Rnordman

Flight delays are unfortunately common in air travel. Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight has crunched the numbers and determined the magic hour to avoid delays.

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As both the teachers’ union and government enforced a media blackout during sustained bargaining this weekend, social media users on both sides of the issue fired barbed words at one another, hoping to weaken the other side’s defences. But as battles go, it was a lopsided affair, with a torrent of barbed tweets and posts in support of teachers overwhelming a barely perceptible trickle of support for the government.

When used correctly, social media can be a driving force of ecommerce traffic. Ideally, this leads to an increase in brand awareness, referrals, and sales. If your target audience is moms, your social media presence is especially important, as moms are 20% more likely then the general population to use social media. However, a presence on social media platforms is not enough on its own. Brands must understand which platforms are most effective for their target audience to develop a successful strategy.

To dig deeper, here are 3 social network platforms that your brand might utilize to increase traffic to its online retail business – especially within an audience of moms:

Facebook: This social network receives the greatest amount of daily traffic, which isn’t surprising when you consider that 7 out of 10 moms have a Facebook profile. There are many ways brands can engage consumers via Facebook – often in more in-depth ways than with other platforms. Brands can host contests, create polls and post quizzes, which allows consumers to share their opinions and content. This can lead to stronger relationships between brand and consumer – and in turn, can generate more ecommerce traffic. According to Business Insider, Facebook is also a strong social platform for middle-of-the-funnel advertising, which includes retargeted advertising and merchandise referrals. This is important for brands to note, as Facebook is an important platform to drive repeat customer sales.

Marketing takeaway: To increase ecommerce traffic through Facebook, offer both original and user-generated content, leverage advertising capabilities, and provide discounts or offers that are exclusive to Facebook fans.

Instagram: This picture-based platform is a poweful tool to show off your brand’s unique style and overall image. It’s an ideal platform to gather user-generated content which can be an important asset for brands. Create brand-specific hashtags to prompt conversations about your product to increase customer engagement and ultimately drive them down your ecommerce path. Encourage users to post photos of your brand’s product in use. Comment-based contests can also be highly effective among the over 7 million daily Instagram users. Include links in your profile and relevant images that lead consumers right to where they can buy. This directly drives traffic to your ecommerce site and helps consumers avoid a separate internet search for the product they wish to purchase.

Marketing takeaway:  Visually represent your brand on Instagram with compelling images, brand-specific hashtags, and high-quality product photos to show off what your brand is all about. Include direct links to relevant product purchase pages.

Pinterest: Pinterest is one of the fastest growing platforms, and is now the third most popular social network in the world. If your target audience is moms, this network is increasingly important for your brand. In fact, 80% of Pinterest users are women. According to HubSpot, Pinterest traffic has the highest Average Order Value (AOV) – mainly because imagery drives higher consumer engagement and is a crucial force in ecommerce conversions. In addition, Pinterest is a prime resource for top of the funnel marketing – consumers mainly use it for product discovery and inspiration. Pinterest referrals to ecommerce sites are 10% more likely to buy then other shoppers, while Pinterest pins that include prices receive 36% more likes then those without. Consumers on Pinterest love to discover new products, find inspired DIY projects, and gather fashion ideas – and your brand should be visible

Marketing takeaway: Use Pinterest to increase your brand’s ecommerce traffic through new product buzz and reveals, valuable imagery, and retail prices. It’s good to have a healthy mix of brand products as well as general inspiration that helps guide consumers back to your site.

Social media can be a powerful tool to help produce higher ecommerce revenues. Brand awareness and engagement may lead consumers from your social media channel all the way through the purchase path. Keep in mind that one common quality all of these platforms have is visual appeal. Leverage this as you show consumers – often moms – how perfect your product is for their busy lives.

You can call it old school if you want; you can even call it old hat. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking that email marketing has lost its importance for businesses of all sizes. Email marketing remains the cornerstone of any content marketing endeavor—and if you doubt it, just think about how many marketing emails you’ve received this week from big companies like Amazon.com.

Actually, the percentage of professional marketers who heavily use email marketing has increased in recent years—and most small business owners who follow their lead say that email marketing produces significant ROI.

Don’t discount email marketing, then, but embrace it—using the tips we’ve offered below.

Tips for Developing a Strong Email Marketing Program

• First, your email marketing campaign is only as strong as the email list you assemble—so ensure that you make it easy for people to sign up for your list. Put an easy-to-use, prominent signup box on your website, and also include links in any emailed receipts and invoices.
• When you send email blasts, include a short but value-loaded subject line; draw attention with a subject line that promises immediate benefits, like a discount or a special promotion.
• Develop and nurture your audience. Whatever email marketing platform you use—and we recommend Constant Contact first, MailChimp as an alternative—you should be able to track the views and opens you get. Keep tabs on which kinds of content seem to get opens, and use that knowledge to inform future emails.
• Don’t restrict your call-to-action to the bottom of the email; place one above the fold! (Or better yet, avoid the kinds of lengthy emails that require scrolling.)
• Be smart about recycling your blog content, press releases, and even Facebook posts. You don’t necessarily need to craft a huge new message for each email newsletter you send out; at Grammar Chic, we often send out emails that essentially round up recent blog entries. We know of other companies that send out email roundups of Pinterest posts, which can be another practical way to recycle your best content and get it in front of a new audience.
• Always include contact information, including a telephone number and a link to your website. Remember that more than half of your emails will be opened on mobile devices, so you want contact information that can clearly be seen and clicked on.

Customer Loyalty

Sometimes one of the greatest ways to provide great customer service is to give something of value away for free. It doesn’t have to be anything big or expensive. It can be something small. Really small. It just has to be valuable to the customer.

Think about the owner of the restaurant that buys his regular customers a drink or a dessert. Actually, that’s not small enough. I’m talking really small. Something that costs a dollar or two; maybe less.

What prompted me to write about this was an email from Ron Baker, president of Gracey-Backer, who saw me speak several years ago. The short version of the story is that Ron was pulled over by the police one night for having a burnt out brake light. The police officer didn’t give him a ticket because Ron promised that he would get it fixed immediately. He went to the closest full-service station, and the mechanic quickly replaced the bulb. Ron asked, “How much do I owe you?” The mechanic said, “This one’s on me.”

Ron was dumbfounded and at the same time delighted. Ron said, “I wasn’t even his customer, but I am now! I used to buy gas at the discount gas station a few blocks away and save a penny a gallon – maybe 20 cents on a tank full. Not anymore. I now get my gas at the Exxon station.”

Ron’s story reminded me of Chris Zane, who owns a bike store in Connecticut. Known for his amazing customer service, one of Chris’s tactics is to not charge the customer for anything that costs less than a dollar. For example, a customer who needs a master link, which is a small part that holds the chain together, doesn’t have to pay for it. Zane says, “The cost to me is virtually nothing. We’re not going to chase the pennies — we’re looking at the long-term effect of giving someone a master link. And you should see the look on people’s faces.” It turns out the tactic of free costs Zane less than $100 annually. A small price to pay for loyal customers who are worth thousands of dollars over time. By the way, you can read about Zane’s philosophy about this in his book, available on Amazon.com.

Sometimes there is no monetary value at all. It’s just a little effort, taking time out to do something nice for a customer, or a potential customer. I’m reminded of one of our newsletter subscribers who sent in a story about how he had car trouble and was stranded on the road. A limo driver was passing by and asked if he could drop him off at a service station, at no charge. He was just being a Good Samaritan. It paid off because the gentleman with the car trouble owned a company that now hires his new friend to drive him to and from the airport.

Sometimes free can be a great customer service strategy. It adds value, promotes good will and builds trust with your customers. All good things that can eventually lead to customer loyalty!

Social media dominates the time people spend online, and a vast majority of companies now have some type of social presence.  Unfortunately, social success remains elusive for many; common social media faux pas are largely to blame.  Social media as a marketing channel is a force to be reckoned with that you cannot afford to ignore.  Being a contender for meaningful social media influence requires a solid strategy and sidestepping common social media faux pas at a minimum.  Top-notch social media marketing is not overly brand-focused; it captivates your social audience, engages your social prospects and offers significant value—through high-quality original content and curated content from trusted outside sources, which you share across your social media channels, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook and Pinterest.  Avoid social media faux pas to amplify your social media ROI through increased influence and lead generation and conversion.  Learn how to stand out and triumph over your competition in the social media arena. 

1. Not Having a Solid Social Media Strategy

Lacking a solid social media strategy, you will miss out on many advantages—like the optimization of your social lead generation.  Just setting up social profiles or posting haphazard Facebook updates or tweets will not make social media channels a viable or profitable part of your overall marketing plan.  A winning social strategy requires you to allocate the necessary time and resources to develop and implement one, which will deliver an integrated, high-value approach to social media.  There are numerous factors you must take into account, including your brand identity and voice, social listening, the make-up of your intended social audience, quantifiable goals, a social content calendar, original highly shareable content, high-quality content curation, and clearly defined metrics to track and measure your progress.  Without a solid social media strategy, you could create some of the best online content, have a stellar website, and yet still not attain a significant social reach or any meaningful engagement.

2. Failing to Develop a Unique Voice for Your Brand

Is your tone on social media generally formal, more casual or even humorous?  Does your social media voice create a positive and professional representation of your brand? Do you captive your social audience?  If your tone and voice are off-putting to your social prospects, it is high time to update and refine them.  It is vital to have a social presence as unique as your brand, while remaining true to your brand identity.  Achieving the right balance will take time and experimentation.

3.  Being Overly “Salesy” Instead of Genuine and Human

Although it should be obvious, many brands seem to forget that social media is supposed to actually be social.  If you have a significant Twitter following and only follow back a handful of your followers, you are sending the wrong message.  Failing to follow back and practice genuine engagement signal to your audience that you are uninterested in your community and the dialogue that transpires.  Be truly social; get engaged, and have some real interactions.  Genuine engagement can help you magnify overall social following, foster goodwill and even expose you to a larger pool of social prospects.

4.  Not Performing Cross-Channel Social Promotion

Your approach to social media needs to be integrated to achieve optimal results; neglecting cross-channel social promotion can be a costly mistake.  The practice involves a planned marketing effort across your various social channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.  To boost your ROI, you should be consistent in message, while fine-tuning the way your content appears on each social channel.  Proper presentation of your social content requires different approaches for various social networks.  For example, LinkedIn updates should not appear like tweets overloaded hashtags.  While custom-tailoring updates for each of your social networks, leverage a common theme to unite your social content.  This coordination will generate synergy so that your tweets, Facebook posts and LinkedIn updates have a greater combined impact than if they were created out of synch.

5.  Failing to Leverage the Power of CTAs

Calls to action (CTAs) are vital to the success of your social media marketing.  You need captivating CTAs, which are just as important for social media as they are for other marketing channels.  Clearly explain the action you would like your social prospects to take after accepting one of your offers or engaging with your brand.

With a solid strategy and best practices, social media can be a powerful force in your marketing arsenal.  However, real social media success is the result of your integrated social media presence working in conjunction with a complete inbound marketing plan, including highly shareable content, strong CTAs, winning email marketing, and stellar website design. Inbound marketing can help your company reach its marketing goals and be victorious in the age of social media.

LinkedIn groups provide a unique way to communicate and build relationships with your target audience. Finding and participating in the right groups can be a key for both lead generation and generating results using LinkedIn. We recently had the opportunity to interview Cindy Kraft, the CFO-coach, who has built a very powerful business asset through growing a LinkedIn group for her CFO coaching market.   Everyone wants this benefit and Cindy shared strategies that work for creating it. 

Communicate in a Highly Focused Way with your Target Audience

At its core, a LinkedIn group should be a central place to host discussions with people, particularly those with the same interests as you. The real magic in groups comes from your leadership position in the group. Posting valuable and relevant content will create a leadership position for you and build trust with your audience. Now think about this.  Whom do we tend to do business with?  Of course, it is those we trust!

Cindy has a very interesting story that highlights the ability to create deep engagement and use that to create multiple conversions. She created a niche market, found her audience, and attracted them to her.  She refers to this process as “getting out of the ocean and building a pond just for your market.  It provides you a unique level of control, visibility and credibility to engage your market. This engagement then creates conversions not just on one level, but on multiple levels.

When it comes to group management, some strategies that work for her include:

1. Kickoff – Getting started requires strategy and planning.  Define your market. Find out where the target audience is and meet them, and communicate with them.
2. Communication Plan – Plan to communicate value and do in a concise manner. Specifically address this issue, “why should someone in your audience follow you?”  Next, sustain your communication flow of value.  In Cindy’s situation, she is giving her audience the ability to cut through the noise and find information valuable to their career growth.  She is the filter for her audience to get insightful information they are seeking.
3. Growth – There are a couple of elements here. First, you need to be able to attract and keep people in the group.  A sustained flow of valuable content helps significantly.  In line with this, you will need to be available yourself or have someone available to moderate the content on an as-needed basis.
4. Evolve the Group – It’s your pond but it isn’t a pond in isolation.  Evolve the communication, the group membership and moderation as conditions dictate.

Engagement Leads to Conversions

When we talk about conversions, a conversion does not necessarily need to end up in the phrase, “Oh, I sold this, that or the other to someone.”  The conversion could be part of a bigger process. For Cindy, there are a series of conversions that are building upon themselves.  Here first conversion was to raise her credibility and visibility to her target audience.   She ultimately has become the logical person for them to find when they have an item that they need to be addressed.  In short, she has become a “thought leader” for her market.

And… that’s not the only conversion for her.  She has client-related conversions.  She has conversions related to recruiters.  Then she has organizations coming to her to ask her to speak on related topics.  That also, in effect, continues to raise her credibility and visibility.

When performed correctly, sustained engagement ends up creating conversions, which like a snowball rolling downhill, continue to grow and expand. To be fair, yes it may have been a little tough to get this rolling from the beginning but once you get it rolling, the benefits just increase in an exponential level, depending on if you’re looking at quantifiable benefits, intangible benefits or tangible benefits.

Cindy shared her strategies that work in terms of building a business asset.  What are some of yours?

Interested in generating more effectiveness on LinkedIn, click here to for a free 30+ page guide.

A few weeks ago I attempted to provide a clear distinction between customer experience and customer support in this blog post. Since then, the post was re-published on a number of customer experience and service websites, was shared by many readers and drew some very interesting comments. The subject clearly hit a nerve.

While obviously not everyone agrees with the definitions proposed in the article, the discussion itself serves a purpose in solidifying the important concepts in our consciousness.Clear and practical definitions of terms have tremendous implications on the formulation of business strategies, and help us to communicate constructively. One of the reasons it is so difficult to gather support and to obtain financing for customer experience related initiatives is the perception of “squishiness” which is a by-product of fuzzy subject definitions.

I would like to propose a draft for a short dictionary of terms related to customer experience subject matter. The word draft is used purposely to indicate that you are welcome to offer any constructive suggestions for improvement. These definitions are borrowed or re-constructed for the sole purpose of achieving further clarity:

1. Customer-centricity – a value based belief system or philosophy.

Like many other “religions” customer-centricity is (supposedly) easy to understand, but difficult to practice – according to Micah Solomon. In my own experience in the context of business, the things that are easily understood and sincerely accepted for their value, are not very complicated to practice.

According to Bob Thompson in his book Hooked on Customers – it is “a management approach to executing business strategy of delivering the total customer value that drives genuinely loyal customer attitudes and behaviors in a target market”. Bob also states that customer-centricity is not a destination, but a journey.

Of course there are many more definitions, like this one “placing the customer at the center of a company’s marketing effort, focusing on customers rather than sales” that sounds good, but is not particularly actionable or accurate, in my opinion.

The best distinction between customer-centricity and product-centricity was offered by Don Peppers in this article.

My own understanding of this term also requires the clear choice of including the company’s customers into the circle of the company’s stakeholders AND excluding share traders from that circle. There is a difference between investors and speculators. This choice re-defines the focus of management decisions from importance of quarterly earning per share results to a long-term sustainability of the business.

1. Customer Experience – a perception your customers share about the totality of their experiences of doing business with your company. A more commonly used definition is

“Customer experience (CX) is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods and/or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier. This can include awareness, discovery, attraction, interaction, purchase, use, cultivation and advocacy.”

While its completeness and inclusiveness are open for a debate, I do not see any critical omissions or contradictions which would negatively impact any specific business initiative. The real debate is whether customer experience can be managed or measured.

1. Customer Service/Support – for the full context it is best to go to the original post.

Many agree with Chris Zane that

“The Customer Support starts when Customer Experience Fails!”

The most damaging thing about the confusion of Customer Service with Customer Experience is that it makes it all too easy for some to change their title and a shingle on the door, and pretend that nobody noticed – well, customers will.

1. In e-commerce and other internet businesses, Customer Experience is often confused with User Experience.

(UX) involves a person’s behaviors, attitudes, and emotions about using a particular product, system or service. User experience includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership. Additionally, it includes a person’s perceptions of system aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency.

The UX surely is another element, attribute or subset of Customer Experience, but the confusion makes it easy to take your eyes of the ball when it comes to fulfillment, support, and other processes that impact the experience of your customers doing business with your company. Consider that some of your customers may love their User Experience, but hate their Customer Experience. The opposite is not likely.

This is not an exhaustive list, but if these distinctions are not understood a measurable change in your customers’ experience is not likely to materialize.

 

There is no way to avoid it. Your online presence now defines you. It has become the essential extension of a business or personal brand.

A recent survey by Yodle found that 52% of all small business owners do not have a website.That is a scary and shocking statistic. This means that they are putting their business at an immediate disadvantage.

In 2014 there is no reason to not have your brand online no matter how small your business is!

There are only two alternatives

To get your brand on the web there are really only two options. Do it yourself, or pay someone to do it for you

The DIY route means that you can now have website or blog with a few simple steps for as low as $3.95 per month with a free domain and WordPress template! If you don’t have the time, the inclination or don’t have the ability to do it yourself then you can get one done for you for a few hundred dollars. Sites like Elance and Freelancer provide the low cost means to design and build a website or blog.

If you don’t want to stretch to that huge expense then you have some “free” options. You could have a Tumblr or Blogger account which are free and can be set up in a matter of minutes.

There is no excuse except either laziness, a big procrastination gene or just plain ignorance.

How do you appear when “Googled”

Business credibility is damaged if you do not appear when a search for your business is performed online. 10 years ago it was maybe an option but today it is mandatory and essential to have your name appear in a domain name.

What appears when you are “Googled”?

If all that comes up is your Twitter profile then you don’t look serious. If you have a Linkedin profile then at least you are making an effort. If you have a Facebook page then you are relevant. Have a Google+ page… then you are almost a trendsetter. On Pinterest and Instagram then you are super cool!

The other aspect of small business that the survey revealed was that online advertising was only used by 12% of small business. In an era of easy self serve digital marketing with targeted Facebook sponsored boosted posts it shows that many small businesses are struggling to reinvent themselves in a digital world.

So what are the essentials?

So if you don’t have a blog or website or need to improve your online brand, here are some essentials you need to consider optimizing, improving or just plain do!

1. Create a compelling “About us” page

This page is one of the most visited page on your website. Often it ranks as the second most visited page on a website or blog after the homepage. At a glance your homepage should make it easy for people to know what you’re about when they land.

When they visit the “about us” page it should provide the in depth reasons why people should read your articles, view your content or buy from you. If you are an authority in your field then it should highlight the awards you have won, the clients you work with and third party verification.

Easy to scan online social proof provides that important validated credibility.

2. Be “memorable”

Being memorable online is an art and a science. It means that you have to consider a brand name, design and a distinct “voice” that cuts through the clutter and noise. Again you can do it yourself or get professional help.

Alexandra Watkins of “Eat My Words” (who I have worked with) can help with that creative “cut through” with a memorable name.

Standing out can be enhanced with a web design that doesn’t scream “me too”. Being memorable also means creating a brand voice that comes through in your writing style. This is sometimes called your “writing voice”

3. Designed for the social web

Making your content move with minimal friction is now an essential tactic on this social web. Obvious sharing buttons that allow people to share while reading your content is now a core design essential.

Sometimes designers will want to get funky and minimize their visibility or ease of use. That is a fight you need to win. Function over form is the mantra here!

4. Optimized for subscribing

The demise of the “free” social network lunch where getting organic visibility and reach on Facebook has diminished to single percentage figures has highlighted what has always been essential. Building your “own” large email list.

It means you need to have a high conversion rate from website visitors and traffic to “subscribers”. This means doing the following:

• Turning your homepage into a massive subscribe form
• Using non-annoying popovers
• Create a strong incentive to subscribe with a free offer (eg ebook) in return for that important name and email address

5. Content centric that adds amazing value

Content that is easy to read, view and consume is vital. But it also needs to add value to your website visitors lives and business. This means it has to be well structured filled with stories and statistics and solve problems.

Cliches and fluffy acronyms sound nice on the surface but they often lack depth and meaningful takeaways. It means that your website should include content such as

• ebooks
• Whitepapers
• Regular blog posts
• Podcasts
• Videos
• Cheatsheets

6. Visible credibility

Visible and quick takeaway credibility is important on the web where you are one only one click away from oblivion. This means that the website should display in a heart beat your credibility.

This includes:

• Books you have written
• Publications you have appeared or have been quoted in
• Awards you have won
• Social proof that displays how many people are sharing your content and following you on social networks
• The customers you have worked for

7. Optimized for search engines

Many websites have an awesome design but they aren’t built for “Googling’. It means that the key words and phrases that potential customers use to find your goods and services are missing or are buried so deep in the website code that search engine crawlers can’t index your site.

So make sure that before you design and develop your website or blog that the top 20 to 50 phrases you want to rank for are included.

8. Products and services to sell

Bloggers and website owners need to have products and services to sell. Otherwise, what is the point of creating great content and driving traffic to you site. Making sure you have these visible and easy to find in your homepage tabs is key.

9. Landing pages that convert

How many advertisements on Google or Facebook have you seen that just take people to a homepage. The problem with that is that they make it hard for people to subscribe, register or buy.

Home pages are typically not designed to convert traffic to subscribers.

If you are promoting a product then you need to have a landing page that converts. You will also need to test and keep testing your conversion rates to optimize that page.

10. Built for mobile

The uptake of mobile, apps and tablets has surprised many organisations small and large. There is a mad scramble to design blogs, websites and apps that make it easy for potential customers to view, use and buy on a mobile device.

In some industry sectors up to 50% of traffic is now coming from smart phones and tablets.

What about you?

On this fast moving web we all have much work to do. The pace of change doesn’t seem to be slowing but accelerating.

So what do you need to work on today?

The Hustler’s Playbook: Ignore the Critics is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

Hustlers inevitably draw attention to themselves. Because they work hard, make waves, and make things happen, people take notice. Some small portion of those who take notice will be critical of the hustler (not only will the number of critics be small, their stature is equally small).

The critic attacks the hustler. They attack her work as being inferior to others and inferior to their own work (many critics will mistakenly believe they are the hustler’s peer, even though they criticize instead of hustling). They attack the fact that she makes waves, that she doesn’t know her place. They attack her because she is producing results. And her results are the real source of their criticism; they criticize because they are jealous.

The critic wants the attention that the hustler commands. When they can’t get the attention themselves, the critic tries desperately hard to bring down the hustler. When the attacks on her work and the attention she is getting don’t work, the critics attack the hustler personally. They attack her intelligence, her appearance, her motives, anything to bring her down to their level. When the attacks get personal, you know for certain the critic is beaten.

None of this matters to the hustler. The hustler doesn’t care what the critic believes about her or her work. The critic’s attacks don’t interest the hustler because she isn’t doing what she does for the critics. The critics aren’t her audience. The hustler is hustling for herself, for the people counting on her, and for the people who find value in what she does. So she ignores the critics, and she continues her hustle.

There isn’t a professional movie critic with an academy award for directing or acting. Their isn’t a music critic with a shelf full of Grammys for having written, produced, or performed music that changed the world. Their isn’t a literary critic with a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize in literature. Those awards belong to the hustlers, to the people who have put themselves out there, who have bravely opened themselves up to the criticism.

If you are going to hustle, create, and make a difference, you are going to draw the slings and arrows of the critic. The critic isn’t your audience, and trying to please the critics is a fool’s errand. Ignore the critics, and let the trolls be damned.

There are millions and millions of people on LinkedIn and attracting them to your profile is getting more challenging. It is critical to identify and pursue effective ways to make it easier for people to find you on LinkedIn. If you’ve spent time creating the perfect LinkedIn profile and taken the opportunities to update it regularly you’re a step ahead of the competition. Getting more eyes on your profile, and for longer periods of time, will increase the likelihood of a visitor becoming a contact, a contact becoming a lead, and a lead a success story. Don’t fret if you need a little LinkedIn help to get noticed because that is exactly what today’s post is all about.

There are a variety of ways to make you easier to find on LinkedIn. Here are three key ways for you to consider adding to your tactical plan:

1. Search Engine Optimize (SEO):

Your Profile LinkedIn’s search algorithm offers five areas where it’s important to put the right keywords in. These are: 1) Professional headline, 2) Summary, 3) Current work experience, 4) Past work experience, and 5) Skills and expertise.

Think about the keywords that identify you and your expertise and try to come up with a list of fifty. While that may seem like a lot (and to a degree it is), you can have variations of them. For instance, if you specialize in digital marketing, perhaps you can also use digital marketing strategist, content marketing, graphic marketing, consumer marketing, etc. Using derivations of one phrase should help you get to fifty fairly quickly. (Also… take a look at the keywords that others similar to you are using.)

Once you’ve identified your keywords, look to strategically put them in those five areas without keyword stuffing them. You want it to be readable and professional. But you want to subtly include those keywords in there so that you’ll be able to be found more effectively.

2. Become More Active:

Use activity to drive more people to your profile. A few of the actions you can take include sharing valuable and relatable content, updating your profile (sensibly and modestly- not just with fluff), providing collaborative input on others’ content, and joining and participating in active groups.

Make sure all of the content you contribute, both in groups and on your own personal profile highlights your expertise and provides the value that your target audience is expecting. This solid one-two punch of activity and search engine optimization is a great way to help LinkedIn help you meet your goals.

3. Create your Profile Carefully and Revisit it Regularly:

Remember, you’re making it easier for people to find you on LinkedIn, so when visitors land on your profile, make sure it’s timely and relevant! Keep your profile up to date with any changes in your skills, job status, et cetera. You can also customize your LinkedIn URL and promote it by placing it in your e-mail signature, on your website, your blog, your newsletter or anywhere else you may network socially.

Be sure to check your privacy settings as well and make sure your profile is findable- no amount of LinkedIn help in the world can save a profile that can’t be found.

The more active you become on LinkedIn, the easier it will be for your target market to find you. If you’re not sure if you’re on the right track, do a search and see how easy it is to find your profile. Ask a colleague to do the same. What would your target audience key in to find you, and when they do, what will they see? Perhaps the best tip of all, never stop building your profile. As with any business application, review its effectiveness, and adjust as necessary. Fine-tuning can only serve to bring you greater success on LinkedIn.

Interested in generating more effectiveness on LinkedIn, click here to for a free 30+ page guide.

One day in early March at about 1:00 p.m., a woman wearing conservative business attire and toting a wheeled bag strolled through the front entrance of Procter & Gamble’s 17-story headquarters in downtown Cincinnati. She told security she had an appointment, possibly with one of the businesses that rent space in the building, and was waved inside.  

But she never arrived at the office. There was no appointment.

Instead, the woman made her way to an emergency exit door and pushed it open. Eight associates, all pulling bags of their own, swept in and disappeared into a crowd of arriving employees.

Though they too wore business suits and what looked like P&G employee badges, they didn’t work for the consumer-goods giant. They were from Greenpeace, and they’d come to save tigers.

Wordlessly, the nine activists made their way past the security desk and headed for two rendezvous points — one, in a 12th-floor office suite in the iconic building’s north tower, the second, in an office just opposite, in the east tower. There, the two groups jimmied open several windows, attached rappelling gear to the window-washing stanchions, and climbed out into the chilly air.

After a zip line was strung between the two towers and secured, the smallest member of the team, 20-year-old Denise Rodriguez, of Queens, New York, edged out onto the wire, shimmied to center point, then dangled there in the gentle breeze, 70 feet in the air. She was wearing a tiger costume.

Her colleagues unfurled a pair of 60-foot-tall banners on the front of each tower. The banners denounced Head & Shoulders, the antidandruff shampoo, for “putting tiger survival on the line” and “wip[ing] out dandruff & rainforests.”

A rented helicopter hovered overhead as a videographer and photographer captured the unfolding drama.

Arriving on the scene, Capt. Paul Broxterman of the Cincinnati police found the windows had been braced shut from the outside. He knocked on the glass and got one of the activists to call him on his cellphone.

“How long are you guys going to be out there?” he asked.

“We’ll be wrapping up shortly,” came the reply.

The incursion, which left P&G’s vaunted corporate security force looking uncharacteristically flat-footed, was the latest foray in Greenpeace’s seven-year campaign against the use of improperly sourced palm oil. A highly saturated vegetable fat derived from the fruit, or sometimes the kernel, of the oil palm, it is, in and of itself, a relatively innocuous substance, a common ingredient in everything from laundry detergent and cosmetics to candy bars and ice cream. In recent years, demand has spiked because of its popularity as a replacement for hydrogenated oils and as a source of biodiesel fuel, which, paradoxically, is often promoted as an environmentally sound alternative to fossil fuels.

The problem — what elevated this viscous wonder elixir to the top of Greenpeace’s global agenda — is the aggressive manner in which the world’s biggest palm-oil producers, based in Indonesia, have gone about meeting demand: burning and clear-cutting the nation’s priceless tropical peat forests to the ground, then draining the underlying wetlands to make way for massive oil-palm plantations.

As Greenpeace’s banners made clear, that deforestation is destroying the habitat of the Sumatran tiger, of which there are said to be fewer than 400 left. Also threatened are orangutans, rhinos, elephants, and about 114 bird species.

But truth be told, the animals are really beside the point.

Greenpeace’s tigers are a kind of decoy, a sleek feline metaphor pressed into service on behalf of the broader existential threat that we all face because of the warming of the atmosphere.

It turns out that the results of Indonesian deforestation go far beyond decimating tiger habitats. The critical issue is not even the jungle itself exactly, but the swampy peatlands from which it rises — massive watery bogs up to 50 feet deep containing layer upon layer of fallen vegetal debris.

This peat acts as an immense living storage locker for carbon dioxide, and as the peatlands are drained, the plant matter decomposes, releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere at a truly frightening rate. By one estimate, the amount of carbon given off because of deforestation in Indonesia accounts for a whopping 4% of global carbon emissions — from just .1% of the earth’s land surface.

Of course that’s a lot of information to fit on one banner. The tiger is convenient shorthand.

“It’s easy to say, ‘If you’re destroying forests, you’re destroying tiger habitats,’” says Phil Radford, the outgoing executive director of Greenpeace USA (his replacement, Annie Leonard, was announced in April). “It’s harder to say, ‘Do you know that forests store carbon and if we save the peat bogs we will trap all this carbon and methane in the soil?’ We say both, but we start with the place that people are, the thing they care about the most first.”

Says his colleague Nicky Davies, the organization’s campaigns director: “We’re not going to win by telling people what they should care about. And winning is the objective.”

Greenpeace’s strategy, which it calls “market-based campaigning,” has proved devastatingly effective. It goes like this: Pick an area of concern. Identify on-the-ground producers whose actions are contributing to the problem. Follow the supply chain to a multinational corporation that peddles a widely known consumer product. Send an email or two, kindly pointing out the company’s “exposure” and suggesting an alternative. Ask again, firmly but pleasantly. Issue a sober, meticulously researched public report. If the desired response is not forthcoming. roll out a clear, multipronged media campaign, ideally starring a beloved animal species and featuring a hashtag. Climb a building or two.

What seems to happen, inevitably, is the multinational company, eager to remove the stigma from its signature brand, promises to ensure that its products are sustainable and begins cancelling contracts with any third-party suppliers who fail to guarantee compliance. In order to retain the multinational’s lucrative business, the largest suppliers fall into line. Before long, as the cascade effect grows, they begin eyeing their wayward rivals, companies that are still operating in flagrant violation of the new rules and undercutting them with other customers. Eventually, broad new industry protocols are adopted to level the playing field.

Rinse, repeat.

 

Sailing to Amchitka

They thought of themselves as Hobbits, embarking on a journey to Mordor. Or some did, anyway. The founders of Greenpeace didn’t agree on much. As cofounder Bob Hunter wrote, “We spent most of our time at each other's throats, egos clashing.”

Emerging from the acid-laced Vancouver hippie scene, the cadre of activists who gave birth to the group were a loose confederacy of draft-dodgers, radicals, mind-expansion mystics, tree-huggers, former beatniks, and Quakers, in addition to a few Hobbit heads like Hunter.

In 1971, after reports surfaced of a planned underground nuclear test on the island of Amchitka, on the far western point of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, a dozen of them chartered a fishing boat, a halibut trawler called the Phyllis Cormack, temporarily rechristened it the Greenpeace, and set sail from Vancouver hell-bent on thwarting the U.S. military.

A few days after they left Victoria Harbor, cowboy icon John Wayne arrived in Vancouver on his private yacht, a retrofitted World War II minesweeper. The star was asked what he thought of the protesters.

“They’re a bunch of commies,” he said. “Canadians should mind their own business.”

A few days later, the group was turned back by the U.S. Coast Guard, and the nuclear test was carried out as planned. But the audacious voyage received worldwide media attention and ignited a firestorm of opposition, leading the U.S. government to abandon its plans for future tests on the island, which eventually became a bird sanctuary.

If the incident proved anything, it was the power of mythmaking and what we now call optics. (It’s worth noting that several Greenpeace founders were fans of media-theory rock star Marshall McLuhan.) The framing of the story — scruffy, daredevil ecowarriors risk their lives in a brave if hopeless stand against the most powerful military in the world — resonated deeply, and the David and Goliath dynamic became the cornerstone of Greenpeace’s identity. Nearly 45 years on, it still works.

In the years that followed, the group expanded its goals, taking on commercial whaling, the dumping of toxic and nuclear waste, seal hunting, arctic drilling, drift-net fishing, PVCs, GMOs, HFCs, and a number of other afflictions, all reasonable objectives, which in retrospect look like dress rehearsals for the big show: the increasingly urgent effort to slow the effects of climate change, a threat that was scarcely understood when the group first set off for western Alaska.  

Greenpeace’s confrontational and swashbuckling approach has helped make it one the world’s most powerful environmental NGOs, with branches in 41 countries, 2.9 million donors and more than $350 million in annual contributions.

But increasingly, the organization has begun to temper its intensity with a cool-eyed and disciplined pragmatism, resulting in a string of extraordinary victories. On deforestation, a variety of companies, including big suppliers such as Asia Pulp & Paper and manufacturers like Kimberly-Clark, have been joined by Mattel, Nike, McDonald’s, Yum Brands, Unilever, Ferraro, Coca-Cola, Mondelez, and Nestlé in pledging to end the clear-cutting of precious rain forests. Tech giants like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Salesforce have promised to power their data centers with renewable energy, a pledge that led Duke Energy, the nation’s largest power utility and one of the most flagrant emitters of CO2, to begin providing clean energy to win their business. And grocers like Wal-Mart, Safeway, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s have begun selling sustainable seafood.

Greenpeace’s achievements have not been accomplished without help. Many have been undertaken in partnership with other environmental NGOs, from the World Wildlife Fund to the Rainforest Alliance, which are also doing important work. And organizations like the Sierra Club and NRDC are doubling down on political activism on the global-warming front.

But when it comes to catalyzing change in the corporate arena, Greenpeace seems to have cracked the code in a way that offers some important lessons for other advocacy groups.

Corporate representatives who have sat across the table from Greenpeace give the group’s negotiators high marks for professionalism. “They’ve been very trustworthy,” says Bill Weihl, manager of energy efficiency and sustainability at Facebook. “Certainly, when they first started, it was adversarial, but fairly quickly it turned into a productive conversation.”

Aida Greenbury, managing director for sustainability at Asia Pulp & Paper, calls Greenpeace “one of the very, very few NGOs I fully respect, because the people behind it really believe in what they are fighting for. We trust they are helping us achieve what we both want to achieve.”

“They are real subject-matter experts,” says Suhas Apte, former vice president of sustainability for Kimberly-Clark, the paper-goods giant. The company, which produces Kleenex, has made an astonishing turnaround — from clear-cutting ne’er-do-well to sustainability poster child — since being targeted by Greenpeace beginning a decade ago. “They obviously have a vested interest,” Apte adds, “but at the same time, they are very pragmatic and practical people, and as long as you are willing to listen, their whole intention is to see a change happen.”

“NGOs have become very businesslike,” says a sustainability officer for a major media company, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They’re thinking through the strategy and creating an integrated campaign just like a company would when marketing a product, going through the R&D phase, the development phase, production, and then the retail channels. It’s a corporate approach.”

Meanwhile, unlike several other environmental groups, including the World Wildlife Fund, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Audubon Society, Conservation International, and the Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace does not accept corporate or government funds. “We don’t have anything for sale,” Rolf Skar, Greenpeace’s forests campaign director, points out. “There’s no green stamp of approval you can pay for. You can’t pay us to set up a park. We’re not going to act as paid consultants to help you clean up your supply chain.”

“It’s what I like most about them, to be honest,” Apte says. “Most other environmental NGOs are looking for some sort of partnership where you put some money in. Greenpeace doesn’t do that. In that sense they are unbiased and open-minded.”

 

Lessons From The Great Bear

During the summer of 1993, the usually tranquil Clayoquot Sound along the western coast of Vancouver Island became the site of a mass protest by indigenous First Nations communities and their supporters. Timber companies were aggressively clear-cutting the area’s temperate rain forest, with the eager support of the provincial government. As supporters began trekking to the site from Vancouver to participate in daily blockades of a remote logging road, the protest grew into the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. The battle, which lasted throughout the summer, led to more than 900 arrests and no shortage of media coverage.

And then, effectively, nothing.

It wasn’t until a coalition of environmental groups began applying pressure to the loggers’ customers — who themselves sold retail goods to consumers — that the situation began to turn around.

Greenpeace targeted Home Depot, labeling the company the “world’s largest retailer of wood products from ancient forests.” Home Depot quickly began leaning on its suppliers. As pressure grew, the British Columbian government began to shift its stance as well, resulting in historic agreements to preserve more than 50% of the surrounding central and north coastal regions — which the environmental groups had cannily renamed the Great Bear Rainforest. It was one of the group’s biggest wins, and it became a template for future campaigns.

“What we learned from that is it was unrealistic to expect government to take the lead,” Skar says. “In order for government to reform land use, generally they need some sort of consensus. And we couldn't go straight to the large logging companies and tell them to do something different. We had no leverage. But we could tell the Home Depots of the world that their most important assets, their brands, could be affected easily by our campaigns as long as we had our facts right.”

Tracing the various components of a given product through a complex supply chain can be a complex task, even for the offending companies themselves.

To ensure its reports are accurate, Greenpeace employs 100 full-time staffers around the world in its research and intelligence units, including satellite imagery and mapping experts, as well as reconnaissance teams who can track a shipment of goods to its source. Often, damning evidence can be uncovered through a careful analysis of the public record. In other cases, corporate whistleblowers tip off the organization to violations.

When Greenpeace went after Kimberly-Clark for using virgin forests to manufacture its paper products, the company reacted defensively, convinced its practices were environmentally sound. “We thought we were very progressive,” Apte recalls. “But the magic is in the details, and Greenpeace found out that one of the third parties we were relying on was not getting wood from the right source.”

Whatever a company’s market capitalization or lobbying mojo, its consumer-facing brands represent a soft, sensitive underbelly. Kimberly-Clark, an enormous player in the paper-goods industry, produces Cottonelle, Scott Tissues, and Huggies, among other brands. But Kleenex is its largest brand by far, marketed in more than 20 countries. After outlining its concerns, to little effect, Greenpeace launched the “Kleercut” campaign, tweaking the tissue’s familiar cursive logo, in 2004. The publicity effort went on for years. Activists decorated trucks as tissue boxes and parked them outside corporate headquarters. They printed a doctored version of USA Today and distributed it at the World Tissue Convention. They infiltrated shareholders’ meetings. They launched a group called the Forest Friendly 500, urging universities, companies, and other major purchasers to boycott Kimberly-Clark’s products. They blockaded mills and chained themselves to train tracks. They pranked a man-on-the-street shoot for a Kleenex spot, sending activists one by one to pose as passersby and denounce the tissue as cameras rolled, then they released their own video of what happened. At one point, as Kimberly-Clark CEO Thomas Falk prepared to deliver a speech at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin, activists managed to access the audiovisual equipment, swapping out his PowerPoint deck for slides focused on the Kleercut campaign.

It gets to the point where the CEO says, I’d like this to go away.

 

A flustered Falk cut the talk short, and guests were ushered into a luncheon, where they were greeted at their table settings with satirical menus further hammering home Greenpeace’s message.

Economically, the effect of all this was negligible, but that wasn’t the point. “The nuisance impact was much larger,” Apte says. In 2009, when he came in as vice president of global sustainability, ready to engage with Greenpeace, some colleagues were dubious. “There were a lot of skeptics and nonbelievers who had been dealing with it since 2004,” he recalls. “But it gets to the point where the CEO says, ‘I understand that we have a very progressive policy, but I’d like this to go away.’”

Before long, Kimberly-Clark toughened its procurement guidelines based on Greenpeace’s recommendations, a shift the two sides announced at a joint news conference in August 2009.

Of course, the success of this technique depends on a company’s susceptibility to public pressure. When it came to Asia Pulp & Paper, a large multinational unknown to most consumers, Greenpeace simply looked downstream to find a purchaser of the company’s paper that might be more concerned about its brand image. It chose Mattel — specifically, one of the company’s most iconic toys, Barbie — which was being packaged with cardboard traced to virgin forests. (The campaign, called “Barbie, It’s Over,” portrayed Ken, Barbie’s longtime beau, kicking her to the curb because, as he put it, “I don’t date girls who are into deforestation.”)

 

Mattel soon reached out to APP, and while it was a relatively small customer, the paper company got the message. “It was not about tonnage for us,” Aida Greenbury says. “But it really affected peoples’ perception of APP. That campaign was very effective.”

APP soon opened negotiations with Greenpeace, though not without some hesitation. “It wasn’t love at first sight, that’s for sure,” Greenbury says. “It was very tough, especially for an Asian company, to receive such blunt and harsh criticism. When we first met them, the trust level was not even zero — it was probably minus 50. It was hard to give internal information to a radical NGO. ‘Are they going to use it against us?’ But they didn’t. They used it to help us, and we built up trust. It was an interesting journey.”

Last year, APP launched an impressive zero-deforestation plan, which has had profound ripple effects. “The impact of our conservation policy is not only on our concessions,” Greenbury points out. “It’s on all suppliers entering our supply chain. We think it’s our obligation to help our suppliers be able to comply with our policy. So it’s quite huge.”

Recently, APP took the issue a step further, announcing a plan not merely to end clear-cutting but to restore 1 million hectares of rain forest.

 

Greenpeace’s Civil War

Greenpeace’s transformation into a high-performance industrial spanking machine was only accomplished after a bloody executive putsch — the sort of boardroom intrigue more commonly encountered among pinstriped Masters of the Universe than Birkenstock-wearing idealists.

Fundamental issues involving the group’s identity and tactics came to a head in the late-'90s, as two opposing factions of Greenpeace ecowarriors began skirmishing with one another. The conflict, which pitted the central office in Amsterdam, backed by the European national groups, against the American affiliate, Greenpeace USA, boiled down to this: Encouraged by the ascendancy of Green parties in Germany and elsewhere, the European contingent was ready to grow up, join the establishment and work for change from the inside. Past efforts along these lines had already shown promise. A few years before, a staffer in Germany had worked with a scientist to pioneer a clean new refrigeration technology, dubbed Greenfreeze, which had since been widely adopted throughout Europe and Asia, resulting in a massive decline in the release of hydrofluorocarbons.

The Europeans remained proponents of direct action, but only as part of a multipronged effort that also included “solutions work,” such as developing feasible alternatives to unsustainable practices, and opening negotiations with corporate adversaries. They were also eager for the NGO’s many semiautonomous satellite offices to coordinate their efforts around large-scale, global issues such as climate change and GMOs.

The Americans were still in protest mode, putting their efforts into local battles and community building in a bid to jump-start a broad social movement.

They were dedicated activists on both sides, all zealous do-gooders. But the philosophical gap soon became unbridgeable. And there was another problem. The sprawling network was governed by a longstanding arrangement by which the national groups based in rich countries paid annual dues to the home office in Amsterdam, which used the funds to support less wealthy satellites in the developing world.

The setup worked well, but a wrinkle had emerged: Greenpeace USA was going broke.

The effort to build a grassroots movement based on retail canvassing and coalition building had taken a toll on the American group’s public profile. As a result, its fundraising tanked.

Although the localized approach led to some important wins — for instance, curtailing the dumping of toxins in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” — they came at the expense of the global organization’s key priorities. For instance, Greenpeace USA was missing in action during the negotiations over the Kyoto Protocols, essentially declining to participate. And it opted out of the GMO campaign, which was gathering steam around the world. Membership and donations plummeted by more than 60%. As a result, levies paid to the central office slowed to a trickle.

Eventually, acting on a clause in the bylaws, international body took aggressive action, dismissing Greenpeace USA’s executive director and parachuting in a replacement in from Amsterdam with a mandate to clean house.

The acting director laid off 335 staff members out of a total of 400 (mostly door-to-door canvassers) and slashed the annual budget by more than 25%. The board of directors was sent packing.

After a period of soul-searching, the U.S. group signed on the global agenda, retooled its operations and replaced the expensive canvassing efforts with an expanded online presence. Eventually, the organization began to notch some wins — on GMOs, for instance, and the use of toxic chemicals in children’s toys — which began to reduce internal tensions. Membership rolls bounced back and the money started flowing again.

 

Giving Up On Government

Greenpeace’s energetic crusade to turn corporate transgressors into eco-champions came about in response to a sudden realization that the traditional approach, pushing for government regulation, had become a spectacular failure.

“A lot of NGOs working on deforestation had a bit of a pipe dream that some sort of U.N. climate treaty or U.S. law, cap and trade or something, would save the day,” says Rolf Skar. “The disappointment that was Copenhagen” — the 2009 U.N. climate summit widely regarded as a bust — “left a lot of us scratching our heads about what to we could go next.”

In the U.S., the inertia around environmental issues can be attributed to the paralysis of a divided and acrimonious legislative branch. As Radford points out, “There hasn’t been real national environmental legislation passed since Superfund in the 1980s.” The Clean Air Act, he notes, was technically an extension, and recent moves on green issues — like the tough new fuel standards — have come from the executive branch without congressional action.

“The old equation for environmental groups was help write a bill and get Congress to pass it, or pass state laws and then press for consistency,” Radford says. But now, the outsize influence of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which aggressively promotes conservative policies in statehouses and municipalities, has come to dominate local politics. “And gerrymandering and voter suppression have made it hard to do much in Congress,” he says.

That’s to say nothing of the estimated $1 billion that conservative groups spend annually to fund climate-change skeptics, think tanks, and advocacy organizations.

Apte puts it more bluntly. “I don’t believe our legislators will adopt any action on climate change,” he says. “Unfortunately, there are some politicians who are naive about the whole issue, and so much money is put behind those candidates that I doubt Congress will ever act.”

In many of the key countries where Greenpeace operates, authoritarian regimes and rampant corruption can create further difficulties.

“What we’ve come to learn from Indonesia and other countries that are incredibly corrupt, is if you can flip enough companies, then civil societies and the companies together can get laws passed,” Radford says.

He points to the example of ranchers in Brazil who were aggressively clearing forests to create more grazing lands. Some 75% of the beef was consumed locally, and the national government had a financial stake in the large beef processors, so Greenpeace’s leverage seemed minimal. But it turned out the leather was going to Nike, Timberland, and BMW. The group initiated campaigns against those brands instead. “It was real easy to get the attention of the cattle industry when those companies got on the horn and said, ‘We’ve got a problem here,’” Skar recalls. Before long, the beef producers came around, working with Greenpeace to adopt strict new policies against deforestation, without the Brazilian government’s input.

There are other reasons for this indirect approach. Greenpeace’s scuffles with governments have proved dangerous. In 1973, Dave McTaggart, who would become the group’s chairman, lost sight in one eye during a scuffle with French commandos after he tried to prevent a nuclear test in the South Pacific. More than a decade later, French intelligence agents bombed the Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow Warrior, which was attempting to prevent similar tests. A photographer was killed in the explosion, and the vessel was sunk. French officials initially denied involvement in the bombing, but the plot was uncovered by New Zealand police.

In the Amazon, death threats are so routine that activists wear Kevlar vests and travel in armored trucks. Greenpeace Brazil campaigner Paolo Adario, who often uses a small plane to identify clear-cutting in remote regions, has found himself unable to land at certain airstrips because of angry mobs waiting for him. Campaigners have been hung in effigy in Indonesia, and the Rainbow Warrior II was chased through international waters not long ago by an Indonesian destroyer and warplanes. Just last year, a Greenpeace ship protesting drilling in the Arctic was attacked by armed Russian commandos, who arrested the crew. The activists, called the Arctic 30, were charged with piracy, a crime carrying a 15-year sentence, before being released as part Vladimir Putin’s pre-Olympics amnesty.

By contrast, dealing with multinational corporations is a walk in the park. “Companies tend not to show up with automatic rifles and start shooting inches above your head,” Skar observers, referring to the aggressive tactics employed by the Russian military in the arctic standoff. “We’re nonviolent,” he says. “We’re not going to fight back.”

Moreover, corporations tend to be motivated not by ideology but by revenue, and are therefore less likely to question the hard science behind global warming. Notable exceptions include industry titans like Charles and David Koch, who profit directly from fossil fuels.

Tech companies especially have shown an awareness of the dangers posed by carbon emissions, perhaps because they are staffed and often run by young engineers and scientists. “One thing about working with the IT sector,” says Gary Cook, Greenpeace’s senior IT analyst, “is we have never had a debate about climate change. They all think it’s real.”

That helps explain why Greenpeace’s campaign to persuade major tech companies — most notably Google, Facebook, and Apple — to power their data centers with renewable energy has been so successful. After being slammed in Greenpeace’s 2012 report “How Clean Is Your Cloud?” Apple has since earned praise for committing to using 100% renewable energy to power its iCloud server farms. It even installed solar arrays at its facility in Maiden, North Carolina, rather than tap into the coal-generated power provided by the local utility, Duke Energy.

“The fact that Apple went and did that told Duke that if it sits on its hands, motivated companies can go around them,” Cook says. “Other commercial customers started to say, ‘Hmm, maybe we should look at this, too.’ Duke doesn’t make any money if companies generate their own power.” Before long, pressure from Apple, as well as Google and Facebook, persuaded Duke to create a program offering green power to major corporate customers rather than lose their business altogether. “Duke never would have done that on its own,” Phil Radford says.

One tech company that has steadfastly resisted Greenpeace’s entreaties is Amazon Web Services, the world’s leading hosting company and one of the sector’s largest users of fossil fuels, according to Greenpeace. “I’m an optimist about them,” Cook says. “If motivated, I feel confident Amazon will find a way to move at significant scale. But at this point, there’s no indication that they’re going to do that.” Seeking a more vulnerable pressure point, the group recently launched a campaign against Pinterest, a major AWS client, demanding the company “Make Our Pins Green” and enlisting some of Pinterest’s most widely followed users in the effort. (Disclosure: Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider.)

One key reason for the shift in thinking in corporate boardrooms is globalization. Most large companies now operate across borders — often with offices, factories, licensees, and suppliers in some of the areas most directly affected by climate change — and are therefore more likely to experience the effects directly.

Apte points to the massive floods that swept Thailand in 2011. Because major automakers depended on parts manufactured in Thailand, assembly lines went idle around the world.

“If you were to ask some guy in the auto industry five years ago, ‘Do you believe in global warming?’ he would have said no,” Apte says, “but more and more, people are coming to the realization that climate change is having a big impact on supply chains. Business leaders are smart enough to see what is happening. Ask them about economic impacts, and the amount of money each company is losing has gone up tenfold.”

The other key factor for businesses is a heightened sensitivity to the value of their signature brands, often built over many years at considerable cost. The decades-old practice of “culture jamming” — what the French Situationists who pioneered the technique called “détournement” — has been weaponized by social media, enabling organizations to use a company’s own elaborately planned marketing campaigns against it, often to devastating effect.

“Companies invest a lot in advertising and building relationships with consumers, and it’s really easy for us to mess that up,” Skar says. “We can outperform many companies online with the right issues —more hits, more likes, more views. That’s really increased our power.”

 

‘Fuzzier, Wuzzier, Greener’

Even Greenpeace’s detractors have taken note of the organization’s newfound potency. Fred Smith, former president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and founder of the group’s Center for Advancing Capitalism, calls Greenpeace “one of the most effective” groups out there at essentially guilt-tripping corporations into becoming more socially responsible, a trend he considers hopelessly misguided. “It’s bad for companies, bad for customers, bad for shareholders, bad for workers,” Smith says. “But boy, it can get CEOs really great publicity in newspapers. Their wife can come home from the garden club and say, ‘Dear, you’re so much better than the other corporate husbands I know!’ And their children can say, ‘Daddy, you’re not as evil as I thought you were all these years!’”

Smith maintains that the desire be perceived as benevolent has made corporations less competitive. “It’s going to put them out of business,” he says.

Aida Greenbury of APP disagrees. “We are doing this because consumers are calling for it as well,” she points out.

But Smith insists most of the research on consumer preferences is flawed. “Companies go out to people and say, ‘How do you feel about my brand now that I’m fuzzier and wuzzier and greener?’” he says. “But there’s very little data that that translates into sales.” That’s not to say CEOs shouldn’t be pay lip service to environmental concerns. “I mean, look, don’t go around saying, ‘We don’t care about these things,’” Smith says. “Use all the nice, soft rhetoric you want. But for god’s sake, don’t take it seriously!”

Smith attributes initiatives around corporate social responsibility, or CSR, to a crippling sense of shame that has taken hold in America’s C-suites. “The average approach of a businessman when attacked by an environmental group is to say, ‘We’re working on it. We’re not as bad as you think. We’ve spent a fortune on environmental cleanup. In another decade we’ll be down to zero,’” he says. “And then they step back and wait for applause and they never get it! Why? Because to most people, it’s like a guy who gets up and says, ‘All right, you’ve got me. I did beat my wife, but I have cut down dramatically on wife-beating in the past five years. I’ve gone from leather belts to cloth belts, and from every day to once a week.’

Use all the nice, soft rhetoric you want. But for god’s sake, don’t take it seriously!

“You can try to please your customers,” he adds, “but don’t try to please your critics. These people are utopians. You can never please them.”

That may have been true in the past, but Greenpeace has gradually adopted a new policy that aims to give corporate leaders enough praise — and glowing brand publicity — to persuade others like them to hop on the bandwagon. Internally, this tactic has become known as “spank and thank.” When Kimberly-Clark adopted a new sustainable policy after a five-year battle, Greenpeace followed up with a thank-you campaign urging supporters to email Falk directly to express their gratitude (more than 15,000 emails were sent) and produced a humorous YouTube video in which a scruffy 20-something gazes into a mirror and practices making up with a former flame, Kimberly, after a rough patch.

“It was a beautifully done parody,” Apte says. “Hats off to them on creativity. With a small budget, they produce more effective media than some of our brand guys did.”

Recently, they did the same thing after several top tech companies made commitments to using renewable energy, flying the Greenpeace airship over the Bay Area praising Apple, Google, and Facebook for going green while slamming Amazon, Twitter, Netflix, and Pinterest for failing to do so.

“We have a motto internally, which goes, ‘We have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies,’” Rolf Skar points out. “The minute you want to change, great. We don’t hold any hard feelings. We’re focused on a cause, not a company.” In other words, love the sinner, hate the sin. Fundamentally, Greenpeace remains an organization made up of dedicated, fiercely ideological true believers, but it has become disciplined enough to steer clear of distracting culture wars. Instead, like any good evangelist, the group stands ready to embrace any corporation that sees the light, welcoming them warmly into the fold.

“As long a they see companies making a genuine effort, these guys will bend over backward to help you,” Apte says. “They want to use you as a role model to change others in the industry.”

On both an interpersonal level and a strategic one, this approach has been vital. In previous eras, when activists of various stripes waged scorched-earth campaigns of demonization against corporate villains — think Nestlé, Nike, California grapes — and at times seemed to decry capitalism altogether, companies rarely saw an upside to playing ball. Now, they’re guaranteed that a genuine turnaround will be greeted by a chorus of approval. As consumers increasingly seek out greener products, the halo effect provided by a Greenpeace thumbs-up can become a significant part of a brand’s identity and ultimately drive revenue and build staff morale.

Indeed, the unlikely romance between Kimberly-Clark and Greenpeace seems to have deepened with time. “The relationship blossomed to the point where we began sharing our five-year plans with them,” Apte says. “We want to know in advance if there are any showstoppers in there from their perspective.”

 

The Palm-Oil Crusade

The palm-oil crusade made its public debut in 2007 with a report called “Cooking the Climate,” which compared the peat forests to “ticking time bombs” and labeled Indonesia the world’s largest producer of greenhouse-gas emissions linked to deforestation.

The report also noted pointedly that while many leading palm-oil users, including Unilever, ADM and Nestlé, were already members of an organization called the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), which was designed to clean up the industry, the results were underwhelming. As the report put it, “Many in the industry are using the RSPO to cover their backs, putting off urgent action while the destruction continues.”

The problem was that suppliers blended oil from numerous plantations, effectively laundering the bad oil with the good.

While Greenpeace’s report openly acknowledged that “consumer companies … have virtually no way of knowing whether or not the palm oil they are using is from rain forest destruction and conversion of peatlands,” it nonetheless began to campaign against such multinationals.

First, it took aim at Unilever, chair of the RSPO. Following a script that had been perfected with the Kleercut campaign, it chose a beloved brand, Dove. The soap had recently rolled out a marketing campaign dedicated to questioning society’s distorted ideas of female beauty. The promotion was wildly successful, turning Dove into a champion of female empowerment and a social-media darling. It also made the soap exceptionally vulnerable to criticism. Greenpeace simply made its own dead-on parody of one of Dove’s web spots featuring a young Indonesian girl, and sat back as it became the organization’s biggest viral hit. Unilever responded a few months later, declaring a total moratorium on palm oil linked to deforestation.

With Unilever on the path to reform, Greenpeace targeted Nestlé with a viral spot linking Kit Kat bars with the destruction of orangutan habitats. In it, an office worker bites into a chocolate bar only to find a bloody primate finger.

“Frankly I didn’t like it,” Skar says about the video. “It was too crude.” It did the trick, though, and Nestlé’s botched response offered a cautionary tale for other companies who might find themselves facing a similar controversy in the social-media era.

As the video, a parody of widely broadcast Kit Kat spot, began to rack up views, Nestlé pressured YouTube to remove it on copyright grounds. YouTube complied, prompting a flurry of angry posts on the candy bar’s Facebook page, which were promptly deleted, leading to still more cries of censorship.

Reposted on Vimeo as “the video Nestlé doesn’t want you to see,” the spot blew up. Given the lengthy campaign against Nestlé for its marketing of infant formula in the developing world — the boycott began in 1977 and is still underway — Greenpeace was “ready for a long slog,” Skar says. But two months later, following a dramatic shareholders’ meeting that was interrupted by Greenpeace operatives who rappelled from the ceiling with a banner, the company announced a zero-deforestation policy not only for palm oil but also pulp and paper. “They wound up overperforming,” Skar says. “Not that their supply chain is perfect, but it takes time to turn around a ship like this.”

Having flipped Nestlé, Greenpeace promptly moved down the list to the next big offender, Procter & Gamble. Len Sauers, P&G’s sustainability officer, says the company was already developing a sustainable palm-oil procurement policy when Greenpeace’s activists turned up in Cincinnati with their climbing gear. “We did not ignore those actions you reference,” he writes in an email. “But the fact is we were already addressing the issue.”

In any case, the timing was auspicious, and the reaction was swift.

On April 9, Rolf Skar was with his girlfriend and some friends in a small rented bungalow in the beach town of Ceulita, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, when his phone began buzzing with news.

It had been just over a month since Greenpeace had initiated its campaign against Head & Shoulders. The group had followed up the operation in Cincinnati with a coordinated action on March 26 that hit P&G offices around the world. A banner was deployed on the company’s corporate headquarters in Jakarta. Activists in tiger suits turned up at a facility in Manila. A red carpet walk of shame was unfurled in Delhi. And at a cleaning-products conference in Manchester, activists presented a Golden Axe Award to the company’s head of sustainability.

Now, P&G appeared to be making a change. The company had issued a press release touting a new sustainability goal, and Skar’s colleagues had scheduled a conference call to plan their response. Skar hopped on the call. There were six people on the phone — high-level staffers from around the world. They all digested the announcement, looking for loopholes.

The language was impressive. “P&G’s commitment to no deforestation in its palm supply chain is unequivocal,” Len Sauers wrote in a press release. “Our aim is to develop effective long-term solutions to the complicated issue of palm-oil sustainability. We are committed to driving positive change throughout the entire supply chain, not just for us, but for the industry and for the small farmers who depend on this crop.”

That sounded pretty definitive, but the fine print wasn’t perfect. The 2020 timeline for total compliance seemed distant, and the definition of high-carbon forests was somewhat vague. But Skar, among others, was convinced the company meant business.

The one with the final say was Bustar Maitar, the head of the Indonesian forest campaign. “If he’s not happy, none of us can be,” Skar says.

Ultimately, Maitar gave his assent and Greenpeace drafted a statement. P&G, it said, “finally took the plunge and decided to clean up its act and wash its supply chain clean of bad palm oil.”

Shortly after the announcement, I asked Skar what company he thought would stumble into Greenpeace’s crosshairs next. “Johnson & Johnson has a lot of great brands,” he said.

But just a week later, J&J, too, pledged to stop using palm oil linked to deforestation, leaving just PepsiCo among the U.S.-based companies Greenpeace originally pressed for action.

Skar declines to discuss Greenpeace’s plans, but it’s not hard to picture a full-on media blitz touting “Uncool Ranch Doritos” or “Mountain Don’t” coming soon to a YouTube channel near you.

 

***

After the March operation in Cincinnati, the nine Greenpeace activists were arrested and spent the night in jail. They were charged with burglary, vandalism, trespassing, and inducing panic. If convicted, the felony charges could bring maximum sentences 9 1/2 years and $20,000 in fines, a notably harsh punishment for a kid in a tiger costume.

“While some people may be sympathetic to their message, this is definitely a crime,” Hamilton County prosecutor Joseph Deters wrote in a press release. “This was a very sophisticated plan that put P & G, fire, and police personnel at risk while causing damage to a major corporation. They had numerous other ways to get their message across without committing a crime. They should be prepared to face the consequences.”

Greenpeace might well reply that climate change carries some significant consequences as well. The good news is that the business world appears increasingly to understand this reality. Asked what advice she’d give to a CEO who finds his or her company in Greenpeace’s crosshairs, APP’s Aida Greenbury is categorical. “Embrace your harshest critics,” she says. “Tackle your most difficult problems head-on. It’s 2014. It’s not the time when companies can play greenwashing and hope that the issues will be buried. We have the internet now — full transparency. So stop dancing around with the elephant in the room. Try to find solutions and implement them.”

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We all want better results.

Who couldn’t use more visitors turning into leads, and more leads turning into paying customers?

You have the power to create those results for your business. But in the words of Peter Drucker, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

That’s why conversion-rate monitoring and optimization are vital. Turning to data to understand what’s working well and what could be improved puts you in the best position for sustained success.

Conversion Rate Optimization is an investment. Getting the best possible ROI on that investment requires finding and gathering the right kind of data. The higher the quality of the data you collect, the better insights you’ll gain from testing and evaluating the results.

Collecting high-quality data isn’t as difficult as you might think. Keep reading to see how to do it.

Image Source: mortsan via Compfight cc

Searching for the Best Data: Quantitative and Qualitative

According to Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, “one accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions.”

Some businesses dive into CRO without considering how they’ll gather and analyze data beforehand. Doing the groundwork first would put them in a better position to achieve success. A 2013 report from Econsultancy revealed that businesses adopting a “structured approach to improving conversion rates are twice as likely to see an increase in conversion.”

Deciding what data to collect and how to collect it is integral to any successful CRO strategy. Take a look below to see how you can collect two different types of data – quantitative and qualitative – and make them the foundation of your CRO strategy.

Quantitative Data

Quantitative data is foundational to any effective CRO strategy. Here are two ways you can collect it:

1. Google Analytics

Use acquisition analysis to focus on your main traffic sources and monitor your metrics. Pay close attention to your site’s bounce rate, average order value, and conversion rate. Then, continue with a behavior analysis to see what your users are doing on your website. Find and document these numbers for an idea of what’s working and what can be improved.

The conversion analysis’ conversion funnels provide great information on where you’re losing purchases and why the transactions are coming up short. Gathering this data is the first step to testing and improving your conversion funnel. This funnel infographic shows how this data is found:

Image Source: The Daily Egg

2. Segmentation

Universal Analytics is another effective source to understand how different users interact with your website. Many of us use segmenting to better understand our users, and this source makes it easy to gather information on new vs. returning visitors, shopping cart abandonment, and your most loyal customers.

You can use A/B testing to challenge your assumptions about why different traffic segments behave the ways they do. Then you can apply the insights from these tests to optimize your website for more conversions. But before you do, take a look how to gather another type of information essential to developing your CRO strategy: qualitative data.

Qualitative Data

Numbers can only tell you part of the story. It’s great to analyze bounce rates and traffic levels, but the best CRO strategies dive deeper. They turn to qualitative data for explanations why the numbers add up the way they do.

Going straight to the source for these answers – your customers – opens up a window of opportunity. You’ll get a better sense of what your customers need and how well you’re serving those needs.

Collecting the best qualitative data begins by asking general questions. Why do customers need my product? How will they use it? What’s the main motivation that drives them to buy?

Once you’ve done some legwork, it’s time to start gathering qualitative data to fuel your hypotheses and begin testing.

Gathering Qualitative Data: Get the Most from Your Customers

Your customers can give you insights you’ll never find in your Google Analytics dashboard. Here are 6 ways to gather the best qualitative data:

1. Get Your Customer Service Team Involved

Your best source of “inside information” into your customers’ minds might be hiding right under your nose. Members of your customer service team speak with customers all the time, giving them insight and a unique perspective. You can tap into that knowledge. Set up a meeting with some of your best customer service reps to get their ideas how to boost your conversions.

2. Address Your Customers Directly

There’s no substitute for one-on-one conversations. Reaching out to your customers directly (over the phone, via email, or even in person) will make them feel special and provide insight you won’t find anywhere else. Personal outreach lets you understand product praise, complaints, and other feedback in language your customers use naturally. It also fosters customer loyalty and trust.

3. Create Surveys

Surveys are an efficient way to gain more qualitative insight into how your business is performing. Asking questions like the following can provide a wealth of new CRO testing ideas:

• “How did you find out about us?”
• “Did you find everything you were looking for on own website?”
• “What suggestions do you have?”

You have a choice of being direct or indirect in your approach. Quarlaroo strikes up a conversation with visitors while they browse through your site, while 4Q, a free service from iPerceptions, offers an exit survey from your landing page. You could also use SurveyMonkey to offer visitors an incentive – like a discount or chance to win a gift card – if they complete your survey. Keep your customers in mind, and do what feels best for you. The sample below shows how you can gather data on where your customers heard about your business.

Image Source: Teledini

4. Leverage Tools

Heatmaps provide actionable data to help you understand what’s getting noticed on your site and what users click. CrazyEgg provides a great service for identifying these hot spots. For even deeper insights, try ClickTale; it records videos of your visitors’ screens and measures scrolling.

Visualizing your data provides qualitative insight into the ins and outs of your website. Plus you can customize these tools to cater to your needs and collect specific information you’d like to gather.

Image Source: inBoundio

5. Try Usability Studies

Usability studies are often overlooked. They are affordable and are conducted informally, making them a smart way to gather qualitative data.

UserTesting is a neat tool that helps you travel through your website by entering keywords and choosing your ad. They also can test competitors’ paths and note any reactions to their study. You can set up the tool as a set of feedback questions or an open-ended form for getting information from the test. Just make sure to document your feedback so you can use it to fuel your understanding of the data.

Image Source: UserTesting

6. Use Experience Mapping

Experience mapping is a two-fold process. First, you can get an idea of experience touch points by finding out where users interact with your website. Then, you gather your data. Which issues are you seeing at each touch point? A tool like Adaptivepath can help you conduct this research and get a more in-depth understanding of your website’s strong and weak points.

Image Source: Adaptive Path

Applying Qualitative Data to Create Better Results

Okay, so you’ve gathered some data. What’s next? Using insights within that data to test your website and optimize conversions. Here’s how you can get the ball rolling.

1. Conduct A/B Testing

Around three in five companies surveyed say A/B testing and multivariate testing are ‘highly valuable’ for improving conversion rates.- Econsultancy 2013 Report

Now that you’ve collected your data, it’s time to use testing to confirm your hypotheses and challenge assumptions. You can run A/B tests to test the original version of a webpage (the “control”) with a slight variation (the “treatment”). Make sure you have the right software, then run an A/B test. It could take some time to generate statistically significant results, so A/B testing should be ongoing for the biggest boost in conversions. This infographic covers why A/B testing is such an integral part of the CRO process.

2. Make Major Changes

Don’t be afraid to test drastically different designs and assess their impact on your conversions. Many businesses are conservative with testing, sticking to simple color changes and tweaking call to action buttons. But you can change the way users sign up for your website, how they create a free account, and more. Major changes like these can lead to the largest increases in conversions.

In an effort to increase conversions, Basecamp started off with a simple drawing and developed subheadings to get their message to customers. Eventually they decided to give their website a major facelift, and it paid off; the redesign increased conversions by 14%.

3. Get Creative

Videos on landing pages can improve conversion rates by up to 80%.- EyeView Digital

Adding a little flair to your website can increase your revenue dramatically. You can incorporate infographics, images,, and even video trailers to better engage your users. Also, take the time to invest in developing lifelong customers. Offer incentives for customers if they refer a friend or spend a certain amount of money. You’ll keep your customers happy and loyal.

4. Add Personalization

Simplify. 20% increase in decision simplicity results in a 96% increase in customer loyalty, 86% increase in likelihood to purchase, and 115% increase in likelihood to recommend. -CEB

So, you’ve got the hang of the basics now. Trying some advanced techniques can take your conversion rate over the top. You can track your user activity, find out what content interests them, and incorporate your findings into your homepage. Target your users’ favorites and send out personalized emails. You’ll notice higher click through rates with these strategies.

You can also try Automated Behavioral Targeting, which reaches out to every customer and develops the best content for them based on their previous browsing activity.

Leveraging High-Quality Data to Increase Conversions

A systematic CRO strategy can generate more leads, customers, and an edge over your competitors. It’s one of the best investments you can make for your business. But it is an investment.

The higher the quality of your data, the better you can assess your performance and spot opportunities to improve. Apply the strategies in this post to collect better quantitative and qualitative data and develop a testing plan to optimize your performance online. Then it’s just a matter of working your plan and time. The rewards – more customers, profits, and a higher profile in your niche – pay off for months and years to come.

Which method of data collection do you think leads to the most actionable insights for your business? Leave us a comment below and let us know!

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”  This is the famous sound bite from John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address.  Fifty plus years later it is still memorable.

In business, the ability to get your point across very easily and make it memorable can generate business growth while potentially increasing conversions significantly.  People often think a sound bite is just it’s a clever quip, but it is actually more than that.   In this post, which is based on a conversation we recently had with Susan Harrow (AKA the Sound Bite Queen), we will share some suggestions for you to use when creating sound bites for your business.  Ultimately, a good sound bite can be a vital weapon that you can add to your creative marketing idea tool kit.

The most effective sound bites are usually in the form of an analogy, anecdote, story, statistic, fact, one-liner, acronym, and metaphor.  Sound bites should flow naturally so you will want to have a mix of those so it doesn’t sound like you’re trying to make a sound bite.

There are two things that a sound bite should do in the course of a business conversation.  First, it should rapidly tell the audience you are in front of, what’s of value to them in this moment, and second, how can you help.

“Speak to what your audience needs to know now and how you can help. It’s not about bragging about yourself. It’s about speaking through the results of your clients to your potential clients and customers. That’s what gets people to pick up the phone and hire you, or buy your product.” Susan Harrow, PRSecrets.com

A good sound bite could display your creative marketing ideas and might just be the hook that gets people reeled into your business.  They can be used for meetings, your LinkedIn profile, face-to-face networking, talking to customer/client, etc. It is important to practice and continually refine your sound bites.

Why communicate in sound bites? Neuroscience says that you have to communicate in 20-second chunks of conversation in order for the brain to actually process what you said. Anything beyond 20 seconds, without a pause, we cannot grasp or process in our brain. Thus, neuroscience dictates we have to learn to speak in sound bites.

Creative Marketing Ideas for Sound Bites

Get your own sound bite buddies.  Grab a friend or a colleague or someone to practice with who will be kind to you.  Then run your sound bites past them and see what they retain. Often times we don’t know what’s going to resonate with other people. We may think certain things we are saying are very important to communicate and then come to learn, they really weren’t to other people listening to them. This is what we are looking for from our sound bite buddies. Based on their response, you’ll start to identify what you’re saying that’s not sticking and you can even use this time to brainstorm new sound bites with your peers.

As you tell these stories you start to refine them. Perhaps you might want to try that in a different way or in a different order or with some different details. Basically what you are doing is you are playing with these. It’s an iterative process of playing and having someone as a sounding board that will help you.

Quick Recap

Creating sound bites

• Look at your bio, experience.  Create sound bites that speak to what your audience needs to know now and how you can help
• Things that sound bites should do:
  • Explain what the value is in the moment
  • Detail how can you help
  • Speak through the results of your clients to your potential clients/customers
  • Explain the issue they had, what YOU did to help, and the results they saw
  • Address fears of clients
  • Find a sound bite buddy – run it past other people, what do they hear?
  • Refine these, listen to what people say, feedback, shape your sound bite and story

Interested in more creative marketing ideas? Click here to download the ultimate kit for content creation.

The Challenge: Companies rely on customer referrals to bring in new business. But, they continue to struggle to interact, listen, and respond in a manner that provides the engagement and motivation for customers to actually provide those referrals.

Online customer word of mouth interactions and reviews have always been a part of Google, which now has new rules in place that will boost business reviews to a greater degree of importance in 2014. For example businesses will now be able to feature a small 67 character review right under their PPC ad. Additionally, Google will gather and display photographs, comments, and reviews in organic search results if a prior related search had been commenced.

Five new findings regarding word of mouth marketing have emerged from thousands of hours of Voice of Customer research conducted by our firm, ERDM;

• Engaging and competitively differentiating customer experiences are the foundations of today’s customer relationships.
• Personalization of content, communications and experiences per customer’s individual preferences are proof points that you care about your customers.
• Spray and pray blasts yield ever lower response rates and hurt your brand.
• It’s not about self-serve. It’s about providing customers with guidance and education which provides value and saves time.
• Authenticity, storytelling and emotion are the most powerful elements of marketing communications.

One especially innovative organization that has embraced deep customer engagement is Thrillist Media Group, the leading men’s digital media company. They have focused on differentiating themselves through personalization across channels, to their savvy male audience. Per Ben Lerer, Co-Founder & CEO of Thrillist Media Group, “Word of Mouth Marketing has played a huge role in our growth… The key has always been to think about our content creation purposefully: why does someone need this information and how will they be better and have more fun as a result of it.”

Examples of how Thrillist has engaged customers to buy and be brand advocates include;

• They refined their marketing lists to identify specific audiences for relevant “This is recommended for YOU” emails sent on selected products.
• They have taken the time to understand the personality as well as the purchasing history of their customers in order to present them with a humorous display of products portrayed to make them “disturbingly more handsome”.
• The company took measures to speak to their customers in a consistent tone and “be the brand” in every channel. And, though each medium was customized for its own unique experience, it presented a concerted and consistent personalized message for its consumers.

This resulted in;

• Increased traffic to the site
• Decreased “unsubscribes” by 50%
• Increased engagement by 15%.

5 Takeaways to Cultivate Customer Referrals:

1. Create methods of direct conversations. Give customers ample avenues to engage in conversations with your company through the touch points of their choice.
2. Develop strategies for active listening. Let customers know that you are listening and that you are giving them empowering levels of knowledge. Customers will not provide a referral if they do not understand the company, the products, or your company’s perceived value. Empower them with the knowledge to go forth and tell others what they’ve learned.
3. Provide a consistent value-driven customer experience. Customer’s own reputations are on the line when they recommend your company to others. By providing them with good customer support, it gives them confidence that others will have the same high quality customer experience.
4. Be humble. Acknowledge what you don’t know about how your customers truly define engagement. Ask for voice of customer insights from your customers and then trust their wisdom and act on their recommendations.
5. Achieve frictionless, high-value, engagement across every medium in the multichannel mix. And, select channels that serve the customer. For example, texting an offer is intrusive, but using text as a reminder for something they want is value.

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Believe it or not, businesses, colleges, cities, and states like seeing how much energy all their buildings use. The growth of a software company called Lucid proves that.

Lucid announced $8 million in new venture funding today. The company plans to bolster its cloud-based software and hire the kinds of people who can get lots more businesses using the software, which analyzes usage from lots of devices and systems to produce simple applications and dashboards.

Fortunately for Lucid, the cloud as an aggregation point seems to make more and more for organizations.

The company has observed “a steady move away from high-cost, proprietary, slow methods of connecting building systems and devices and accessing their data, and a turn toward the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model that innovative companies use to deliver revolutionary products today,” Lucid’s chief creative officer, Gavin Platt, wrote in an email to VentureBeat.

It’s one of a few energy-efficiency software companies that have taken on funding in recent months. Others include AutoGrid Systems, EnergySavvy, and FirstFuel Software.

On top of those, Opower, a company with software that shows people information about their energy usage at home, debuted on public markets in April.

This doesn’t mean a renaissance for greentech startups. But it does hint at the value of technology that can help companies and people cut down on the amount of money they spend on a necessary resource.

Small wonder Google, Cisco, and other companies “have a huge interest in entering the space,” Platt wrote.

Lucid’s software brings together energy, water, and gas usage statistics for every building that a company operates. Inputs include utility meters, lighting controls, and power-generation systems — in total, more than 150 systems.

The creation of a common language for lots of different proprietary systems might not sound like a big deal, but it is. Suddenly, it becomes easy for companies to understand what’s going on with all of their facilities, without checking a slew of isolated dashboards and databases, and without doing a lot of complicated work to bring the data into one place.

“You just click ‘connect,’ and the connection is done, and we do all the heavy lifting,” Lucid founder and chief executive Vladi Shunturov told VentureBeat.

Lucid also makes software that visualizes energy usage information for building occupants, whether on a big, shared screen in the lobby or on an online dashboard employees can view whenever they want. Lucid’s Building Dashboard software can also display how much money companies are spending on energy and how much carbon dioxide they have emitted so far for a given month.

Lucid started in Ohio in 2004. Now it employs 40 people and is based in Oakland, Calif. It will probably hit 80 or 85 people by the first quarter of next year, Platt said.

The company says it has 400 customers, including Disney, Google, PNC Bank, Skanska, Sony Pictures, the state of Florida, and the University of California.

Formation 8 led the funding round for Lucid. Zetta Venture Partners also participated. To date, Lucid has raised $9.5 million.

Eric Blattberg contributed reporting.

Is eBay's latest report on paid search really a blow to search engine marketing? Or are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

Following the release of the final results of an ongoing study, there have been headlines proclaiming that “eBay warns that search ads have 'no measurable benefit'”.

So, either eBay is making an outrageous claim that paid search ads don’t work. Or, the headlines are slightly misleading.

Having now read the paper by eBay, it would appear that both may be true.

Online retail giant eBay (via Blake, Noska and Tadelis at Berkley) argues that paid search or ‘search engine marketing’ (SEM), the largest internet advertising channel by revenue, has had its benefits overstated.

Well, what it says is that 'conventional methods used to measure the causal (incremental) impact of SEM vastly overstate its effect'. OK, that’s not quite the same thing. That’s related to crude measurement techniques that not all marketers use.

It also argues that:

...the effectiveness of SEM is small for a well-known company like eBay and that the channel has been ineffective on average.

This is coming closer to the bold assertion made by headline writers that eBay is wholly dismissive of the channel. But it’s not clear that a broad swipe has been taken at the whole channel; rather, the wording suggests that SEM simply hasn’t worked for eBay.

The authors also “find a detectable positive impact of SEM on new user acquisition and on influencing purchases by infrequent users.” In short, the report calls into question only certain elements of the search marketing channel, and the current methods of attribution – not the entire concept.

Branded search

The report starts by talking about branded search, that is, consumers typing a company name into a search engine. These people are then served both a paid-for advert and the organic listing for the company.

The report found that turning off these brand-keyword paid search ads for eBay did not lead to a decline in traffic or indeed attributable sales. The report also argues that many customers who click on ads (and go on to purchase – score!) would have purchased anyway.

According to the report:  

Advertising may appear to attract these customers, when in reality they would have found other channels to visit the company’s website.

It’s easy to see why and how this type of budget allocation could be discredited. A click on the paid ad is PPC budget down the drain, surely.

Well not necessarily! eBay is a massive brand, and would of course dominate the natural listings for 'eBay' terms. Not all companies rank highly for their own name.

Furthermore, similar studies have shown that turning off the paid ads for some brands, even when they do dominate the organic search results, leads to a (sometimes significant) decrease in sales revenue.

So what about generic product searches?

When people search for a generic term, do paid search ads facilitate product discovery and lead to sales? Maybe, but Google’s recent Clickstream Whitepaper shows that search behaviour, although constantly changing, tends to begin with a branded term, unless the search is for property (nearly 100% generic searches) or travel products.

In other words, generic product searches are on the decrease.

The beauty of paid search, of course, is that it is a lot more nuanced than the reports from Google and eBay may suggest.

Success in this channel will completely depend on your market, your products, the keywords you are looking to target and your approach to attribution. Ebay does say “our results show that for a well-known brand like eBay, the efficacy of SEM is limited at best.”

As Econsultancy pointed out when the initial findings were unveiled last year, the report is worth a read... but “the lesson is: find out what works for you and not what works for eBay.” 

You probably already know the marketing value of social media. You probably already know certain vanity metrics of social media. You possibly even know the detrimental effects of being bad at social media.

Do you know the value of giving social customer service?

Giving customer service over Twitter and other social channels is not only becoming a necessary part of a brand’s social media presence but also one forced upon it by a consumer base who sees your unsuspecting brand operating in a public space and thinks “now I’ve got you!”

Of course this is only true of the brands that haven’t prepared well enough to deal with customers via social channels. Those that either ignore complaints, questions or even just rudimentary engagement.

There are many brands out there totally nailing social customer service, and there’s a collection of them in how the top brands use Twitter for customer care however if you need extra persuasion that bringing customer service to you social strategy is the right thing to do, here’s a collection of stats and infographics to give you that final push.

From our own Social Media Statistics Compendium…

• 42% of leading UK companies say that customer service is the most important skill required for real-time social community engagement.

• Of the 4.8m small businesses in the UK, nearly a quarter (23%) earn over £1,000 per annum through connecting with consumers on social platforms.
• 49.5% of 18-24 year-olds have dealt with a brand through social media. 27.4% of 55+ age group have also dealt with a brand with social media. 

• 31% of marketers see increases in customer engagement from the use of social media.

What motivates a Twitter user to follow a company?

• Almost 10% of all brand mentions by a male follower are a complaint, as are 5% of brand mentions by a female follower.

Download our full social media statistics compendium for much more.

From Lithium Technologies…

• 53% of customers who ask a brand a question on Twitter expect a response within one hour.
• However, if a customer makes a complaint to a brand using Twitter, that figure goes up to 72%.

• If companies don’t respond within the one hour time frame, 38% of people feel more negatively towards the brand, and an impressively galvanised 60% will take action against the brand using social media.
• 74% of customers believe that if they take to social media to criticise a brand, this leads to better service. 
• More than half of all Twitter users engage with brands, and that same number prefer Twitter to other traditional methods of communication when they need to contact them.

From Simply Measured… 

• 30 of the Interbrand Top 100 Brands currently operate a dedicated customer service Twitter feed, a number that has increased from 23 since December 2012.

• Mentions of dedicated customer service handles have increased by 44% year-over-year.
• The average response rate to all customer service mentions was 42%, while Ford achieved the best response rate at 75%. Only five of the dedicated support accounts maintained response rates greater than 60%.
• The top 10 dedicated handles account for a massive 59% of total customer mentions, and demand has actually increased by 20% since December 1. These accounts responded by increasing the number of tweets they sent by 39%.

Each of the top 10 brands by mentions averaged response times less than 24 hours.

From Social Bakers…

Here are 2013’s top 10 global brands with the best customer service on Facebook.

• Brands improved their response rate by 143% on Facebook over the last year.
• Here are the best operating industries on Facebook by response rate, from 2012 to 2013.

From Ambassador…

Finally here’s a neat infographic that sums everything up nicely. Especially compelling is the fact that if a follower receives good customer service via social media, they will spend 21% more.

For more on social customer service from the blog, check out 10 emerging examples of best practice and how Barclaycard balances compliance with social customer service.

Quick test: Who’s the audience for your blog? How about your eNewsletter? Your podcast? If you are like most enterprises that sell multiple product lines to multiple audiences, you may have two, three, four or more different audiences you are trying to target with the same content initiative. How’s that working for you?

Two case studies

Large technology company. While Robert Rose and I were in Toronto for the LinkedIn Content Marketing Master Class, one attendee had a question about buyer personas. More details revealed this large technology company (a Fortune 100 company) had precisely 18 different audiences they were targeting with their single blog. Needless to say, the blog wasn’t working very well for them.

Forbes.com Who is the audience for Forbes? According to Forbes Media, the site targets the world’s affluent business leaders with insights and information. OK, that’s a bit broad, but I can live with that. But with a quick look at Forbes.com articles, it’s clear to see that Forbes.com targets the audience known as “the entire planet.” Not only can you find what to wear to a regional small business conference, but you can also find which historic cemeteries have outdoor music performances. Hmmm. Even worse, while some content of Forbes AdVoice (its native advertising program) is relevant, much of the paid content is pretty useless for just about everybody. I believe this is why Forbes is having a tough time selling the company. Forbes is asking for an estimated $400 million for the brand, but reports are that is an unrealistic number.  Why? Because it’s incredibly hard to monetize an audience of everybody.

Four questions

Whether your goal is to sell more software or advertising, you need to get focused on your core audience. If you haven’t already, answer these questions and make sure your entire content marketing team pastes them to their foreheads.

1. Who? Who is the audience for each piece of content (fill in the blank, i.e., blog)? Who is the specific buyer persona you are targeting with this platform?
2. Why? Why are you doing this? What is the behavior change that you must see to call this content initiative a success? (Do you need to drive sales, save costs, or drive customer loyalty?)
3. Outcome? What’s in it for the reader? How are you making their lives better or jobs easier in some way? What’s the pain point you are solving for them?
4. Replacement factor? If you didn’t provide this kind of information for your audience, would they care — or notice? Could they find the information elsewhere? Is what you are saying really that important?

While all these questions are important, if you have multiple responses to “who,” the other questions are almost impossible to answer. Having multiple audiences waters down the content, has less impact and will be almost impossible for you to accomplish your marketing goals.

Two that do it right

Indium Corp.: Indium Blog.

Audience target: Engineers with questions around industrial soldering equipment.

Indium has become the de facto expert on all things industrial solders because that’s all they cover–specifically for engineers.

OpenView Venture Partners: OpenView Labs Blog

Audience target: Growth-minded entrepreneurs seeking early-stage funding

This “value-added” venture-capital company commits a number of internal resources to becoming THE resource for early-stage company executives.

Next steps

Congratulations. You got the job! Now the real challenge begins: hitting the ground running. I once interviewed a C-level leader from the retail industry about the importance of quickly getting the lay of the land when coming into a new role. “The first step I take when taking on a new assignment or project is what I call ‘surveying the landscape,’” she said. “I study my surroundings, and I try to understand the people and processes that drive value in that particular area.”

You see, if you spend the first few weeks of a new job focusing solely on your new job description, you'll pass up opportunities that will set you up for long-term career success and growth, like understanding how your role can support other areas of the business and building alliances with influential counterparts. But by getting to know your new environment, you'll be able to quickly pick up momentum and become known for driving value in the organization right from the get-go. Get started with these four tips. Read more...

More about Networking, Business, Marketing, How To, and Influencial

Developing a loyalty program that ensures a successful outcome can be hard, but at Social Annex we’ve determined 10 crucial steps that help our clients build out a powerful, customer-centric loyalty solution.

1. Segment for maximum effectiveness
Loyalty programs are not one size fit all; treat your customers differently based on their engagement level, demographics and purchase behavior. Separating your audience by these characteristics will enable you to create targeted campaigns. For example, you should create specific campaigns for new members, repeat buyers and inactive members.

2. Incentivize the right actions for desired outcomes
Pinpoint which available actions will result in which outcomes, either increased engagement, conversions or brand advocacy. Depending on what your long term goals are, certain actions can be more heavily rewarded when customers complete them to motivate them to do so.

3. Identify real rewards that will motivate your customers
High end consumers tend to be brand conscious and respond well to points, on brand perks and exclusive memberships. Keep your loyalty program exclusive by segmenting rewards for VIP members and new adopters. Use a tiered reward system to entice your shoppers to keep completing more actions for more exclusive rewards.

4. Gamify the loyalty experience
Gamified loyalty programs create a competitive online community. Customers would earn badges for the actions they complete and can see how they rank with public leaderboards. Create mystery and surprise badges to keep motivation high and your customers on their toes as they interact with your brand.

5. Marketing and Cross Promotion
Market loyalty programs as a way to achieve membership-only rewards. Cross promote across existing social channels and through email newsletters. Include CTAs around your site for each available action to ensure that your loyalty program cannot be missed.

6. Integrate with all 3rd Party Systems
For the largest impact, fully integrate your loyalty program with your existing 3rd party systems. Integrate with your ESP, CRM, marketing automation and content management platforms for future remarketing campaigns, targeted emails and lead nurturing.

7. Develop an Email Marketing Strategy
Once integrated with your ESP and marketing automation platforms, continue promoting your loyalty campaign with three key emails: transactional, trigger and general marketing emails. Keep your members informed with transactional emails that show them which rewards they’ve earned by completing which actions. Excite your members with triggered emails whenever they have reached a new status after achieving a certain amount of points.Target people who are 200 points away from the next level with a list of actions to unlock more rewards.

8. Enhance your loyalty with a Seamless Omnichannel Experience
Reward shoppers for making purchases online, in store, on mobile apps or even over the phone. Customers will appreciate the fact that they can rack up points and rewards no matter how they shop.

9. Continually evaluate and optimize
Continuously revisit your program in order to switch up rewards and point systems for optimal results. Each loyalty program should be designed with ROI in mind and be continually optimized for maximum results over time.

10. ROI Analytics
Calculate how much weight in rewards should be put behind each action to keep your loyalty program revenue positive. Keep track of members’ repeat purchases, conversion rates, average order values, referral orders and lifetime value. With a Loyalty Calculator, you’ll be able to create a predictable ROI positive loyalty program by month one.

Inbound marketing for B2B requires the same skills as for B2C, plus a few. In B2B, the inbound marketing lead is often not a lead at all, but a nurture opportunity. So we need inbound marketing tactics for both early-stage and late-stage buyers. We've just found a great new B2B marketing tool to share with you. HitTail analyses your existing search phrases, then finds those you are not well-optimised for, compares them against traffic and competition before making concrete recommendations. This not only helps you find long tail phrases to optimise for search, it is especially useful for giving you a list of phrases to blog about if you are stuck for ideas.

read more

Businesses are always looking for innovative ways to gain more traffic and customers online. Tactics range from the now nefarious keyword stuffing to the well-worn buzzword of 2013, ‘content marketing’. Most businesses understand the importance of content. Or should I say, they understand the long-standing phenomenon of creating material for people to consume now known as ‘content marketing’.

Marketers around the world have been incessantly and with increasing force chanting the simple mantra of “create good content” for what now feels like an eternity. However marketers have realised that with all this hype about content marketing and the proliferation of Internet access across societies and devices, we will be hit with a biblical flood of content and the only businesses escaping it will be those who have built great content arks. These businesses will be able to float above what one marketer has elegantly described as a sea of C***. The answer marketers are providing to this deluge is another simple slogan “don’t create good content, create great content”. Or if they are really creative an extension of this is “create a great content brand”.

Beyond these apocalyptic visions and basic incantations remains the question that no one will answer.

How do we create great content?

How do we create content that people want to read, like, favourite, bookmark, share, and read again?

Most marketers will tell you, you need to be buyer oriented, authoritative, strategic and passionate. They point out what you need to do but not how to do it. While we all know the instant emotions and heartstrings that sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy tug on, not every business has the ability to tap into a squirrel saving 16 puppies.

But, there is an answer that addresses all the above criteria for creating content and provides a methodology for getting it done, it also answers the need of positioning yourself in a prominent and well-respected position from which to generate business, that alternative is thought leadership marketing.

While thought leadership is most often associated with Nobel laureates and Fortune 500 CEOs, ‘thought leadership’ is accessible to any business and a thought leadership marketing strategy is something that is effective across all industries and provides solid results in the extremely competitive online market place. It focuses on the production and measurement of original content within the desired category or industry.

The driving force for this marketing strategy is market research. Thought leadership demands original thought, or thoughts that challenge the status quo, and market research answers that demand by providing new information from which to discern trends and illuminate areas of contention. By using market research businesses are able to provide fresh and innovative content for demanding audiences while constantly measuring and refining its reach, reputation and results.

Cut Through the NOISE

There is just so much content out there. The normal answer to trying to cut through the noise is simply write better content but most people don’t provide a guide on how to do this. By using market research, thought leadership marketing solves exactly this problem. You can cut through the noise with content based on insight derived from market research. Good thought leadership increases your brand’s reputation and gives your buyers confidence in your product or service.

The uses of market research extend further than the creation of one-dimensional content. It can help in the creation of company umbrella messages and proof points, media releases, stakeholder engagement, SEO, and even sales material for Business Development Managers. A thought leadership marketing strategy supports more than just the marketing department, it supports the whole business, providing a solid foundation for the creation of content to be used as a medium of interaction with buyers at all stages of their journey and in all parts of the company. The ability to measure and refine afforded by the market research also provides the opportunity to continually improve your lead generation and customer relationships.

Some of the key ideals a thought leadership marketing strategy should include are:

1. Considered Approach: Identifying what is important to your target audience and what their pressures and priorities are.
2. Differentiated Design: Examining the current marketplace and ensuring that the design of your research will provide data from which you can create content that stands out.
3. Focused Planning: Making sure that the research conducted and the thought leadership content created from it matches your companies other planned activities in marketing and more generally.
4. Robust Sampling: It is important that the sample selected is representative of your market and the market believes and accepts your research for its accurate and insightful portrayal of the market.
5. Impactful Deliverables: It is important that the content produced has impact and is meaningful and relevant to the consumer.
6. Content Evaluation: There should always be an evaluative process to ensure the project was a success and look for improvements for future iterations. This could also be your starting point as you can audit your current content before creating further material to set benchmarks and standards.

These ideals are the foundation for any good thought leadership marketing strategy and they provide a measurable and accountable system for the otherwise complex challenge of creating original insightful content. Thought leadership doesn’t have to be based on paradigm-shifting insights or Nostradamus-esque predictions. Instead, it can come from a directed and focused attention, centring on the points that research has shown matter to the buyer. By using well-designed market research you create that unique perspective buyers are looking for in their content.

Thought Leadership is Not Content Marketing

Thought leadership deals in content that is original and research driven. It should be unbiased and driven by the buyer not the business. By using market research businesses can layer their content, creating a customer centric view that makes sense to the buyer.

Content marketing is most commonly a lead generation tactic based solely in the marketing department, it often involves repackaging content, creating content from secondary sources, the reuse or repurposing of content pieces and the weaving in of a product or service influence to the message.

Thought leadership marketing differentiates itself from this by creating original research-based and layered content, this allows businesses to organically take the lead (metaphorically and on search engines) with new insights and ideas. The layering involves using different parts of the research and putting it into multiple forms to spread the message. This way the buyer can continue their journey through your business constantly learning and establishing your reputation as a thought leader.

It is important to note that content marketing can be driven by market research and will be boosted by the research’s input. Thought leadership marketing can be used and to some extent should be used in tandem with content marketing. However, thought leadership marketing keeps market research as its core and crucial element in the creation of content. It is not for replication and repurposing it is for leading discussions, building brands and establishing connections. Driven by market research, thought leadership marketing provides an answer to both the demands of original content creation and your business’ need for lead generation.

If you would like to see a practical example of thought leadership marketing in action have a look at a blog about the Commonwealth Bank’s Future Business Index by clicking here or if you would like to read more about using market research to create content and drive thought leadership click below to download ACA Research’s free Thought Leadership eBook.

 

By Tibor Shanto - tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

Over the last couple of weeks, I found myself as the prospect at two sales meetings I attended. I always find it hard to concentrate in these meetings, because of what I do, I tend be distracted from the topic at hand, and focusing more on form and format of the execution, and the meeting is unfolding.

For me a sales meeting is like a present, what’s inside the box is important, but the box itself, the wrapping, the ribbon, the bow, and finally how it is presented and unwrapped are integral to the experience. Done right it can enhance the experience, and as a result lead to faster cycles, firmer prices, and a series of knock-on benefits. Needless to say, do it wrong, and you get the opposite and detrimental effect. And while you can still get the sale in the end, why make things hard on yourself and the buyer.

This is why some may see some the “mechanics” of sales as being pedestrian, in some ways secondary to the “the technique” or “methodology”, the mechanics and dynamics of execution are still more important than many want to acknowledge.

Both were good products, both were good sales people, but in both cases their style of execution got in the way, and in one instance will likely cost her the sale. I want to be clear, it was not that I did not like the individuals, it was the way they executed, the unnecessary distractions, to the point where I lost interest in dealing with them. Just as a times buyers lose interest in us, despite the fact that we did everything by the book.

Let’s look at the salvageable sale first. She kept using my name. There are time that I recommend using the buyer’s name, probably for all the reasons you’ve heard, but not be very sentence. It was Tibor this, and Tibor that, Tibor everything. I love my name, and unlike many, she was pronouncing it correctly, but I was getting sick of hearing it. Instead of listening to her, I started counting how many times she used it in the hour, (21). (At one point I almost responded “yes Mom”.)

The other rep, he is unsalvageable, just pissed me off. Every question he asked me was prefaced by telling me how great he and his company were, as though I should apply to buy from them, and I’d be more than silly if I didn’t, even when there are a dozen more vendors like him in a stone’s throw, or certainly a click of a mouse. The questions were less about what I was out to achieve, but each was an assumptive close. What’s worse is he probably has the right product, top three potential fits, but I just can’t picture spending time with him, his ego, his company’s ego without eventually expressing my feelings in a very direct way.
When it comes to making the sale a great experience for a buyer, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Challenger, a SPINner, or any affiliation, pay attention to the “wrapping” too, it counts. Playing it by the book is good, but some things are not in the book, just in the room.

Hey, if you liked what you saw here, invite me to speak at your next meeting!

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto 

Growing digital marketing skills and knowledge are more important now than ever. I’m sure you can relate to the pressures of having to continuously stay on top of what’s new and most effective.

The good news is that much knowledge can be gained from new experiences and connections. In the past 2 weeks I’ve had the good fortune to attend an Integrated Marketing Communications event at West Virginia University a content marketing conference in Antwerp, Belgium and a digital marketing conference in Bucharest Romania. Plus this week I’m in London for a few meetings where similar topics will be discussed.

Amongst those geographically diverse experiences, each with a focus on some aspect of digital marketing and communications, I have noticed a consistent set of expectations regarding information delivery, content quality and interactions.

Besides recognizing these trends, I’ve come to realize, that each is an area that I need to improve upon. Maybe the same is true for you.

Everyone Loves A Great Story

At the Content Marketing Conference Europe held in Antwerp, I listened to Danny Devriendt’s story about how the size and form of the Russian space shuttle has little to do with the American space shuttle (they look the same) and more to do with the size of a horse’s ass.

As you can imagine, the “What?” effect of that statement had people’s attention as they listened for the punchline of how a horse’s ass could have anything to do with the Russian space shuttle, let alone how it relates to content marketing.

The lesson he was after can be expressed with my favorite phrase on the value of storytelling:

Facts Tell, Stories Sell

We all know storytelling is important. But how are you acting on that insight? What are you doing to collect, curate and manage stories to be told? Are you finding stories to use with every content object you create and are they relevant to both the business and the audience you’re sharing them with?

Stories on Tap

During last week’s ICEEfest conference, I was given the opportunity to do an on-air interview for ProTV, a popular TV station in Bucharest. I didn’t know the specifics of what we’d talk about until a few minutes before starting.

Did the TV reporter ask me for facts? Did he ask me for case studies or data from a report? No, of course not. He asked me for quick stories – 5 of them. In 5 minutes, right before the cameras rolled.

Sadly, I was only able to offer up 3 stories in that time and only 2 made it to the show. But I was able to get some of our own story and key messaging into the interview – “Attract, Engage, Convert” and “Be the Best Answer”.  Regardless, the experience reinforced to me the importance of having sound bite stories on tap for whatever expertise I want our agency to be known for.

The Futility of Utility

Publish useful information and you’ll inform the reader. Tell great stories and you will inspire them.

I talk about this a lot with the content marketing maturity model and how companies evolve from quantity to quality to utility to storytelling. It’s an important perspective as companies seek to evolve the effectiveness of their content investments.

Tell stories well and share them in a way that reconciles your brand objectives and how you want to be known with the things that your intended audience cares about. Relevancy isn’t just about the customer, it’s important for the brand objectives to be present in content as well.

Doing so requires making the effort to really understand who your customers are and what questions they need answered in order to buy from you. Find out the triggers that will connect and engage your buyers and package your content into easily digested and shareable content. Content usefulness + interestingness = awesomeness.

Infotainment Trumps Information

Nick Sohnemann from FutureCandy gave a visually stunning presentation at ICEEfest about the future of retail using background music to embellish his slides, calls for participation, lots of video and even a real-time demonstration of Google Glass.

Granted, presentations at this event were given in a movie theatre with a huge screen and many small screens projecting behind the speaker (plus a killer sound system and A/V people who knew what they were doing) so the experience was a bit more immersive than at a typical conference.

All the same, Nick could have shown slides of innovative new technology with a few videos. But what he did was more like an informative performance, setting the stage with music to get people’s attention, articulating what they could expect and then narrating a string of videos and demonstrations.

Every single person sitting in that auditorium will remember Nick’s presentation and when they think of companies that are experts at helping businesses adopt new technologies, they will certainly think of FutureCandy.

The Takeaway with Storytelling and Content Marketing

Great stories are interesting. They take you away from where you are into a head space that taps imagination and visualization. Complex ideas can be quickly conveyed though stories. Otherwise distracted audiences are kept at attention with stories. The interestingness of stories helps create a competitive advantage for those telling them by providing information in a way that connects on both intellectual and emotional levels.

No matter what business situation or geographic location you find yourself in, you simply cannot go wrong having a great (and relevant) story to tell. With each content object you create, always answer the question: What’s the story in this message?

I challenge you to think about incorporating more stories in your content. I know I’m challenging myself to do the same.

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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2014. | From Antwerp to Bucharest – Lessons Learned About Storytelling and Content Marketing | http://www.toprankblog.com

I’ve spent a lot of time since 2009 advising clients on email strategy and implementation, but less on actual implementation.

I was starting to miss the fun of creating campaigns, hitting the send button and watching the results. That changed when I decided to launch a new UK crowdfunding startup, with some close friends.

As Head of Digital, I’ve had to get back into the detail of email marketing and think beyond the strategy. This blog shares my experience on what makes for good email marketing in terms of process and strategy components.

I hope you find it useful reading.

Simple sign-up process

Lots of data gives CRM teams more weapons to play with. However, requiring customers to submit lots of data simply to sign-up for an email, in my experience, kills your sign-up rate.

For example, if you’re a fashion retailer, why would I give you my date of birth just to get your newsletter?

It’s better to keep data entry requirements minimal and then use follow-up touch points to enrich the data. All you really need is the email address and the person’s name, or even just the email address.

I really like how Selfridges does this. The online form is simple and you get a nice follow-up email encouraging you to share more data in return for relevant emails.

There are two primary options on the website, both should run in tandem:

1. Persistent sign-up box in the site wider navigation, where the email submission and conformation is done on the page using ajax.
2. Email sign-up landing page that can be accessed via a site-wide navigation text link and is used as a content page to promote the benefits of the newsletter and provide a sign-up form.

Schuh is another example of a quick and easy two stage sign-up form. It’s done on the page and all you need to give is your email and select your interest area.

Preference centre

A recent #ecomchat on this topic revealed a divide between those who think a preference centre is essential and those who see it as a ‘nice-to-have’ but certainly not business critical.

A preference centre benefits you and your customers. Customers have a central data view where they can update their preferences at any time (assuming you make it visible on the website!) to ensure they only receive what they want.

As needs change over time the preference centre is flexible to allow these changes to be reflected in the opt-in permissions.

For your business, the preference centre can be presented on the website and integrated with the email service provider (ESP) via an API to ensure that the user record in the web database matches the user record in the ESP.

This synchronisation is really important to ensure you satisfy data protection requirements. It can help drive segmentation within your email data lists because you can build out the preference centre over time.

For example, we are building a preference centre based on two criteria:

1. Communication channel – telling us how we can talk to customers, focused on email and SMS.
2. Email type – telling us what types of email each customer is happy to receive, with the primary types being the content-led newsletter and sales-based project alerts.

Clear unsubscribe option

Make it easy for people to wave goodbye. Sounds crazy doesn’t it, making it easy to reduce your database size. However, not only is this a legal necessity but It’s also good customer service to be transparent about how people can update their preferences and opt-out.

If you have multiple email lists and different communication channels (email, post, SMS etc.), make sure you have a preference centre so the opt-out isn’t universal and blocks communication that the customer is still interested in.

A useful addition is to have a feedback form once the unsubscribe request has been processed to ask why people are unsubscribing. Below is an example from Oliver’s Travels.

Relevant segmentation

What can you offer subscribers?

Generic blast campaigns are still sadly prevalent but it’s relatively easy to segment and tailor email content based on individual segments. If you don’t use segmentation, the end result is invariably poorly targeted content.

Below is an example of poor targeting from Key. It sent a generic Father’s Day promotion email offering a free apron for every online order.

Quite why a subscriber to a Shopfitting and storage email would be motivated by an apron for their Dad is beyond me.

The biggest challenge is to define how to cut your segments. Are you dividing the database based on user profile? Or interest? Or purchase history? Or a combination?

We have a two stage process starting with very simple segmentation to find out who wants to receive the newsletter and/or project alerts (when new projects go live on the website).

We want to separate those who are most interested in backing projects (funders) from those who want to stay in touch with what we’re doing (brand enthusiasts).

Stage two will build out the granularity of the list segments by enriching the user profile, capturing data on interest areas and audience type. Where we can tie a subscriber to a registered account on the website, we can go even further and analyse browsing and purchasing data to fine-tune the segmentation.

We’re using MailChimp and it’s a brilliant tool that on the surface feels lightweight thanks to its simple and intuitive UI but has a lot of excellent functionality under the hood, including a well designed set of APIs.

Data enrichment

If you follow the advice above, you’ll capture an email address and not much more when people first sign-up. You have a new subscriber, so how can you learn more about them?

Data enrichment is the process of adding more customer level data to build a more detailed profile that helps you with your segmentation and campaign targeting.

A few obvious ways to do this:

1. When a new subscriber signs up via the website, on the confirmation page give them an incentive to share more data. Selfridges uses this approach as well as the follow-up email.
2. For transactional websites, use the order confirmation page to ask for more information (you’ll have their email address from the checkout and can store the data against this email, even if it’s not yet opted-in for marketing).

Types of email

A common mistake with email is to rely on the standard newsletter format as soon as someone subscribes. In my experience, this misses a trick because not everyone who signs-up understands your value proposition.

You need to put the effort in to engage with new subscribers and persuade them to take you seriously. Below is a structure that I’ve seen work well:

Welcome program

Multi-phase campaign for new subscribers that tells the brand story and promotes USPs. This starts with a general welcome email that encourages people to share more data to help with your segmentation.

Activation program

This takes new subscribers and looks to move them along to openers, then clickers. For people who haven’t opened an email, you need to look at two things:

1. Are the emails hitting the inbox? If not, can you clean the emails or do you have a problem with your sender reputation to fix?
2. Test the subject line to try and increase the open rate – split out non-openers into a separate segment and then AB test the subject line like crazy.

Once people are in the ‘openers’ club, it’s time to focus on getting them to click. This involves testing different types of content and CTA (call to action). Don’t jump straight into a juicy offer as some may just not be ready yet to click, or haven’t seen content that excites them. You don’t want to give money away just because you don’t yet know enough about what floats their boat.

There is certainly a time and place for an offer to drive email conversion rates but the most valuable email customers are those who click and buy because they like what you email them.

Churn program

This involves identifying inactive subscribers – you need to define the thresholds first so there are clear criteria for when a subscriber is inactive vs. just not currently responding to emails.

Once these criteria are met, this should trigger the purging of the email from the list into an archive list.

Why?

There’s no point continuing sending emails to uninterested people. Not only do you risk tarnishing the brand but there’s also a cost involved. As your list grows, you want to strip out ‘bad’ email addresses and focus on people who open and click.

But first make sure you’ve worked hard to reactivate people. Test subject lines to encourage them to open. Ask them why they’re not responding. Incentivise them with an offer as a last resort if that fits with your brand ethos.

Conversion & Retention program

This all about the conversion, whether you're ecommerce focused or lead generation.

Based on the data capture of which segment each customer belongs to, each campaign will have a tailored version for each segment (and not all campaigns will be sent to all data lists). You can use the same email template and change the content. You will need a default version that is sent if a customer isn’t assigned to a specific segment.

Testing & optimisation

It’s critical that you find ways to evolve your email program, learning from results and talking to your audience to encourage feedback.

A few pointers:

• Include a link in each email to a persistent feedback form – this should be focused on the email program, not general feedback e.g. “Tell us how we could improve our emails”.
• Make sure that every email campaign has a test – whether this is subject lines, content, day of send or landing page, never miss an opportunity to test.
• Consider using a testing tool like Optimizely to support AB & MVT testing of landing pages for email campaigns.
• Agree a structure for capturing test results and learning so it’s visible to everyone who needs to know.
• Use the lessons from tests! Don’t just think ‘well, wasn’t that interesting’, makes sure you do something positive to improve the next campaign.

Reporting & analysis

There are two key types of reporting to square away:

1. Campaign reports

These relate to metrics from your ESP in terms of inbox delivery rate, open rate, click rate, click:open ratio, #unsubscribes etc.

2. ROI reports

Revenue based metrics from your analytics tool (usually Google Analytics) including conversion rate, average order value and revenue.

You can go deeper with KPIs but these are the key ones to measure.

Agree a reporting structure, for example look at campaign reports 24 hours after the email is sent, then after three days, seven days and 14 days. This lets you learn the tail of the campaign, how long it takes for all activity to trickle through.

Analyse performance over time to pick out data trends and then act. For example, if your unsubscribe rate goes through the roof, work out why. Is it from new data you’ve added? Is it in reaction to a specific email? Is it from one particular email client like Gmail? Piece together the jigsaw and take actions when needed. Don’t just sit back and wait for them come to you.

Further reading

There are too many useful articles on email marketing to share all of them here, so I’ve picked out three from some of my favourite writers/websites:

Copyblogger: 37 Tips for Writing Emails that Get Opened, Read, and Clicked

Pure360: Re-engage with unsubscribers with Facebook‘s new audience tool

And here’s an aggregated list of email marketing blogs on Econsultancy – bumper reading pack!

What do you think?

Is there something missing that should be part of an email marketing program? Please share your comments and experience.

Like all holiday seasons, summer’s full of special occasions. Birthdays. Beaches. Blowouts. It’s the time of year when many industries get to offer specialty products and packages for vacation-ready customers.

But in B2B markets, similar demand can still help generate sales leads. Plenty of people need a lot of down time without necessarily losing their work focus. That opens up a lot of needs that are more or less B2B (from catering to your typical company BBQ to temporary outsourcing).

Of course, like summer itself, this doesn’t last forever and many prospects don’t want lose to productivity (and their minds) to the haze. You need to perfectly time your summer lead generation campaign so that they don’t get too accustomed that they permanently (and drastically) alter their work routine. So, how do you space time between your offers and generating demand for them?

• Have a start and an end – When a season begins and ends, they have a natural way of marking it. It may not be a specific day but they do give clear signs. For you, you can be a lot clearer. Set a date of when your special summer service packages will end. Make sure it’s realistic and the words are clearly seen in all respective marketing materials.

• Do it near the weekends – You don’t have to take this too literally. The reason why weekends seem a popular time to unwind is that there’s a sizeable week of work between them. In that same sense, it’s good to check if prospects have spent enough time at work before suggesting that they take it easy using what you’ve got.

• Set your capacity – Think of a beach café that’s only open around summer time. Because it’s summer time, it’s always full right? That means everything is at capacity. Set a similar capacity for your business. Remember that you have plenty of other customers to serve so don’t hesitate to say limit whatever it is you’re providing one particular prospect. This allows enough of your resources to serve all and keep each customer from taking more than necessary to maintain focus.

There will always be a lot of work to do but there are times in the year it’s best to decrease the load for a bit. B2B marketers can serve as the limit to how much slack they can cut whether it’s limiting how long the break’s going to be or how many sales leads you yourself will be generating.

You’ve probably got a feedback form on your website. If not there, then you have one on your Facebook page. Regardless of its location, a feedback form exists in some location or the other, and it connects your fans and customers to you.

Marketers don’t spend a lot of time obsessing over their feedback forms, when they really should be. It’s the portal to communication, the gateway to your fans getting in touch with you. What kind of mistakes are marketers making when it comes to setting up a feedback form? I’ll show you.

It’s an important factor of your website to pay attention to, given that this is where you’ll be generating sales leads, answering questions, getting feedback, growing your network, getting requests, it’s essentially the contact portal in many ways between you and your customers.

1. You’re Not Putting Enough Thought Behind the Header

For Circus Social, the company that created the above feedback form – the pitch of the brand has always been that like the troupe of a circus, each person brings something unique to the table that helps their clients. The banner has everyone in the team, having a good time and being jovial. It makes someone reaching out understand what the “tone” of the company is most likely to be.

And beneath that – a catchy little one liner that tells visitors what they should reach out to you for. Should they get in touch for technical questions? Questions about new hires? Anything at all? It’s important that make it very clear what this particular form is for, especially if you have a number of forms that are handled by different people.

2. The Form Fields Are Too Simple

The general rule for this is always to keep it simple. You don’t want a long drawn out series of questions and entries here that ask your visitors about their date of birth, where they last had lunch and what their preferred choice of pasta sauce is. It’s irrelevant. Ask only what truly matters in the very first interaction.

Hi, what’s your name and how I can help?

In this particular instance, for Circus Social, there’s a slightly personal connection formed. You can choose to be connected to a particular person if you’d like. If you already know someone from the team, perfect. If you’re reaching out because you saw something someone in the team mentioned – great! If you’re looking to reach out to no one in particular, just pick someone who looks friendliest in the banner. ;)

It’s little things like this that make feedback forms a little bit of fun, add a slight personal touch and excite the visitor – and eventually add up to making it a perfect feedback form.

3. All Form Submissions Go to the Same Person

Come on, be honest. No matter what the content of the form field submission is, no matter who it’s meant for – most form submissions go to the same person. An e-mail address like submit[at]domain.com or info[at]domain.com gets the e-mail from the contact form.

By streamlining this process and ensuring that the delivery of the message gets to the right person, your response time will dramatically improve, and seeing that you’re incredibly responsive to the e-mails that you receive, people will probably reach out to you more using your forms.

4. The Misc. Elements and Messaging in the Form

And it’s hard to find where to stop. The two very basic things that you should definitely have in your feedback forms after you’re done with your form fields and banner image:

• Alternate ways your visitors can contact you.
• Links to your social profiles.

As in the example above, it’s also useful to add either a map that locates where your business is located, or perhaps just a picture of where the business is. It adds that little “natural” element that makes the business appear a lot more real. Now of course, huge companies like Apple, Microsoft need not do this – but for smaller brands, entrepreneurs, cafes and the rest – it’s not something that you can skip out on.

Hope that helped! And I hope you go ahead and give your feedback for ma revamp if it needs one. :)

If you’re looking to set up a perfect feedback form – here’s the tool that you should use to create one!

The benefits of marketing automation are clear—better customer engagement, increased loyalty, and more effective campaigns. But what can your organization realistically expect in terms of sales?

• How about a 2x higher bid-to-win ratio for the top 20% of your sales reps?
• Or would you prefer an average of 1.5x higher revenue year-over-year?

Perhaps you’d settle for both?

Gleanster Research has just published a fine new report, “What Sales Should REALLY Expect From Marketing Automation.” It’s based on results from two recent (Q1 2014 and Q4 2013) studies.

The report lays out specific sales challenges and measures them against how marketing automation can help sales work smarter, faster, more efficiently, and more effectively – and what sales can expect from a well-implemented automation platform.

Among the survey respondents, sales leaders at companies that had adopted marketing automation did see that 2x higher bid-to-win ratio for the top 20% of reps, and did get 1.5x higher revenue year-over-year. In addition:

• 82% saw significant improvement in lead quality
• 89% reported sales cycle time was tightened
• Of those using a CRM, 76% saw reps increase their usage of the CRM

Marketing automation is a tool for lead to revenue management

As the study points out in the beginning, “marketing automation” is a misnomer; it’s really a tool for optimizing the path to revenue. (That’s probably why Forrester Research chooses to use the term “Lead to Revenue Management” system to refer to marketing automation platforms.)

Given what marketing automation can do for your sales, it may seem surprising that sales isn’t leading the charge to adopt marketing automation; what’s not to like about a system that boosts revenue? The answer to that may lie in the context sales operates in.

The difficult sales environment, Part 1: External forces

It’s a noisy world out there. Your buyer is assaulted by marketing and advertising noise from a million channels, and tunes it out – except when they’ve decided they want something. Then they go online to look for solutions. That’s where they begin in their buyer’s journey, and that’s where they stay for most of the journey, doing research, reading reviews, and asking for opinions from others in social media. And that’s where they will find you, if you’ve got the answers they’re looking for. (And if you’re doing optimized content marketing.)

They won’t be ready to talk to you until they’ve already made a lot of decisions – likely with the input and feedback from other members of the buying committee. Fewer decisions are made by just one person nowadays, which is just one more reason the average sales cycle has gotten longer.

The difficult sales environment, Part 2: Internal forces

Most sales teams function in a very dynamic environment, and they don’t have control over all the moving parts. They’ve got finding, coaching and keeping talent on the one hand; product quality and delivery on the other; and forecasting and quota management on still another.

Every department in a company has a role to play in sales enablement, particularly marketing. According to Gleanster’s Q4 2013 data, only 32% of marketers pass leads to sales that are qualified by budget, authority, need, and timeline (BANT). That means that in almost 70% of organizations, sales reps are spending valuable time qualifying leads – not closing them. Too many reps spending too much time on too many activities that aren’t focused on closing = major pain.

If you’re a sales leader in this position, here’s the key question: What can you do to help your reps spend more time selling and less time prospecting?

And here’s the answer: Outsource lead generation and qualification to your marketing department. And make sure marketing knows what you require from a marketing automation platform.

What to ask for from marketing automation

Here’s what a good marketing automation system should be able to do for the sales team:

 

Take over lead qualification.

Yes, much of this can be done by marketing automation today. The best leads will display their interest by engaging with you: visiting your web pages, opening your emails, registering for your webinars, downloading your white papers, filling out your forms. It’s marketing automation’s job to see this, track it, note it, and report it.

Score leads.

Trot out your BANT criteria and assign point values to each. For example, suppose you have good customers in a manufacturing vertical who bought your product because their pain registered as a 7 on a 1 to 10 scale, and your product solves that problem. A new lead in that vertical gets a good score. Now suppose that you have great customers in a logistics vertical whose pain registered as a 9 … they bought because your product solved an even more painful problem, and they bought a bigger package. The new lead in logistics gets a higher score than the one in manufacturing.

Score actions.

For example, if people who became your customers tended to download your pricing brochure, then give that download action a high score. Pretty soon some leads – those with better BANT criteria and those who actions indicate a higher degree of sales-readiness – will have high scores that tell you “We are ready for sales.”

Tell sales when something important happens.

Want to know when John Doe visits your Product X page? Set an alert in the marketing automation system – they work 24/7. Want to know when someone from Company B visits your website, and which pages they look at? Check your Website Visitor Tracking report (or set an alert.)

Help sales find new buyers.

Your marketing team can use automation to do inbound marketing with forms, landing pages, SEO optimization, social publishing options, and a lot more.

Help those buyers trust your company.

Your marketing team can also use content marketing to extend your brand, create credibility and trust, and draw in the likeliest buyers. If your content is good, marketing automation can help you distribute where it will be appreciated, and most likely to be acted on. When someone finds your website, reviews your content, and then signs up for a demo, marketing automation will tell you who that person is and what they’re interested in.

Get leads through the whole funnel, alive.

With longer sales cycles and more complex deals, you absolutely must nurture leads. You and your marketing team should first segment your leads into groups, ideally with characteristics that are unique to each group. The less overlap, the better. Use trial and error with a beta group to figure out which nurturing path works the best, and then replicate that path with automation. New leads can enter the program at the beginning and proceed, never missing a step. It’s always-on, tireless communication – and it scales for as long as it takes, for as many leads as you get. It’s also hard work … the kind you can’t possibly do manually.

(Here’s a tip: Nurtured leads often make bigger deals. Just sayin’.)

Help sales close leads.

Your marketing automation system should integrate all the data that results from prospects’ interactions with all its features into one complete situational awareness package that is unique to each lead.

When a lead’s score gets high enough, that lead will automatically be pulled into the CRM system and handed to the sales rep. The rep can see every email the lead opened, every webinar attended, every page visited, and all downloads. Behavior patterns throw the prospect’s concerns into high relief, revealing what matters to that lead – and giving the sales rep the inside intelligence to say just the right thing.

Integrate with your CRM.

Most marketing automaton platforms can do this. The one thing to watch for here is which database, CRM or marketing, is the database of record. Ultimately the decision needs to remain in the hands of the customer. There are scenarios (like cost control) where you might not want 100% of your marketing database in your CRM.

(One best practice we at Act-On employ is passing only Sales Ready Leads from Act-On to our CRM. This keeps your CRM storage cost down and performance unaffected.)

Get more information

The new Gleanster paper goes into a lot more detail about what marketing automation can do for your sales team and how it accomplishes those benefits. It sets realistic expectations and addresses the question of disruption with tactics to minimize adoption setbacks.

Getting to the heart of lead cost is not easy.

There are a multitude of factors to consider. For example, should you factor in nurturing into the costs? Even then, how much?

In today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog post, I wanted to explore cost per lead by sharing a few tips and insights from the panel of industry experts that spoke on the subject at MarketingSherpa Lead Gen Summit 2013.

Tip #1. Clearly define what a lead is for your organization

Before you can even get close to what your lead costs are, you first have to define what a lead is to your organization, or as Atri Chatterjee, CMO, Act-on Software, simply said: “Just because you have a name, it doesn’t mean you have a lead.”

The panel rightfully pointed out the idea of a lead can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

So the first step on your path to determining lead costs is to cut through the confusion by creating a universal lead definition that the key stakeholders in your organization can all agree upon.

Tip #2. Move toward thinking of lead cost in aggregate

So what should you factor into your lead cost?

This can get tricky, but let’s consider, for example, that you can buy a list of 2,000 leads from a broker for $20.

Does each lead cost only a penny?

Not so much.

I say this because when you factor the associative costs to create content, market and solicit to those leads, the true price is likely much higher.

One recommendation the panel had was to uncover some of the factors that you might be overlooking and consider them in your cost.

When you look at the price from an aggregated perspective, you’re probably a lot closer to a true lead cost.

This notion was also shared by Erik Matlik, CEO, Madison Logic, who summed up the factors to consider in your cost per lead.

“I would put literally everything into your cost per lead,” Erik said.

To learn more tips on lead cost, you can watch the MarketingSherpa on-demand replay of “How Much Should Leads Cost? Tips for different channels, industries and deal sizes.”

You may also like

Lead Generation Checklist – Part 4: Clear and Universal Lead Definition [More from the blogs]

Fostering Sales-Marketing Alignment: A 5-Step Lead Management Process [Case study]

Why the Term “Marketing-Qualified Lead” Creates Serious Confusion – Part I [More from the blogs]