. 

But, like with any platform, run tests and try to make the ROI work for your business. And, if nothing else, you will get some great feedback about whether various business segments find your product compelling. 

Experts say that cloud computing is disruptive and then continue on to discuss how the cloud quickly enables innovation while competition between cloud service providers drive costs down. Both of these scenarios are accurate, but the disruption from cloud has additional shockwaves that only now beginning to be felt. Hardware and software vendors are starting to show signs of wear on their revenue streams due to cloud. Eventually, that wave will begin to impact the ecosystems that includes Value-Added Resellers and professional services firms that implement the products for those vendors. Sometime between these two points another wave of disruption will begin to take hold; the move to multi-vendor solutions.

read more

Understanding the Sales Force by Dave Kurlan

I love my Macbook Pro.  It's four years old which means I've had it for three years longer than any Windows laptop I ever owned.  That said, it was beginning to underperform, slow down, and choke.  Yesterday, at around 4 AM, I decided to regroup and deal with those issues.  First, I evaluated the problem, and identified the biggest memory hogs and performance sapping programs.  Next I downloaded Memory Clean and Disk Doctor to free up some space and memory.  Then I downloaded the Mac-specific apps for QuickBooks, Wunderlist, Calendar Pro, and MailTab Pro so that I wouldn't have to keep my biggest memory hog, Chrome, always running with all four of those cloud applications permanently open in the browser.  Then I deleted about 10,000 sent items from Outlook, repaired the machine's permissions, restarted the laptop, and it was performing to expectations again.  I was excited about what I had accomplished in such a short time!

That process isn't very different from what executives must do with an underperforming sales force.

• Evaluate the Sales Force to identify the real reasons for the underperformance, to what degree the issues are causing problems, and which individual underperformers can be saved.  Identify the changes that need to be made under the hood to bring in more new business, increase the win rates, shorten the sales cycle, and determine the increase in performance that will come as a result.
• Install the most useful and helpful sales applications, pipeline management and analytics to drive performance.
• Optimize the Sales Process so that it is milestone-centric, properly sequenced, timed and weighted to make the forecasts more reliable.
• Coach up the sales management team so that they have more of an impact when they coach their salespeople.
   
• Thoroughly train the sales force on new business development, sales process, consultative selling, qualifying, selling value, differentiation, closing and relationship-building.
• Upgrade the sales force by developing a sales-specific recruiting process that includes predictive sales selection through a sales-specific candidate assessment.  This must eliminate the guesswork, and instead, consistently result in each new hire being a strong salesperson who will succeed in your business.
   

I was able to identify the problems with my laptop, optimize it and get it performing well again in just a few hours.  However, it will take several months and probably longer to accomplish the same thing with your sales force.  At four years, my laptop had already far exceeded my expectations for performance and longevity.  Your sales force will produce and eventually meet and exceed your expectations for many years to come, and certainly for a lot longer than four years.

The biggest difference between the laptop and the sales force is not the time it takes to achieve improvement.  It's the time it takes to recognize the limitations and refuse to accept those limitations or say, "It is what it is."  Don't be overwhelmed by the changes that must be made, do bring in a trusted outside expert to evaluate, guide, help and train, and don't overthink it. 

The cost?  That's easy!  How much are you wasting on your worst salesperson?  You already have the money to make the required improvements.  Less is nearly always more.

(c) Copyright 2014 Dave Kurlan

Robot Joe (Photo credit: FlySi)

This year, more than any in a long time, I am hearing a strong backlash to the volumes of emails and content buyers are receiving. In the past eight months, after conducting numerous buyer interviews, this pattern has become so evident; it is as if buyers are screaming at the top of their lungs. In my opinion, there is a cause and effect dynamic taking place in B2B marketing. It goes something like this:

The hard adjustment to the new digital economy is putting pressure on B2B companies to grow. Many are jumping on the content marketing bandwagon. This pressure is resulting in the creation of campaign after campaign in attempts to win over existing customers and new buyers. Inadvertently causing a visible shift in how they are perceived.

The above is my brief view of how I see what is happening to buyer behaviors and perceptions. Let me provide you with an example from an actual customer of a Fortune 500 organization. An example I used at my recent BMA 2014 Conference presentation:

“I’m not sure what happened but it is certainly different. I mean I used to get the occasional emails among many I get but may still have taken the time to give a quick look. Now, it has gotten somewhat out of hand. It seems like everyday I am getting multiple emails from them. What I do now is basically delete them all. I just don’t have the time.” Senior Director, Finance Operations

Although unarticulated, you can sense perception of the organization sending the emails is changing. It is being shaped by the activities and behavior of the organization – not by content. In fact, the content is not even being read.

The Missing Link: Human Connection

From my vantage point of helping organizations and interviewing buyers, there is a missing link occurring. It has to do with buyers desiring high touch in a high tech world. Businesses today risk, in using new digital technologies fervently, losing the human connection with their customers and potential buyers. Through such fervent activities related to automating marketing, organizations can unintentionally create the opposite of what they had hoped to accomplish. Which is, “de-humanize” their digital and content marketing efforts!

Robotic Marketing

The fervent activities I refer to have much to do with automation. What organizations have to be on guard for today is what I call “robotic marketing”. Why would I call it such? Because we can automate to such a degree, we take the human factor right out of it. What follows are some general observations, which should give us pause, based on talking directly with buyers:

• Buyers’ notice when you are pushing hard. As seen above, buyers can figure out when someone has been given a huge lead quota and the campaign pumpers are pumping.
• Hooked on marketing automation. To get the return on recent marketing automation, companies are attempting to make full use of it. Some are doing so in a very overzealous way. It is important to get a return – but at the expense turning off customers and buyers?
• Automating the process. Usually, the focus of automation has been to automate processes. In the name of efficiency and effectiveness. However, a problem arises when the process is what the buyer sees. Such as this example I saw recently in an email displayed for me from a buyer: . Sloppy and obvious to the buyer it was sent by an automated robot.
• Automating bad habits. Without taking care to determine what is the right level of interaction and relevancy we should be having with buyers, we may be automating very bad habits. Taking the status quo and automating everything about it – without first asking questions related to what stays, what goes, and what is needed. For example, the mention above by the Senior Director could be a bad habit in the eyes of a buyer – now exacerbated with automation.
• Automated scheduling means forgetting. With automation has come automated scheduling. Some scheduling is happening so far out, important adaptations are being missed. For example, buyers in a specific group interviewed were receiving content about an industry issue, which was hot three months prior but no longer.

Here is what is evident. If you are engaged in robotic marketing, buyers are going to be astute enough to pick it up. Unfortunately, it will speak volumes about whether your firm really cares. And with millions and millions of content flying about in the digital landscape, getting attention will be next to impossible.

Build Human Connection

A mantra I echoed recently is this – instead of looking at new digital technologies to automate processes, we should look at how we can enhance human interaction. Buyers are not signing up for cold realities. What they do seem to desire is more high touch connection. But, high touch has to have meaning and value for the modern buyer to engage. We are living in an age of digital connections infusing every aspect of life. And, customer and buyers are valuing the one thing we all do not want to lose – the human connection.

The Man

There may not be a CEO or entrepreneur on the planet who doesn’t smile just a little bit when they hear the phrase ROI. In a world that is fueled by obvious returns in periods to short to make meaningful progress (thank you stock market), the idea that measurability exists provides piece of mind to so many of those responsible for the vision, strategy and execution of their respective organizations.

For many things that our businesses do, measurable ROI is simple. If I buy one more machine and put it into production I can generate X% more products, which will generate Y% more profit. The decision then comes down to a simple question of cash flow. Is the potential return worth the short-term financial risk? This type of ROI can also be applied to other facets of the business such as software automation or expansion of the sales force. However, measuring ROI is not always so simple. In fact, in some areas of the business it can be downright hard.

In marketing, the role (unbeknown to many) is to create customers. Essentially spending X amount of dollars to create Y number of new customers; a simple equation perhaps, but the math to determine the success has long been evasive or maybe even impossible.

Before Internet marketing ruled the roost, the primary measurement of marketing success was how many people “Viewed” your advertisements. From broad scope to narrow focus, the idea was to put your business in front of as many of the potentially correct clientele as possible and more or less hope for a response.

With advertiser feedback and the evolution of 1:1 direct marketing the science became a little bit better, but without specific user action such as the filling out of a survey or input of a campaign code it was still next to impossible to directly correlate the creation of a new or returning customer with a specific campaign.

To some extent the marketing spend was somewhat of a pseudo science that kept entrepreneurs and their CFO’s awake at night. Just what was the return of a back page ad in the New York Times?

Money (Photo credit: Tax Credits)

The Myth

With the evolution of digital marketing and social media the ability to measure has taken a substantial leap as every campaign can be tracked, keyword spends can be seen and conversions can be associated with dollar value returns. In short, it is possible to set up every piece of content, tweet or keyword buy with a means to determine its effectiveness answering the question; did someone buy something because of this campaign.

In many ways such progress is an epic improvement to the way it was done before. Now the customer needs to do nothing but just “Surf” for us to get the appropriate data to determine the success of a marketing campaign. For some this may be a moment for celebration, but for others the new and more readily available information merely creates more questions, more unknowns and more uncertainty.

As campaigns themselves become more measurable and the results that ensue become more clearly attributable to ROI, the original question of marketing as a means of creating a customer ends up hanging in the balance. Just because our keyword led someone to a landing page, which led him or her to click on our link and take a specific action, is that the reason they bought something?

The most cut and dry response may be yes, but really the answer isn’t that clear. Does that workflow from click to buy measure in any way the role of content that the ultimate customer may have consumed? Does it say for sure whom in the customers community may have influenced their decision to buy? Is it really safe to say that the purchasers’ affinity toward your brand is legitimated by the sequence of events they went through just prior to making the purchase?

Of course the answer may vary based on the nature of a transaction with the specific brand, but I think the attempt to directly correlate the purchase with the campaign strictly to place a measurable ROI on an activity is an obtuse oversight on the part of those trying to do so. This is because marketing has two very unique stages that need to be measured in totality to fully understand ROI and unfortunately only one part is clearly measurable while the other is not.

The measurable part being the ROI on a campaign, the second being the creation of the aware consumer, the passionate brand advocates and the community that drives earned response to the campaigns seeking measurement. What did building those relationships cost? Can it be measured? Can it be attributed? Better yet, should they be?

Where the science of marketing ROI unravels is perhaps where marketing’s greatest application of effort is needed; creating the relationships that fuel a purchase. Otherwise all of those measured campaigns are going to be nothing more than a beautiful automobile without the gas and oil required to run it.

The Legend

Measured return isn’t something that can or should be ignored. It is important to every business to have those tracking results or improvement would become elusive for every facet of a business, but in the world that we call marketing, ROI needs to be seen for what it is and what it isn’t and complete measurement still (and may always) lack a certain amount of potential as return on relationship is an idea with legs, but unfortunately not a formula.

In the future, as sentiment measurement gains traction and big data correlations continue to provide more clarity to how things that aren’t apparent connect, there will continue to be more and more advanced ways to measure the ROI of the entire marketing mix. However, for now there is still perhaps as much art as there is science when attempting to draw any final conclusions.

What may be the most important take away from all of this is that the desire to connect dots that don’t connect needs to be avoided at all costs when trying to measure the ROI of certain marketing practices.

For instance, the value of a follow, a like or (gulp) an impression; sure you can build an equation that will give you an answer but don’t be upset when I pass judgment on your for making ridiculous correlations.

The desire to put a stake in the ground with a flag that says “Marketing ROI” will probably continue to radiate like heat in the Saharan desert, but just remember the mirages that you see when you reach your most desperate point are most likely not real, which sounds an awful lot like Marketing ROI?

For years I have worked with sales professionals who strive to get around the Gatekeeper – that person at your prospective customer’s company who guards their executive from unnecessary time with all sorts of things but most notably from salespeople.

Reps who try to avoid the dreaded gatekeepers of the business world say that you should “Call early or call late”. I agree – do call early and late in an attempt to reach an executive buyer AND ALSO – don’t shy away from building relationships with executive assistants and administrative assistants.

There are at least THREE reasons why it pays off to work with an EA or AA:

1. EAs (Executive Assistants) and AAs (Administrative Assistants) are easy to reach. You do not have to do much tracking down to find them and you don’t have to leave dozens of messages or spend time to strategize on how to get to them.  In the world of calling buyers, it is an easy connection with a high payoff – assuming you have something of value to share.
2. The EA or AA usually controls their boss’ calendar. They know more about what’s on it than the crazy busy executive himself or herself. Doesn’t it make sense to win over the person who can get you on their boss’ schedule?
3. You get great practice talking with EAs and AAs using your best executive level conversation skills. Rather than only talking to execs, create many more high-level conversations sharing with their assistant why you think it is a good use of their boss’ time to talk with you – the WIIFM factor. We all agree that when an assistant understands there is something of great value, they can actually become your ally and make it happen.

Yes – you could have an internal champion because of the relationship you build up with the EA.

In addition, you can learn:

• What your executive is focused on
• When the best time to reach them is
• What they like, dislike, or would want to hear

If an EA or AA really likes you, they will champion you to not only getting the appointment but even strategies toward closing the opportunity. I’ve seen  or heard about this happening dozens of times in dozens of opportunities.

Just be sure you do not:

• Demean or diminish the role or value of the EA / AA.
• Call them a secretary – now that dates you! Secretaries have gone the way of the stewardess. Don’t say it anymore if you do!
• Have a negative image of what a Gatekeeper is and instead align with them

My long time colleague Keith Rosen has some great tips in the video here that I encourage you to watch. It’s a few short minutes and discusses how humor, for example, can be one way to win over an assistant and get that executive appointment locked down.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So do you work to dodge the EAs and AAs of the world, or do you find ways to team up with them to help their bosses? We say,

Don’t Ditch the Gatekeeper – Align with him or her. Do this, and watch the results.

Lori Richardson is recognized on Forbes as one of the “Top 30 Social Sales Influencers” worldwide. Lori speaks, writes, trains, and consults with inside sales teams in mid-sized companies. Subscribe to the award-winning blog and the “Sales Ideas In A Minute” newsletter for sales strategies, tactics, and tips in selling. Increase Opportunities. Expand Your Pipeline. Close More Deals.

email lori@scoremoresales.com | My LinkedIn Profile | twitter | Visit us on google+

The post Embrace The Gatekeeper appeared first on Score More Sales.

Robert Klara in his Adweek article, For Some Retail Brands, Lifetime Guarantees Never Went Out of Fashion, discusses guarantees and their impact on branding.  One of the things that struck me is that the companies offering no-questions-asked guarantees are also the ones that charge prices many consumers consider obscene.

Well-established brands, like Johnson & Johnson, GE and HP, with stellar reputations and more reasonable, albeit premium pricing, place some limitations on their guarantees.  Intuitively that makes sense.  The higher the price, the better equipped the company is financially to stand behind its offerings.  

Another important consideration is that price-conscious buyers are more difficult to please.  That means that they’re more likely to return your product or service.  The greater the likelihood of a return, the more restrictions you have to place on your guarantee to protect your company’s financial health.

Not obvious

While I’ve often written about the relationship of pricing to brand perception, I don’t know that I’ve ever thought of guarantees as part of that equation.  I have to admit that my CPA background has always had me focusing more on the risk potential than the pricing/branding advantages that guarantees afford.

My experience in working with clients is that, when considering guarantees, they look at what their ‘competitors’ are doing so that they can be ‘competitive.’  Neither they or I considered the importance of congruency between the guarantee, pricing and branding.

Takeaway

In the future, when considering what guarantee to offer, make sure that you’re also considering:

• Where you are on the pricing spectrum–obscene, premium or low.
• The probability of a return.  The lower the price, the higher the probability.
• What impact your guarantee and price will have on your brand image.

Then ask yourself ‘Are the three elements, guarantee, price and brand, congruent?’

Every day I talk to sales managers, directors and vice presidents about their teams. We talk through their administrative and workflow pains and I tell them how Prialto can help. We offer value in a number of ways, but one of our value props often, too often in my opinion, sends the conversation down a confounding path.

By taking administrative processes and workflows off the plate of their salespeople, Prialto gives those salespeople additional hours in the day to focus on other key, high-touch tasks, not the least of which is selling. The confounding part of the conversation comes after I explain how we do that and it usually goes something like this:

“Look, this sounds great, but if I gave my sales reps more time, they would probably just spend it on the golf course or head home early.”

It’s a disheartening sentiment on a number of levels. And I’m not even going to spend time on the fact that it’s been proven again (New York Times) and again (Forbes) and again (The Economist) that working less actually makes you more productive (and I’ll just barely reference the fact that A LOT of business gets done on the golf course!). No, I want to focus on the fact that, when presented with the opportunity to save sales reps time, like more than 12 hours a week worth of time… some management-types will question whether or not their reps will make good use of that time.

Why is that? Two thoughts come to mind;

1. Salespeople tend to be a social bunch. Imagine you’re an executive and your path from say, a conference room you frequent, to your office takes you by the engineering team and then the sales team. The engineering team is plugged into their computers and perhaps literally, hacking away. The sales team is loud, chatting with one another, around each other’s computers and lazily lounging on the office furniture.

Does that sound like a sweeping generalization of Sales teams AND Engineering teams? It is! Sales teams, good ones are just as focused as engineering teams. Even the sentiment that salespeople tend to be an overly social bunch is not really true for “good salespeople.” Which leads me to believe the real reason people say this is…

2. Salespeople are on the front lines of blame when things aren’t going well for a company. Now before you jump all over me to say, “when things are going well, sales people are greatly rewarded,” I would like to say I agree with you.

However, rarely, if ever, has a management-level person admitted, when revenue is down or stagnating that their product simply has issues. No, the first people to blame are the ones who are supposedly, directly responsible for bringing that revenue in the door. And that seems a little unfair.

The title of this post, “do you hate your salespeople?” is obviously supposed to be provocative So “hate” is probably hyperbolic, but at the very least, when expressing such a sentiment you can safely assume that these managers who don’t believe their people are worth saving time for simply lack a certain degree of respect for their sales teams.

In recent years, email marketing campaigns have often gone the way of the print mail marketing campaigns: straight into the trash bin. People have become more and more selective when giving out their email addresses, even at some of their favourite stores. Though many cashiers will ask for an email address in order to send buyers coupons, consumers are already expecting to be hit with a barrage of junk mail and spam.

Spammers and email scams like the Nigerian prince scam have made it harder for earnest marketers to reach out to consumers with their messages. However, all is not lost. You just have to know how to reach your market without coming off as an electronic sales pitch.

As any good marketer knows, marketing is an on-going process. Even if you’re a famous company such as Nike or Coca-Cola, you will always need to market your goods or services. If you’re struggling to come up with new leads, companies such as GetWired can help you generate new leads with email campaigning and other forms of marketing.

Your first step is to choose a goal for your campaign, or simply put, a way to determine whether or not you’ve received a lead. Read on to learn about possible goals you may have and how you too can launch a successful email marketing campaign that generates the types of leads you want.

Sign Up for Weekly/Biweekly/Monthly Newsletters

Getting people to sign up for newsletters is an excellent first step. This is a great way to bring them the latest news, the latest products and services and any specials or deals you might have going on. This is the kind of stuff they’re genuinely interested in, and so long as you don’t bombard them, you’ll look forward to opening your emails.

Keep your newsletters short and to the point. Try not to touch on too many subjects. Choose three or four topics, create engaging content and send it off. You want to entice buyers to click on certain parts of the email to get more information on a product or service. Keep some information back so it will force readers to click a link to your site.

Getting a newsletter sign up also shows a level of trust between you and consumer. They trust your company not to give out their email address, and they know you’re not trying to spam them.

Sign Up for an Upcoming Event or Show or Attend It

Trade show and other events make for great marketing opportunities. People come here to buy so you already have their interest. The hardest part is letting people know where you’ll be and when you’ll be there.

Shows and events give you the opportunity to interact with your customers face-to-face without distractions or the option to delete you. The consumer can see your product up close and get a better idea of what you’re all about. Your sales people will have better chances of nailing sales if they can only get people to come.

By getting people to commit, or at least saying they’ll commit, you’ll know two things. First, you’ll have a rough sketch of how many people are coming to the show with the intention of dropping by to see you, which will help you decide how many people should be sent to work the show. Too few and customers won’t bother waiting. Too many and your employees will be overcrowded and bored.

Second, you’ll know how people genuinely interested in the product or service. Even if they don’t make it to the event, the fact that they went through the trouble of making their commitment known is a good indication that they might be willing to buy from you in the future.

Interact with Company’s Social Media Pages

Getting more likes on Facebook or follows on Twitter is usually a good sign that you’re doing something right. Basically, the consumer is expecting to interact with your brand on a near-daily basis, and that’s an awesome first step.

Make sure your company’s social media links are in an accessible place on your email campaigns. If readers have to look too hard, they might just forget about it all together. If you’re having trouble getting people from the email to the social media site itself, offer an incentive. It doesn’t have to a discount or a coupon, but a promise of more information and the latest updates.

Be sure to keep your social media and your websites working together. You don’t want to give too much away on social media because you can’t always gauge interaction. People might view your status updates and tweets, but never click on links. They might visit your site later, but you won’t have an accurate read on the success of your marketing efforts.

With emails, you can track how many people click links so it’s best to use both in different ways.

Purchase a Product or Service

The end game is always the same. You want people to come and buy from you.

The success of an email marketing campaign is often measured in how much money was made within the days or weeks, depending on the type of email, following the campaign. Theoretically, if more people clicked the links to your site and your profits were up, your campaign was a success. There are naturally many factors that play into this, but on the whole, it’s a good start.

When encouraging customers to buy from you, keep your subject lines short yet informative. Something as simple as “Summer Sale” will probably generate more clicks than “Check out these cute summer clothes at out summer sale.” Include all of the necessary details about the product or service you’re trying to sell, but hold back just a little so the customer will have to click the link.

All of these indicate that a potential buyer is interested in your company and might make a purchase either in your store or online. While opening the email is a good first step, it’s getting your audience to the next step that is the true challenge.

Summer might be looking sweet for vacation goers but it’s a battlefield in the box office. Edge of Tomorrow and Maleficent were neck in neck but it seems to both that The Fault in Our Stars is currently dominating. And all the while, Transformers 4 and How to Train Your Dragon 2 have yet to make their entrance.

Still, the shocking and fast-paced competition should really come to no surprise for anyone in the marketing business. Even the most successful sales lead generation campaigns can find themselves in a similar situation: One minute you’re on top, but then there’s always a bigger fish.

It sounds like a typical corporate cliché but it’s a reality all the same. If you’re not careful about your success, there can be someone with a better sales lead generation process that can eat yours up.

So how do you stay in the game? Obviously, the best answer would be to never stop growing. If you never stop growing, you always end up being the bigger fish. In fact, it’s like growing a mutant one because you’ve got more liberty than a geneticist to grow what kind of parts you need to adapt in this ocean.

The only problem though is that growth itself requires a strategy:

• Don’t just grow anything – Of course, like any unstable mutation, having the best of certain parts doesn’t exactly make you invincible. On the contrary, it can also make you dangerously inconsistent. You can’t expect a customer to keep going through your funnel when the information they’re getting starts growing sharply inconsistent.

• Learn to be a scavenger – Just because you have set standards for sales leads doesn’t mean you can be overly picky. Sometimes old and cold opportunities are your best bet when it’s the only thing to keep your sales teams working. Read up on the basics of recycling your sales leads because even the biggest sharks in the ocean feed on dead meat at times.

• Use your senses – If you’re going to grow something, much priority should be given to your senses, mainly the ones telling you of any change in the market environment. Your lead generation campaign should be prepped to detect predators, find more potential sources of leads, and teach you how to keep adapting.

The law of the jungle applies to sea as much as land. It applies also applies to marketing. Just like your favorite movie, they might always be a bigger fish if you don’t maintain the grown of your sales lead generation campaign.

When we talk about search engine optimization, we tend to think mostly about how it applies to B2C, or Business to Customer, websites.

This is, perhaps, only natural. After all, the internet is seen as a sort of public forum, offering easy access to information and e-commerce for anyone with access to a laptop, tablet, or smartphone.

So it can be easy to forget that the internet, and by default the search engine, is not only a direct conduit between businesses and potential customers, but also between businesses themselves.

B2B websites need an upwardly mobile web presence as much as their B2C counterparts. Unfortunately, with so much emphasis being placed on SEO for blogs and e-commerce websites, many B2B sites are lacking in fully realized optimization strategies.

At best, B2B sites may be under optimized for organic search to climb a few spots in rankings. At worst, they may be poorly optimized and off the map, costing valuable and potentially lucrative leads.

So lets look at some common missteps that plague B2B companies and their website optimization.

Industry Dependent Keywords

This is perhaps the biggest mistake made by B2B websites who have tried to optimize their websites for better online performance.

Industry specific jargon or nomenclature used as keywords in your anchor text, tags, and online content may make sense to you, but not necessarily to a potential vendor or business partner.

The language your company uses for a specific product of service may differ significantly from the search terms a buyer might use to find your website.

It is important to reevaluate your keyword strategy, and approach from the perspective of a potential vendor who might be unfamiliar with your specific industry terms.

Consider the following tips:

• When brainstorming new keywords, consider the buyer and how your product can answer their immediate needs. Ask your support staff or sales team to take note of common questions from vendor call-ins and use this data for new keyword ideas.
• Conduct customer surveys to learn more about how your current customers found your website. Take inventory of keywords used to find your website for an opportunity to show up even higher for those keywords.
• Use Google Analytics to track your current search traffic and note which search terms are bringing in leads. Setup up these filters and monitor for optimization opportunities or keyword ideas.
• Use social media to look for the most popular keywords and phrases that may relate to your industry and products. You can also take a look at Google Trends and target those trending topics for your industry.

Employ these tips to create a fresh glossary of keywords that can be used to enhance your on-page SEO.

Creating Fresh and Engaging Content

Content is the fuel that drives the search engine. Whether it’s B2B or B2C, a steady stream of high quality content is the secret to getting noticed by both search engines and potential clients.

Blogging is the best way to market your products and services, and to reach customers through online searches, organic links, and social media shares.

However, a successful blog requires an ongoing supply of high quality content. In the wake of Google’s Hummingbird and Panda updates, simply turning out fluff pieces on your company isn’t good enough.

Consider your market, and create content that offers real solutions to their problems and concerns. It is better to have one solid, and authoritative, blog post per week than a daily puff piece.

Keep Your Content Crawlable

Following hot on the heals of creating valuable content, is ensuring that your content can be easily crawled and indexed by Google’s search bots (and other search engines). If the search bots cannot accurately crawl and index your website, they will conclude that there is little if any content to be referenced.

A lack of perceived content will inevitably cause your site to lose traction in organic searches. Use Google’s Webmaster Tools (GWT) to identify any crawling issues and make adjustments.

• XML Sitemap – This is the first step. Make sure you create and submit your sitemap in GWT.
• Broken Links – These should be repaired, eliminated, or properly redirected using a 301 or 302.
• Robots – Make sure you’re not blocking any URLs on your site by visiting www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt and make sure this file is properly formatted.

While the first rule of creating online content is to make it easily accessible to your audience, it is just as important to ensure that it is properly optimized for the search engine bots. Pay special attention to your H1 tags, anchor text, and internal links.

B2C websites may get the lions share of attention when it comes to search engine optimization, but the rules apply equally to B2B companies.

If your website isn’t getting the online attention it deserves, or if you have seen it slipping in the search results, now is the time to reevaluate your SEO strategies and bring them in line with the latest best practices.

American author and poet Maya Angelou died this week at the age of 86. Her life was inspiring and her experiences she shared in her writings gave voice to a whole people who faced sexual abuse and Jim Crow discrimination. Her life would lead to international fame as an artist and activist. Here are five unique lessons that sales people can learn from Maya Angelou:

#1 Know the People: In a lifetime of global travel, Maya Angelou got to know people wide and far, but she took great effort to know those she met including learning their language. The best salesperson will understand the unique “language” and culture of the people they wish to serve – whether that means knowing a bit of foreign languages if you sell to international markets, or having an understanding for the unique culture of the companies you work with in B2B sales.

#2 Keep Trying New Things: What can Maya Angelou’s resume tell you about your sales career? Her own life and career was diverse and dynamic. She was an author, dancer, poet, activist, and screenwriter and playwright among many other things.  Reinventing yourself in sales is essential to make a lasting impact and keep your career interesting. Is your career ready for a re-boot? Could you gain some new skills or diversify your outlook on your industry? Opportunities may be around the corner.

#3 Take Care of Yourself: Maya Angelou loved to cook for friends and nourish herself with home cooked meals. Sales can be physically demanding with long days of travel and many hours talking on the phone. Don’t underestimate the value of the time you may spend by taking care of yourself with good food, exercise, restorative sleep and social interaction. Taking care of yourself first can help sustain your body, mind and soul as well as nurture family relationships. This principle is especially important between long business trips.

#4 Be Dedicated and Deliberate: “I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music,” said Maya Angelou. Even in her final years of life, she would set aside time each day for writing. Do you spend the same time each day making calls to new leads? Sales is a craft and it takes effort and time to perfect it. Just as writers and artists need to dedicate time to pursue their craft, sales people need to set aside fixed durations of time to keep consistently doing the “small things” that contribute to their success.

#5 Tell the Truth: Scanning Maya Angelou’s personal challenges that she faced over a lifetime, its easy to identify areas that would be difficult to own up to, or discuss publicly. Maya was dedicated to “telling the truth” in her work. No topic was too hard for her to face honestly. Do you find yourself shying away from the truth when your sales numbers are down, or do you dig in and find weaknesses in your approach to correct? Being able to face up to our vulnerabilities is part of sales success – and being “real” and genuinely human with your customers is often the best way to build better business relationships.

Let’s take the legacy of Maya Angelou with us into the next day of a great career in sales.

Digital marketers are getting hooked on reporting bigger numbers, but in the process your marketing may actually be making a smaller and smaller impact.

Marketers are making a land grab, including in their reporting big swaths of results that were not driven by their marketing efforts. Many even count the same results twice, all to show that marketing is contributing to results. No wonder 8 in 10 CEOs don’t trust the work marketing is doing.

The problem starts when you begin measuring your programs based on the companies or individuals you reached and what they did. Unfortunately, this is the easy, and almost universal, way to measure digital marketing today.

With all of the data available today you can identify more of the people reached through your marketing than ever before. In turn, that means your reporting is more inflated than ever before. Yikes!

Here are four common culprits.

1. Branded search

If I’m looking for a computer, search for Dell, click the top organic result and buy a new laptop, is search the reason I bought a laptop from Dell? No. I was already looking for Dell, search was simply an easier way to navigate.

When you report this as a sale driven by marketing, you are taking credit for a sale even though marketing didn’t cause it. In my particular case, it would be because I have had two very long-lived Dell computers. My next computer will likely be a Dell because of that experience, not because of my navigational search.

How important is search as a navigational tool? According to Wordstream, the #1 and #2 keywords based on search volume are facebook and youtube. The top 25 includes google, hotmail, facebook login, yahoo, ebay, yahoo mail, craigslist, aol, gmail, and amazon. That’s a lot of navigational search.

Unfortunately Google makes it difficult to identify branded search traffic today, ensuring marketers will continue to credit search for what would have happened regardless.

Sorry to break it to you, but brand followers on social media have the same bias.

2. View-through Reporting

I still remember when DoubleClick first rolled out view-through reporting. In one day our reported results increased by an order of magnitude across nearly every client we were working with. What had really changed? Just the reporting methodology, the actual impact of our marketing efforts hadn’t changed one bit.

Marketers today still report on view-through, or post-impression, results. Some even still use the default 14 or 30 day reporting window many ad management providers still default to. This introduces two major issues:

• Double counting results. How did think that view-through visitor got to your site? Many turned to Google. A few may have been on your email list. But since most B2B marketers measure view-through results in an ad management platform using cookies that cannot be read by the rest of marketing technology stack, the same activity can be independently attributed to two or three different marketing activities.
• Counting what would have happened anyways. If you have a well-known brand and run a well-targeted campaign, you are reaching people who would buy from you without your marketing. In controlled tests, I’ve seen programs where 95% or more of view-through activity was simply counting what would have happened anyways.

And don’t forget that you are reporting on view-through activity from ads that often aren’t even viewable!

3. Marketing Influenced

Like view-through reporting, marketing influenced revenue, sales or leads counts who your marketing had the chance to reach, without any indication that your marketing made a difference in the outcome.

To your credit, the label at least indicates that your marketing wasn’t responsible for the activity, but you improve this metric by increasing your volume of marketing activity, not improving the performance of your marketing.

This is the equivalent of a supermarket buying a billboard in front of their store and then claiming the billboard was driving all of their sales. Let’s stop the ridiculousness.

4. Retargeting

Retargeting is nearly de rigueur for digital marketers today but it will almost certainly contribute to over-counting your results.

You are marketing to people who have already found their way to your site! Many are customers already!! If you managed to completely suppress this group from all of your marketing, they would probably still be far more likely to come back than the average person you reach through your programs.

If you add view-through reporting to retargeting, you can nearly guarantee that you will be double-counting.

It’s Time to Forget Attribution

For marketers that want to earn the trust of the CEO and the business, put aside attribution. Fancier counting isn’t nearly enough. It is time instead to focus on understanding the difference marketing actually makes in your business and then start improving those results.

The comments are yours.

Photo Credit: stevendepolo via Compfight cc

How to tie your content marketing measurement to business results

Kudos to the folks over at Contently whose latest report reveals that 90% of marketers are uncertain that their key content metrics are effective in measuring business results.

Whilst the report suggests at an increasing anxiety amongst content marketers, it is however largely encouraging to see that the content marketing industry is maturing and increasingly committed to measurement and delivering demonstrable business value.

As we all know, leading content marketers measure more, but just because you can measure just about anything these days, but that doesn’t mean that you should.

As we pointed out in last month, it’s essential to know what your business objectives are. This will help you pinpoint the areas of your content strategy that you want to measure so that you can identify what’s working well, and the tactics that need some fine-tuning.

As a starter for ten, useful content marketing measurements might include:

• Your performance and visibility on search engines

• Lead quality and lifetime value

• Email newsletter subscribers

• Social metrics (shares, likes, RTs, comments, etc) and audience growth

• Web traffic

• Number of conversions attributable to content marketing

• Acquisition costs for user, leads and sales

MEASURING WHAT’S IMPORTANT

It’s helpful to understand that content marketing is effective at every stage of the customer journey. From ‘awareness’ to ‘consideration’ to – ideally – ‘conversion’.

You might like to measure the efficacy of your content marketing differently against these three distinct stages:

Awareness

Content marketing for awareness is vitally important – particularly as 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine and 75% of searchers don’t move past the first page of results (source: ZMOT). Quality content increases the number of ranking keywords for which your site can rank and surveys report that a majority of online consumers research products via social media before making a purchase.

How to measure awareness:

• Improved search engine ranking
• Increase in first-time web visitors
• Increase in social metrics (i.e. likes, follows, +1s, RTs, pins, comments, etc.)
• Increase in email signups

Consideration

Consideration is important because search engines increasingly rank content based on relevance, time spent on-site per user, amount and age of pertinent original content and social ‘buzz’ about the site.

Furthermore, sites with the magic number of 311(+) indexed pages see an average traffic increase of 236% and a double-digit lead growth (source: Hubspot). Interestingly, 61% of consumers were also said to “feel better” about companies that delivered custom content (source: Customer Content Council).

How to measure consideration:

• Increase in page-views
• Longer visit durations
• Decrease in bounce rates
• Increase in social activity
• Increase in email click-through and open rates

Conversion

As we’ve said before, whilst content marketing is a wonderful way to enhance the brand’s relationship with customers and prospects, a brand cannot stay in business through measuring engagement alone. If content marketing does not demonstrably ‘move the needle’, why do it at all?

Ideally, your content marketing should encourage a tangible business goal (for example: did reading this article stimulate more purchases or more contact form submissions?).

How to measure conversions:

• Increase in marketing qualified leads
• Increase in sales qualified leads
• Increase in deals closed
• Increase in deal cycle
• Increase in average order value

TRACKING YOUR AUDIENCES’ TOPICS OF INTEREST MAKES CONTENT MEASUREMENT EASIER

At idio, we’re opening up a new means of content measurement for content marketers – namely: helping them to see which content topics are resonating amongst their audience.

By using content analytics to understand the topics (people, places, concepts, etc) within a piece a content, Content Intelligence helps content marketers see the content topics that are driving the most engagement, identifies the content topics that are underperforming, discovers which content topics are over & under indexed on a site and displays content engagement and performance over time.

The beauty of having a topic-level understanding of your content is that you can take the guesswork out of your editorial strategy and have a confident measurable content marketing programme that increases awareness, encourages consideration and stimulates conversion.

Marketers need to become more confident about measuring content marketing. Measurement reveals how your content fits into the customer’s buying cycle. It can identify the best formats, topics and strategies to use, and – most importantly – it supports requests for more investment.