Rnordman

Suppose a major advertising network gave consumers the same opportunity that email marketers have given consumers: the ability to opt out of advertisements they didn’t like. As a consumer, this has a certain appeal to it. From the perspective of a marketer, these changes could be a little unsettling. Let’s see what Facebook has in store for both groups.

Facebook announced they are further empowering individuals to opt out of the ads they are seeing to make their experience more tailored, and in theory, more enjoyable.

This is interesting timing for Facebook to start empowering more users, especially as it continues to grow in size and works to further monetize its News Feed algorithms. Does this announcement mean brands will have to work even harder (or spend more) to reach Facebook users?

As a brand, the initial news might seem less than positive; however, these changes actually could benefit a smart brand in a variety of ways.

First, let’s take a look at how it works in practice from the user standpoint. Here’s a recent ad snapshot from a SHIFTer’s individual FB feed; this is the ad as appears natively:

Using the ad dropdown menu, we get a few options to choose from that enable declining this particular ad or all ads from this brand.

Diving in further in the About this Ad section, we receive this pop-up, basically echoing Facebook’s announcement about how an individual user can take more control over what ads displayed.

As a brand, this is actually good news – no more guessing whether your ads are resonating with your audiences.

Additionally, Facebook’s advertising system typically works on a CPM (pay per view) basis – even with some campaigns where advertisers request to pay for clicks, rather than views of their ads. By offering users a chance to opt out, Facebook is helping brands to reduce the cost of CPM campaigns.

With Facebook’s enhanced CPM model a rejected ad wouldn’t cost you anything, and you wouldn’t waste future resources targeting this individual.

There is also an earned media aspect to this announcement as well. In the past, users might just choose to ignore your ad in their feed, and you could only measure the engagement aspect of the ad.

However, consider that your reputation as a brand is also being tested. If ad after ad is rejected by users, then you might have a reputation management problem. For example, if you’re a part of a brand or industry that is not well loved, then that reputation isn’t just impacting your ability to obtain earned media, but your ability to see your paid media perform well once users can vote whether they want to see ads from you.

This opens up additional value for PR professionals to provide. Instead of just creating earned media, PR professionals’ work will now directly impact paid media as well. Imagine the converse situation: a brand so beloved that shows high impact ads might be able to leverage its reputation and trust to help its ads perform well.

Buried in this announcement is the best news for brands – Facebook is opening up their retargeting detection abilities so that marketers can target users of other websites. From the announcement:

“Starting soon in the US, we will also include information from some of the websites and apps you use. This is a type of interest-based advertising, and many companies already do this.”

This has interesting potential, depending on the targeting options they give to advertisers. For example, suppose you are Pepsi. You might want to target people who visit Coke’s website. Suppose you’re Neiman Marcus. You might want to target users of a Nordstrom app. When combined with the deep interpersonal details Facebook can uniquely provide to brands, the company is taking a further step to giving brands even more reasons to invest in its ads. This also opens up a new era of competitive intelligence and competitive marketing.

How did Facebook manage to accomplish such a broad-reaching marketing feat? The Like button is the answer to this question. With the widespread adoption of the Like button, Facebook has a back door into much of the web, similar to how Google began tracking websites with its free Google Analytics product. This announcement indicates to brands that Facebook is going further to make Google-like retargeting capabilities available, and enhancing the ad potential of the platform.

Overall, as much of a benefit these changes are to the consumer, they are an even more powerful positive set of changes for marketers and communications professionals. Test these features out as they become available!

True, on an individual level, superstar employees produce great work and great results. But their value to the team extends much further. On top of incredible productivity and excellent performance, they also are able to:

Spot More Good Talent

There is a cognitive bias that the most capable people underestimate their ability, while the least competent overestimate their capabilities. It comes down to not being skilled enough to recognize your own lack of skill. And if you can’t recognize it in yourself, you can’t see it in others either. “A players hire A players; B players hire C players,” was a motto of Steve Jobs at Apple.

Attract Other Superstars

In his review of a National Bureau of Economic Research paper titled “Why Stars Matter,” Walter Frick concludes, “in at least some cases, the biggest effect of hiring a superstar is who it allows you to hire next.” The research he cites found that a superstar’s impact on recruiting was a more significant driver of improved organizational productivity than the superstar’s performance alone. Starting just one year after the superstar joined the department, the talent level of newcomers to the department increased significantly. Vick Vaishnavi’s example of Lebron James joining Miami Heat supports this: A-players like to work with other A-players.

Develop Others by Modeling the Right Behavior

A team of low performers has low expectations by definition no matter how hard they work. The biggest problem they have is that they don’t realize this is the case until they can see, feel, and experience the difference between two disparate levels of performance. Just by working for or next to a superstar, everyone else’s capability and potential increases.

Teach Others

More formally, they also explicitly teach and train others. High performers are always learning, growing, and developing their skillsets. This often puts them at the cutting edge of innovative thought, new trends, and best practices. After vetting and implementing new approaches, they bring that new knowledge and capability to others.

Elevate Team Norms

Superstars are motivated to work hard and achieve results. This builds a climate of excitement. They also want to feel a sense of equity, and will be quick to not tolerate underperformers.

If you have superstars on your team, thank them for the value that they bring above and beyond their own individual performance.

How to Spend Time Thinking is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

There is one activity that will have a tremendously beneficial impact on your results: thinking. You mind is always working, but it isn’t always doing the productive work of thinking. Much of the time it is running loops, asking the same questions over and over again, and driving you into the same states.

To interrupt the loop and do the productive work of really thinking, you have to slow down, make the time, make the space, and use the tools to think.

Time to Think

Thinking takes more time than you think.

Unless you schedule time to think, to really do nothing else but think, you won’t do it. You make time to exercise your body so that it stays strong, healthy, and so that it serves you well. You have to do the same thing for your mind.

Schedule time when you can be alone to do nothing but think. This isn’t time to plan your next week, even though you might have ideas about what you need to put on your agenda. It isn’t time to work on a project, even though you may generate ideas about those projects. Just block the time to be alone with absolutely no agenda but thinking.

If you want to make this time more powerful and more productive, do it first thing in the morning.

Space to Think

You need a space to think. That space needs to be free from distractions. Your mind is a novelty-seeking device. It evolved to pay attention to things that are new and interesting. And it evolved to create things that are new and interesting. Your space to think should foster the later, the creation of new, interesting, or useful ideas.

Someplace that is comfortable. Someplace quiet. No Internet. No television. No other people present. Just you and your thoughts. And maybe classical music or music you might hear in a spa.

Tools to Think

I love technology, and I can’t imagine not using all of my electronic tools. But honestly, I do my best thinking with one of two tools: the single blank page of a Google Doc or a legal pad and pen. Both of these tools allow the free flow of ideas. Each allows you to write down the ideas as they come to you.

Some people love mind maps. Other people like index cards. Some people don’t write anything down. Whatever works for you is the right choice.

Thinking

Write down whatever comes to your mind. Then write down the next thing that comes to your mind. If you can’t think of anything to write, write down “I can’t think of anything to write.” Write something until some idea comes to you, and an idea will surely come to you (you may be out of practice taking time to think).

Write until you run out of things to write, and then go back and read everything that you have written. As you reading, write down the ideas that come to you as you are prompted by what you have written. There’s more in those ideas, and thinking about them bring out more ideas.

Ask yourself: “Why is this important now?” Ask, “What should I be doing with this idea?” Ask, “What value does this idea have an what would make it a stronger idea?” Ask, “Who would benefit from this idea?” Answer the questions that come to you, then answer the questions that those answers bring.

Evaluate your ideas. Ponder them. Thinking is asking yourself questions about ideas.

You produce more and better ideas when you make the time to think. Block time, make space, use the tools, and improve your results by spending time thinking.

Information is like tap water now. You can find it easily and it’s free. Hop online and in less time than it takes to get hot water to your shower you can find the answer to just about any question.

Photo Credit: AshtonPal via Compfight cc

However, it can be paralyzing to want a little more information before taking action toward a goal. There’s always one more book, blog post, podcast, magazine article, conference, or course to absorb. We think, “This will be the tipping point.”

The problem

We think there’s a formula.

If we follow this plan, sign up for this seminar, or read this book we’ll find the answer that will unleash our success.

Under the guise of research we get more information. Yet we know in our heart it’s something else — something deeper. When we pull back the curtain, the truth is much simpler. We’re afraid.

We fear putting our best out to the world and being rejected, or worse, getting no response at all.

How this happens

Somewhere along the way, we let ourselves down. Our confidence took a hit and the aftershocks continue to rob us of the self-trust we once enjoyed.

These memories haunt us and we talk ourselves out of taking action before we even begin. So we think and ponder and worry if we have it just right. We might have missed something and if we launch now we’re certain it won’t be good enough.

Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. But one thing is for sure: We’re not in the game. Not being in the game is worse than not being good enough. When we’re in the game we can make adjustments and improve.

We never get that opportunity when our art stays held captive to rejection. So how do we deal with this?

Overcoming our fear

The solution to fear always involves increasing our courage. Fortunately, having courage doesn’t require removing fear, but it does require a commitment.

A commitment to value our art more than our emotional safety.

A commitment to serve others through our creativity.

Ultimately, a commitment to increase our courage despite our fear.

How to become more courageous

1. Filter your information. Choose only a handful of people (online or off) to consistently follow and absorb. These are your trusted advisors and your information filters. Don’t get stuck in the research trap. You don’t need more information, you need more action.
2. Find a supportive community. There’s something about knowing there’s a community of people encouraging you and keeping you accountable to provide the strength to release your art. Get encouragement and feedback from others and don’t do this alone.
3. Focus on your previous success. You’ve had some wins so think about what you did in those situations. Confidence is built through competence. So recall what you’ve done well when you begin to doubt yourself.
4. Set a public deadline. You’ve heard this before but a deadline will get you moving. Even if it’s self-imposed, it helps to know when you’re going to release your hard work into the world. A deadline you’ve shared with others forces you to jump off the cliff when you’re scared to death.
5. Commit to action. Just take one baby step. You may not know steps eight or nine, but you know step one. Do something even if you’re not sure it’s the best thing to do. Change the focus from yourself to serving others with your art.

Formulas can be helpful and maybe sometimes we would even prefer a formula.

However, we must carve our own courageous path if we’re to impact the world with our art. Some paths will be well worn and others will be ruggedly wild.

Regardless, your path will be uniquely yours and you have to trust yourself to know the way.

Question: What else gives you courage? Share in the comments.

On Feb. 10, Jason Fyk received a strange Facebook message.

“Bro.”

The message had been sent by someone who wasn’t his friend on the social network, someone using the alias “Anthony.*” It was a name Fyk had come to know and dread.

Minutes later, the traffic on his website, FunnierPics.net, nosedived. Google Analytics showed the number of active readers drop from 3,000 to zero instantly.

When Fyk, known online as Jason Michaels, clicked over to his company’s Facebook page, WTF Magazine, he found another message from Anthony.

“Site’s down :(.”

Fyk’s business was under attack, and not for the first time. He’d spent the past few years locked in ferocious virtual combat over his Facebook pages, battling a shadowy group of adversaries that he and his friends call Script Kiddies, on the assumption that they're young hackers who exploit low-level vulnerabilities on others' sites.

Anthony prefers the name the Community, and he readily admits — albeit communicating only under a pseudonym — that the group’s activities include hijacking valuable Facebook pages for fun and viral fame. (Meanwhile, Anthony and his cohorts refer to the WTF team as the Neckbeards.)

One of Fyk’s employees quickly determined that FunnierPics.net was under a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) reflection attack. When Fyk’s team contacted the host, GoDaddy, they learned an estimated 70,000 servers had gone dead, resulting in more than 1 million customers losing web service. Fyk’s IP address, GoDaddy confirmed, was the attackers’ target. The others were collateral damage.

“Imagine the World Wide Web is like a six-lane highway, and each exit is its own server,” Fyk said. “And one of the exits is my server.” The attack sent so much traffic up the road to Fyk’s exit that every exit preceding it became jammed as well.

And the waves of bots were still coming.

Within 16 hours, Fyk’s team got his site working again, but not before they’d lost $15,000 in ad revenue. Since then, his company has been subjected to a number of similar attacks, and one of Fyk’s most valuable Facebook pages, an MTV fan page with 1.3 million fans, has been hijacked,  stolen by a user who used a security glitch.

Fyk, 40, is a self-made millionaire who’s built his fortune almost entirely on Facebook. It’s a rewarding business but not without its challenges. Not only must he play a constant game of cat and mouse with hackers and digital thieves but he must do so on a field of battle that is constantly shifting because of Facebook’s habit of routinely — and mysteriously — tweaking its algorithm.

“It’s legitimately a cyber war,” said Fyk, who describes his archenemies as tech-savvy teens who are motivated by boredom. “I make almost a quarter-million dollars a month, so I have to protect what I’m doing. That means if I have to play their kiddie game, I play. I don’t have a choice.”  

They may be kiddie games, but they are hardly trivial, having led to physical threats, out-and-out swindling, and run-ins with police.

And while Facebook security monitors for suspicious behavior, digital theft seems to be running rampant.

A Rough Road To Millions

In 2011, Fyk was bankrupt, in jail, and borderline suicidal.

His troubles dated to 2005. Fyk had been working in real estate. As the month went by, the market turned. Eventually, it caused him to go into a “financial tailspin,” as he puts it. With a wife and a young child to support, he scrambled to find a new way to generate income.

Some friends approached him about starting a website, and he snatched up the domain WTFMagazine.com. The acronym, they decided, would stand not for What The F--- but Where’s The Fun, and the site would be a home for original, entertaining content. Fyk likens his business to College Humor.

“[Our team] was running with no money,” Fyk said of the digital business' early days. “We were doing the fake-it-till-you-make-it thing, putting content together and starting to pick up steam, but I had no idea what I was doing.”

Fyk formed an LLC on Sept. 10, 2010, and launched the website in January 2011. “It was just fun, goofy, stupid stuff,” he said. His Facebook pages and websites publish the same kind of content today.

WATCH: Jason Fyk explains his "attempted murder" charge.

Shortly after WTF launched, Fyk found himself behind bars. He'd driven to Baltimore to interview an American stunt group, the Adrenaline Crew, for a story. They were all hanging out in a parking lot, about to drive to the interview location, when a drunken brawl broke out. Startled, Fyk said, he stood off to the side and began filming the fight on his smartphone. When things got serious, he stopped recording and tried to break up the fight. Instead, he got blamed for allegedly planning the altercation and found himself charged with attempted murder.

“It was a stupid drunken brawl,” he said, adding that he had met the people involved in the fight only a few minutes earlier. “Granted people got hit, and granted it was a fight, but it was never a felony fight. It was misdemeanor-assault stuff.”

Still, Fyk was thrown in jail and had to spend the little money his family had left on a lawyer. Two months later the charges were dropped, and Fyk was released from prison, broke.

"I couldn’t just go get a job at McDonald’s, because my bills were massive,” he said. “My kid held me together. I was almost suicidal. It was a disaster for me. I put my head down and kept pushing forward.”

Fyk tried to think of ways to make a lot of money quickly. His jail story was so strange, he felt it might make for a compelling book. But he wasn’t an established writer, and he knew the only way to sell a book would be to build a following.

“The only resource I had was social media, and it was free,” he said. “I decided to give everything I could toward getting as many eyeballs in my possession. Basically, I needed a distribution list.”

Facebook had launched Pages for businesses in 2007, but they were slow to take off, and even by 2011, no one was quite sure of their value. Fyk saw an opportunity, though.

At first he tried to grow just one Facebook page, representing WTF Magazine. Before long, he realized that even pages that were totally unrelated to his website could be useful as well.

“It didn’t really matter if a page was specific to my brand,” he said. “I could get distribution whether it was through WTF or through a 'Family Guy' fan page, for example. As long as I got someone to like a page, they were effectively one more member of the distribution list.”

Fyk set out to build and maintain as many pages of all varieties as he possibly could. His wife thought he was crazy. “I’m sitting there when we couldn’t put food on the table spending all this time on Facebook pages,” he said. “I’m telling her, ‘Look, I know the distribution is going to be valuable.’”

Fyk now owns about 40 Facebook pages and controls more than 28 million "likes" in total. The pages reach 260 million people on Facebook and the “distribution” list sends his website tens of millions of pageviews a month. This earns him multiple millions a year in advertising revenue, which he pairs with other businesses, such as social-media consulting. He employs 16 people and has a ghostwriter working on a memoir.

It wasn’t long before other Facebook users realized how powerful pages could be. Everyone from teenagers to established publishers scrambled to create distribution lists as Fyk had on Facebook, sometimes acquiring fans through devious or illegal means.

 The ‘Likes’ Cartel

When Facebook Pages first launched, even nonsensical pages could grow followings quickly and organically. A page titled “Can This Poodle Wearing A Tin Foil Hat Get More Fans Than Glenn Beck?,” for example, collected 230,000 followers. Pages with news hooks also took off. In 2012, a page called “Binders Full of Women” exploded after a statement Mitt Romney made during the presidential debate, quickly racking up 300,000 likes. When actor Paul Walker passed away, a fan page mourning his death, "R.I.P Paul Walker," earned 422,000 follows in a few days.

Now that the site has become saturated with pages, the easiest way to grow a following is to buy already-established pages from other Facebook users. The buying and selling of Facebook pages is forbidden, since pages aren’t owned by managers but by Facebook. But that doesn’t stop people from doing it.

The website FanPageTrading.com maintains an online marketplace for Facebook pages. Another service, called Content Promoters, fittingly advertises its service on a Facebook page and offers premade fan pages with 1,000 likes for $20 or 2,500 likes for $40.

"Buying and selling Pages is against our policies, and we use a variety of signals to help detect suspicious actions on Pages," a Facebook representative said. Facebook watches out for other methods of taking over a page, such as theft. "When we surface these high-risk actions, we help the Page admins retain or regain control of their Page using techniques like identity verification or direct one-to-one assistance. We have pursued legal channels as well to help defend our platform."

Fyk, who places the market value of his stable of Facebook pages at more than $1 million, claims some of today’s largest publishers either purchased pages a few years ago or teamed up with larger pages to grow their networks.

Upworthy, a site that grew from no readers to 30 million monthly uniques in 14 months, largely because of Facebook traffic, teamed up with established pages to help it gain early traction — not unlike the way other news sites, including Business Insider, forge content syndication deals and cross-link promotions with other publishers.

PolicyMic, a media startup that has more than 10 million monthly uniques and raised more than $12 million, also partners with a dozen popular Facebook pages to help seed and spread stories.

BuzzFeed has been rumored to have bought numerous Facebook pages to help its network grow to more than 100 million monthly unique visitors, but CEO Jonah Peretti said they have never purchased a Facebook page.

When asked how many Facebook pages BuzzFeed owns, Peretti said he isn’t sure.

“We have one main page and then I think some of the verticals have them,” he told Business Insider in an interview. “We don’t buy pages. I did talk to some startup company that buys Facebook pages, and they were explaining how they test content and run it across these things, but we don’t do anything like that.”

But he added that BuzzFeed does have informal relationships with owners of large Facebook pages.

“We have seen that if we do an awesome post about Barbie and a Barbie fan page posts it, there’s a spike in traffic,” he notes. “It’s possible sometimes someone at BuzzFeed will ping someone who runs another page, the same way they’d ping a blog or someone who runs a site. But we don’t have any agreement or exchange or anything like that."

In the past, buying and teaming up with other Facebook pages were ways to guarantee distribution on the social network. “A few years ago, you could get cross-posted on other pages and it would be insane how many people you’d get,” said Fyk.

Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm has since changed, however, making cross-promotion growth more difficult. Even organic reach, the number of people a publisher can distribute their content to via their own Facebook pages, has diminished.

In response to publishers’ complaints, Facebook recently offered an explanation for the decline in organic reach. “There is now far more content being made than there is time to absorb it,” the company pointed out. “On average, there are 1,500 stories that could appear in a person’s News Feed each time they log on to Facebook.” News Feed, it added, “is designed to show each person on Facebook the content that’s most relevant to them.” Most stuff no longer gets shown.

For businesses like Fyk’s, the development is not only frustrating but it’s also expensive. Fyk now spends more than $1,000 a day on Facebook ads.

Not long ago, Scott DeLong, founder of the fast-growing web property Viral Nova, likened Facebook’s volatility to the threat of a natural disaster.

“Reached 1m fans on FB. Post reach was promptly cut in half. Running a business on FB is like opening a McDonald's on an active volcano,” he tweeted, adding “It means you never know when the whole thing can blow up/change on a whim. FB is constantly changing things; no consistency.”

To help guarantee Facebook traffic, the buying, selling, trading, and bundling of Facebook Pages have become more popular. But there’s another popular way to acquire lots of fans quickly on Facebook: hijack them.

What Teens Really Do On Facebook

Anthony and Austin are teenagers (as such, we are identifying them by first names only). Although they have never met in real life, both said they’re like “brothers.” They bonded a few years ago when Anthony’s Facebook page was stolen and Austin helped him get it back.

Both are members of what they call the Community, an informal group that supposedly connects more than 50,000 tech-savvy teens across the web. Many have found one another through Facebook’s “mutual friends” feature. Their shared interests include social networks, gaming, web culture, and hacking, though the Facebook page's About section declares that the group is "dedicated to stopping self-harm, cyber-bullying, and underage nudity" (see the screenshot above). Anthony is often credited with being the ringleader of the Community because he created the page.

“The Community is a large collective of teens on the internet that interact a lot, whether it’s just talking and texting and Skyping each other to owning, liking, and sharing Facebook Pages, to following each other on Twitter and Instagram,” Anthony told Business Insider in a Skype interview. “The Community has gone largely unnoticed by adults, and it’s never been in the news. No one knows what the Community is outside of the Community,” he adds. “But it exists.”

The pair remember their first experiences with Facebook pages in 2009. The company had just opened up the product to the entire Facebook community and middle-school friends were making ones dedicated to favorite cartoons and celebrities.

“We were just kids, we didn’t know what we were doing, we didn’t know anything about marketing,” Anthony said. “We just kind of jumped head first into this world.”

That world quickly morphed from harmless fun into one where “people were trying to screw you over,” Anthony said.

“You had a lot of 12- and 13-year-olds getting on the internet and making Facebook pages so their friends could see them,” said Anthony. “What we didn’t expect was that this would actually get huge, with online communities of people hijacking and running pages.”

Facebook hijacking is when a person who isn’t the owner of a Facebook fan page is able to seize control of the page from its manager. Pages go largely unpoliced by Facebook, and there are a number of ways to steal a page from its owner. One method that used to be common was to earn a page manager’s trust, offer to help manage it, then delete the original owner from the admin panel and lock them out of the Page. Facebook has since cracked down on this practice by changing the way admin accounts are set up.

As a result, hijacking has become more intricate, Austin said: “It requires a lot of planning.” Groups, such as the now-defunct Church of Hijacking, teach members how to steal pages. Fyk and Austin both said that when a Facebook page reaches about 100,000 fans, it becomes a target for hijackers — especially when the pages aren’t verified by a Facebook-granted blue checkmark.

The first page Austin remembers seeing stolen was one dedicated to Justin Bieber run by female fans.

“People took these pages because the reactions of these girls were funny,” Austin said. “They would take these pages and post things about how they hated Justin Bieber and other irrelevant things, and it would make the girls really angry. The people who stole it would laugh at their reactions.”

When people began to monetize Facebook pages, in 2012, stealing pages went from fun and games to full-on cyber combat, complete with confederacies among the owners of the largest pages, and attacks against other page owners who wronged them.

“You have wars, you have diplomacy, you have betrayals, you have alliances, you have secret agreements, you have coalitions, and you have embargoes,” Austin said of the current Facebook Page battle.

One of the earliest people to monetize Facebook pages was Carl Shelbourne, now employed by Fyk. Unlike blogs, which enable owners to embed ads on their pages, Facebook does not allow advertising, except its own. Shelbourne began posting affiliate links instead — links to online merchants who pay a percentage of their earnings to whoever sends them customers — and with millions of followers, he soon began bringing in serious revenue.

But not everyone applauded the idea. “People hated it,” Austin said.

The use of affiliate links highlighted a philosophical divide among the growing Facebook mafia: users like Fyk and Community members who controlled numerous pages.

“It was like, ‘Don’t do that,’ because we ran pages for the fun,” Anthony said. “We didn’t run pages for money. That’s what separated us from a lot of other adults who ran Facebook pages. We just wanted to have fun.”

Though the battle lines were drawn, the idea of monetizing pages eventually became widely accepted, even by Austin and Anthony.

The site Mylikes.com provided moneymaking links for page managers. Meanwhile, in addition to posting affiliate links, page managers occasionally created clothing lines and sold fan T-shirts.

“The summer of 2012 was perhaps the most moneymaking period for all of us,” said Austin. He said he raked in about $10,000 in July alone.

“Everyone was making major bank,” said Anthony.

Facebook Page monetization was also made possible by the creation of tools that helped users manage more than one page at a time. Hootsuite, for example, allows page managers to blast content across multiple Facebook properties at once. Facebook has also added the ability to schedule blasts.

Fyk has assembled one of the largest page networks on the platform, outside of traditional publishers like BuzzFeed who own numerous pages for different verticals. But his team has struggled to get their pages verified by Facebook, which makes them a prime target for hijackers like Austin and Anthony. Facebook isn’t as quick to help unverified Page owners retrieve their followings when they get reported or removed, and sometimes the pages are lost forever.

Austin has also felt the pain of losing a valuable Facebook Page. One of the pages he was able to grow and monetize was a 4chan fan page, which topped 500,000 followers. When 4chan complained about it to Facebook, the page disappeared.

“Facebook gave me no opportunity to change the name,” Austin recalled. “All of that work on the page, and it got deleted.”

While some pages get shut down because of complaints from the copyright owners, others are victims of the ongoing cyber war.

In April, one of Fyk’s fan pages for MTV — a page with more than 1 million likes — went missing. At first, he assumed Facebook had shut it down at the request of Viacom, but then he got a Facebook message.

“Hey man, I have your 1m page,” the message read. “I’ll give you your one million page, and I get this in return, deal?”

Fyk didn't take the deal, and he still hasn't gotten his MTV page back.

Recently, another page of Fyk’s was temporarily removed from Facebook for publishing pornographic content that Fyk said he never approved. After a little digging, he found a Facebook status update suggesting Austin was behind it.

“What a nice thing to wake up to on this fine summer morning,” Austin wrote with a screenshot of a message from Facebook that read, “You reported Cleveland Brown [a Fyk page] for harassment. This page was removed.”

Soon, Fyk received a message from another Facebook user who confirmed Austin’s involvement. This person asked Fyk to pay him a lump sum of cash in exchange for getting Austin and his friends to leave Fyk’s pages alone. Fyk, while temped to end the war, hasn't paid.

The Community's reason for partaking in Facebook pranks and hijackings is simple: They think it's funny. And the pay — money that can be generated after amassing Facebook likes — isn't bad either. 

"It provokes a reaction that some people find absolutely hilarious," Anthony said. "For others it's for monetary benefits."

Hijackers such as Anthony and Austin don’t fear Fyk or Facebook’s wrath. They’ve both been kicked off the social site numerous times. They either create new accounts or get old accounts back from friends.

"It happens," said Anthony. "I get my account back every other day."

Deleting and stealing Facebook pages is just the beginning, though. Another common tactic is trying to get innocent Facebookers in trouble with law-enforcement authorities.

Once, when some of the Facebook hackers were in a battle with Fyk, they spread a rumor on the social network, branding him a pedophile.

“He said he was going to kill my friend, so we said he was a pedophile and he got spammed and everyone who likes his page thinks he’s a pedophile now,” Anthony said with a laugh. “It’s just silly little internet things that drive him insane, and it’s nothing illegal. I have my freedom of speech to say anything like that, but we don’t do anything in terms of black-hat illegal activity.”

When we mentioned the laws against defamation, Anthony backtracked. “Probably somewhere along the lines of that, but it wasn’t me who did it, so I’m not really worried, and I forgot who even did it,” he said.

In Anthony’s defense, Fyk is not entirely blameless for the ongoing hostilities. Occasionally, the millionaire has lost his temper and said things he likely regrets.

“FYI f*cktard ... you are a laughable little boy that will never be able to do s---,” Fyk wrote Austin after one particularly aggravating spat. “But now you have gone and f----- with me again. Now I’m going to waste my money to wreck you and your moms life. Here I come.”

Another teen has tangled with Fyk online also said he was threatened.

After Ben (a pseudonym) stole one of Fyk’s Facebook groups — something he readily admits — he said he received a message back from Fyk. “I have contacts outside of Facebook,” it said. “I’ll destroy your life.” The message included his address, phone number, and father’s name.

Not every Facebook prank perpetrated by the Community is about tormenting Fyk.

Once, for example, Anthony and a friend thought it’d be funny to convince their Facebook friends they had died.

“I made a bunch of news articles about myself that I actually got hosted on news organizations’ sites for obituaries about me and my friend,” Anthony said. “We then posted in the Facebook groups saying we were going to kill ourselves. Nine or 10 hours later we got alternate accounts for Facebook and posted the news articles, and it caused this massive uproar inside the group.”

Soon a rest-in-peace Facebook page in his name appeared, racking up 20,000 likes. 

The battles among Facebook gangs have also included real-world sabotage. Anthony details some of the ugliness, which he said he doesn’t partake in but has seen firsthand.

“It was not uncommon to see stories of kids’ computers getting infected by rogue viruses and 25 gigabytes of child porn being put on their computers and a swat team being sent to their house,” he said over Skype. “It’s not uncommon for people’s personal bank details to get leaked, and it’s not uncommon for Social Security numbers to get leaked.”

“It’s an all-in prank war,” he added.

The Facebook crusades have made him paranoid. Before agreeing to be interviewed, he said, he stalked me, my husband, and my extended family online to make sure the request was authentic.

“I’ve been thrown on my bed and handcuffed [by cops] and asked questions about what I do online,” Anthony said. “I’ve been harassed and threatened before. I get death threats on a daily basis."

Despite the frightening encounters, Anthony feels largely untouchable. When his next birthday rolls around, that might change.

“The fact that I’m not 18, my personal information is not yet publicly on people-finder sites, and I kind of mask my IP address ... makes me largely untouchable by 95% of the people in the hacking community,” he said.

Fyk, too, maintains more than one identity on Facebook.

"I would never use my real name because I've seen firsthand what the internet can do," Anthony said. "The internet strips you of a lot of innocence and you fall into the wrong crowds sometimes and get desensitized to the stuff you see.”

For Anthony, whose Facebook profile said he specializes in “cyber bullying,” knowing where to draw the line in online antics requires a serious gut check. “The line for myself is two things,” he said. “I don’t cause permanent damage to people, and if I knew I was causing permanent damage to someone, I would stop it. Or, females. I don’t mess with females like that.”

That said, both hackers have regrets.

“Sometimes I look back and cringe,” said Austin. “I look at my mistakes and I say, ‘Wow, I was stupid,’ but that’s how I refine my methods.”

Anthony, too, sounded somewhat remorseful.

“One day, you’re just a normal kid,” he said. “You don’t wake up one day and say you’re going to take someone’s Facebook page. It all started out as joking and having fun.”

No doubt Fyk wishes he could hammer out a truce — or at least a cessation of hostilities — with the Script Kiddies. They've discussed it, although nothing has been resolved. Anthony said the trio is working on a "mutual negotiation" right now.

Fyk isn't sure anything will change, though.

"It has been my personal experience that they never stop," he told Business Insider in an email. "Do I want peace? Yes, peace of mind that my family, my business, my employees, and myself are safe from harassment and [cyber] terrorism."

Facebook's security team is aware of the hijacking problem and is trying to clamp down on it. "We recommend Page admins enhance their account security by enabling Login Approvals on Facebook and adding a second authentication factor for email accounts," a company representative said. "It’s also a good idea to limit the number of admins on Pages and to use less permissive roles like Moderator for administrators who don’t require access to all functions."

Even if an agreement were reached and Facebook's security improved, it would not mean the end of Fyk's difficulties by a long shot.

For that, Facebook would need to become a slightly more amenable environment in which to do business. “Facebook can be difficult,” Fyk wrote. “But without it [WTF Magazine] would never be able to be on this earth. I live a very comfortable life. So we thank them for the platform. We just ask that they don’t take it away from people once it becomes valuable to their businesses.”

Read more of Business Insider's long-form features »

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When you are thinking of building a new marketing strategy for your brand/product, one of the things you look at is how your competitor is faring in terms of content & execution. It can always act as a source of inspiration or a new thought as to how you can improve your own services looking at your competitor’s execution. Competitive Data is the best source for your brand to modify your own plans rather than your assumptions.

There are various tools (free/paid) which makes your life easier to spy on your competitors in the digital age. Here we look at some of the alternatives which you can try to stay one place ahead and strategize accordingly.

SEO Competitive Tools

Search Engine Traffic is one of the most sought after traffic sources for brands. More often than not you are vying for the same keywords as your competitor, but how would you like to digest that information? Looking at keyword based information (paid or organic) helps you build your keyword/content optimization & lets you be ahead of the race. Some Tools which can help you with the information related to SEO are given below:

Open Site Explorer

One of the many tools which fall under Moz, you can go to http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ to get started and compare up to 5 websites to look at website relevant metrics. You can have up to 3 searches daily for free accounts after which you will need a Moz account to sign in and access the tool. The Domain Authority & Page Authority metrics are developed by Moz which helps compare websites according to their content efficiency out of 100. The more the rating, the higher authority the site has in Google search rankings.

Linking Root Domains tell you the external linking websites (or backlinks) to the main page. Mostly a higher number of backlinks is a positive signal for the website and one of the factors to be taken in to consideration if your brand is behind in acquiring quality backlinks compared to the competition. You can also look at some of the authoritative links each website has to review which websites are your competitors targeting (and if you can leverage some of the same category).

ScreamingFrog

ScreamingFrog is a free download which helps you give an overview of the basic elements of the pages of your website. The elements include page titles, descriptions, image tags & much more. You can check if your website is better fir compared to your competitor & if there are any new keywords which your competitors are targeting which you might want to have a peek at.

You can look at individual pages to figure out their details & keywords. A pretty handy free resource to have when analysing your own as well as your competitor’s keywords.

SEMRush

SEMRush provides lots of great information about competitive profiling related to adwords as well as organic traffic. The paid version provides in-depth information on a website you enter by choosing which domain of Google would you want it to search for (India is not available yet).

Below are some of the features you will get with the free version:

• Organic Traffic vs Ads Traffic
• Organic Keywords (Top 10)
• Ad Keywords (Top 10)
• Competitors in Search (Top 10)

A paid version of the tool will give you an indepth report of organic traffic & Ads traffic competitors along with the ability to export the reports for further drilldown. You can also view the month over month trends of multiple domains over organic traffic vs ad traffic giving you an overview of how your bran is faring in organic traffic. Search for a particular keyword to get a monthly volume along with the probable CPC value under ‘Keyword Research’. You can get only the top 10 suggestions for a particular keyword along with its volume for a free account.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a must have tool when you want to analyse backlinks of your domain compared to other domains. You need to create a free account to access some of the free features of the tool and can always upgrade to view the full functionalities of the tool. Similar to Open Site Explorer, you can compare up to 5 domains (2 for free accounts) to view the information on backlinks such as:

• How many backlinks to the website?
• How many ‘DoFollow’ vs ‘NoFollow’ links to the domains?
• What is the Domain Rank (Ahrefs metric) ?
• How many authoritative websites (including .edu or .gov websites) citing the domain?
• Monthly trend of Referring Pages to the domain

You can also request SEO report for domains (up to 3 free reports) for a period of last 30 days. The report crawls up to 1,000 pages of your website and gives you basic information about Page titles, meta description, headlines and the internal/external links to individual pages. This can certainly be a pretty effective feature for a website audit. There is a backlink report which you can use similar to the SEO report for analysing your website’s backlinks in detail (3 Free Reports).

In addition to Ahrefs, you can also try Majestic SEO which works similar to the above mentioned tools with providing additional metrics known as ‘Citation Flow’ and ‘Trust Flow’ indicating the Page importance and it’s likeliness to be referred by other domains as an authoritative page.

Social Media Competitive Benchmarking:

Social Media benchmarking is also an integral part of any social media strategy to regularly check your social media presence against your competitors. We can use some of these tools to get started with competitive profiling on social media to determine their earned and owned presence.

Simply Measured

Simply Measured lets you access some cool FREE social media reports if you don’t have the budget to spend heavy on competitor’s data. Some of their Free Offerings include:

Twitter Follower Report:

Gives you an overview of the audience of the Twitter account you specify including the location & follower distribution. A report which can do an audience comparison of your brands vs the industry and if you need to change your audience building strategy. Also, gives you the most influential followers of the specified account with their most talked about topics and Klout score. Handy? Definitely!

Facebook Competitive Analysis Report:

Want to check your Facebook presence in terms of content and engagement? With this free report you can have a first level view in minutes. You can do a competitive check of 10 Facebook pages (including your own) who have less than 250,000 likes for the last 2 weeks. Engagement Comparison & Top Content breakdown are some of the highlights which we can get from the report.

Facebook Insights Report:

Got a Facebook page and want a readymade dashboard for Facebook Insights? You can connect your Facebook page with this tool to get a template dashboard with last 2 weeks data for your page. The report contains the ‘Engagement Megaphone’ breaking the major components of your page and showing it in a visual manner along with engagement drilldown and top contributors to your page. Really Helpful!

Google Analytics Traffic Sources Report:

Authorizing with Google Analytics lets you uncover the traffic sources report which will help you gauge the evergreen question ‘Which traffic source is the most beneficial to my website?’. A detailed report available for the last 30 days for your website.

There are similar reports for Google+, Vine, Instagram and LinkedIn Pages which are available for you. And you can download the same in excel/PowerPoint to make it presentation ready for your Boss!.

SocialBakers

SocialBakers lets you monitor your competition in terms of audience growth for Facebook/Twitter. The paid version offers a lot more in-depth analytics available on a page level to measure the impact of a campaign or a content in general compared to other Brand pages. Helpful For:

• Audience Regional Distribution [Facebook]
• Audience Growth [Last 6 months]
• PTAT/Engagement [Facebook]
• Video Views [YouTube]
• % of Fake Followers of Twitter Account [Fake Follower Check]
• Social Marketing Reports [Region Wise]
• Socially Devoted Brands [Compare your Brand with the industry]

We list down some more notable free tools which can help you with your social media audit:

WildFireApp : Social Media audience growth for Facebook, Twitter and Google+

TwitterCounter: Basic Twitter stats like Followers, Following, Tweets for any Twitter account

FollowerWonk: Another Moz gem which analyses Twitter profiles along with audience level analysis and comparison feature of upto 3 Twitter accounts.

CircleCount: Helps you with the statistics of Google+ Brand pages i.e: Follower growth

Topsy: Check earned and owned mentions of your brand viz a viz your competitors to judge the overall chatter & sentiment around the Industry

Twtrland: Check out activity and engagement activity of Twitter accounts with an additional search and tag functionality for influencer identification with Twtrland.

Also, check out the review of the Professional version of Twtrland

Web Ranking Tools

These tools provide you competitive intelligence on websites for companies to help in consumer segmentation.

Alexa

Alexa is the most popular website benchmarking tool used for browsing through the popularity of a website. The estimated numbers on Traffic, bounce rate are a fair indicator of a website’s popularity compared to other. You can get a ‘Global’ and Country based rank of the website along with demographics information around a website.

SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb goes a step beyond Alexa to give traffic sources along with the top referring domains to the respective website. The Traffic sources are given in detail (which keywords work for the website) along with the social referral traffic estimation. The interface is also a lot cleaner and attractive than Alexa.

Bonus Tools

• Marketing Grader: Try Marketing Grader by Hubspot measures your website for parameters related to blogging, SEO and social media giving an overall score to your website URL.
• Mention: Mention can be used for monitoring the web including blogs, forums and social networks with results delivered to your inbox depending on the frequency selected by you. The free alerts can be used for monitoring any new mention of your Brad vis a vis your competitors to always keep a tab on the real time results.
• Google Alerts: Google Alerts lets you set up an alert and have the latest news about the keyword delivered to you inbox. Works similar to Mention but covers a wider range of content on the web.

There are tons of other tools whether free or paid which you can use for your competitors audit besides the ones listed above. Any tool which I have missed and you would recommend to be included in this list?

Let me know in the comments

Featured Image Source: Flickr

“It’s the same old saw: marketers seeking easy-peasy answers to VERY difficult problems.”

You’ve got to love Hugh MacLeod.  He pretty quickly cuts through the inanity of a lot of the digital, internet & content marketing conversation going on today.

Lots of it is genuine and well intentioned…but vacuous.  Inbound marketing agencies are often staffed by marketing folks and/or millennials.  Neither is a group that has much empathy with industrial manufacturers or their prospects.  Yet that often doesn’t stop them from bandying about cliches and bromides…and making rather outrageous projections for what a few blog posts and social media updates will do for a B2B manufacturing business.

That costs credibility – not only for the group making the optimistic / poorly informed claims, but for anyone who speaks a similar language.

Buzzwords are profane

Turning again to Hugh….

Is it any wonder that folks that make “real stuff” have a rather dim view of folks that just run off their mouths?

And then consider the tens, and often hundreds of thousands of dollars that most manufacturing companies have been cajoled into dumping into marketing over the years which had no clear ROI or even demonstrable impact.

Combine years of frustration and squandered resources with folks tossing around buzzwords and applying marketing approaches to sell products they don’t understand to prospects with whom they can’t empathize and you have a toxic brew.

B2B marketing is more important than ever

That’s the sad paradox.  As more folks babble about it (and owners of industrial companies become even more jaundiced and skeptical) it’s increasingly important.  After all, 93% of B2B sales initiate with an internet search, and research shows that buyers won’t engage with sales reps until the buying process is nearly complete.

So the model of cold calling direct sales is decreasingly effective – and the marketing alternative is increasingly necessary.

So what’s the answer?  How can marketers with real business background and industrial experience assuage the understandable concerns of B2B business owners?  That’s a story that’s still being written.

Want to learn more about how B2B Sales & Marketing are evolving?  Download our free book.

images – GapingVoid and GapingVoid

Account-based marketing is a trend that is gaining a lot of traction, probably because it just makes so much sense. Sales has always used an account-based approach while evaluating the leads they receive from marketing, as the first thing they look at is if the lead is from a company they believe could become a potential customer. After all, a “qualified” lead that has run the gauntlet of demographic and activity-based scoring from a company that will never, ever buy is not really a lead.

There is a problem, however, with the account-based marketing approach.

As B2Bs continue to try and adapt one-to-one B2C techniques and technologies to work on the accounts they try to sell to, they miss the vital and strategic understanding of how B2Bs actually buy. The vendors we work with for demand generation and the technologies we have invested in have yet to grow and evolve to accommodate the account-based approach, forcing us to work within the confines of their systems and continue to make decisions based on demographics, and not firmographics.

A high level marketing executive pointed out once that his company “doesn’t sell to glass buildings, we sell to people.” While true, B2Bs are not selling to individual people – we sell to a committee of people tasked with making a decision together. All of these people have different motivations, different pain points, are rewarded differently, and are evaluating your products or services from different points of view. The only thing they often have in common is that they work for the same company, and unless they are all engaged in some sort of buyer dialogue with you they are not likely to buy.

Consider myself as an example of an “engaged” individual in your marketing automation system. I get calls from marketing technology vendors almost daily, based on the fact that I am a bit of a collector of white papers. I download the hell out of those things, with every intention of reading them all to help expand my knowledge of marketing best practices. I must be a “hot lead” in more systems than I can count, and I am sure I am not alone. I know many folks in the space that do the same as me. We are the window shoppers, the tire kickers, and there is no easy way to identify us in most marketing automation platforms since our titles are probably in the sweet spot and our activity-based scoring is through the roof.

How can you tell if there is a real selling opportunity at my company? Easy! If I am not the only one from my company interacting with your website or downloading content.

The problem though is that most (if not all) marketing automation platforms don’t offer that sort of visibility into account-based activity. There is no way to easily tag multiple prospects to a single account. Running a report on the account name might work, unless there are multiple spellings of the company name (IBM vs. I.B.M. vs. International Business Machines) to muddy the waters. Consider how leads vs. contacts work in Salesforce.com. Traditionally, when marketing owns them, they live in the leads tab with no common link at the account level. Conversely, when sales own them, they become contacts and cannot exist unless they are associated with an account. Why can’t marketing automation offer the ability/option to operate the same way, providing visibility into account-level interest and activity in our programs?

Our service providers put us in the same sort of pickle. When renting an email list or putting together a content syndication program, there is often no easy way to exclude leads from companies we know will not buy. Sometimes you are allowed to provide an exclusion or suppression list, but it is typically limited to specific email addresses you already have rather than expanding to companies you know will not buy. Filtering is usually limited to titles or departments, and almost never company size or industry. And don’t even try to specify B2B vs. B2C! They simply are not configured to provide firmographic-based leads – at least until enough customers demand it. They take advantage of the fact that we need those leads now, and rather than force them to change they way that they serve our needs we wind up paying for leads we know will never, ever buy.

The problem with account-based marketing is that our vendors are not yet equipped to handle the change in tactics. Until we put it at the top of the features request list, or walk away from vendors that cannot accommodate the approach, we are going to be stuck using a shotgun approach to demand generation when a precision rifle would serve our needs much more effectively.

According to Hubspot, companies that blog have 55% more website visitors and generate up to 88% more leads per month. The challenge for many companies though is keeping it up to date – it’s a full time job! If you want it to work hard for your business, it requires planning, an editorial calendar, regular maintenance and a team of writers and promoters – otherwise, you risk it becoming a dumping ground where content is posted for content’s sake.

Where do blogs work in the sales funnel?

Blogs tend to work well at the top and middle of the funnel depending on the content. They tend to be light-hearted and chatty which works well at the top but others might be more educational – such as how-to guides – which help to drive people through the consideration phase.

What do the journalists think?

Our journalists love writing blogs – who wouldn’t enjoy spending their days researching the top 10 places to visit in Paris or writing pieces about wedding trends? But are they truly valuable to a business? In this week’s ‘Ask The Journalists’, I ask them if every company should have one.

Pablo Smithson

It’s not set in stone that you should automatically have one, but if you run a business then you really should have a fresh perspective on your industry if you are going to be a success. A blog just allows you a platform on which to reinforce that perspective with opinions, news and creative projects – all of which show the search engines and potential customers the breadth of your expertise and passion.

Elizabeth Smythe

Yes, every company should have a blog as it injects personality into a brand, encourages engagement and can serve to differentiate businesses. As consumers, most of us want to know that the people we buy goods / services from are inherently ‘nice’ and do nice things – the blog is an opportunity to communicate this. Plus it also allows a company to highlight their expertise on industry events and brag about achievements in a way that isn’t too smug.

Laura Varley

No matter what industry you’re in, it’s always a good idea to have a blog – as long as you’re filling it with high quality content. Whether you want to use it to run competitions, discuss what’s currently going on in your industry or create useful guides for your customers, a blog is ideal for showing potential prospects that you’re the expert in your field.

Just remember that a blog needs to be well-maintained. You want to give your customers a reason to come back to your website every week and a bare blog that hasn’t had a post in over two months makes your website look poorly maintained.

Larissa Hirst

A blog can be a rewarding and engaging aspect of a company website; or it can be a dull space where press releases and staff changes are distributed.

I believe every company should have one, but only if they are truly serious and passionate about their content marketing strategy. Otherwise it just highlights a disengaged company that doesn’t know how to speak with its audience and consumers.

Graeme Parton

Having a blog gives you the chance to show potential customers that you’re always at the forefront of your area of business. You should be using content to show your authority in the industry but this isn’t something that can be achieved particularly easily with straightforward news pieces, so be original and show your true colours through your blog pieces. If they’re thought-provoking and useful enough, they should boost engagement with shares and comments, too.

Are you thinking about starting a blog? Or maybe you have one that just isn’t working for you? If so, then our Guide to Blog Content Marketing will help get you on the right track.

One of the greatest benefits LinkedIn offers is the ability to communicate directly with your target audience.  However, with over 300 million users on LinkedIn, finding one’s target audience is not the easiest thing to do.  It requires some planning, testing and effort.

Clearly, there are many great resources to turn to for help with this topic, but one of the best ones might be to utilize SlideShare (which by the way, is owned by LinkedIn). These presentations contain a great deal of knowledge that can be used in order to enhance your own LinkedIn experience.  Here are seven interesting SlideShare presentations that can help you find your target on audience on LinkedIn.

If I Were 22 – LinkedIn Infographic

(created by LinkedIn)

A very interesting perspective (via an infographic) of what today’s LinkedIn influencers looked like when they were 22.  For instance:

• Nearly 86% of the LinkedIn users polled are working in a professional field that they would have never imagined.
• That only 2% of 22 year olds believe their most important skill is their knowledge.

This could provide insight to help you better understand how people develop in their professional lives.  Thinking well out of the box, perhaps understanding how certain influencers evolve could potentially help you anticipate where to position yourself professionally to find your target audience on LinkedIn.  There’s quite a bit of insightful data provided by LinkedIn.  You’re in for a treat with this graphic.

LinkedIn Basics & Beyond: 2014 Edition 

(created by Pam Ann Marketing)

This presentation is a great introduction for LinkedIn users.  It highlights the basic “Do’s & Don’ts” for creating an optimal and valuable LinkedIn profile.  It also features great information on how to find your target audience by using simple features built into the platform.  Here are a few tips you can find in the presentation:

• DO: Join LinkedIn groups and post actively.  You should be sharing genuinely useful information that will engage your community.
• DON’T: Join groups you’re interested in.  Join groups that your target prospects are in.
• DO: Be sure to be strategic and specific with how you present yourself to other users.

Advanced LinkedIn

(Created by Milena Regos)

What caught our eye about this presentation was that its creator was talking about issues that most people do not talk about.  If you like reading “Best Practices,”  you’ll enjoy this SlideShare.  In it Milena…

• breaks down and gives a great deal of insight on LinkedIn Ads
• highlights ad campaigns and offers tips and advice on how to specifically target your campaign to find your target audience on LinkedIn.
• focuses on tracking business goals, growing your page & analyzing the conversion rate of your content. 
• digs into LinkedIn groups
  
• address how to effectively engage your network.

How to Rock the Perfect LinkedIn Profile

(created by LinkedIn)

Here’s a great presentation about a musician, Matt Henshaw, who used LinkedIn to rejuvenate his professional music career.  He offers fantastic information on how to be found by using the search tools, along with the skills and endorsements feature. Matt is a prime example of how powerful LinkedIn is to find your target audience.  He was able to search, find, and interact with his target audience leading him to a new job in the music world.  A must read for all LinkedIn users!

LinkedIn Company Pages Playbook

(created by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions)

This presentation shows a handful of simple ways to enhance your companies LinkedIn page.  It is essential to first find your target audience, inform them and then engage them within your own community.  Engaging them helps build connections, which leads to a higher conversion rate and more business.  A few tips that could be found in the presentation include:

• Asking members for feedback will increase your volume of comments by over 50%.
• Linking to relevant “best-of” lists that can amplify your own content and your own business.
• Posting videos and other interactive media will help amplify and generate more interest toward your brand.

5 Rules for Content Marketing on LinkedIn

(create by Oneupweb)

Content is what separates the winners from the losers.  This insightful SlideShare presentation highlights the five essential rules for finding your target audience and distributing your content to them effectively.  All LinkedIn users should follow these five simple rules in order to control and optimize the content they distribute to their network.  Consider these two rules …

• Optimizing for the user  – You should attempt to make your content available on as many platforms possible.
• Losing the Sales Shtick – Do not try to sell your ideas or content, rather draw interest from your users.  Your content should be able to sell itself with the proper positioning and audience.

Finding your target audience on LinkedIn is both undoubtedly powerful as well as very challenging.  These SlideShares provide insight to help make your path less challenging.  What are some of your tips you would add to these?

Does your current marketing annoy your potential customers? Does it shout “Listen to me, give me your money!”?

If your company is focusing solely on outbound “push” marketing methods like unrequested messages sent through direct mail, telemarketing, print advertising, radio or TV then you can answer “Yes” to both of those questions.

It’s time your business integrated outbound marketing with inbound marketing. Inbound, or push, marketing says to your potential customers, “We should get to know each other. Then you can buy from a trusted ‘friend’.”

Ready to learn how? Read on for an inbound marketing primer.

What is a Lead?

Before you can think about inbound lead generation, you must first understand what a lead is. Anybody who has indicated an interest in the product or service that your business is selling is considered a lead. These include people who:

• Call you for information.
• Respond to a survey.
• Visit your store.
• Submit their information on your lead capture form.

The Benefits of Inbound Lead Generation

Customers Reach Out To You

With inbound lead generation, you attract a steady stream of potential customers to your website with interesting content and build their interest in your products and services over time. By attracting people to your website with quality content, you are “getting them in the door.” When they are ready to do business down the line, you are one of their first choices because they have a relationship with your business.

Results are Measurable

Inbound marketing measurements reveal precisely how your prospects are engaging with you, how often they’re converted from website visitors to customers, and how much revenue each of your marketing channels are producing, down to the minute, penny, and click. Not to mention, you’ve just captured their name, title, company, and biggest unmet need from a landing page – information you can use to qualify, convert, and monetize that lead. Minnesota Business Magazine

The Ways in Which Leads Are Generated

Think of inbound lead generation as the hiring process. When a prospective employee fills out a job application, they are willing to share a huge amount of personal information in order to have a shot at getting the job.

The same idea is true for lead generation. When your prospective customer is interested in what you have to offer, they will share important information in return.

Lead nurturing starts by collecting contact information in exchange for something the visitor deems of value, but with little risk. Often, this entails some form of information or product trial intended to help solve the visitor’s problem. Jeff Bullas

Coupons

If your business puts out a coupon on the Internet, people who find it valuable will likely share their name and email address to get it. That’s not much information, but it opens the door for you to continue the conversation through email and indicates this person has a direct interest in your product or service.

Content

Unlike a coupon download, content consumption doesn’t indicate that the potential customer has a direct interest in your product or service (unless you only offer one thing). To understand their interest, you will need to collect additional information.

The goal is to collect enough information for the sales rep to understand whether a person is interested in your product or service, and whether they are a good fit. This can be done all at once, or over time.

Here on Groove Digital Marketing we collect:

• First & Last Name: used to personalize email communications
• Company Name: Allow sales to research the prospective client and see how they might benefit from our services.
• Primary Email: used to communicate through email marketing campaigns
• Website URL: Allows sales to research the prospective client.
• Best Describe Me: Allows us to customize our communications into different funnels.
  • Marketing Manager Who Needs a Boost
  • CEO/Owner Who Needs Sales
  • HubSpot Client Looking for Help
  • Other

Components of Successful Lead Generation

The lead generation process can be broken down into a few key components

• Landing Page: the part of your website that the customer “lands” on in search of a product, service, or an answer to an important question. Once the visitor is on your landing page, you can collect information via a form.
• Form: a component on your landing page that collects information in exchange for something in return.
• Offer: This is your “something in return”. It must have enough value that it entices the visitor to fill it out.
• Call to action (CTA): This can be an image, message, or some other type of element that calls the lead to take action.

Conclusion

Inbound lead generation is one of the most effective ways to take leads and turn them into customers. It’s a win-win for everyone – customers don’t feel like you’re being invasive, and your sales team has an easier time converting leads into sales.

What’s holding you back from getting started on inbound lead generation? Please share your comments below.

You’ve done it. You’ve carefully crafted long-form content that blends wit and humor with information and style. You can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to read this thing of beauty, and you know this is going to be very useful to many of your readers. The content sells itself, you think.

Right?

Not quite. You need to help get the word out about your long-form content in order to really attract a strong following. You may have a few loyal followers so you need to be encouraging them to share as well. They probably have friends with similar interests who would also be interested in what your writing.

The bottom line is that your fan base will never really grow to the size you want without giving your content some good publicity, but with so many platforms and ways to share, how do you know where to even begin? Follow these easy to steps to use social media to market your content and you’ll be on your way to building a bigger community of followers in no time, giving your content the attention it deserves.

Look for a Few Good Keywords

As with every post, you should have about five keywords that will help with SEO. You know this already, and you’ve already embedded them in your content, links page title and meta description for good measure, but did you know that social media needs these keywords too?

When using Twitter or Facebook to post the link, be sure to include keywords as hashtags. Your brand should at least be one of the hashtags. Your article’s main topic and maybe one or two subtopics should be the others, if you have room. Remember not to crowd your tweets and posts with hashtags.

Above all, don’t pack your content with keywords, often referred to as stuffing. Readers can tell when a phrase is being used over and over. If they don’t know much about keywords, they might think it’s just poor writing on your part and stop reading. If they’re keyword savvy, they might be put off by what you’re doing and close the page anyway. Either one results in a loss of readership for you.

Use Images When Appropriate

When scrolling through their newsfeeds, social media users usually gloss over most of the text. Sure, they read some posts from friends and family, but for companies, sometimes they just scan the post quickly and move on. Your goal is to get them to stop and pay attention to your post, enticing them to click the link and read your wonderful content.

Photo and text: CC-BY-SA 2005 Voyou Desoeuvre

Images don’t really help with getting the highest spot on search results, but they do attract social media clicks. Adding an image can easily grab a reader’s attention and make them want to find out more. You can post all sorts of a images related to your post, some you take and others you find. Keep the image simple for the most part. You don’t want your reader to be too focused on the image. Let it relate to your article and drive traffic.

If you want to expand your outreach to Instagram, you can post photos and add the link underneath. Of course, you want to make sure your image is relevant to the articles. If you’re talking about shoes, don’t post a picture of a monkey with the link attached. Give your audience something they can repost or comment on to create conversations about your post.

Remember, images are usually a bit larger and take up more space on the newsfeed. It will be harder for your audience to scroll through and skip it completely.

Namedrop Games

Have you ever had a friend meet a celebrity, major or otherwise? He or she probably uses almost every opportunity to talk about that time he or she was behind Natalie Portman in line at a Starbucks. It’s annoying, but people love to namedrop, and when you’re publicising your content on social media sites, you should too.

It’s smart to use other expert’s advice and research in your posts. Though they aren’t entirely your words, you can use the information to make a further point or back up your argument. Your readers are bound to know these big names in your industry, so why not show them that you know these experts too?

When sharing your blog link, you can mention the person’s name before the link and include links back to the original point of reference. Linking to respectable sites will help improve your link profile, but it would be even better if the expert mentioned you in return. So long as you show respect for the other person’s expertise and time, they might be willing to link back to you or mention you in a post.

Share and Be Shared

No form of marketing is a one-time thing. You don’t run a TV ad once and hope a lot of people saw it. You run it for months and get new viewers every day.

Content and social media marketing work the same way. Post the link to your article multiple times. They should be consecutive posts, and they should keep repeating themselves. Try to find new angles to promote your long-form content. Look for events happening in the news and try to relate your content to the event.

Your followers also don’t live in one time zone, If you live in Australia and post something in the morning, fans in New York City might be getting ready to go out for the night or be turning off their lights for bed, depending on how early in the morning you post. By the time they get back to their newsfeeds, your content might be buried under a pile of updates from friends.

Naturally, you should have sharing buttons on all of your content, but it’s also beneficial to add “tweet this” options to quotes and sentences within your post. Add this to your best sentences to strike the reader and encourage him or her to share its impact with their social media friends.

Back in 2009, a little more than three years after Twitter launched, the company tried to address the nagging problem of user retention. It introduced a Suggested Users list intended to help new users find people to follow right away and thereby make the service stickier.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter's cofounder and chairman, admitted at the time that this didn't fully solve the problem. "Our sign-up process is still fairly weak," Dorsey told The Los Angeles Times. "It's not the best way to suggest people to new users because they're...not relevant to everyone."

Five years later, user retention remains as big a concern, if not more. One report earlier this year quoted inside sources saying that Twitter had signed up "at least" a billion users to date. Another report cited an independent tracking service that found Twitter had registered about 1.5 billion accounts. Yet, there were just more than 250 million monthly active users on Twitter as of last quarter Read more...

One in five Canadian executives believes bribery or corrupt practices occur widely in business in this country, according to a new survey by Ernst & Young.

That compares favorably with a global rate of 38%, but it’s still not good enough says Mike Savage, an Ernst & Young partner and Canadian Fraud Investigation and Dispute Services Leader. “I think many of us as Canadians would look at a number of 20% — one in five — and that’s still too high for the standards we set ourselves,” he said.

This graph shows how executives around the world perceive corruption, so expresses the global average. The Canadian figure is not included in the report but Savage provided me with the details about our homegrown perceptions of bribery and corruption in a phone interview.

In 2012, only 14% of Canadian executives reported believing that corrupt practices happen in business. Savage says the increase may be due to a number of high-profile corruption cases in the interim. “It’s speculative, but I think the issue of corruption has received a lot more attention over the last two years — all the publicity and press around law enforcement activity,” he explains. “I think that has fed into the perception that perhaps things are not as good as we believed they were two years ago.”

Four per cent of Canadian executives reported asking to be paid a bribe in a business situation, versus a global rate of 7%, while 10% had been asked to make a charitable contribution by a customer or client, compared to 20% worldwide.

READ: The Crackdown: How the RCMP is going after companies that bribe foreigners

Savage says the discrepancy between the perceived prevalence of bribery and executives’ own experience of it may be down to stories circulating in the industry or post-bid analysis that identifies competitors corrupt practices as the reason for a successful tender.

Sour grapes may also be a factor, he admits. “It’s easier to believe that somebody else won the contract not because their price was better or their product was better, but because the playing field was not level.”

The report notes that Canada has recently amended its anti-corruption regime, which may act to reduce that one-in-five number two years hence.

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The post One in five executives believe bribery is widespread in Canada appeared first on Canadian Business.

Effective content promotion depends not only on online PR and advertising, but also on searching your ecosystem for brands with familiar audiences. Those are the brands with which you could form a mutually beneficial relationship.

We’ve seen some very effective examples of this recently. For example, Jason Lemkin former CEO of Echosign, and Aaron Ross, former sales director at Salesforce.com, recently put together “The Predictable Revenue Guide to Growing Your Sales”, a long-form guide on growing your SaaS company.

Their promotion plan involved sharing it with influencers. But most interestingly, they gave relevant sections of their book to other vendors to offer to their audiences. For example, Gainsight, a SaaS customer success software vendor, offered the book to their audience behind their own lead form:

Another example of joint content is this bundle from KISSMetrics and Unbounce:

Both companies share a similar audience—mid-market to enterprise digital marketers—and they repackaged some of their best content into a kit to promote mutually to their large audiences.

So how can you make these partnership-driven promotion efforts work for your company?

Three Quick Tips to Do Content Promotion through Biz Dev

The following three tips are key when working with partners as part of your content promotion plan.

1. Get your partners involved early both before and during creation

As I’ve written about previously (on this site and elsewhere), the biggest mistake people make in top-of-funnel content marketing is creating content and promoting it as separate processes, rather than viewing the project as an integrated, end-to-end process of planning, creation and promotion.

Before you start creating your content piece, make a list of the companies you’d like to get involved and figure out how you can work together.

2. Map your ecosystem and find non-competitive brands with mutual audiences

Begin this process by asking: “Who has the audience I want to reach but doesn’t compete with me?”

People often reach out to partners where there’s no fit—either their offerings are directly competitive (or perceived to be competitive), or there’s simply no audience overlap at all.

A good way to approach this is to map your business ecosystem, starting with the question: “Who else do my customers trust?”

For example, if you operate an ecommerce store selling chess sets, you won’t be able to partner with other chess stores, or more general stores.

But you can probably work with:

• Chess teachers
• Online chess schools
• Chess organizations and clubs

and the list goes on.

3. Find and create mutual value

Once you have a list of partners, don’t simply ask them if they’ll share or mail your content.

At this risk of cliché, ask yourself not what your partner can do for you, but what you can do for your partner.

How does working with you help your partner? Does it drive new customer acquisition, branding, lead generation, or something else entirely?

Before you approach a potential partner, understand that your she will have to tell her boss why they should share their audience with you—and for the partnership to succeed you’ll need to have a very good answer ready.

Partner Up for Content Promotion Success

Partners are an important part of a successful content promotion strategy—and they can make the difference between campaign success and failure. Start early and keep your partners’ success in mind, and you could find yourself with a successful campaign on your hands.

It turns out consumers don’t know why they buy the things they buy. At least, they are really bad at explaining why. But neuroscience is giving marketers better insight into consumer behavior, and you might be surprised at the findings.

Barbara O’Connell, Senior Vice President at Consumer Neuroscience Practice, explains that while consumers may not really understand why they take certain actions, research in psychology and neuroscience shows that people are strongly driven by instinct. Studies have also shown that surface-level factors, such as an items being cool or fun have more of an impact on buying behaviors than cost.

So why exactly do consumers do the things they do? Why does anyone make one decision over another when it comes to buying? Our brains are a lot simpler than we’d like to believe, and our nervous systems have much of the answer.

The human nervous system is quite the masterpiece, and as marketers learn to understand and use neuroscience to impact the behaviors of consumers, branding and marketing will become more effective. Let’s look at four factors that have a strong effect on the way humans behave.

Structural Design

The nervous and endocrine systems work together to produce behavior, but structurally, the two systems are complete opposites. The nervous system is completely hardwired through a system of connections in a highly organized grid. Neurons are fast and efficient. On the other hand glands can release hormones to any part of the body, although a target receptor is required, and unless the hormones locate one, no effect takes place.

How can the structural design of the nervous system, and the fast and efficient speed of the neurons, affect consumer behavior? You explain the factors really nicely, but a few sentences after each factor (so each one would look like this) might have tied it into the goal of your audience: to learn something they can apply

Speed

The hardwired and close connections of the neural system make reactions occur in a matter of milliseconds. Hormonal reactions happen much slower and rely upon traveling through the bloodstream and making a connection with receptors, causing a much slower effect on behavior.

Length of Impact

Because neural reactions happen quickly and efficiently, they control our most primitive and instinctive behaviors. The consequence is that their effects are short-lived.  Hormonal connections impact behavior for longer periods of time than their neural counterparts. Particularly, hormones that affect the production of proteins in the body have an even longer-lasting impact on behavior than hormones that do not.

Distance of Action

While the nervous system is wired throughout the entire body, neural transmissions happen more locally than globally, bodily speaking. The endocrine system’s use of the bloodstream as a transmission method and its ability to be released at any point within the body make it more far-reaching and globally impactful than neurotransmitters.

How to Use the Science

Now the question becomes, how can we use the science to create more effective branding and advertising schemes?

Neuromarketing firms like True Impact, have been helping brands and advertising companies develop better and more impactful marketing plans. Using high-tech medical equipment, True Impact and similar firms are able to view brain scans of human subjects as they watch advertisements or look at packaging.  True Impact has also established a partner site, The Whiz Cells, which was created a selling platform in which they capitalize upon these many neuromarketing factors in order to better help consumers be more effective in selling their old devices.  It’s like eBay with some heavy neuromarketing.

Diana Lucaci describes the value of True Impact’s research, “’The person in the machine might not be aware of it, but we know exactly what he was looking at when everything fell apart, and can recommend ways our client can fix it.’”

This is more effective and less expensive than traditional focus groups and surveys. The findings of neuromarketing research are completely objective and virtually free from error and misinformation. The result is highly specific and targeted branding, packaging and advertising.

Did you know that the shiny, yellow potato chip bags illicit feelings of guilt from women? Frito-Lay discovered this truth through neuromarketing research in 2009 with True Impact. The company changed their packaging, which obliterated the guilt, and profits went up more than eight percent.

Dr. A. K. Pradeep, CEO at NeuroFocus, developed some best practices regarding advertising and consumer behavior.  Pradeep recommends the method of business mapping to highlight the locality of these trends:

• Women enjoy images of human interactions and women in groups enjoying activities–they respond to direct eye contact – particularly in the northeast.
• Women process language more fluently than men and respond better than men to text-based ads across the nation.
• Men are impulsive buyers who respond to athleticism, advancement and success found most apparent in the Midwest.
• Men are drawn to spatial imagery.
• Lead with emotion, as it builds brand connection and long-term influence.
• Keep images on the left and text on the right for easier neural processing.

Neuromarketing is proving to be a valuable tool for brands and marketing agencies, and it creates the opportunity for truly powerful and impactful advertising.

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Google MyBusiness replaces Google Places for local businesses and provides a new Google+ admin page service for all businesses

Value/Importance: ★★

Recommended link:

Announced on 12th June 2014, this has been touted as a major change, with an in-depth review by Search Engine Land for example. But we have rated it as relatively low in value and importance for marketers since it should’t be overhyped – it doesn’t involve new options for marketing, rather it is a new labelling to be aware of. It’s an attempt by Google at providing a more unified business offering from Google. It’s a good move since it aims to reduce the confusion between Google+ for Business and Google Places which it replaces.

What you need to know / do

• 1. If you or your clients are looking to register a local business within Google, e.g. to be visible in Google Maps, you now need to go to Google My Business rather than Google Places which is replaced.
• 2.Information including reviews and photos are now available as part of a company Google+ page, so it’s important to improve the quality of these to show satisfaction and credibility with the business.
• 3. Businesses can choose their type and information provided and displayed for consumers depends on this – the essential choice is retail, local or brand/company.

• 4. A new Admin interface for business owners accessible from the Google+ page combines editing of Google+ with Insights (limited Google+ page Analytics which were already available) , reviews and where relevant AdWords and Analytics.

• 5. Google My Business is part of a wider service called Business Solutions which offers services for advertisers and agencies too.

It’s almost a cliché but there is truth to it. Companies don’t really sell anything but ideas. Everything they create, from products and services to sales and marketing campaigns, is born from an idea.

And what’s the best way to pass an idea? Communication.

Hence, whether you favor telemarketing or not, the idea driving your business is your biggest value. You need to share that idea, one way or another.

You’ll find the same point expressed in a SalesWorks guest post by Amar Sheth. How do you expect products to succeed when there’s really no fundamental idea driving behind them? What are you even making deals for? What are your B2B prospects and customers getting for it?

Is it the products or is it the idea that these same products can make for a better, more successful work life?

Communication isn’t essentially just about the words. It’s about how those words affect a prospect’s understanding of your company’s idea. Obstacles to this sort of clarity exist in all kinds of communication, not just telemarketing. It’s not about:

• Controversy – There’s already plenty of controversy for each form of B2B marketing. Email has spam. Web banners have scams as well. The more you try and dig the dirt on every method, the more you’ll just risk growing cynical since none feel so ‘clean.’ Why should the mistakes of past marketers keep from trying to send your own message? Do you avoid mailing packages because of letter bomb terrorists?

• Cost – Cost isn’t limited to how much you’ll be paying for infrastructure or even how much you’ll being paying an outsourced company. Obviously, factors like ROI and additional investments like time and collaboration have to be considered. Don’t let price stop you when the reward of communicating your idea perfectly can be worth a whole lot more.

• Efficiency – Like cost, efficiency isn’t just about the numbers credited to a particular method. It’s about accountability behind those numbers. What exactly led to, say, your poorer sales results? Did you really have a bad presentation or was there just not enough lead nurturing before the appointment? Efficiency is determined by more than just what’s used and even how it’s used. It’s the activities that came before and after it.

Obstacles to communication exist in different forms but they all have the same effect, the failure of prospects and customers to understand your greatest asset: your business idea. No matter what method you use, your main objective should always be to communicate it.

By Jeff Cann, 

It’s often said that social media is much like a cocktail party: intimate, engaging, and an opportunity for the host to meet new people and give guests a truly memorable evening. For a brand, social media is not much different. While it was once impossible to imagine that your favorite running shoe company or baseball team could ever talk to you personally, brands and customers now have that opportunity each and every day.

So that all brands can be incredible hosts, I would like to share three best practices for throwing the best Twitter cocktail party you can.

1)     Don’t always talk about yourself. 

A very quick and easy way to audit what type of content your Twitter handle creates is to look at the proportion of Tweets that are Re-Tweets, @Replies and Regular Tweets.

What should your mix look like?  Because different industries will see different levels of engagement, as well as utilization of Twitter as a customer service channel, there is no magic formula. But ensuring that you’re proactively and reactively engaging with customers and potential customers more than you’re broadcasting news about yourself is always the first step to becoming a good host.

2)     Work the room and play to your audience

One thing all of your customers have in common is the fact that they have purchased your product or service. While this may bind the whole crowd together at a very basic level, there will always be very distinct groups and interests within that crowd, making a one-size-fits-all approach not only difficult, but largely ineffective. Cocktail parties are no different. Guests all share something in common, but groups of folks can and will congregate and engage in very different conversations. In a nutshell, it’s the job of social analytics to show brands who these groups are and what the people in those groups are talking about.

Using the Communities report in Sysomos Heartbeat, brands can uncover who the most influential community members are, and what the theme of their group’s conversation is. By leveraging this information, you can provide value to the group’s conversation and spend your time (and resources) wisely by targeting the folks who know the most about a topic.

3)     Host your party at the most convenient time

Depending on where you are in life, a 6pm cocktail party may be infinitely more appealing than one that starts at 11pm. A brand’s audience is no different.  So if you’re going to host a party, you may as well do it at a time that works well for the majority of your guests.

Given that your followers are your guests, look to make announcements, host online chats and execute campaigns based on the times when their base engagement rates are highest. Sounds simple, but it will give a big boost to your chances of success.

While social brings with it new challenges and opportunities, the overall objective from a marketing standpoint has never changed: get the right message to the right person at the right time. Following the three best practices above will ensure that you’re not only a good host, but that your brand is positioned for success and capitalizing on the tremendous opportunity that social represents.

Since joining Sysomos during its startup days in 2009, Jeff Cann has experienced the impact and spread of social across virtually all industries and job functions. With 14 years of client service and client management experience, including seven years exclusively in web and social analytics, Jeff brings a unique data- and client-focused lens to Sysomos. In his current role as Sr. Director of Client Experience, Jeff manages a team of Social Media Specialists responsible for client usage, adoption and success of Sysomos applications. 

The post Want To Win On Twitter? Think Like A Good Host appeared first on Sysomos Blog.

Inspiration is hard to fake. The same goes with quality. But what’s a business owner or a content marketer to do if they’re supposed to come up with great content, and they don’t know where to start?

Everyone knows that content is the key to turning a lead into a buyer. Each lead reads through your content and takes away something that they find useful. If your content isn’t valuable to them, they’re less likely to pay attention to your brand and what you have to say. No amount of SEO, keyword lacing, or fancy gimmicks can replace high-quality content.

So where can you find some inspiration for your content? Here are some ideas:

Start with Your Own Site

Google Analytics Acquisition Overview

If you’ve already published material on your site, then chances are you also use analytics to see which content draws in the most users. From analytics software, you can see what types of content your visitors are attracted to, what they find interesting, what no one bothers to read, as well as what they find most worthy of comment. You can also use your social media accounts to see which types of content generate a larger following. For example, if you find that your blog post promotions on your Twitter account are getting more attention than your long form content promotions on your LinkedIn account, you may be doing right by Twitter, and you can do the same style of promotion with LinkedIn.

Find the Content the Crowd Likes

The amount of engagement your content gets from social media accounts can tell you which content generates more engagement, and therefore more attention. Count your likes, shares, comments and all forms of social media engagement to give you a clear picture of what content is socially successful. You can also join in the conversation in order to let your followers know that you’re listening to what they have to say. Read what your followers have to say about your content and respond whenever they have questions, or whenever they show appreciation for your content.

In addition, you can put your readers to work by encouraging them to post comments. An ending sentence to your comment like “Please share your stories below” or “Please let us know what you think” can be a great prompt for your readers. You can also put up polls and surveys to find out what they think about certain topics.

See What Your Competition is Doing

Google Adwords Keywords Suggestion Tool

Do a sample Google search for they keywords in your site. If you’re not at the top of the list, find out who is. Check out their site, and see what they’re doing right. Are they using more long form content? Do they have a lot of infographics? What are they doing to get a higher ranking? You can follow up by learning what more people are interested in. Try to emulate what they do when it comes to engaging their readers, whether it’s by having more promotions, having content with a lot of links or having interesting content that their readers can easily digest.

Find Out What’s Being Asked

Have a look at answer sites like Yahoo Answers and Quora to find out if there is anything that people often ask when it comes to something in your niche. For instance, if your business deals with gardening, find out some of the common questions about growing and harvesting plants, and create your content around it. Social media groups are also a great place to start looking for content inspiration. You can read through tonnes of different questions, and you can even join in the discussion. Answer sites and social media groups are a treasure trove of unanswered questions about your industry that you can use for your content.

Read Up on Current Events

The latest news and trends about your industry can make for great up-to-date content. By finding out what the latest trends are in your industry, you can create a whole range of articles, infographics, and content about it. For example, if you’re in the design industry and there’s this new kind of software on the market, mention this in your content and show the readers how updated your site is. In addition, you can even make use of RSS and Google Alerts to tell you whenever there’s new information on breaking news on topics related to your industry.

Do Trend Searches

Google Trends

Sites like Google Trends, Topsy and Alltop help you find out more about trending topics. Google Trends can show you what people are searching for when it comes to a particular industry. For instance, when people search for recipes, are they interested in video tutorials, tutorials with lots of images or more straightforward text tutorials?

Topsy, on the other hand, helps you search for a certain keyword across social media sites. You can even set it up to a particular location. So if your business is stationed in Sydney, you can search for the trending topics about your industry in Sydney to see what people are talking about. Alltop, unlike Topsy, searches for items from authoritative sites, and shows you what the bigwigs in your industry are talking about. Combine these three search tools and you’ll definitely find some content that people are highly likely to view.

Step Out of the Office

Photo: La Biennale di Venezia — CC-BY-2.0 2013 Bruno Cordioli

Content writers and business owners may be so caught up with what’s going on in the virtual world that they forget what a rich source of inspiration the real world is! Media like magazines, newspapers, TV and radio are still widely used by people because the content they have is still relevant. Information from these sources don’t necessarily have a lot of online attention, which gives you the opportunity to be the one to make this information available online.

Events in your industry allow you to have a firsthand experience with what you’ll be talking about online. By participating in seminars, trade shows, and exhibits, you can give your online viewers a glimpse of what’s happening in your industry. With the Internet right at your fingertips, you can live Tweet the event, create Vines, or even write a whole article complete with pictures!

Don’t let a lack of inspiration get in the way of you being able to produce quality content! Try new ways of finding engaging ideas to make sure that you can stay informed, and that your readers stay interested in your content.

The key to using social media effectively, is to consistently share information of value. If you’re in sales, you likely have a social media network filled with people who are looking to generate more revenue per rep and improve overall sales effectiveness.

We’ve outlined five pieces of content that any sales manager or executive can relate to. Use these messages over the next week to show your own value with your social media networks, your colleagues and your own sales team.

Click the Twitter or LinkedIn links to easily share the content with your teams.

1. Improve Your Sales Discovery Process

Force Management’s Brian Walsh just posted a three-part series on Improving Your Sales Discovery Process. Even if you’re a veteran seller who prides him/herself on effective discovery, there are some great reminders in this series about how to uncover the biggest business problem.

Great tips on how to improve your effective sales discovery process: http://forc.mx/SC4cpJ

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2. 5 Ways to Beat the Competition

If you want to repeatedly hit your revenue numbers, you need a sales team that can effectively articulate differentiation. Prospects not only need to see the value of your solution, they should also clearly understand why they should do business with your company, rather than your competitor. This slideshare provides 5 tips well worthy of a social media post.

Five things you can do right now to effectively separate your solution from the competition.  http://forc.mx/SPLhrK

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3. How to Ensure You Maximize Your Prospect’s Time in Your Next Sales Meeting

Driving repeatable success in a sales organization requires a sales team that articulates value in terms of customer outcomes. It also requires salespeople who are audible-ready to maximize any opportunity they have in front of a decision maker. This blog post provides key tips on maximizing your prospect’s time in your next sales meeting.

How to maximize your prospect’s time in your next sales meeting
http://forc.mx/SC4Ao9

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4. How a Sales Franchise Mindset Can Improve Accountability on Your Sales Team

When our clients come to us to improve their sales planning processes, they often have a misdirected focus. Their sales teams are spending too much time “working around the opportunities.” The key to driving qualified pipeline, however, is focusing your team on the territory, not opportunities. This link describes how you as a manager can add value to your sales team by improving your sales planning process.

Add value for your sales team. Consider the “franchise mindset” http://forc.mx/1eahLqg

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5. Why Your Sales Initiative May Fail

The Sales Curmudgeon’s blog series was such a success, we created an eBook out of his tips. It’s a good and frank read on how to drive effectiveness with your next sales initiative.

Are you launching a sales initiative? Read this eBook before you start: 5 Reasons Why Your Sales Initiative May Fail http://forc.mx/SC4OM3

Every CEO of a large company worries about the small competitor that will come from behind and change everything. Consider Southwest Airlines, which shook up the airline industry with its low-cost, high-customer service approach to air travel. Or that little book retailing site that opened its online door in 1995 and became the world’s largest online retailer.

That’s why leaders of large healthcare companies are looking over their shoulder and thinking, “What is that small startup that is going to shake up our industry? Who is that David to our Goliath?”

Historically, corporate Goliaths have taken one of two approaches to this kind of upstart competition—try to muscle them out of the market or bring them into the fold through acquisition. But increasingly we’re seeing a third option: collaboration. In these novel relationships, the Davids and Goliaths leverage each other’s strengths and perspectives – and everybody wins.

From a pure business perspective, the greatest value in joining forces is that it makes the pie bigger for everyone and creates more value for consumers in the process.

A concrete example comes from within my own company, McKesson, the largest health-care services firm in the US. In 2005, McKesson invested in a David called RelayHealth that was in the connectivity business before connectivity was hot. A year later, we did acquire them — but rather than swallow RelayHealth whole, we wanted to preserve its innovative DNA and disseminate it across our company.

For its part, the RelayHealth clinical business team is fiercely protective of its culture and thinks of itself as a nimble, high-performing, risk-taking group inside the larger organization. There is some tension in this independence, but with thoughtful management, we’ve been able to bring out best in both organizations.

What makes it work for our company? There are two critical elements: 1) buy-in at the senior level of the organization and 2) the willingness to compromise on some processes that are integral to a large company but can kill innovation for a smaller firm. To be sure, we are still working through some of these issues. Our team at RelayHealth would tell you that they have benefited from the financial and customer resources that McKesson brings to the table. At the same time, they have experienced frustration with some of the structure and requirements that a $137 billion firm has to have in place to manage risk and scale. But even as we work through these issues, we continue to collaborate on ways technology can transform healthcare, and our role in that.

In our relationship with RelayHealth and other similar partnerships, we are seeking new ways to innovate – and looking over our shoulder. We’re mindful of an admonition from Rushika Fernandopulle, the CEO of startup Iora Health: “If you don’t disrupt yourself, someone else is going to do it to you.”

Iora’s own partnership with Dartmouth College offers additional guidance for both the large organization seeking external entrepreneurial ideas and the smaller innovator looking to increase its reach.

Iora Health’s prescription is simple:  increase the connection between the patient and their provider. Iora’s reimagined version of primary care brings intense “coach-like” attention to the most costly patients to improve patient health and reduce costs.

The young company recently partnered with Dartmouth to provide primary care to their employees and retirees. As part of the relationship, Iora is collaborating with the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, a traditional healthcare provider that would normally be considered a large and forbidding competitor. But the leadership at Dartmouth-Hitchcock wanted to inject innovation into their primary care program.

Buy-in from the Goliath’s top leadership was critical. From Fernandopulle’s perspective, it takes “pretty progressive leadership” to pull off a successful David-and-Goliath relationship. That buy-in has to come from very senior leadership—middle management typically can’t pull off such an unusual partnership.

Fernandopulle also advises other Davids to be realistic about their expectations for the relationship with a large organization. Sometimes Goliaths are most comfortable with the smaller innovator if the innovator is already partnered with a known entity, as Fernandopulle did when he partnered with Mercer to provide primary care services to Boeing employees.

Finally, Iora’s top doctor advises Davids to put their branding ego aside and let the larger organization get the credit for the successful partnership. The startup’s value will be seen through the results of the partnership—but sometimes the larger organization’s leadership may need to claim more of the credit at the beginning of the project.

There are upsides and downsides for both organizations when large and small come together. But because large organizations may find it difficult to innovate from inside, looking outside the enterprise can help force change, bring fresh perspectives and challenge status quo thinking. At the same time, economic pressures mean companies need to be efficient and operating at scale. Goliaths can bring efficiency and scale to the table for the smaller organizations.

Given the unprecedented level of change gripping the health care industry, large and small health care organizations will need to depend on innovation, creative thinking and sometimes each other to successfully navigate the evolving marketplace.

Tech enables….but repels

Technology has created enormous opportunities for SMBs in the B2B manufacturing and industrial spaces.   Small companies with lean marketing budgets can achieve really (should I say literally??) amazing results with well conceived and relentlessly executed digital strategies.

But many never do.  Too many CEOs, presidents, founders, GMs, etc. simply don’t buy the “story.”  You know the type – the “I’ve got a blackberry and that’s all I want to know about technology” types.  The same type that rails against the inanity of twitter (although probably without ever using it…) and other platforms.

Some of it may be hang-ups or traditionalist bravado.  But realistically, some of it is a reasonable response to the the not uncommon absurdity with which technology is pitched.

Have you seen this video for example?  Presumably a satirical look at technology in advertising, it highlights precisely why folks that make real stuff on real machines in real factories are dubious of marketing technology.

After all….

“Who needs a freakin’ idea these days when you’ve got an awesome piece of tech?“

And with “game changers” coming at a blistering pace….

Anyway, it’s easy to understand why the decision makers in B2B manufacturing companies are skeptical of industrial marketing buzz.

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater

Unfortunately that understandable response costs them growth.  Some (even much) technology offers real value.  Here are a couple examples – albeit ones that are often derided by the blackberry brandishing titans of industry.

Video – I’ve written about it here before in the context of avoiding overproduction.  And I’ve also covered the importance of providing marketing content across channels to satisfy buyers with various preferences (not everyone just wants to read whitepapers like you do!)  I’ve even touched on the challenge facing middle aged B2B manufacturing company execs trying to empathize with the millennial engineers that they need to sell to.  Well, tying all those points together is a recent article from WARC.

“Online video key to reach millennials”

screams the headline

But sadly many companies miss this opportunity because online video gets lumped together with other less valuable bits of marketing tech.

Webinars – It’s amazing how often someone says “I would never waste an hour sitting through one of those things!  Don’t tell me people really watch those.”  (Normally while they caress their blackberry…..)

But guess what – people do sit through them.  And they value them!

In fact, a recent study conducted by Adobe and the Content Marketing Institute finds that webinars offer enormous value (and growing – for those that engage expertly and creatively.)

“Overall, the survey results pointed to a very clear trend: Content marketers who are finding success with webinars are broadening the scope of how they use them and are applying them across the full spectrum of the buyer’s journey.”

Discerning the inane from the valuable

How can companies leverage the technology that works without wasting resources on the absurd?  That’s part of the role of good partners.  Capable marketing advisors who have owned businesses, have deep experience in B2B manufacturing, and have extensive experience selling to the right buyers will survey and monitor evolving tech.  They’ll intuitively recognize tools that can be productively used while avoiding the gimmicks.

And they’ll design the manufacturing companies’ B2B marketing programs to integrate those tools where appropriate.

Put a different way, as the owner of a manufacturing business you don’t have to worry about technology!  Your choices are simpler:

1. Growth or stagnation
2. If growth, then marketing with Outside Expertise or a DiY program
3. If outside expertise, then B2B business people or marketing agencies amped up on technology

Seems like a straightforward choice, don’t you think?

The mobile in-store payments space is already crowded with a lot of different companies trying to get people to pay for goods in person via mobile. 

But most consumers still aren't biting.

People just don't seem to see a compelling reason to use their mobile phone to make a payment over using a credit or debit card.

But at BI Intelligence, we think that mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) payments could act as a Trojan horse and finally get consumers to replace their wallet with their smartphone. 

That's because mobile P2P payment apps like Venmo and Square Cash offer consumers a compelling reason to use them. In particular, they provide a way for people to pay each other instantly, even if they don't have cash or a check on them. That removes the need to go to an ATM or take a trip to the bank to deposit a check. 

BI Intelligence believes that once people adopt the behavior of paying their friends and family with their smartphone, the barrier to in-store mobile payments will be a lot less significant.

In a new report, we look at examples of where mobile P2P payments have already enjoyed enormous success, and which of the handful of  P2P apps have the potential to catch on with consumers. We also look at why the limited revenue available to P2P apps is another good reason these companies may eventually offer mobile in-store payments.

To access the full report and all our coverage of the payments industry, sign up.

Here are some of the report's key findings: 

• Peer-to-peer payment apps solve real pain points for consumers. Our high-end estimate is that mobile P2P transactions volume could reach $86 billion in the U.S. by 2018. 
• In emerging markets, there is especially huge potential for P2P payments made on cell phones, due to a lack of financial infrastructure. A high proportion of the population in these markets lack access to checking and savings accounts.
• Kenyan telecom Safaricom provides an excellent case study for the success of mobile P2P payments  in emerging technology markets. The telecom has a product called M-Pesa, which allows its users to transfer  money to one another via text message. Largely as a result of M-Pesa's success, an impressive 92% of Kenyans say they have used mobile P2P payments. 
• Mobile P2P payment services are usually free or next to free to use, which begs the question of how they will be monetized. Different services have experimented with fees and even advertising. But mainly, these services will serve as Trojan horses to gain user trust for mobile-based transactions. 

In full, the report: 

• Forecasts transaction volume for mobile P2P payments through 2018 and gives an estimate for the size of global P2P payments. 
• Explains the value of mobile P2P payments to consumers and why there is such a compelling case for mass adoption. 
• Profiles ten companies' P2P services that we think are indicative of the breadth of services on offer. 
• Analyzes the major obstacles that mobile P2P payments face, including interoperability and security risks. 

BI Intelligence is a subscription research service from Business Insider. We cover the payments, mobile, digital media, and e-commerce industries. For full access to all our charts and analysis, sign up.

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Most business blogs are filled with content that won’t do that business any good. Simply publishing posts isn’t enough. You must have a strategy behind what you publish. Here are seven considerations you probably haven’t addressed:

1) You aren’t writing for your potential buyers

Are you writing what your existing and future customers want to read? Have you even thought about who they are or what they want? If you aren’t sure, ASK THEM! Until you have a clear idea of who your buyers are, you can’t write what they will want to read. Refer to The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Business Blogging for details.

2) Your writing is boring

Are your titles compelling? Does the first sentence grab the reader’s attention and keep them reading? Do you create content with a hook? If you think your business is boring, so will your readers. You have to find a way to make it interesting. Stories are good. The best writers are the best story tellers.

 3) No visual appeal

Every post should have a good-sized image above the fold. Images should be optimized for fast loading and to draw attention without overwhelming your post. Add an infographic or a relevant video. Newer blog themes feature a large image centered at the top. Typical sizes that work well are 560×300 or 600×340. Older blogs may use a square image. You will want to upgrade your theme.

4) Not mobile responsive

Speaking of upgrading your theme, your blog must be mobile responsive. Early “mobile responsive” themes even on Genesis were not fully responsive. Check to make sure your header, images, and videos all resize automatically to fit every device size. If they don’t, you need a different theme or custom coding or a plugin. Find out more in Making Your Blog Mobile Responsive.

5) Content isn’t relevant to your business

Do not listen to people who claim you can blog about “anything”. You need to be writing about topics people likely to buy from you will want to read. At least some of the time, that content should be about what you sell. Before you write another post, make a list of topics your buyers would be interested in.

6) Are you making your business likeable?

People buy from people they like. You don’t want to always be selling, but you do want to be generating goodwill. Does your content make you likeable to your readers? Are you building trust and developing a relationship with them? Are they commenting and sharing your content? (You DO have social sharing buttons, right? Be sure your Twitter button is configured to add your Twitter username.)

 7) Publishing Frequency

How often should you publish? There is no one answer, but once a week is a good minimum. If you can’t seem to make that happen, consider hiring someone to manage your blog. Write Collective provides an affordable blog management service staffed with writers who know marketing.

TIP: Promote, Promote, Promote

Spend twice as much time promoting your content as you do creating it. Refer to How to Promote Your Blog Posts Effectively and How to Promote Blog Posts: 200+ Ideas from 8 Experts.

If all this seems overwhelming, why not hire it done for you? That way you can focus on your core business while an expert in marketing who loves to write gets the results you aren’t getting from doing it yourself. Every small business I’ve consulted with has found keeping their blog updated a challenge until they hired it done.

Sales reps enjoy communicating via Twitter, and if you don’t, you should.  There are so many opportunities available through Twitter. For starters, it raises brand awareness, allows you to create and engage with specific audiences, and provides countless insights into the minds of your target market. But while all of that is great, make no mistake - the real goal of using Twitter is to funnel sales.

Twitter provides sales reps the best of both worlds: an effective way to communicate and share information combined with a powerful selling application. 

So how do you get your followers to go from tweeting to buying? Here are five tips to convert your followers into your clients, fast.

1. Assess your audience.

It has never been easier to build a network appropriate to your selling goals. To get started, make a list of your customers, prospects, competitors and thought leaders and start following them.

Once you establish your foundation, Twitter will suggest additional people and businesses to add. As you prospect, continue to grow your Twitter list. As you run lead generation campaigns, add contacts to your Twitter list. Make any new prospects in your pipeline new additions to your Twitter feed.

2. Position yourself as an expert.  

On Twitter, share blog posts you have written, articles you have contributed to other publications, and conversations you are engaged in with LinkedIn groups. This demonstrates that you are up-to-date on your industry’s trends and involved in current issues that affect your prospects. Share the information you are creating and curating during your daily Twitter practice. Then use that information to engage with others and start conversations.

3. Use your network to uncover your target audiences’ issues.

Tweets hold a lot more insights than just quirky thoughts and personal photos from your prospects. They can show you what really matters to your target market. What are people talking about? What discussions are they following? What questions are they asking? Where are they looking for answers? Dig around and pay attention to the topic and themes that emerge. This will help you uncover ways you can swoop in to help solve their most pressing business issues.

4. Be timely.

Once you uncover your audience’s business concerns, you will want to respond in a timely, helpful and friendly way. I recommend setting up a free Hootsuite account to facilitate checking your Twitter account several times a day. This will allow you to address your audience in as close to real time as possible. If someone is seeking an answer from you, in most cases, they want it immediately – even more immediately than on email. 

5. Always offer a solution.

By this time all of your Twitter-based detective work will have paid off. You know what’s troubling your prospects and you have the perfect solution to help them. Now is the critical moment where you offer to take the conversation off line and explore a solution.

Whether you are offering an article, ebook, webinar, or a tidbit of advice, share your message with a well-crafted tweet that contains direct language and a strong call to action to convert from tweeting to talking.

Here’s an example of a tweet that converts for a lead generation campaign: “Q2 is almost finished. Are you on track to meet your numbers? Download our eBook and help tune-up your sales  ow.ly/wqkUJ.”

And if you just want to have a phone conversation, ask for one!

Twitter isn’t just about sharing quirky thoughts and photos. By paying attention to your target audience’s interactions, you can move from just engaging to selling.

Have you been looking for a single resource for landing pages? A comprehensive how-to on optimizing your landing pages for conversion?

Have you been searching the web for that one piece of landing page guidance that gives you everything, including:

• A comprehensive introduction to landing pages?
• A step-by-step, detailed analysis of the elements you need to be including?
• Every aspect of optimizing for audience, traffic source and desire?
• A complete breakdown of A/B variable testing, metrics and analytics?

Good. Because this took us a while to write.

Wishpond is a software provider based out of Vancouver. We make landing pages and online marketing campaigns easy for small businesses, cutting out hours of coding with easy-to-use templates and automatic integration of the latest marketing tips and tools.

You can find more tips and tricks about landing page optimization and online marketing at The Wishpond Blog.

In this article, however, we’ll show you:

• How to optimize the necessary elements of a landing page
• Show you the three main landing page types (with diagrams to show you what they look like)
• Give you optimization best practices
• Discuss designing your landing pages for specific audiences
• Dive into A/B testing
• And much, much more!

We’ll also be offering a free download of our even more comprehensive landing page ebook, so be sure to watch out for that along the way.

Let’s get rolling, because we have a ways to go.

Introduction to Landing Pages:

So what is a landing page?

A landing page is a distinct page within your website that is built for a single conversion objective.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeuS3PnjTH8

Basically, it’s a page that people “land” on when they come from a specific traffic source (search, online or social ad, social media platform, or anywhere else).

It is different, however, from your other website pages because this particular page should be designed with a single actionable “ask” as its focus. That ask might be filling out lead information, scheduling a sales call, a free demo, a trial, an immediate sale, or any number of other conversions.

However, before we get further into the world of optimization, we’ll have to first tackle the essential elements you need to be including in your landing page.

Section #1: 7 Optimizing Elements of your Converting Landing Page:

What you’re seeing:

1. Image:

The first thing people see, your landing page’s image should be visually appealing and relate to your product, service, or content. Especially important for a sales-focused landing page, images of people work very well. Remember to incorporate your image into the background of your page (rather than as a visually unappealing square).

2. USP/Headilne:

Your Unique Selling Point (USP) or headline is the single element that convinces your landing page traffic that they’re in the right place and should stick around to find out more. Your USP is a catchy, single sentence or phrase that communicates value, inspires, or simply details exactly what a visitor stands to get from engagement with your business.

3. Benefits bullet list:

Your list of benefits is where you communicate specific value to your landing page traffic. Made up of 3-5 specific things you’re offering or parts of your service, benefit lists add specificity and convince your traffic that you can provide what they’re looking for.

4. Form Fields:

Your landing page’s form fields (whether they’re for lead generation, registration, or purchase) need to be carefully balanced (this is more important than you might think). Form fields ask for personal information, something not given out lightly. Are you offering enough value to warrant the “ask”? See more on form fields in “7 Tips for Landing Page Optimization” below.

5. Customer Testimonials/Trust Symbols:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8dRl2axniI

The landing page element that communicates legitimacy more than any other, customer testimonials and trust symbols are where your business stands aside and says “but don’t take our word for it!”

Reviews from previous clients, the logos of major business you’ve worked with, awards you’ve won, or official partnerships you have, all ensure your landing page visitor knows your business is trustworthy and worth engaging with.

6. Call-to-Action Button:

All the elements above convince your landing page traffic that a conversion is probably worth it. But unless you have an obvious place for them to do that, they’ll just leave. A visible call-to-action button (like “start a free trial” or “download the ebook”) tells people where to convert on their interest.

7. Under CTA confidence booster:

Short and to the point (“only takes 5 minutes”, or “no-spam guarantee”) your CTA confidence booster is a brief phrase or sentence that puts the cherry on engagement. Right as they have their cursor poised over your CTA button they’ll see this small print and will be more likely to click “yes.”

Section #2: Using the AIDA system to determine landing page layout

The AIDA system is as essential to remember when designing your landing pages as it was for the first ever automobile ad.

The AIDA system was originally coined in 1898 to describe the process that consumers go through. Each of us goes through these four steps in some manner every time we complete a purchasing action:

Awareness:

Your landing page traffic is a fickle person. They’re comparing you to your competitors as well as an investment of their own time, and they won’t stick around for more than a few seconds unless your page communicates quickly that you have what they want.

A great test for Awareness is to find a friend (who is as unaware of your business’ service or products as possible) and run a three second test:

• Sit them at a laptop and have them close their eyes
• Bring up your landing page and tell them to open their eyes
• Allow them to look at your landing page for three seconds and then close the laptop.
• Do they know what service you’re offering?
• Do they know the product you’re providing or how you can help them?

If not, you may need to take another look at the elements we mentioned above (particularly your Unique Selling Point).

Interest:

Your landing page has to communicate value beyond simple need satisfaction. Your traffic expects your tool or product to cater to their specific desires, and you can’t always be entirely sure what those desires are.

As a result, design your landing page based on Audience (I’ll discuss this more in-depth in section #5 below). This allows you to be as confident as possible about what your landing page traffic is looking for.

The interest stage is where your consumer determines if your product is for them. They’ll determine if you will be satisfying their personal or business needs:

• Is it clear who this page is directed at/made for?
• Are the available options clear and prominent?
• If there’s only one option, is that one option obvious?

Decision:

The Awareness and Interest stages have proven to your landing page visitor that you can provide what they’re looking for. Now they have to determine if they’re going to actually engage.

Design your landing page so it provides as much value as possible. Cover your bases.

Are they looking for a specific characteristic of your service or product? An optimized landing page anticipates and provides.

Action:

Your visitor has now gone from being aware of your business’ product or service, understanding you can provide the specific value and characteristics they were looking for, to deciding they are going to purchase.

The question is, are they going to do it with you? Have you sold them on converting with your business, or simply sold them on converting?

The action step is where you convince them to engage with your business in particular. You do this first and foremost with a clean and professional page. Once you have that, you close the deal with customer testimonials, trust symbols, awards and recommendations, previous client logos, “about us” paragraphs, and other personal touches that ensure you’re a brand that they want to work with (instead of just a brand).

Section #3: The three primary types of landing pages:

Sales-Optimized Landing Page:

A landing page optimized for sales follows the AIDA system closely:

• Features clear and distinct benefits written for its target audience
• Showcases obvious value in the form of a USP and benefit list
• Contains trust symbols like customer testimonials, reviews, brand logos and awards won.

It rarely features a social element, and is designed to focus attention on the CTA. This is why a sales-optimized landing page would be where you’d experiment and test eye-direction, linear focus and color psychology.

Lead-Generating Landing Page:

Lead-gen pages are far less visual, as it’s likely they’re based more on content promotion than they are on sales.

Lead generation landing pages have the highest conversion of any landing page because you’re collecting traffic from online advertising or search – people who have clicked on your content-specific links are clearly interested in your topic, and submitting lead information is far less of an “ask” than forking over real money.

As a result, your lead-gen page can focus more on describing your offer than your sales page might.

Here are the recommended elements of a lead-gen landing page:

Relationship-Building Landing Page:

Relationship-building landing page are built for your already warm leads (people who have very recently engaged with your business, submitted details, or converted in some way).

Leads are at their most interested in the moments after you’ve given them something. This is the perfect time to further your relationship with a personable, engaging landing page.

Ideas for how to further your relationship with a warm lead:

• Ask that they register for a free, one-on-one demo of your tools in which you answer any questions they might have and go over anything they want to know
• Promote an upcoming webinar (which they’ll have to attend live) related to the content they just downloaded or the product trial they just started
• Offer a related piece of content that adds value to their engagement with your business
• Promote your social media accounts. Ask them to Follow you on Facebook (giving you more digital touch points for communication)

We used to recommend that people use a personalized letter format for relationship-building landing pages (with the entry form, of course), but I’ve recently seen success with video.

Either option makes your relationship (which up to now has been based on selling and purchasing – even if we’re talking lead gen) a personal one.

Communicating your brand as a friendly, communicative, even casual, one increases the chance of them engaging with you:

• Make it clear you are always willing to help with any questions or concerns
• Provide a “personal” email for them to contact you
• Introduce yourself or your customer service/account management team on a personal level

Here’s are the recommended elements of a relationship-building landing page:

Section #4: 7 Top Tips for Landing Page Optimization

1. Make it about the visitor, not about you:

Your landing page needs to focus on providing value to its visitor, not asserting how awesome your business is or how proud you are of something you’re doing. There are a few ways this best practice can affect your landing page:

• Use personal pronouns: Use “me”, “you” in your copy and your CTA. Test which one your audience responds to more
• Showcase benefits, not features: Speak to your audience in a way that resonates with them: rather than saying “This processor can run all four of its cores at a base clock frequency of 4.0GHz!”, say “The fastest computer processor you’ve ever seen! Surf the web at light speed!”
• Make it easy to navigate: I’ll mention more about how to do this in section #6 below, but it’s important that your landing page is clearly laid out. You don’t want your visitor to be thrown off by excess distraction or too many stages of conversion
• Don’t be pushy: Ease off the throttle (primarily in your CTA’s). Don’t push a possible lead too hard or they’ll run the other way. For more on how to be relaxed yet optimized in your own landing pages, check out my article “Landing Pages: How to Sell without Selling”

2. Weigh your form fields intelligently:

It’s essential to weigh the benefit of more lead information against the increase in disengagement that more lead information might cause. For instance, your sales or marketing team might get huge value out of knowing a lead’s location. However, asking for a zipcode might increase the chance of your landing page traffic disengaging. Is it worth it to your business to ask anyway because your close rate is that much higher?

In other words, should you optimize your landing page for a few seriously interested leads, or a bunch of semi-interested leads? Which one gives your business the best ROI? Test it for yourself! (more on this in section #6).

3. Optimize your Call-To-Action:

Your CTA button should be the focus point of your landing page. Everything is building up to your traffic clicking that single button. So yeah, it’s worth putting some time and energy into optimizing it.

Here are a few best practices:

• Only one CTA on each screen section (one above the fold, one below
• Make it stand out with color contrast: orange button on blue page, green button on grey page, etc.
• If you have content below the fold, repeat the CTA. Always make it easy and compelling for the visitor to take the desired action.
• Make sure the CTA is displayed in a visually distinct, centralized place
• Make it clearly a button. Don’t make people guess at what they should click on.
• Use visual cues, such as arrows or images of people looking at the button, to draw the eye.

4. No top navigation bar, footer or external links:

It’s vital that your landing page offer no distractions: no secondary CTAs, no unnecessary text, and no top navigation bar.

Secondary, or tertiary, links and buttons do nothing more than decrease conversions on your focus CTA. By definition (check this out above), landing pages are a page designed with a single goal in mind. Anything that doesn’t help achieve that goal is unnecessary and should be skimmed off the top.

5. Customer Testimonials:

Customer testimonials are one of our favorite elements in sales landing pages, as they have more of an effect than many people realize:

• They feature real and relatable people, increasing the personality of your page
• They feature people similar to your landing page traffic, increasing the chance of that traffic trusting the rest of your message
• They can showcase specific value points of your product or service you may not otherwise mention
• They can be specific, offering almost case-study-like metrics, KPI’s and analytics in real-world and concrete terms (“We increased our site traffic by 74% in three weeks and had an overall ROI of 522%. Awesome!”)

Here’s how to optimize them:

• Feature the full, real name of your reviewer (and job title and business name where applicable). This increases the chance of your landing page traffic relating to the customer on a personal basis
• Feature the face of your customer. This has a huge effect on whether or not your testimonial is believable. A testimonial without a corresponding face next to it (your landing page traffic thinks) could easily be fabricated
• Under-sell it: Something subtle like…

• Get specific: Don’t be afraid of asking, specifically, what a customer did at a certain point of using your service what the results were). This is awesome to get real-world insight and concrete numbers.

6. Social Follower Count Buttons

Social follower counts work as peer-pressure tools, encouraging your landing page visitor to engage with your business on social. Becoming a Fan of your business on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ gives you a new and valuable touch-point you can use to nurture your leads towards a final sale.

7. Show the Results (ROI)

Concrete numbers and real-world values are far more convincing than stock figures. For instance, stating an ROI of, on average, 187%, is far more effective than “most clients double their money!”

Section #5: Optimize for your audience, traffic source and desire

Your landing page is affected by the source of traffic coming to it. As we mentioned in the AIDA section above, unless you keep in mind the values, wants and needs of your landing page’s audience, you’ll struggle to find success.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to any business:

• E-commerce companies recognize that they’ll find more success promoting a winter jacket in late September than they will in July. This is nothing more than knowing your audience, recognizing what they’re thinking about, and acting accordingly.
• B2B companies will recognize that exclusively posting product and service-related content on social media will lose you fans (and fast). This, again, is about knowing your audience, recognizing their mindset depending on platform, and responding intelligently.

Landing pages are no different. Here’s a few examples of how traffic source can affect your landing page design and conversion:

Facebook Posts:

Collecting landing traffic from Facebook is slightly different from any other source, and can actually be harder as many social media users aren’t going to be immediately comfortable being sent off-site to your landing page.

That’s why we recommend incorporating a Facebook landing page tab into your Page. Many 3rd party landing page software providers have this capability, and it should be the matter of a simple click to translate your website’s landing page template for the Facebook platform.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgEmat-s8Oo

This ensures that people can actually convert on your lead-generation page or a contest without having to be sent off-platform, hugely decreasing bounce rates.

Google Ads:

Your Google Ads and corresponding landing pages need to be friends.

Creating a cohesive ad/landing page campaign increase conversions on both.

The most important effect that PPC Ads have on your landing page is in keyword matching.

Here’s what you need to be doing to your landing pages to ensure they’re optimized for PPC ad traffic:

• Ensure your landing page copy is original content that matches the subject matter of your ad (for instance, if you have an ad that’s tested very well and has a high quality score, don’t decide to start using it to send traffic to an unrelated landing page)
• Make sure your landing page header (which should be “”) matches your Adword headline closely
• Make sure your landing page’s subheaders (which should be “
  

  ”) match your ad’s keywords

• Don’t keyword stuff your landing pages, as Google will see this and reduce your ad’s efficacy

Facebook Ads:

Facebook Ads are a fantastic way to drive traffic to your landing page, especially businesses looking to generate leads.

The targeting capabilities of Facebook Ads (something that is constantly developing) allow you to show your ads exclusively to people with a certain job title, income bracket, even car ownership. They also allow you to show your ads exclusively to people who have expressed interest in a certain subject (a subject you could write an ebook about, for instance).

When designing your landing page to collect traffic from a Facebook Ad, it’s important that you optimize that landing page for SEO when collecting traffic from Google Search. Here’s how that optimization looks:

• 1 in 10-25 words on your landing page should be a keywords in headline and generally spaced throughout
• Your URL path needs to have the keywords of your landing page offer
• Meta-tag your landing page’s images with keyword offer (don’t overstuff, but include)
• How fast it loads affects your SEO (don’t have heavy images, long videos, or complicated code)
• Don’t use Flash or Javascript if possible (as Google can’t read it)
• Use headers to prioritize keywords

Email Blast:

Email marketing still has one of the highest returns on investment out of every strategy we have at our disposal. Combined with optimized landing pages, we’re talking about a seriously effective campaign.

Here’s what we recommend:

Send audience-segmented emails that traffic back to segment-specific landing pages.

And here’s what that means:

Let’s say you’re a local pizza restaurant. You’ve recently run an online social sweepstakes giving away free pizza at three of your city’s colleges and universities. You’ve also been running Facebook and Google Ads directed at parents, promoting an email-gated coupon code.

This has given you a bunch of awesome leads in your area – leads that make up two clear and definitive audience segments.

Here’s how you use email and landing pages in tandem:

To your segment made up of college students, send an email blast promoting “student Saturdays” where you give a 50% discount coupon on all large pizzas bought with an active student card.

Drive traffic from the email to a audience-specific landing page with the headline/USP of “Munchies eating you up?” and copy “Students eat cheap on Saturdays! Get your 50% coupon free!”

To your segment made up of parents, send an email blast promoting “We’ve got dinner covered”, where you offer the same discount on large pizzas.

Drive traffic from that email to another audience-specific landing page with the headline/USP “Kids hungry and you’re out of ideas? AcmePizza’s got you covered” and copy “Make Thursday pizza night with AcmePizza’s 50% coupon. Coupons last six months and are usable only on Thursdays between 4 and 8 pm. Get yours before they’re gone!”

Something to remember:

It’s essential that nobody finds your campaign-specific/segment-specific landing pages through search (as this would be confusing to say the least) so we recommend you implement a no-follow strategy. Check out my colleague Krista’s comprehensive article on the subject.

Section #6: How to Test and Analyze your Landing Page to Maximize Conversion

A/B Testing

A/B Testing is where we take your existing landing page and we make it the best it can be.

Seriously – A/B testing your landing page is key to its optimizing it for maximum conversions.

Here’s how it works:

We create two landing pages: one we’ll call your “control” and another we’ll call “variation”. The pages are almost exactly the same, except that the variation landing page has a single difference, an element we think will increase the chance of a conversion (for instance, an image of a smiling woman holding our product as opposed to an image of our product by itself)

We then use a third party software tool (like Wishpond) and send half the people who want to traffic to our page to the control, and half to the variation. Then we measure how many of those people converted on the control, and how many converted on the variation.

Once we (or the tool) has reached a statistically significant confidence that one page or the other has outperformed its competition, we make the winner our final landing page.

Make sense?

What about multi-variate testing?

Multivariate testing your landing page is the same as A/B testing except you’re testing more than one single element. We advise against it (unless you’re a huge corporation with unlimited resources). Not only does it take a lot longer to come to a statistically significant conclusion, but you can never be 100% sure of your results.

This is because testing multiple variables gives you a convoluted result. Let’s say you’re testing your CTA button color, USP and customer testimonials together. If your variation page outperforms your control, you never know if it’s all three of those new elements working together to achieve results or if it’s just one of them increasing conversions massively while the others actually decrease conversions (but not enough for the results to be negative).

So stick with split testing your landing page for now, and get back to me when you’re a multinational corporation.

Heatmaps, Scrollmaps and Mouse Tracking:

Heatmaps (of which CrazyEgg is the most popular) are an incredibly useful tool, as they tell you exactly what your landing page visitors are clicking on. If you do have any extraneous links or buttons (which we don’t recommend) your heatmap will show how often those are being clicked.

Heatmaps are especially useful when optimizing your homepage for conversion:

• Is nobody clicking on your “about us” tab? Test removing it.
• Is your “product reviews” tab bright white (being clicked on constantly)? Test making it more prominent or featuring the most recent reviews in a sidebar.

Scrollmaps are also handy, as they tell you where your landing page visitors are spending most of their time:

• Are they spending time focusing on your customer testimonials? Test bringing them up the page to make them more obvious.
• Are they examining one particular benefit over another? Test replacing the one going unnoticed.

Mouse tracking (though one of the more creepy tools landing page optimizers have at our disposal) allows you to, essentially, look over the shoulder of your landing page traffic as they negotiate your website:

• Is your traffic having trouble finding a popular product they’re looking for? Test cutting out steps and make that page easier to access.
• Is your traffic interacting with a certain element of your page right before converting? Test placing that element closer to your CTA (or moving your CTA closer to that element)

Previously online marketers like myself would have recommended eye-tracking, but (for most small and medium-sized businesses), the tools are prohibitively expensive. Mouse tracking, on the other hand, is far more affordable and has an extremely high (like 85-90%) correlation with eye movement anyway.

Conclusion

Feel free to cut and paste individual sections from this article and save it to your computer, as we recognize that 4,000 words is more than you can absorb in a single sitting. Please feel free to get in contact either in the comment section below or at @JDScherer on Twitter – I’d love to help you out.

This article, hopefully, has given you a solid basis from which to start your own landing page campaigns. Remember to design for a single “ask”, keep your audience in mind, and test relentlessly until you’re satisfied with your conversion rates (which you never should be!).

Author: Chris Goward

Are you planning to redesign your company’s website?

Is your boss (or her boss) worried the website’s looking a little old and dated? Maybe they’re not happy with its performance and want a redesign to recharge sales?

In that case, I’m glad you found this blog post before you started.

Because I want to show you why the traditional website redesign process is a dangerous trap that can cause you pain and lost revenue. After that, I’m going to show you how to avoid this trap, and guarantee your success in your next redesign.

And let’s be clear: When I say success, I don’t mean a pat on your back from your boss, or kudos from the design community. If your website’s main mission is to sell something or help sell something – that is, to ultimately produce revenue – I’m going to show you how to guarantee your website redesign leads directly to an increase in revenue.

The secret? Never redesign your website again – or at least, never “redesign” in the traditional sense of the word.

The Invisible Risks of Redesigning Your Website

You see, wholesale website redesigns are dangerous things. When new sites launch, they look new, fresh, and modern. They have all the newest features and badges and social media options. They almost always look better and so – people assume – they are better.

But the reality of website redesigns is that they are very risky propositions. That’s because the redesign process used by most marketing departments – or their agencies – doesn’t deal with risk mitigation.

To understand the risks, think about how many individual changes are made during a redesign: Layout changes to the site-wide templates, copy changes, design and typography, the flow of pages through a checkout, etc. During a full redesign, very often the only thing that stays the same is the company logo and banding elements.

The problem is, everyone gets so excited about the new, they rarely sit down to discuss the risk of making all these changes, and how they impact the site’s all-important conversion rates. Maybe some of those changes help boost the conversion rate, but it’s just as likely that others will hurt your sales or sign-up rates.

How do you know which have positive or negative effect?

As you can see above, website redesign masks the effects of many changes.

If you make design changes without testing their effect on your key metrics, you could be in for a nasty surprise. Maybe your new home page headline increases conversions, but the new call-to-action buttons hurt conversions. If you don’t track the effect of each major change individually, you have no way of knowing which changes are helping and which are hurting.

Many marketers go into a redesign expecting that the new design alone will boost their conversion rates. But redesigns more often hurt conversion rates. If you don’t actively set out to manage the risk – by continuously testing key changes – you could lose a lot of money.

Mitigating the risk of a redesign can only be accomplished with rigorous conversion rate optimization testing of each of the main changes. You need a strategy that includes understanding your buyer personas, prioritizing test hypotheses to fix conversion-killers, setting up controlled split tests (or A/B tests), and then analyzing the data to get new insight and make informed changes.

A Better Approach: Evolutionary Site Redesign

If you want a new, better looking, and more profitable website, there’s a way to redesign while slashing the risk to zero. This approach to website redesign is something I call “Evolutionary Site Redesign” or ESR.

ESR essentially uses A/B testing principles to redesign your site to work better, not just look better. Rather than relying on the gut-feeling and potentially flawed intuition of an art director, your website decisions should be made against the crucible of customer actions.  Once you’ve defined your website’s goals clearly, you can test and continuously optimize to improve on them. This is a continuous process – since various elements of the site are constantly being tested and improved, your site will never get stale.

Let’s say you’re courting design-savvy customers, so you want your website to look new and current. And if conversion rate is a key business driver, you should be continuously updating your design by testing the major site-wide elements that combine to create your site’s look and feel.

Elements like header, navigation, persistent calls-to-action, headlines, fonts, etc. can all be tested to ensure that any design changes contribute to a rise in the all-important conversion rate. By testing the major design-defining elements across the website, you can then evolve your design based on how people respond in the way that matters most – revenue-driving actions.

Take Amazon as an example. When was the last time they redesigned their website?

Having trouble remembering? It’s because they never redesign in the traditional sense. Instead, they’re constantly redesigning through ongoing A/B testing. It’s no fluke that they’re cutting a wide swath through so many markets.

And, you can do the same thing with your website.

Evolutionary Site Redesign (ESR) Best Practices

Here are a few best practices for getting the most out of Evolutionary Site Redesign:

1. Align Website Objectives to Business Goals

Start by defining your business goals and how your website supports them. If you’re making changes to any part of your design, test the effect of the changes on the core objectives.

I like to think of it as a goals waterfall. Business goals should determine website goals, which in turn determine conversion goals. Conversion goals should determine which variations of design elements get adopted.

Be careful about testing metrics that don’t directly contribute to your business goals, like bounce rate. A design change could easily reduce the bounce rate of a page while actually harming sales. You aren’t in business to reduce bounce rates, you’re in the business to make sales or generate leads.

2. Generate Great Hypotheses

As you probably remember from high school science, experiments always start with a great hypothesis. Website experiments are no different.

If you are considering redesigning the look of your navigation, for example, what’s the goal of the redesign? Are you assuming that by reorganizing the main pages in the navigation, users will find what they are looking for more easily? If so, what metric are you using to define success?

At the very least, do no harm. Often, design changes are dictated by other needs, like branding, making a site consistent with other company properties, etc. In these cases, when change needs to be made, check to make sure a design element you want to change doesn’t harm the existing conversion rate.

But if you are forced to make a change, always look for opportunities to boost your conversion rate. Even a single percentage gain – when repeated a few times in different areas – can add up to significant incremental revenue growth,

As you are testing, always keep your hypotheses in mind. You’re not trying to figure out which variation will win – you’re trying to answer a specific question.

In other words, don’t run a test to tell if random image A will out-perform random image B. Instead, set up your test to answer the bigger question, such as: Do product pictures on category pages outperform lifestyle images? Do your customers respond to better to a different aspect of your value proposition?

3. Execute a Cycle of Continuous Improvement

Getting the full value of Evolutionary Site Redesign requires a commitment to ongoing testing. A single A/B or multivariate test does not make a conversion optimization strategy. Research shows that the greatest contributor to optimization success is repeated, structured testing. The bonus? The more often you test, the better your site will perform, and the fresher it will look!

4. Analyze Results for Insights

There’s more potential in Evolutionary Site Redesign than just conversion rate lift. A winning A/B test result is often just the beginning of the test’s value. There’s much more to gain from a smart analysis of the results. By learning how your users react to a specific design element, your designers may unlock new approaches that you can test to get even better results.

By adopting a continuous improvement approach to drive the Evolutionary Site Redesign process, you ensure that website test iterations – and your redesign process – are driven by solving customer problems rather than just creative aesthetics.

The Top 5 Benefits of Adopting ESR

In summary, here are the five biggest benefits of this “un-redesign” method:

• You get a new site “look and feel” and conversion rate lift at the same time
• You learn which elements actually improve results
• You maintain your team’s focus on the important business metrics rather than “aesthetic” redesign
• Your website never faces lags in results in-between redesigns
• You avoid the risks of a traditional site redesign

Great design can play a huge role in increasing clarity, communicating value, and boosting conversion rates. However, design needs to be judged by how well it performs. Otherwise, what’s the point of design? So, the next time your team is considering a website redesign, chime in with a suggestion: “Let’s test that first.”

Putting it to the Test: Never “Redesign” Your Website Again was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com