Rnordman

“I’m no genius. I’m smart in spots—but I stay around those spots.”
— Tom Watson Sr., Founder of IBM

The concept of the “Circle of Competence” has been used over the years by Warren Buffett as a way to focus investors on only operating in areas they knew best. The bones of the concept appear in his 1996 Shareholder Letter:

What an investor needs is the ability to correctly evaluate selected businesses. Note that word “selected”: You don’t have to be an expert on every company, or even many. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.

It’s a simple concept: Each of us, through experience or study, has built up useful knowledge on certain areas of the world. Some areas are understood by most of us, while some areas require a lot more specialty to evaluate.

For example, most of us have a basic understanding of the economics of a restaurant: You rent or buy space, spend money to outfit the place and then hire employees to seat, serve, cook, and clean. (And, if you don’t want to do it yourself, manage.)

From there it’s a matter of generating enough traffic and setting the appropriate prices to generate a profit on the food and drinks you serve—after all of your operating expenses have been paid. Though the cuisine, atmosphere, and price points will vary by restaurant, they all have to follow the same economic formula.

That basic knowledge, along with some understanding of accounting and a little bit of study, would enable one to evaluate and invest in any number of restaurants and restaurant chains; public or private. It’s not all that complicated.

However, can most of us say we understand the workings of a micro-chip company or a biotech drug company at the same level? Perhaps not.

But as Buffett put so eloquently, we do not necessarily need to understand these more esoteric areas to invest capital. Far more important is to honestly define what we do know and to stick to those areas. The circle can be widened, but only slowly and over time. Mistakes are most often made when straying from this discipline.

* * *

The concept applies outside of investing.

Buffett describes the circle of competence of one of his business managers, a Russian immigrant with poor English who built the largest furniture store in Nebraska, thusly:

I couldn’t have given her $200 million worth of Berkshire Hathaway stock when I bought the business because she doesn’t understand stock. She understands cash. She understands furniture. She understands real estate. She doesn’t understand stocks, so she doesn’t have anything to do with them. If you deal with Mrs. B in what I would call her circle of competence… She is going to buy 5,000 end tables this afternoon (if the price is right). She is going to buy 20 different carpets in odd lots, and everything else like that [snaps fingers] because she understands carpet. She wouldn’t buy 100 shares of General Motors if it was at 50 cents a share.

It did not hurt Mrs. B to have such a narrow area of competence. In fact, one could argue the opposite: Her rigid devotion to that area allowed her to focus. Only with that focus could she have overcome her handicaps to achieve such extreme success.

In fact, Charlie Munger takes this concept outside of business altogether and into the realm of life in general. The essential question he sought to answer: Where should we devote our limited time in life, in order to achieve the most success? Charlie’s simple prescription:

You have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle of competence.

If you want to be the best tennis player in the world, you may start out trying and soon find out that it’s hopeless—that other people blow right by you. However, if you want to become the best plumbing contractor in Bemidji, that is probably doable by two-thirds of you. It takes a will. It takes the intelligence. But after a while, you’d gradually know all about the plumbing business in Bemidji and master the art. That is an attainable objective, given enough discipline. And people who could never win a chess tournament or stand in center court in a respectable tennis tournament can rise quite high in life by slowly developing a circle of competence—which results partly from what they were born with and partly from what they slowly develop through work.

So, the simple takeaway here is clear. If you want to improve your odds of success in life and business then define the perimeter of your circle of competence, and operate inside. Over time, work to expand that circle but never fool yourself about where it stands today, and never be afraid to say “I don’t know.”

Circle of Competence is part of the Farnam Street latticework of mental models.

Join the conversation about this story »

Today, I continue my series on the impact of pricing on market performance. In recent posts, I showed how a high price might INCREASE sales, by making the product more desirable and how to use psychological pricing to increase sales. Today, I’ll talk more about how to price bundles of products and how coupons impact sales.

Bundle pricing

I talked a little about bundle pricing in my last post. But, there are more psychological issues when it comes to pricing a bundle. For instance, an HBR article shows that customers make very different decisions based on the price of products. This suggests businesses benefit from knowing how consumers think about their prices.

Understand customer goals

Knowing what products consumers want most helps in determining your pricing. So, if you’re Dominos Pizza, knowing whether consumers want your pizza or pasta most, helps in determining the price that’ll result in the biggest order. If the consumer really wants a pizza, offering pasta at a lower price might convince them to add it to their order. The opposite is true if the consumer really wants one of your pastas.

In the real world, you can’t individualize pricing, but online, it’s a snap. Just track what product the visitor searched for first when they entered your website — likely that’s the one they really want. At checkout, offer a reduced price for the pasta (or any other add-on) and the chances of purchase increase significantly. The experiment reported in HBR shows consumers prefer this to getting a small discount on the pizza and pasta combination — even when the resulting price is the SAME.

Similarly, add the cost of shipping to your online products (high value) rather than charge shipping separately (low-value).

Offer low-value items free or at reduced price

Sometimes consumers don’t put a high value on certain items in your inventory. Bundling these items free or at a very reduced costs increases the chances they’ll buy items with a higher value. Clinique uses this strategy. A couple of times a year, they offer their free products with a $25 minimum purchase of other products and the lines circle the counter with women who wait for the free bundle before buying refills (and it draws in new customers, as well). The bundle normally includes a lipstick, moisturizer, maybe a mascara and some eye shadows — all in an attractive bag.

Not only does the free bundle provide a strong incentive for customers to buy product, it allows them to sample other Clinique products they’re not already using, which encourages them to buy these products in the future.

Price of high-value add-ons

Actually, this isn’t part of the HBR article, but it works. Let’s say you don’t want to offer a low price on the product everyone wants from your firm — in our Dominos example, it’s the pizza. Why? Remember from the first post in this series, price impacts how consumers assign value to your brand — a cheap pizza can’t be very good. Or, maybe you don’t want to get into a price war with your competitors — like Pizza Hut and Papa John’s.

What’s your solution? Offer other items to make a bundle at a really low price. In my house (and probably many others) we want breadsticks with our pizza (like the pizza alone doesn’t contain enough carbs). While I might be indifferent between Dominos and it’s competitors regarding the pizza, I’ll likely order from Dominos if you offer a large discount on the breadsticks.

Coupons and discounts

Coupons and discounts increase sales, right? Well, maybe not. A recent experiment shows that consumers aren’t any more likely to choose a high-value coupon than a low-value coupon in certain cases.

And, consumers may suffer coupon burnout, meaning that they’re bombarded with so many coupons, they don’t really feel motivated by them. A recent survey by Kissmetrics shows surprising results based on coupons and discounts.

• Only about 1/2 of consumers say a coupon will make or break their decision about which brand to purchase
• About the same number of consumers say they spend more when offered coupons
• Only 42% of consumers view coupons as very or extremely influential — although 86% consider coupons somewhat in making purchase decisions
• About half of all consumers decide on the brand first, then search for a coupon — implying the consumer would buy the brand at full price if they couldn’t find a coupon. Thus, coupons result in lower ROI, without a substantial impact on sales.
• Coupons had the greatest effect in remarketing campaigns aimed at those who abandoned their shopping cart.

Downside of coupons and discounts

Of course, reduced ROI is only one result from offering coupons and discounts. Here are some other major drawbacks to offering them: Coupons/ discounts

• don’t generate customer loyalty
• don’t increase satisfaction with the purchase
• consumers become used to them and won’t buy unless you’re offering them an incentive
• can create price wars resulting in lower profitability for all firms
• may lessen the brand image

That’s why Apple computers doesn’t sanction coupons and discounts. Apple products are priced the same regardless of retailer and you almost never see them on sale. However, don’t make too much from this, as J.C. Penney attempted a similar strategy, which almost sank their ship.

Others are equally cautious about using coupons, citing similar drawbacks. That’s especially true for BOGO (buy one get one free) offers, which may be more than any consumer wants. For instance, offering buy 1 pizza get 1 free might exceed most consumers needs. Or offering a free product with purchase means you must have sufficient capacity to satisfy demand for both products.

Buy me, buy me, buy me!!! 

Not what you want to hear. Sure it’s implied, but as soon as even the most straightforward of online purchases becomes that much more brazen, that’s when us consumers start to rethink our behavior.

So what makes for great ecommerce copywriting? What’s the difference between a quality product listing and a boring list of specs? Does it even matter?

Surely product copy is all about manipulation or at best, gentle coercion? 

As content marketing becomes more and more vital to every industry, the ability to create quality copy, even for ecommerce has become a crucial skill. It’s a key way to market your brand and a fantastic way to separate yourself from similar competitors selling the same product. 

Your excellent copy and the different ways you can use it can also make your brand more trustworthy and foster a deeper sense of loyalty.

Here are five fantastic examples of copy from around the ecommerce world that will hopefully inspire you. For more advice, check out Graham Charlton’s post on what makes great ecommerce product page copy.

Onefinestay

Onefinestay has a great ‘about’ page that delivers the details of its service succinctly and without fuss.

It’s written with short sentences, broken into three paragraphs so as to let that white space shine through, and contains little waffle.

Then if you want to find out more about its history, just scroll down to equally well-laid out prose that delves deeper into how it all came about.

As opposed to the opening ‘about’ segment this is a lot more narrative driven and isn’t afraid to use more interesting, evocative language. ‘Crotchety’, ‘neon allure’, ‘a patron whose hands were white with durum’.

The sales messages, skilfully entwined with the prose, are down-to-Earth, with nicely delivered bits of observational humour: “you get all the advantages of a hotel, like the nice smelly stuff in small bottles. And with none of the downsides, like somebody bothering you at 8.53am to fold your toilet paper into a triangle.”

The attention to wordplay extends to the location listings. One of my favourite things to do is to scroll endlessly through the listings to see how many different adjectives it uses to describe various London boroughs and how many inventive iterations of ‘come and stay’ it can use.

I imagine there’s a spreadsheet loaded with adjectives in the Onefinestay office, where their (over)use can be tracked. 

Clicking through on a listing brings you to a page containing even more well-phrased verbosity.

I think you’re either on-board with this or you’re not. It’s hard not to be drawn to wood panels that ‘cast their honeyed glow across thick cotton’. 

I’m particularly impressed by how each location’s description has a theme, that’s consistently adhered too. The above example talks about the ‘organic’ nature of the apartment and it’s carried through to its subheadings in the ‘full story’ page.

Onefinestay certainly has a template, but it’s one that works well, and easy for any copywriter to adapt to and with plenty of room to use their own imagination.

Norman’s Records

Leeds based Norman’s Records is a pleasure to follow on Twitter, mainly due to its cavalier attitude to marketing new releases…

The problem with listening to 6 Music at work is having to go and turn the volume down every time a bloody Elbow song comes on.

— Norman Records (@normanrecords) May 6, 2014

'The Long Goodbye..' by LCD Soundsystem is out again to defeat the entire point of Record Store Day http://t.co/iZOKtbHtQ1

— Norman Records (@normanrecords) June 3, 2014

It’s this attitude that makes me trust it more. 

This healthy disregard for bullshit carries over directly to the matter-of-fact, fully responsive ecommerce site. 

Albums have reviews or blurbs written by the staff themselves, there’s none of the copying and pasting of press-releases that most other music sites tend to practice.

What’s more, the reviews are incredibly well written. Full of wit and verve. Here’s the review for Swans’ ‘To Be Kind’.

Even the caveat that ‘all reviews are simply the personal opinions of our staff and customers’ links to this wonderful piece of copy.

Norman’s Records is a good example of the power of original content. I’m far more likely to trust the person behind the counter’s opinion or recommendation than the blurb written by multiple hands in a marketing department. 

Firebox

In terms of actual product copy, Firebox does a fantastic job in creating sales-orientated write-ups for its idiosyncratically weird and wonderful products.

The first box underneath the price details contains bullet-pointed features of the product. It’s a good mixture of practical info and gags.

The actual description goes into more detail and is equally well-written, informative and entertaining.

The bullet-points are great for those customers in a rush, the longer description is great for those customers who need a little extra push to purchase.

A search around for these products on other sites reveals that Firebox really does have its own editorial style. This is all unique copy, and makes the site that much more attractive for consumers who seek a little bit more integrity and honesty in their shopping experience. 

Mr Porter

The upmarket men’s attire shop Mr Porter has been bridging the gap between blogging and regularly scheduled publishing with its weekly ‘The Journal’.

Every Tuesday, approximately eight brand new exclusively commissioned articles are collected and published on the site. This week’s edition has a topically sport based theme.

The highlight of this is an interview with Andy Murray. This is a nice lengthy piece, full of wit and insight that would happily exist in a non-ecommerce publication.

It’s a perfect synthesis of editorial, relevance and ecommerce. There are direct links to the product pages of all the clothes that Murray has been dressed in by Mr Porter’s style director (disappointingly not called Mr Porter) underneath each header image.

There’s also a direct link to shop all the products at once on the ‘front cover’.

BrewDog

The craft beer company from Scotland writes superb copy for its range of beers. Exhilarating, merciless and sexy. 

‘Being shot from a Hoppy Howitzer beats the hell out of trotting round a submissive paddock. That's why the internal combustion engine got mounted onto two wheels.’

Sure this type of attention grabbing, metaphor filled  street-poetry wouldn’t suit every brand, but it completely works for its product. 

‘Drink fast, live fast, sleep late and rip it up down empty streets.’ 

Unfortunately this phrase would be so attention grabbing that it grabbed the attention of The Portman Group, who issued a statement saying the packaging and copy breached its code in its association with ‘bravado and immoderate consumption’.

This led to a stunning and beautifully written response from BrewDog on its blog…

Whether you agree or not, it’s a fantastic example of a brand completely sure of its own identity, and using the same tone of voice throughout all of its communication, product copy and marketing.

For more on copy from the blog, check out these 20 inspirational examples of product page copy.

Apart from launching new brands, on-line merchandisers need to find new markets for the sake of expansion. In some cases, web business owners need to wind-up the business due to decline in market or due to outgrowth in initial market, for that reason E-commerce retailers need to search new horizons.

Before stepping into the market, make an in-depth research about market and identify your competitors. Once your on-line business comes in a running position, concentrate on improving the quality of brand & service so as to build progressive reputation that will be appealing incentive in capturing new clients.

If you are looking to enter a new market where there are already so many competitors, like web design and development, selling plugins on-line, affiliates etc., then you need to read the below mentioned stuff.

Example Of Successful Late Entries:

The classic example of late entry in market is Zantac (a pioneer of ulcer relieving drug), it was known for successful late market entry, it also experienced some merchandising hurdles from competitors. Other examples of successful late entry is Boeing, which is a revolutionizer in the jet industry replacing Lockheed which was also a leader of aeroplane industry initially. Another example, Google is the world’s top search engine which made successful late entry by replacing Bing that was tycoons of respective domain before replacement.

Merits of Entering New Market:

Here are some of the perks for merchants to enjoy the new economy:

• Handsome Profit Earning:

The greed of earning high profit pushes merchants to take risks by stepping into emerging market. The profit secured from new economy brings new life to the company and it can be utilized to increase the domestic capital generation capability of the firm. Especially low scale mechanization can easily take benefits of growth from newly developed economies that are not available in their local markets.

• Market Presence:

As a newbie in the market, a merchandiser has biggest edge with distinguishable commodity. Although, in the beginning the response may not be positive, but after studying offers of domestic competitors, the merchandiser can at least make realization of presence in the new economy.

• New Products:

The brightest portion of approaching new economies is that a product already introduced in the previous market can be remarketed in the new market. The biggest example in this regard is Mc Donalds which is the localized product of Arizona. Later Mc Donalds was introduced in other states, where it served as an old thing for Arizona, but a new thing for other markets.

Demerits Of Entering New Market:

Here are some of the potential pitfalls that mostly endanger the new comer of the market:

• Failure Due To Insufficient Understanding Of Market:

Let’s take an example that product designers need to undergo bulk of data analyses within limited span of time, it affects their performance due to unavailability of time to make a research about the technologies rampant in market & future potential in the economy. Although business journals and other research resources of market are valuable sources, but useful concepts and trends extraction from these resources consume time. In the same way, entering a new market requires understanding of challenges due to competition & condition of technologies available for market. There should be a deep observation on the existing and emerging competitors, advancements in technologies, acquiring the intellectual property, ignoring the timely handling of these factors may let your business payback in the shape of cost and recession.

• Incapability In Market Adaptation:

Mostly technicians lack compatibility and motivation, which prevents them to think beyond conventional mindset. An emerging firm lacking essence of objectivity in the processes of marketing disables the introduction of new functionalities in the merchandise. Moreover, not owning a think-tank that decides about the strategies, take on-line business towards decline.

• Lacking Innovation In Product Design:

It is the responsibility of design technicians to introduce new patterns in the design of product, only relying on previous methodologies & resources make on-line businesses suffer. Simply adjusting specific field of intellectual canvas and deficiency of scientific expertise, curtails the element of innovation in the design of commodity. It is believed that precise analysis through material available about the product brings innovative element in the design and enables handling of technical hazards by applying scientific knowledge with different perspective.

Tips To Come Back:

Here are some tips that will be certainly helpful for retailers in coming back into the market:

Price: Find out prices offered by your competitors, neither offer equivalent to lowest price nor charge high rates. In other words, the offered price should be moderate, while keeping market norms in mind.

Services: Discover and make a research about the service offered by your competitors, also find out if your competitors are offering any type of discounts? Offer more incentives than the competitors that will enable you to charge high prices.

Advertising: Acquire the services of advertising company, so that advertising agency could market by promoting benefits of your brand. Also, use other means of advertising like radio, social media, television and newspaper. Publicize your initial sales to generate further business.

Social Events: In order to build progressive reputation in the targeted community, participate in the sports events by means of sponsoring a sports team. Also, take part in charity events by marketing through reasonable donations, along with this join the religious events so that your new product get introduced to eminent people of society.

Have you ever Google searched something and found results that had someone’s photo next to the link? This person was designated by Google as an “expert in their field”, simply because they learned how to use Google+ authorship code to help search engines find their blog posts and content. We’re all sick of About.com, Wikipedia, AskJeeves and these monster content sites taking over search results. I mean how can About.com suddenly be the expert on a huge range of topics from career advice to gardening? Well Google agreed that the domination of search results from these sites was not beneficial for our constant need for information. So they re-programmed their algorithms to seek out thought leaders in their expert industries.

You can’t have a marketing conversation these days without the terms social media and SEO popping up. But if those marketing individuals aren’t sharing with you the value of using Google+ Authorship to leverage your online presence, it’s questionable how much they understand the connection between your content marketing efforts, social media and search results.

Just Ask Yourself: Which One of These Would You Click On?

Who Uses Google+ Authorship?

Anyone who wants to brand themselves or their companies as leaders in their industry are prime candidates for Google+ Authorship. One requirement is that you should be prepared to generate quality content, hopefully using my tips and tools, so that the topics you are writing are relevant and search-worthy. The people who take that extra two minute step to attach Google Authorship code to their blogs, are the brilliant ones who will get two to three times more blog traffic. Some of the brands who can best take advantage of the authorship code are:

• Service Professionals such as Lawyers blogging on best Employment Law advice (full disclosure, this guy is one of our favorite clients). Or a Background Screening company blogging on legislation changes in youth coach screening practices (also a VIP client). Recruiters giving away free hiring advice for a taste of their expertise. Doctors blogging about healthy lifestyle tips. These are the people who are ruling the online results on news in their industry. They are owning them without paying for the ads, which is by far one of the best organic lead generation tools on the internet these days.

• Lifestyle and Consumer Brands have the opportunity to engage their audiences beyond the initial interaction with their product, location or service. They’ve learned what their audience is interested in and searching, and help them find more information through their blogging. Fashion, food, real estate and any brand that plays a role in someone’s life, can easily take advantage of Google+ Authorship.

• Personal Brand development relies on looking like a thought leader. What better way to get people to recognize your name and face, than to have it popping up on search results relevant to your expertise?

• Editorial Content is the absolute best place for a direct ROI on Google+ Authorship. If your website is already spending 8+ hours a day on maintaining quality content, then it’s a no-brainer to include the technology that will bring you readers.

How Does It Work?

Having a Google+ account is the first mandatory step in starting Google+ Authorship. It’s the primary way that Google can verify you are a real human being, because it’s tied to a Gmail account and linked to all of your beautiful colleagues, friends and family. The remaining steps will require some trial and error, but this guy explains it best.

So many people I talk to say they’ve started this process and haven’t finished. That’s fine by me because quite frankly the less people using this trick, the better for me and my clients. But hey, I’m not selfish – I’m sharing the information with you! Let us know your experiences with Google+ and Authorship code.

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, Solve For Interesting, the author of Complete Web Monitoring, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks and Lean Analytics), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist's Manifesto) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see".

Check out these six links that we're recommending to one another:

• Chasing the Cicada: Exploring the Darkest Corridors of the Internet - Mental Floss. "Since the dawn of the Internet, people have been making treasure hunts. Alternate reality Games like, I Love Bees, took it to a whole new level. What happens when a treasure hunt is a test, or a recruiting tool? How do you know if it's just a game? With shades of The Magus, we can't know if it's a game or reality. Jeff Kinkle started following the threads of an online puzzle and... well, it's not clear where he wound up. But the chase is half the fun." (Alistair for Hugh).
• The United States of Metrics - The New York Times. "I spend a lot of time at the intersection of data collection and analysis. As this New York Times piece points out, America is now a data-driven nation, furiously instrumenting itself, with stats overwhelming rhetoric. Challenging your opponent's data is the new stump speech. Or as they put it, 'The nerds have won. Time to replace those arrows in the talons of the American eagle with pencils and slide rules.' This is a worrying trend -- machines are good at optimizing within the current rules, but lousy at reinventing the game. It's probably going to take us a long time to realize that." (Alistair for Mitch).
• Africa Continues Going Mobile - Gallup World. "I think the growth of mobile, and in particular, smartphones, in (what is the term we're supposed to use these days?) the Third  World is going to do all sorts of unpredictable and amazing things. Or maybe that is just my hopeful techno streak pushing itself past my jaded techno streak." (Hugh for Alistair).
• You're probably using the wrong dictionary - The Jsomers.net Blog. "A wonderful essay for anyone who writes for a living, about words and their meanings, and how to bring them both alive." (Hugh for Mitch).
• How to Rank Well in Amazon, the US's Largest Product Search Engine - Moz. "Our friend, Christopher S. Penn sent this link my way. I'm one of those Hachette Book Group authors that is dealing with the impact of their current battle with Amazon. That aside, I was recently discussing Amazon with a bestselling business book author, because I get frustrated when I go to the bestsellers lists and see all kinds of self-published books and ebooks that have gamed the system with Amazon-like SEO and dynamic pricing to get attention. It works. You see people writing ebooks on Evernote have a better sales ranking than something from Malcolm Gladwell. While it's great how it levels the playing field, it's the quality gap that frustrates me. So, it appears that getting your product ranked is as much of an art as getting something to rank on Google... and this is a great primer." (Mitch for Alistair).
• What's Lost as Handwriting Fades - The New York Times. "What happens if the art of handwriting goes away? It's nothing new. Many have been thinking about this since the advent of the typewriter. Now, with tablets and the sudden disappearance of physical keyboards, we may well find out. This piece looks at the value, merits and potential uselessness of handwriting. I, for one, have experienced the massive difference that occurs when you type your thoughts out versus when you write with a pen versus when you speak your words into OCR software. The difference in output is staggering. In the end, it may not be just the art of handwriting that we lose, but the thinking behind it." (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.

Tags: >link bait alistair croll amazon amazon product rank analytics bitcurrent book a futurists manifesto christopher s penn complete web monitoring dictionary evernote gallup world gigaom google hachette book group handwriting hugh mcguire human 20 iambik internet culture jeff kinkle lean analytics librivox link exchange link sharing malcolm gladwell managing bandwidth media hacks mental floss mobile in africa moz new york times pressbooks social media solve for interesting the jsomers blog the magus year one labs

Today’s marketing options are not a choice of few. That was 50 years ago. Today, the marketing opportunities resembles dining in New York City instead of a one horse town. It means you have to make more decisions.

This spells confusion, options and that terrible word…choice!

Scores of advertising options exist, making it difficult to decide, implement, and analyze that all important KPI that the CEO always demands…”return on investment“. When you just advertised on television and sales spiked then you knew what to blame.

Now we need to measure the impact of SEO, social media, traditional marketing, mobile and dozens of marketing networks.

A powerful marketing option

Ebooks have become a marketing option of choice for many businesses. The mention of e-books is catching the attention of many business owners and marketing teams. This can apply to many types of organisations.

An ebook can:

• Position you and your brand as thought leaders
• Be one of the top resources in your industry
• Provide a very efficient way of building your email list

Here are some tips for researching, writing and publishing your ebook, which can be the cornerstone of your content marketing.

1. Start with the customer

Most small business owners think like business people rather than marketers when it comes to disseminating messages to the public. Wanting to sell to the public to ensure the legacy of their business and ability to produce income, owners focus on making money. However, before one makes money you must offer value.

Start with considering what variety of information consumers desire and want.

For example, first-time homeowners may love to know ways to save money regarding DIY repairs. Aside from purchasing a house, first-time owners are sometimes ignorant to a trove of in-house needs and demands confronting them in the first months to years of ownership.

The first place to start is to list the key chapters. Each chapter must uniquely address a common need of consumers, helping them solve a palpable problem in some way. Don’t think about what a business is but what it does for consumers; services and products that solve some sort of ‘problem’ (vacuums rid houses of dirt, cars make transportation easier and hats keep you warm)

2. Getting ideas

Use social media to directly ask or ‘listen’ to the whims and desires of the people. For example, use the search box on Twitter, leveraging industry specific key terms (‘food’ in this case) with emotional indicators such as ‘love’ or ‘hate.’ In this example, we see a consumer’s dislike of breakfast foods is fueled by a lack of variety. A brand, looking to excite consumers or reverse negative emotions could introduce a variety of foods as a selling point.

In addition to social sites, one could use a search engine like Google or Yahoo to generate ideas or ‘listen’ for concerns. Google maintains user data, sometimes suggesting queries to users based on what information is immediately typed.

Notice the suggestions of pie, recipes, and lyrics following “I love peanut butter.” A brand related to food, health, kids, etc. could use such information to offer intriguing content within their book, identifying what topics are major and minor, allotting proper space in their book for popular consumer concerns.

3. Write in parts

Traditionally, authors passed pieces along to editors until books were finished, bound, and published to the public. Electronic authors have more freedom; one does not need to complete the entire book before consumers see the first page. Consider elongating the publishing process, writing in parts.

Consider writing and releasing (and gathering feedback) the e-book in parts (perhaps a chapter at a time). Since you’re giving the e-book away for free, it won’t affect the reception of the consumer; they’re still getting great information free of charge, but the breaks in publishing give a brand time to gauge the reception and address needed edits.

Writing in parts saves a brand time and is more conservative regarding investments. In worst-case scenarios, a complete ‘flop’ does not drain added time and resources from the business. Furthermore, consider getting consumers or industry influencers involved in the review process, possibly including them or providing another favor in exchange for their review and subsequent help with promotion.

4. Identify influencers and Advocates

A number of social tools like Followerwonk (featured below) help identify influencers, people who are largely influential over others and brand advocates.

In addition to issuing users an influential ‘score,’ the tool allows for optimization of relationships and analysis of engagement. All advocacy of brand content is essential, yet some people have more influence that is social and subsequent power over others; identifying influential personalities, ensuring they are a part of the feedback and sharing process can greatly accelerate the awareness and reception of your e-book.

4. Use influencer insight in the ebook

As an added wrinkle, consider using influencers and others to insert insight, making the e-book more valuable to the public. Outside insight introduces a fresh voice to the e-book in addition to increasing the likelihood that participants will be active in circulating the content once published.

In addition to influencers, depending on nature of the content, a brand could feature consumers in e-books as well in question-and-answer or case study portions.

5. Promote on multiple platforms

Once the content is written, gaining awareness is essential. Consider leveraging not only a business web site but social profile platforms (Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter) and affiliate sites (other sites directly or indirectly associated to your industry) as well. Since people love receiving free items, it should be easier to establish an affiliate relationship with another business or industry personality.

Once you’ve identified and began using multiple platforms, measure data points such as search results, click-through rates, and actual conversion rates (people downloading the e-book) associated to the successful marketing of the book. Resources like PosiRank help identify efforts, platforms and relationships that help most. Such analysis helps with the publishing of later chapters as well as in defining optimal methods of future e-book enterprises.

Consider publishing the book on your business site. Build a separate site devoted to the e-book and explore options within and outside your industry related to spreading awareness.

6. Synthesize with other efforts

While you are organizing, creating and writing the e-book, synthesizing such processes with other brand efforts is paramount. For example, during the organizational stage, use the brand Twitter account to ask customers about their needs. Such participation not only helps with formulating something the masses want but aids with promotion and awareness.

Furthermore, the entire process introduces conversation regarding e-books within your industry; post about it on the company blog. Also, inclusion of data tables and cover graphics can stir up interest on visually-focused sites like Pinterest and Google Plus.

An e-book is a tremendous marketing tool but should not be implemented in isolation. Synthesize all processes along with other advertising efforts, strengthening and enforcing brand messages.

7. Crunch data for future publishing opportunities

Measuring the analytics of the book’s reception helps internal marketing as well as serves an authoring brand with additional tools of insight. Once measured, data can be used to issue a separate e-book that helps brands write their own successfully. In addition, gathering information and understanding if the book was a success helps measure whether subsequent publishing of e-books is a valuable asset to the brand.

Those who write guides and schoolbooks write annual editions or reprise old information every few years for a fresh reader perspective. E-books can become great branding tools, helping targeted consumers make associations to specific personalities, services and products.

8. Utilize portions of the book to target reporters

In addition to consumers and influencers, the traditional press needs to get involved in the awareness and (hopefully) dissemination process. Use industry data, provided consumer anecdotes and other parcels of data related to the book to intrigue personalities of the media such as reporters and editors at major newspapers, magazines, web sites, etc.

For example, a given e-book may be focused at food and beverage consumers yet features data related to mobile phone use in acquiring those needs, content a reporter of a major newspaper may find interesting for a related or upcoming story. Additionally, doing a bit of homework, seeing what media hubs and personalities have done related stories, could expedite the process.

Sites like HARO (Help a Reporter Out) offer free email subscriptions, giving descriptions of reporter queries and related stories.

An e-book marketer may easily identify media sources and reporters covering directly related and ancillary stories.

9. Making it work

Each brand’s trajectory may differ from previously successful publishing efforts or those modified due to time, season and related products. Look for windows of opportunity regarding pop-culture stories, reporters covering related topics, influencer interaction, and consumer-centered content.

E-books, especially free copies, are surefire ways to gain awareness and subsequent sales regarding brand assets, but associated marketers and in-house participants must attend to each process, and how it works seamlessly with other efforts, for optimal results.

I’m a man. A 52-year old white man who happens to live in Lancaster, PA.

All in all, that doesn’t make me very unique. There are plenty of other men in Lancaster. In fact, there are plenty of other 52-year old white guys in Lancaster. I just happen to be one of them. If I looked hard enough, I might even find out that I’m not the only Ken Mueller in Lancaster. I might be one of many.

But that doesn’t make me unique. What makes me unique is my story. Even if there is another 52-year old white guy named Ken in Lancaster, he hasn’t lived the same life that I have.

Your business or nonprofit is also not unique. There are plenty of restaurants/plumbers/accountants/book stores in your market. Whatever you do for a business, there is probably at least one other business that does the same thing. For many customers or potential customers, you might even be interchangeable. So what sets you apart and makes you unique?

Too often we try to set ourselves apart by some specific business practice or set of practices. For some, it might be that they are cheaper than the competition. For others, it might be a higher level of quality of products or services. Location might be an important factor for some customers, while others might look for a certain level of customer experience or service.

But again, most of those can probably be replicated. A business can choose to compete with you by upping their quality or perhaps lowering their prices. In many ways, they can match with what you do step for step. Every move you make to bolster your strategic position, they can react with a counter move.

But, that doesn’t mean you’re not unique.

Do you know what makes you unique? Do you know what you have that none of your competitors can ever have?

Your story.

No matter what they do, they can’t match or imitate your story. They can’t replicate the thing that makes your businesses uniquely it’s own entity.

Every business or nonprofit has its own set of stories to tell, and we need to use those stories to show our customers what sets us apart from the competition. At Tellus360, we have some incredibly unique stories, and we’ll be telling those stories regularly as we move forward. We’ll be sharing those stories in our blog, on Facebook and other social channels, and even in person to those who walk through our doors.

It’s a story of sustainability.

A story of Ireland and some historic Irish relics.

A story that includes a stage that was used on tour by Madonna, Lady Gaga, Billy Joel, and more.

A story that includes speakers and monitors used by U2 and AC/DC.

A story that involves reclaimed wood, roof gardens, air raid sirens, and whiskey barrels.

And as we move forward, we are not only telling those stories, but we’re making new ones. New stories that help us maintain our uniqueness and set us apart. The same goes for the stories of our employees and the stories of our customers. Each of them helps us to differentiate ourselves from the competition.

Tell your story early and often, so others know what it is that sets you apart and makes you unique. That’s something that no one else can do for you or on your behalf.

Have you told your story? Are you telling it on a regular basis?

Calls to action (CTA) are an important component to any B2B website. Acting as a special banner, button or graphic text on a webpage, a CTA is meant to prompt the website visitor to perform a specific desired action and continue down the sales funnel.

So what makes an effective CTA? One word: Variety. Keeping your CTAs diverse and fresh keeps your prospective client interested in your business. Here are the two most critical components of an effective CTA:

Varied Content

In B2B, a service or product is being sold that impacts an entire organization and often involves the input from multiple decision makers. Therefore the sale is more complex—often resulting in a longer decision making process.

If your website only features a “Contact Us” page or a newsletter signup, you’re missing out on the potential for visitors to move faster through the buying process. While effective, that content can only support certain stages of a sales cycle. For example, a visitor discovering your website for the first time may not be ready to subscribe for a weekly newsletter, but they would be open to downloading a tip sheet or watching a video.

Oftentimes this content is already lying around your office (literally or figuratively) and just needs refreshing for the web. Here are some new content ideas that can make great CTAs:

• Infographic illustrating your service or onboarding process
• Portfolio or project gallery
• Customer testimonials
• Case studies
• Sales sheets
• Recent presentations
• White papers
• eBooks
• Archived webinars
• Videos
• Articles
• Press or awards
• Blog
• Social media

All of these CTAs address a different type of customer. Here is an example of using varied content for one buyer journey:

Varied placement

This may seem like a “no-duh,” but too often CTAs can only be found on the homepage or the same CTAs are found on single every page—causing a visitor to ignore it. It’s important to consider every page on your site and the different actions a visitor may take depending on what they’re browsing.

Here are three examples of effective CTA placement and variety:

1. NexxCom Wireless “About Us” page

NexxCom Wireless is a provider is high frequency, high performance broadband wireless networks. The “About Us” page is the introduction to their business and their unique value proposition. Because website visitors are reading an “About Us” page to better understand NexxCom, the featured CTA is to download an introductory white paper on the state of the industry.

2. Competitive Edge Research & Communication “Public Affairs Professionals” page

Competitive Edge provides political polling and research analysis. They serve eight different audiences—all with varying needs. By creating audience specific case studies, this CTA is intended to build creditability in Competitive Edge’s experience and expertise among Public Affairs Professionals.

3. Nth Generation “Video Library” page

Nth Generation hosts a robust video library of customer testimonials, past speaking engagements and general education. A visitors who takes the time to watch any of these videos is deep in the consideration phase, which is why the second CTA is to get them in touch with an account representative.

Take Away

Calls to action are critical in creating a website that acts as a lead generator, but too often it’s an afterthought in the design process. Creating tailored CTAs based on visitor interests and position within the buying cycle will ensure these desired actions aren’t ignored and effectively convert your visitors into future clients.

You might have noticed the flurry of activity lately around deep learning. It’s an approach to data analysis centered around stacks of artificial neural networks that, for lack of a more succinct definition, can teach themselves to understand complex patterns and the many little features that comprise the data they’re on which they’re trained. It’s the talk of the town among media types, entrepreneurs and computer scientists not just because it sounds so cool, but mostly because it works.

We’ve covered many of its early applications already — recognizing what’s in pictures, who’s in pictures, how words are related in text and what people are saying. A lot of the research being done in universities, which then gets trained on massive amounts of web data inside places like Google, Microsoft and Facebook, is already making its way into consumer services and even commercial software near you. Google is using neural networks to understand and improve data center efficiency. Some believe deep learning could also be used to analyze time-series data for algorithmic trading models or better understand medical records.

Microsoft’s Skype Translate, a demo of which is below, is an example of applied deep learning.

Perhaps deep learning methods could even help answer the U.S. Secret Service’s request for a software package that can recognize sarcasm in social media posts. That capability, which was part of a broader request for social-media analysis software, was the subject of a fair amount of skepticism and downright derision this week for a variety of reasons. Some questioned the agency’s motives, others its sense of humor and others yet the feasibility of automatically detecting sarcasm.

However, Richard Socher, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate who specializes in applying deep learning models to sentiment analysis (he was lead author of this paper and helped launch a web service called etcML), thinks that given the right model and the right training data, sarcasm detection might be more possible than some think. He explained how via email:

“For example: If the algorithm knew that certain things are negative (from a training set) it could find sarcasm in “I love getting up early” or “Sure, I enjoy spending all day on my homework” because they have a stark contrast and a similar pattern (saying something positive about something negative). Other indicators and structures could be picked up by an algorithm as potential indicators like “sure, yea, totally” or patterns like “something positive followed by FML”. Models like recursive neural networks that have an understanding of word order could learn such patterns if they are trained on some such examples.”

The tweet below is an example of a stark contrast between positive and negative phrases.

Unread emails count just reached 20,000. I win! Or lose.—
Derrick Harris (@derrickharris) April 09, 2014

However, he added, other types of sarcasm are nearly impossible for computer to detect, or even many humans, absent deeper knowledge about the speaker. A statement such as “I love coding on the weekends” doesn’t include any inherently negative language and might well be true for many people.

When I spoke with an Australian researcher David Milne recently about an effort, called We Feel, to track the use of emotional words on Twitter, he noted that same concern with a separate project he’s working on to determine whether tweets about depression or suicide are legitimate or sarcastic. Because standard natural-language processing techniques won’t always pick up on sarcasm in language, Milne explained how his team tries to add context to questionable tweets by analyzing that users’ previous and subsequent tweets, as well as any replies and the users’ connections.

Socher suggested that another problem — especially for the Secret Service — might be in detecting outliers, because so few people actually follow through on dumb statements or even threats. It’s the same problem the FBI had when trying to discern patterns that signal someone might be an insider threat. When the majority of people don’t do something, it can be difficult even for machine learning algorithms to detect meaningful patterns among the few who do. So the FBI focuses on the behaviors of individual employees and looks for deviations from their individual baselines.

With more research and some more advanced models, though, Socher thinks it might also be possible to automate this type of assessment:

“I think eventually algorithms that incorporate a user “vector” or other kinds of user models may be able to distinguish sarcastic statements for very prolific users. One such indicator that could help would be how “out of the ordinary” a certain statement would be for a given user. But for this to work well, we would need a LOT of training data.”

But that’s also the beauty of deep learning at this moment in time where we have access to exponentially growing amounts of digital data and cheap, powerful processors. It’s not perfect, it’s not always easy and it’s certainly not the right tool for every job. Where it works, though, deep learning has proven to work remarkably well compared with previous approaches at solving some very challenging problems. And it’s pointing researchers in the right direction to solve others.

We could call it anything; it could be modeled after the interlocking joints in my laminate flooring rather than neurons in the brain. Yet as long as it keeps producing results, we’re going to see a lot more deep learning research, a lot more startups trying to capitalize on it, and a lot more press writing about the field that’s taking us beyond nebulous discussions about “big data” and “uncovering insights” and into discussions about actually putting intelligent systems to work for us.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Sebastian Kau.

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We’ve all grown up learning that “sharing is caring,” and when it comes to content marketing, it’s no different. Content curation isn’t just a great way to jump-start and maintain relationships with prospects and experts in your industry, it can also save you time and find new inspiration. There’s no question that publishing original content is the ideal way to start building a distinct voice for your brand’s personality. However, curating content can serve to supplement those efforts and solidify the identity that you’re working to create.

The list of benefits is endless, but there are a few key advantages which highlight why curation should be a fundamental part of your marketing strategy. It’s an excellent way to keep your finger on the pulse and stay up to date with industry news, forge connections with people in your sector, and reach out to potential relevant customers. It might take a short while to get used to, but once you’ve started integrating content curation into your daily list of tasks, it will quickly become a natural habit that you’ll find to be essential to your morning routines.

Here are 7 reasons why content curation should play a role in your marketing approach:

1. Take Some Pressure off Your Content Creation

Just because you’ve created an editorial content calendar, doesn’t mean it’s easy to stick to. Although it’s a great idea to determine, ahead of time, how many blog posts you should publish a week, there are often more urgent things that require your attention, and leave that goal wanting. Content creation is one way to overcome the pressure of churning out high-quality and valuale content on a daily basis, while helping you preserve some of your creative thinking for another week. This doesn’t mean that marketers should stop writing original content, or give up trying to reach the weekly quota, just that it’s a good way to supplement your content marketing activities.

The ideal approach is to set aside a block of time every morning, ideally between 30-60 minutes, to read through and curate the latest articles. One tired and true recommendation for media monitoring industry news and trends is Google Alerts. This is a free service which lets you define certain keywords, and receive e-mails with a full list of news and blog clips every time they are mentioned. These types of alerts can ensure you stay on track of brand mentions, competitors, news stories, and learn more about what’s happening in your industry. Regardless of the tool you use, devoting a short amount of time in the morning to going over the latest developments in your industry should be a crucial part of your to-do list and is the best way to always stay informed.

Once you’ve gone through your alerts, start narrowing it down to the specific items you’d like to share. The frequency of curation – and the content itself – should always be tailored to each social network. For example, sharing at least 5 (or more) times a day is acceptable on Twitter, but it’s probably ideal to share 1-2 times on your Facebook Page. Leveraging a social media management tool such as Oktopost, which has a built in content recommendation engine, can enable you to find and share content in minimal time, as well as track the actual performance of your curated articles.

2. Get Inspiration for Your Next Blog Post or Infographic

Speaking of the pressure involved in creating original content, coming up with fresh and interesting ideas every day is a challenging and exhausting task. Browsing through relevant, targeted content can help get your creative juices flowing and give your inspiration for your next blog post. Any time you read an article on a topic you find valuable or educational, bookmark it in a blog ideas folder or keep a running list, and refer back to it later. Once you reach a point where you’re out of ideas, you can look through the list you’ve compiled and chances are, something will jump out at you.

Just remember that in this context, the point of curation is not to copy articles, but to see what topics are being discussed most in your community, elaborate on certain arguments by providing your brand’s distinct perspective, or to pull relevant data or stats that you can later build on. Use the content you read as a guide to what people other marketers in your field are writing about. If possible, you can also check the social media share buttons in the article to see what kind of engagement the content has driven so far, and determine whether it successfully resonated with the audience.

If you’re constantly on the go, and don’t always have time to read everything in one sitting, Instapaper is a neat app that lets you save any article, video or other kind of content you encounter while browsing, and then read and manage all of the content on any device – even if you’re offline. Instapaper also lets you highlight text within the article, so you can refer specifically to the quote, statistic or idea that captured your attention – without having to reread the entire article.

3. Discover Potential Business Opportunities

As mentioned above, content curation doesn’t just supplement your content marketing strategy, it can also be leveraged to bring in new business. In this case, one recommended strategy is to identify the author of the article and do a bit of research on that person and the company they work for. Once you’ve read about the author, his or her position, and what the company does, try to figure out whether they could benefit from your product or service – and moreover, if they’re currently using a similar product offered by your competitors.

If the author at hand is in fact a qualified target, use a tool such as Rapportive to figure out their e-mail. More often than not, the author’s first name alone followed by the company’s domain will be correct, though you can always try out a few first and last name combinations, or even a short search on Google if the latter doesn’t work. When reaching out to writers, make sure to first tell them how valuable and engaging you found their content – and cite specific parts of the article you agreed with, enjoyed most, or could relate to.

Afterwards, provide a sentence or two on why you think their company can benefit from your offering, and the key unique value propositions. At the end of the e-mail, don’t forget to include a simple call-to-action, such as request to schedule a call in the near future, demo or to send more information if they’re interested.

Identifying e-mails and reaching out can be time consuming, so build a template in advance that you can easily modify to fit the specific author; don’t forget to change the contact’s name, the article you’re referring to and which parts resonated with you, as well as the specific product or service you offer that best fits the company’s needs.

4. Connect to and Interview Thought Leaders

Following the logic of the last benefit, apart from directly pinpointing new business opportunities, content curation can also help you connect with thought leaders. The most effective (and flattering way) to reach out is to schedule an interview. After reading an article, do a quick Google search to find out how well known the individual is in your industry. See if he or she has previously been a guest lecturer, how many Twitter followers they have, if they’re ever published a book or manage a successful blog, and what’s being said about them online. If you determine that the person is indeed knowledgeable on the subject matter, the next step is to e-mail them about a potential interview.

In the e-mail, refer to the original article where you found them, and explain why an interview with them would be a great addition to your company’s blog. For example, you can show them similar interviews you’ve conducted with other thought leaders in your sector or original blog posts that relate to their field of expertise. Once they accept your offer, come up with a list of about 10-12 questions in advanced, based on your research of their work and company, and ask if they’d like to review them before the interview.

Record the interview so that you can turn it into a Podcast or SoundCloud file, or transcribe it and turn it into a blog post. In addition, once you form a relationship with the individual, you can ask if they’d like to learn more about your platform, become an affiliate, guest post for your blog, or host a webinar with you in the future. This is just one example of how many amazing connections you can build from investing just 30 minutes a day in curating content!

5. Stay on Top of Industry News and Trends

No matter what industry you’re part of, staying in the know should always be your top priority. Whether there’s a new trend is emerging, your top competitor just launched a new feature, or a groundbreaking merger recently occurred – you should know. Beyond reading the articles for your own knowledge and to show clients how well-informed you are, always share these types of articles with your social audience. This will build your credibility as a source for breaking news in the industry and prove to clients that your interests lie beyond solely promoting your own content, and actually making sure they are aware of the latest updates and developments as well.

One helpful tool for this is Feedly, a free online service which basically aggregates news clips from all of your top media sites in one place. With Feedly, you can either choose a particular sector, such as business, marketing or fashion, and then add the top recommended sources for each one, or manually add sites your frequent to your reading list. When you open the site, you can easily browse articles from all of the different publications – in the same location, and even view recommendations for other sources based on the ones you’ve already added.

6. Show Love to Thy Neighbor

Do you have brand ambassadors, power users or companies that you’re on great terms with? Give them a virtual pat on the back by sharing content they generate (as long as it’s relevant) with their social audience from time to time. This is a great way to show them that you’re interested in what the company has to say, and think it’s valuable enough to also share with your community. The easiest way to curate content from people you collaborate with is to track their company blog, or follow them on Twitter and simply retweet their content (and make sure to change the message that goes along with it).

If you’re tweeting a piece of their content that you found online, remember to tag the specific person or company to bring their attention to your good deed. This is an excellent strategy for building positive relations with others and hopefully will motivate them to share your content as well. Reciprocation is the key to growing favorable ties, both online and offline, and curating content published by a customer or other partner is a good way to show you care about their success and helping them expand.

7. Establish Your Brand’s Credibility

When you start developing a curation strategy, and people like the content that you’re sharing, they’ll come to regard you as a credible source they can rely on for great information. Beyond sharing your own content – which should always contain valuable and actionable advice – try to share articles that you know can help your audience improve at their specific jobs, and that they’ll remember you for.

Eventually, people will turn to you and actively see what you’re sharing, because they know that you carefully read the content before posting, and make sure to determine that the article is worth the time it takes to read it.

When Selling Becomes Urgent is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

Selling is very much the same as diet and exercise. If you haven’t eaten right or exercised for a long time believing that your health was fine, you usually decide to change because you are staring down the barrel of a loaded gun. We tend to find religion when times get really tough and our very existence is threatened.

If you haven’t built a list of real targets, what I call dream clients, over a period of time, it takes time and effort to do the work to identify your targets and the right contacts.

If you haven’t nurtured your dream clients over a long period of time, you are still unknown. It takes time to be known and to be known as a value creator.

If you don’t have a solid pipeline of opportunities that’s three to four times the number you need to make, you have to invest time, usually more time than you think, building a solid funnel of opportunities.

But none of this is to suggest it’s too late to do anything. The best time to start was 18 months ago. But the second best time to start is now.

Get your entire team focused on building a list of target accounts. Start by going back over all of the customers you’ve had and reengage with them. Then make a list of all of the prospects you should be doing business with because you can create massive value for them. The fastest way to help yourself is to help others.

You aren’t going to have the time you need to nurture your dream clients. You are going to have to pick up the phone directly and schedule appointments. There are no “ifs, ands, or buts” here. This is life or death, and staring at the phone without picking it up is staring at your impending doom.

The only way to build opportunities is to get in front of your dream clients and have conversations that result in commitments. Commitments to explore working on challenges and opportunities together. Commitments to share ideas. And, ultimately, commitments to work together.

If you need sales urgently, the answer is to respond with an even greater sense of urgency. Nothing less will do.

The value that comes from connecting your thermostat to the internet isn’t that you can now control it from your smartphone, or that it’s a theoretical home for new ads. The value is that you suddenly have access to cheap information about the temperature of your home, and by collating other data points or simple extrapolation techniques, you also have access to detailed information about what is happening in the home.

This can be cool. It can be creepy. And it can be convenient. But as is always the case when we encounter technological shifts, the internet of things is really a tool. And like a hammer is used to expand the amount of force generated over a small area (allow you to hit something really hard), the internet of things is a tool is for cheaply delivering and gathering information.

What can a connected GE jet engine tell you?

So sensors on your car should be sending information back to the manufacturer about features you use, and your mechanic about how you are driving and wear and tear on the car’s parts. The manufacturer could then change the car’s design, as Ford has done, while your mechanic can offer you a preventative maintenance contract. Shared over a wider network, you can offer real-time traffic information or even improve weather forecasts by acting as a traveling weather station. But you might also open yourself up to tracking by the government or unscrupulous data-miners seeking to help advertisers establish ever-more-granular demographic profiles.

So if we view this as a tool, then let’s stop talking about the internet of things as this monolithic system that will make homes smarter, businesses leaner, and so on. We need to break this tool down and figure out what information we want and where we can get it. We also need to think about what it can unleash on the world and how to set safeguards.

Data can change your business or your life

Let’s start having these conversations. We’ve begun them on the site and via our podcasts, and on October 21 and 22 we’re hosting Structure Connect in San Francisco, a conference that will be devoted to discussing how the internet of things affects our home lives, transforms our businesses and can change our infrastructure. What does cheap access to data mean for these places?

Alex Hawkinson, CEO and Co-Founder, SmartThings Mobilize 2013 (c) 2013 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

Alex Hawkinson, the CEO of SmartThings and Bob Hagerty, the CEO of iControl will talk not just about what one will do with the smart home, but how they plan to build businesses via connected devices. There’s also the overlap between the consumer and the business worlds, be it where the home meets the smart grid or where a patient meets the hospital; that’s a topic Cedric Hutchings, co-founder and CEO of personal health tracking company Withings, will cover.

We’ll have executives from hospitals, retails stores and others businesses talking about how real-time access to information has changed everything from how they scheduled workers to how much they charge for a product. Michael Simon the CEO of LogMeIn (which owns Xively) can share how this access to data is turning former software vendors into service providers and how industrial access to information changes the products a company can sell.

But wait, there’s more

It’s all well and good to think about what cheap access to data can mean, but we’re also experiencing a revolution in how we get access to that data and what people can do with it once it’s out there. An entire generation of startups built on the back of the maker movement and crowdfunding sites have formed to build the products that will connect us in our homes and workplaces.

Workers produce desktop printers that can create small plastic prototypes.

But it’s a tough journey from developing the idea for a connected baseball to getting the product in stores around the world. That’s where we’re creating a series called How We Built It, where a selection of entrepreneurs who have built physical products will share what they’ve learned about prototypes, intellectual property, Chinese manufacturing partners and even the profiles of consumers in each big box store.

We also want to support the up-and-coming products that entrepreneurs are building, which is why we’re creating the Garage@Connect, a program that will showcase 30 new connected devices, sensors or other enabling technology for the internet of things. Each day we’ll show 15 new devices. Entrepreneurs must apply for the program and will receive one ticket and a tabletop for one day of the event. https://gigaom.wufoo.com/forms/garageconnect-application/

Structure Connect is going to be a big show, but here at Gigaom we’ve been producing big shows for years. I’m excited to bring together an amazing list of speakers to cover how connecting everything will actually change the world — from the cool to the creepy. There will be big ideas, but also case studies so attendees can come back from San Francisco understanding how they can start taking the first steps to change their business or just keep better tabs on their home.

Join us.

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Content marketing can be an effective tactic for lead generation as customers look to your brand as an authority in the marketplace delivering relevant information that is useful to their needs.

In today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog post, we’ll look at two tips on transforming your content marketing strategy from Shelby Britton, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Adobe, who presented at MarketingSherpa Lead Gen Summit 2013.

Although Shelby’s example was rooted in Adobe’s webinars, the principles are transferable to your own unique situation.

Tip #1. Develop a highly focused, targeted strategy

Shelby explained that one of her first challenges in revamping Adobe’s content marketing was rooted in moving from “one-off” webinars to a strategy that focused on specific targeted verticals.

Making the move to targeting specific verticals with content also helped Shelby’s efforts to determine where prospects were in the purchase cycle.

“We decided that we could use content to start qualifying these leads,” Shelby explained.

Tip #2. Move from generic to relevant messaging

Shelby also explained making a move from generic messaging to content that focused on relevance for the audience was also vital to the success of Adobe’s content transformation.

“We started talking about the specific solutions and how we could add value to them,” Shelby said.

To learn more about Shelby’s content marketing strategy to aid Adobe’s lead gen efforts, you can watch the on-demand replay of her MarketingSherpa Summit session, “Lead Qualification: How demographics, email content and behavior helped Adobe boost conversions 500%.”

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B2B Content Marketing: Find the bigger story [More from the blogs]

Content Marketing: Consulting firm nets 388% more leads with 4-step strategy [Case study]

Content Marketing: 3 tips for how to get started [More from the blogs]

Webinar Marketing: Adobe revamps strategy and achieves a 500% lift in conversion to sale [Case study]

Consumers are always be intrigued with businesses that understand how to use an image to stand out from the crowd.

Nike has been a great example of how to sell a product without selling. You won’t see ads chock full of text that describes how the product makes you faster or more competitive.

They understand image trumps everything, especially in today’s visual age.

Why this Video Rocks

• The voice over starts out talking about “greatness” – pulling you in. It’s compelling.
• The imagery in the video is not a super model or superstar. It’s a young boy fighting to keep his weight under control. It’s a real image that resonates with the viewer.
• The road and landscape around it are reflect a less is more approach with the visuals.
• At under one minute, the video is compelling enough to get your attention but not long and boring.
• Brand placement for Nike at the end is minimal and doesn’t get in the way of the story being told via the video.
• Nike recognizes the power of the imagery: there is no obtrusive text embedded in the video.

Porsche is another astute brand that understands how to sell with an image.

This print ad stands out – it’s a bit in your face, conveys some humor, fires a shot across the bow of their direct competitors and stands out from the crowd.

What Visual Rules for Brand Marketers are Inherent in these Ads

• They both convey a sense of brand confidence, driving credibility and authority.
• As David Ogilvy famously conveyed and advised: the ad copy drives 80% of the interest – both ads have wonderful compelling headlines.
• There’s a real sense of humor in each – it drives the visitor into and engages them with the inherent “story” in the ad.
• In the age of “infobesity” you have 7-10 seconds to capture the attention of your consumer - both of these ads grab the visitor quickly.
• Nike and Porsche took a certain amount of risk – Nike’s minimalist visuals aren’t sexy and attractive (the landscape is barren) and Porsche went with a black and white ad. #lessismore
• Pixar’s 22 rules for storytelling success are implicit in both of these visuals, especially for the Nike ad, which has a compelling message and story inherent in the visual.
• A consumer is involved with both of these ads almost immediately – they draw the viewer into the ad.
• Both brands recognize the human brain processes images 60K times faster than text and went for an image that has high impact.

The principal of continuity states consumers retain information much better when text and images are overlaid.

Versus

The second image has so much more visual storytelling impact: it’s dynamic and visually appealing to the viewer.

The principal of coherence states consumers can only take in small amounts of information at a time. And this number is constantly diminishing, driven in part by constant smartphone usage (although there are other culprits).

The second image distills the information down so the key facts (“5M kids watch Channel One News”) can be easily digested and understood.

The principal of signaling underscores the importance of connecting the dots in your visual information: A has to connect with B to ensure the visitor understands C. If the audience doesn’t get the connection from A to B then C is not going to understood with your message implicit in your image.

Seven Key Metrics for using Visuals to Drive Brand Engagement

1. Don’t be afraid to experiment with visual communications - creativity drives engagement with your brand. Start slow and measure back end conversions with your imagery to understand what’s working and what isn’t.
2. Map your images and content to the platform by creating discrete types of images that resonate with users on a social network. Personalize your visual content and don’t “broadcast” untargeted content.
3. When/where possible share useful content that addresses the needs of your target market. Use visuals to capture the attention of a visitor and then couple this with text that’s linked out to other sources and/or informs and engages.
4. For visual presentations don’t forget the “rule of three” – Steve Jobs was a master of distilling complex topics down into three.
5. Consumers like to see the human side of your brand. Scott Monty (Ford’s VP of Marketing) has been an advocate of “human to human” communications to drive brand engagement.
6. Tell a story when/where you can - video is of course a great way to use long form content to engage your audience.
7. Chunk your visual content up and reuse it to leverage development costs. The average consumer sees 3-5K visual messages per day and Google has indexed over 50B pages. Repetitive marketing can be a good thing.

Your Business is Under Attack from an Encroaching Digital Landscape – Visual Helps you to Stand Out

• Data is Exploding at an unprecedented rate: projected to be ten times greater the next six years, with 44 trillion gigabytes shared by 2020.
• Content sharing is now platform agnostic: it’s anywhere and everything.
• Marketing budgets are unable to keep up with the growth in platforms.
• Consumers demographics are shifting rapidly.
• Savvy bigger brands are leveraging “social influence” to reach high value customers or influencers; making it more difficult for smaller brands to get heard via the social landscape.
• Businesses are aggressively deploying a product marketing strategy that encompasses no frills brands along side their traditional branded products: getting real world and “mental” shelf space is challenging.
• Native advertising is blurring the lines of how consumers and professionals engage with content.
• All brands are by necessity of changes in the digital landscape forced to become publishers on some scale.
• Technological expertise is overwhelming the core competency of management teams and it’s increasingly harder to find the right staff with an associated rise in what you have to pay them.

The tool we use for creating images that all of our designers love is Canva – it’s easy to use, powerful and turns any content marketer into a designer. This collection of image search tools by Bran Pickings (Maria Popova) is stellar and well researched.

Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Porsche — be warned. With 650 horsepower, Chevrolet is coming after you with its most powerful Corvette ever, the Z06. The Z06's 650 ponies will come courtesy of company's latest supercharged LT4 V-8, which will also produce a brisk 650 lb/ft of torque. 

The Z06's new motor will put it in position to take down many of its more vaunted and pricey European competitors. According to Chevy, the LT4 puts out 90 more horsepower and 134 more lb/ft of torque than Porsche's 911 Turbo S ,and 141 lb/ft more torque than Ferrari's $316,000 F12 Berlinetta.

“The LT4 Small Block sets a new benchmark for power and torque at GM,” said Steve Kiefer, vice president, GM Powertrain Engineering. “The engine also puts the new Corvette Z06 on par with the most powerful supercars offered in America, while delivering performance with impeccable manners that make it suitable for daily driving.”

While most supercar makers have turned to the techno wizardry of twin clutch gearboxes, Corvette Z06 buyers will have their choice between a traditional seven-speed manual and an eight-speed auto-box. Corvette claims that its old-school transmissions will be able to match the performance of even the world's best dual-clutch units. 

General Motors has not released official pricing information for the Z06, which is set to hit showrooms later this year. Automobile Magazine estimates the price to fall just under $80,000, which would put it in line with the previous generation Z06, which sold for $76,000.

Here is a look at how the 2015 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 stacks up against the most exotic supercars sold in the U.S..

SEE ALSO: Here's Why Chrysler's Sales Boom May Not Last

Join the conversation about this story »

Creating a business page on Facebook is a 15-minute job. The real work begins after that. How to launch the page, what to talk about and how to reach out to fans of real value? Getting fans is easy and pretty cheap. (Remember the Facebook fraud exposed video that ripped apart the entire FB advertising process!)

However getting fans who are real, genuine and interested in the business page is not that difficult. It simply needs a focussed approach. If you have a massive budget for social media and ready to spend blindly, you actually would have not landed here! If you really care about creating a community for your business and engaging with real users, start using Power Editor and follow these 6 ways to ensure you reach out to the best-

1. Identify the age, gender, location and languages of your audience. This is the first stepping stone. There is no use making a disorganised targetting to the 100 million Indians on Facebook. The smart thing is to identify just the exact chunk who fits into your audience profile.

2. Gather a character sketch from your marketing team and identify his/her specific interests and behavioral patterns and select in targetting options. e.g. for DI, we would look at an audience with specific interests and internet behaviour, like this:

3. Create a custom audience - This is by far the most effective targetting feature and the most expensive too. It follows a simple re-marketing method. You have walk-in customers to your store. You have subscribers to your newsletter. You have online buyers getting confirmation to their emails. Basically, in any business, you have a valid database of your customers. This email database is fed onto the Facebook ad manager dashboard as ‘Custom Audience’. Facebook will then track customers, by tracking Facebook profiles attached to those email IDs.

Once we have the final list of Facebook profiles, this Custom Audience is your audience for posts, activity or ads. Do note that, here the spend model modifies from CPM to CPC and chances are that cost per click by a Custom Audience will be 8-10 times more expensive. But it is worth the cost! Because you have a clear customer following and engaging with you on Facebook.

4. Create a look-alike audience – This feature is a beautiful extension of the Custom Audience feature. As the name suggests, it is a look-alike database similar to our Custom Audience, which is auto-built by Facebook. The parameters to create this look-alike audience is similarity in profile, demographics, interests, and behavorial patterns as the Custom Audience.

The advantage of a look-alike is a much wider database that Facebook generates using precise interests…a database that is exhaustive to create manually…and a database that is very viable as it’s most likely to engage with your brand messages.

5. Target friends of fans – This is another effective method, based on the age-old strategy of word of mouth marketing and it works wonders even in today’s social world. A brand puts out an ad, not interesting. But your friend likes this page, you suddenly develop an interest! The tendency to click, like, act upon a certain post is higher when there is a hint of a friend recommendation.

Also, like a look-alike audience, since these are friends of existing fans of the page, if your fan has a specific interest set, his friends would also fall in a similar category, hence more likely to fall in your target bracket. (Please note, this option is available on boosting your posts from your page.

6. Right time & right demographic – Location is one of the most effective, yet the most ignored parameter of targetting. On social, most recent posts get most engagement. As time passes, the post moves down in the news feed and engagement is sure to dip.

In case you have a global or an overseas audience, your posts going out at Indian times is a wasted effort. As your real audience is asleep in their time zones. When dealing with an international target location, it is very important to time your posts, so it is published at the busiest hour in that location. The information of most active engagement hours is available in insights.

A bonus tip – A little secret, a tactic I’m sharing, to ensure that your competitor’s audience is definitely watching your brand as well. Here’s how you you can tap the audience that has its direct interest in competition. When selecting the interest of your target audience, enter the names of your competitor pages and all the users who are fans of those brands will see your posts.

Though the above ways will aid in bringing you closer to your audience socially, the real key is to know who your audience is! What is his/her internet behaviour and what do they want to see or do or engage with, when on Facebook. These words from Howard Gossage, said in the early era of American advertising, still hold true!

“People don’t notice ads, they notice what interests them and sometimes it’s an ad.” -Howard Gossage

I have always thought that there are two types of people in this world: salespeople and consumers. When conjuring up the image of a typical member of a sales team, I picture a relentless presenter who is able to convince others of the value behind a particular product or service.

Some could make the argument that we’re all salespeople at heart. Whether you’re selling goods or yourself (to potential employers, schools, mates, etc.), it’s essentially the same.

However, the key difference is that innate salespeople thrive on this process and actually enjoy it.

Regardless of why certain people enjoy and are better at selling, we can all agree on one thing: they are the bread and butter of your company. So what are some of the ways that you, as a marketer, can better support the efforts of the sales team?

Let’s take a look at five things your sales team wishes you knew:

1) Salespeople are investigators

A lot of the time, the sales team spends their efforts on connecting with the right decision makers at the right time. This means researching for the key stakeholder and how to get in front of them.

It may be easy to convince someone of the value behind your product when they have no purchasing power but the real challenge is persuading the person who will ultimately sign on the dotted line.

As a marketer, you can help by ensuring that you’re thinking of this persona throughout the entire content and campaign creation process so as to target that very person.

As a marketer, you can help by ensuring that you’re thinking of this persona throughout the entire content and campaign creation process so as to target that very person.

2) Stories are not as effective as measurable ROI

Yes, prospects who are evaluating whether or not to purchase your product or service love to hear current success stories. However, stories are not as meaningful as measurable ROI figures. Clients want to know “If I’m going to invest X amount dollars, how much can I expect in return?”

By incorporating these into current customer successes, prospects are much more likely to present the case to their superiors as well as evaluate your product seriously.When producing marketing collateral, make sure you include hard numbers to catch the eye of that target decision maker.

3) Buyers care about more than just the product

At the end of the day, consumers want to buy from someone and from a company that they can trust. If your product/service is neck to neck with a competitor’s, the deciding factor will be whether the buyer feels like they can rely on you.

This is the marketer’s job—to create the sense of community and consistency that a shopper looks for and it starts with your brand. Think of strategies on how to associate your brand with those traits and take the onus off the sales team to have to sell that in addition to the actual product.

As Patricia Fripp says, “It is not your customer’s job to remember you. It is your obligation and responsibility to make sure they don’t have the chance to forget you.”

This is the marketer’s job—to create the sense of community and consistency that a shopper looks for and it starts with your brand.

4) Consumers know when they are being sold to—and don’t like it

Why is most of the web traffic garnered through organic search and not paid? Why do 84% of people leave websites that have intrusive or irrelevant ads and 86% of people skip TV ads? Consumers can tell when they are being sold to and resist.

Your sales team knows this better than anyone and that is why they have mastered the skill of selling without seeming to. Again, it is our responsibility as marketers to generate informative content, not to sell but to educate buyers on why they need to purchase your product. At Conductor, we call that Web Presence Management.

It is our responsibility as marketers to generate informative content, not to sell but to educate buyers on why they need to purchase your product.

5) The sales team wishes you’d stay up to date

”Who are some of your competitors?” “Why should I go with you guys and not Competitor A?” “Have you heard about XYZ in the industry, and what is your organization’s take on this?”

These are all objections that salespeople are accustomed to hearing and train for. Ultimately, shoppers want to know that they are buying the newest and most cutting-edge product they can and it is the job of the sales team to convince them.

You can support them by staying up to date on competitors and their actions. Additionally, keeping an eye out for up and coming trends in your industry and evaluating if those align with your business and how to incorporate them. These will be signposts to potential buyers that they are in good hands with knowledgeable experts.

When all is said and done, sales is the engine that keeps the company car operating and moving. They are the representatives for your organization and are the direct ears to your target audience. It’s about time that we as marketers start listening and steer the wheel.

You have a high-dollar product or service that you want to get into the hands of executive-level buyers or high-level decision-makers. This audience doesn’t have time to sift through your website or sit through sales pitches. They want solutions. They want facts. They want answers.

How do you market or sell to buyers who don’t have time for sales pitches?

You produce a white paper.

What is a white paper?

A white paper is a special report that explains why your offering is the perfect solution to your customer’s problem. It doesn’t sell. It educates and persuades. It’s long enough to give a lot of important details, but not long enough to bore the reader. It’s well-written and designed so the customer can print it out and present it in meetings or hand it to the boss who is going to sign-off on the expenditure.

How does a white paper help you make sales?

A white paper is easier for busy business-people to palate because it doesn’t overtly sell. Rather, a white paper gives the customer the information they need to make an informed decision or present your offering to their peers or supervisor.

It shows the customer you understand their problem, then it answers questions and addresses the objections with facts and case studies.

Oh, and there’s a small, unobtrusive call-to-action at the end so the reader knows exactly how to buy what you’re offering.

The Sales Tool That Isn’t Obnoxious

Face it. Most sales-focused content and marketing tools — sales pages, phone consultations, brochures — reek of sales. No matter how genuine you are in your marketing, no matter how hard you work to truly build a relationship with your customers, it’s always obvious you’re trying to sell something.

A white paper handles sales a bit differently. It’s a tool that the buyer can use. It’s pure information. It educates and it persuades through facts.

In fact, many salespeople are given stacks of white papers to take to meetings and trade shows, or given links to downloadable PDFs to send to potential customers, and they don’t even know that the information they are giving out is called a white paper! These pieces of content are unobtrusive but very powerful.

Learning is essential in any business. This is especially true for early stage companies that are still defining themselves. In addition to making customers happier and more successful, your Customer Success team can serve a critical role by helping your organization clarify its Value Proposition. A six-step process shows you how.

The Role of Learning

Initial assumptions made when launching a business are frequently off the mark. Founders adjust their product offerings, sales and marketing strategies, and sometimes even business models in order to pursue opportunities that materialized only after the company was chasing something else. Is this a sign of failure? Not necessarily. Research suggests that start-ups that “pivot” (make a dramatic course correction) once or twice raise 2.5 times more money, have 3.6 times better user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely than companies that pivot more than twice or not at all.[i] In the long run, start-ups are more successful when they learn and adapt quickly.

Learning is so essential to entrepreneurship that investors now expect founders to use iterative methods such as Lean Startup to thoroughly validate markets, products, and business models before raising capital. It’s a modern-day, continuous learning version of the ancient Scientific Method. Similarly, founders also employ quick-and-dirty tools like the business model canvas to articulate Value Propositions and test their hypotheses by experimenting, observing outcomes, and refining their offerings. Only after the enterprise demonstrates suitable market traction do savvy investors seriously consider funding them.

Discovery doesn’t stop once a company sets its path and produces sustainable cash flow. In the early stages, their chosen Value Propositions remain in a state of flux. Often the first customers are the “early adopters,” those willing to try leading edge ideas, but as more mainstream buyers shop the product, customer decisions become less risky and more pragmatic. Start-ups typically realize that their initial segmentation was too broad. For example, if a company starts by targeting “financial institutions,” they may come to realize that “alternative fund managers” are where the real opportunity lies. Competitors have a say in Value Proposition refinement, too. Rivals can emerge at any time, and marketers must re-frame their messaging to retain their competitive distinctiveness.

Your Customer Success organization is in a unique position to facilitate this organizational learning and refinement. Unlike the Sales team, which is intent on closing the next deal, or Customer Service, which focuses on closing the next trouble ticket, your Customer Success team can discover more about customers while onboarding and building relationships with them. Armed with a consistent process and robust data from a growing volume of customers, Customer Success can aggregate and analyze critical observations, enabling you to share powerful market insights with your executives.

Six Steps to Clarifying the Value Proposition

1. Document your Value Proposition. Spend some time with your customer acquisition leaders in sales and marketing, and make sure you capture a current, definitive description of the following:
   1. Target Customers—who exactly the company is going after by industry, business situation, problem set, type of user, individual, etc. The company will tend to do business with whoever will buy, but the more customers fit the ideal profile, the more benefit they will receive, the more loyal they will be, and the more efficient and profitable the business will be in serving them. Like an archery target, define labels for no more than four sets of customers (“bulls eye,” “middle ring,” “outer ring,” and “off-target”) allowing you to rank customer groups by relevance.
   2. Specific, measurable end-result benefits you offer—these are the explicit promises your company makes to customers during the sales cycle, such as exactly how much faster, easier, or less expensive things will be with your solution.
2. Classify your customer base. Review the target customer designations (“bulls eye,” “middle ring,” etc.) with your team and assign each customer to the appropriate category. Add this field to your database. In some cases, you may not have enough information, so devise a strategy to collect the missing data by reaching out to customers directly with calls or surveys. To make sure you do this consistently in the future, add a single question during the online sign-up process: “Which statement best describes you?” allowing customers to select just one answer. Ideally, your marketing team will then use these designations for tailored campaigns.
3. Draft a set of questions to include in your relationship-building process. Whether your customer volume allows your team to contact every customer or just a sampling, craft questions that validate your Value Proposition and ensure your company is delivering on its promises. Decide when and where to properly gather the information during the customer lifecycle. These retrospective inquiries should be included in natural conversation, and customers will appreciate your asking. Make sure questions are appropriate for your target customer designations and are simple and open-ended:
   1. What problem does our product solve for you?
   2. Why is this important?
   3. How exactly does it meet your need?
   4. Why did you buy from us in particular?
   5. How has using our product improved things for you?
   6. What can we do better for you?
4. Record the data. Add these open text fields to your database and put good management practices in place to ensure your team members incorporate this activity into their daily routine. Your management system should include metrics, training, coaching, and job aids to help set and reinforce the new habit.
5. Review and analyze the results every quarter. Along with your team members, look closely at the data, searching for similar comments that appear frequently. Pay particular attention to shifts or trending in relative percentages of target customers, usage, needs or benefits with new customers coming on. Note how segmentation correlates with usage, satisfaction, churn, upselling and cross-selling behaviors. Summarize your data with correct statistical analysis and provide commentary for your findings.
6. Refine the Value Proposition. Present your findings to your executive team and conduct an exercise to edit your Value Proposition (see step 1) using your CSM team’s analysis. This session will be incredibly insightful and productive, leading to new segmentation, clearer messaging, and breakthrough products and services.

Your Customer Success team serves as a critical “listening post,” helping your company continuously learn and understand how well it meets the promises made to customers. Your insights can add clarity and focus to your Value Proposition, spur innovation, and promote sustainable growth and success for years to come.

Do you have any tips or advice on refining your value proposition?

[i] Marmer, M., Herrmann, B. L., Dogrultan, E., Berman, R. (2011). Startup Genome Report Extra on Premature Scaling: A deep dive into why most high growth startups fail

Everybody knows it, marketing is changing quickly and you need to stay up to date on the latest and best strategies out there. Content marketing is trending right now as people just tend to ignore traditional marketing and advertising. The idea of the subtle branding that is implemented in a blog post (or any other form of content) is working quite well right now, but it’s also just a question of time before people will start ignoring this type of content.

As a millennial, I’ve become very good at ignoring all the messages thrown at me continuously. I will look at a banner ad but I will never engage with it, really never, stop spending money on it. Marketers still often engage with the wrong people and this is where I personally use carefully selected influencers to test and amplify my messages.

Below I will be giving some basic tips to kick of an effective strategy but let’s talk about the definition of influencer marketing first.

Influencer marketing, (also Influence Marketing) is a form of marketing in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers. (Wikipedia)

Yes this is a definition from Wikipedia but it’s accurate, you pretty much want to engage with the key people that will affect your target group’s buying behaviour. Here are some basic tips to get you started:

Set your objectives.

Start thinking about what you want to achieve. Are you looking for ROI, brand awareness, increase in market share or maybe lead generation? Your strategy should be adapted to the outcome you want to achieve. Be sure to align this with achievable metrics, you want to have some key numbers to show the effectiveness of your influencer marketing strategy.

Identify your influencers.

Who do I want to target? Be sure to verify that your content and outreach will engage the influencers important to your industry. Influence is always contextual, never forget that.

So how do I know that I’m talking to the right influencers? Well, this is where you come in, you know your business best so you’ll be in the best position to judge the quality and relevance of your influencers. Look further than Klout scores and focus on more mature social data. Marketers tend to focus on the most influential people when reaching out but don’t forget the less influential, they’re more numerous and often easier to engage with.

Take your time with this step as identifying the right influencers is going to define the success of your influencer marketing campaign.

If you’re struggling there are a few influencer identification rankings established on Onalytica’s Blog to help you get started on topics such as content marketing, Internet of Things and more.

Plan your engagement.

Set up a plan for upcoming engagement opportunities. Define your tone of voice, the type of content used and your channels. Some different ways of engaging are: social media (big surprise), content co-creation, hangouts, interviews, quotes (just ask for one for your next blog post for example) and be sure to think offline also. A lot of influencers are speakers or writers and attend different events, be sure to engage with them face to face if you have the chance.

If you plan your engagement with high quality content it’s all about the way you digitally amplify to maximise its reach (with the help of your influencers for starters). Don’t hesitate to repackage your content to extend its lifecycle; an infographic can for example easily be converted in a couple of slides or a long form blog post. Be creative.

Listen up.

Be sure to monitor what your influencers are saying to be on top of engagement and influencing opportunities. After listening a while be sure to connect with the right influencers, with adapted engagement and correct timing.

Engage & scale.

Yet again you are a professional in your market and you know your market. Starting with influencer marketing is a lot of trial and error in the beginning but you can quickly pick up on best practices on the ways of influencing specific people in specific markets.

Be sure to use technology wisely to scale your influencing activities and increase the overall impact of your activities.

Here are a few final tips to get you started:

-          Engage with influencers one at a time

-          Use the right tools and channels for each job

-          Be sure to influence regularly

-          Measure you activity

These tips are more my own take on how to approach influencer marketing from my own experience. Influencer marketing is becoming powerful and your brand should definitely consider implementing influencer marketing to boost your marketing strategy.

The buying process has gotten messy for B2B marketers. This easy access to information means that engagement one second can turn into disinterest in the next. Every new channel puts a hole in your funnel. (Although I’ve never liked the funnel construct, it’s appropriate for making the point.)

Marketers who don’t integrate new channels into their content marketing strategy will find they have a very leaky funnel. I’m not talking about using them, I’m talking about considering how they all work together.

If you want to plug the holes, it’s time to consider:

Consistency of Story

Given that only 32% of enterprise B2B marketers consider their content marketing effective, they need to pay attention to what they’re doing with the 17 tactics they use, on average. Forty-one percent are creating more content than they did last year but the question remains as to what it is and why they’re creating it?

Many of them don’t have a documented plan which leaves me to wonder how they manage it all. But I’d wager that this is an indication of why consistency across channels is lacking. If you’re relying on memory or hoping that everyone is publishing to the idea of the plan, good luck.

The problem I see is that in lieu of a strategy, marketers use different channels for different things. One example I’ve seen a lot is a really well done blog and a Facebook page that’s about the company’s favorite sports team and silly contests. If you’re a buyer and you encounter a really thought-provoking blog post and then click through to the silly Facebook page, what are you left thinking?

The other is a conflict of personas. You may have a blog focused on IT professionals and a LinkedIn Group for line of business. But somehow there are cross links that make no sense but were done for SEO purposes. I’ve seen horrendous crimes done to content in the name of SEO. This can also happen with hyperlinks on phrases that link to product pages on the website with no context. Who do you think you’re fooling? I just read a buyer research study that found buyers are hesitant to click on links when they don’t know where they’ll go. Why do you think this is?

Marketers need to think about the impression made by all the channels in use where prospects and customers may encounter their company. What will the overall impression be if they run into your company on the channels you publish in most? When’s the last time you looked at it from the outside, from this perspective?

Depth of Relevance

I was reviewing content for a potential project the other day. The content was solid, focused on industry trends that mattered to their prospects, but it felt off. It took me a bit to put my finger on it, but I finally figured it out. The company had taken the idea of journalism to an extreme. They were trying to be so unbiased that their content was dry, it was like straight reporting and it was stiff because they weren’t actually taking a stand or speaking directly to anyone.

The company is actually really interesting and has SMEs galore that are willing to contribute content. But they don’t know how to talk to their prospects with any tone, voice or personality. If you stripped away the company brand, the reader would think the content was provided by an association or news publisher. And that’s not the lasting impression you want to leave.

To get to depth of relevance you not only need to know your buyers intimately, but your brand’s personality. Instead of brand guidelines, why not create a brand persona that can help your company become more relevant in information, as well as in style?

Formats Don’t Matter More than Information

One of the first things I hear in a lot of content conversations is about the type of content the marketing team wants to create. We need a white paper or an eBook or an infographic, etc. This is the wrong place to start.

Start with the idea. What topic and for whom? What will they get from it? What do you want to accomplish? How will it work within your storyline?

These are the questions to answer. Then you can define a suite of content to develop around the idea complete with a distribution plan and how you’ll connect the dots across channels. Remember that the expectations in channels also vary. Instead of one content asset, start thinking in terms of content hubs.

If you don’t want to lose your audience, you need to move format to the end of the list. It’s not the most important element. The information is.

Social Does Not Mean Broadcast

I think we’ve forgotten how to actually “be” social. There’s a big difference between broadcasting and engaging. The lazy way out is to post title and link…repeatedly. Or to post title and link when channels including LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ allow you to add much more narrative. Yet, we tend to treat every social channel with the brevity required by Twitter. Why?

What a missed opportunity. Although this would also mean we’d need to think about how to be meaningful – and who has time for that?

The Point

The point is that marketers are putting a lot of investment into channels they don’t own, but they’re not applying the effort to make them pay off. Buyers have a choice. It’s often represented by the back button and then the ignore trigger that has them scan right past your post. Once they start avoiding you, will you be able to win them back? If their experience with your brand across channels is reminiscent of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you’ve got work to do.

The best approach is to think of everything you publish as a form of Natural Nurturing. I wrote about it in my book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, in 2009. This is not a new concept. Every time your content comes into contact with your audience you have an opportunity. Squander it and your funnel becomes a sieve.

The ability for marketers to forecast the number of new leads to be generated is essential for any analytically driven B2B organization. There are two different methodologies to forecast leads, each with its pros and cons. In this post, we will explore both so you can adopt the one that makes the best sense to your business.

The two methodologies are:

1: Financial plan-based

In this methodology, the starting point is the Total Sales $ forecast for the organization. Then, using various conversion ratios based on historical data, the required number of new leads is estimated.

2: Sales headcount-based

This methodology is based on the lead consumption pattern of sales reps, and planned sales rep head count. This methodology can be simple or complicated based on the analytic resources available and the accuracy desired.

The deeper dive:

1. Financial Plan-based Lead Forecasting

This methodology is more widely used because it starts with the organization’s financial goal, which gets the marketing department in sync with the broader organization. The key steps are:

• Start with the Total Sales $ goal
• Identify how much of this Total Sales $ should come from new customers (“New sales $”). For this, use the historical ratio of New-to-Total sales
• Next, estimate the New sales $ that should come from marketing leads (“New Sales $ from Marketing”) – this is based on the historical ratio of New Sales $ from marketing to Overall New Sales $
• Then, calculate the number of new wins needed from marketing leads. Derive this by dividing New Sales $ from marketing by Average Sales Price $
• Finally, estimate the number of leads using the historical ratio of marketing leads to win

Make sure that all the ratios used in the above methodology span only the duration for which the forecast is made. An an example, if the forecast is for the quarter, the ratios should be for the span of the quarter as well.

Pros of the Financial Plan-based forecast

The main advantage of the Financial Plan-based approach is that it’s consistent with the organization’s financial goals. This approach is always helpful, especially when marketing is striving to increase its credibility

Cons of the Financial Plan-based forecast

The main drawback of this methodology is the inherent assumption that leads generated in the period will close in the period. In fact, for the majority of companies, most leads generated will usually close one or more quarters down the line. Thus, this approach has a weak foundation from a timing standpoint.

2. Sales Headcount-based Lead Forecasting

This methodology is based on the premise that each sales person consumes a specific number of new leads per period. One merit of this methodology is that the framework can be simple or complicated based on the analytic resources available in your organization.

In the simple approach, look at lead consumption per sales rep (the rep responsible for closing deals) in comparable periods in the past. Then look at the number of sales reps in the forecasting period and multiply by the average lead consumption amount and voila! – You have your lead forecast!

The complicated (and more accurate) approach looks at nuances of the sales organization’s composition, such as:

• New vs seasoned sales rep. New sales reps consume more leads because they need to build their pipeline, whereas the seasoned rep has an established pipeline and therefore consumes fewer leads. Keeping this in mind, estimate the following:

o Average lead consumption for the period by seasoned rep

o Average lead consumption per new rep. From this, identify the incremental lead consumption for new reps and how long they generally need this incremental consumption. Six months to one year is very likely.

• Consider the structure of the sales organization. In many organizations, there is an inside sales team whose job is to call on leads and prime them for a contact with the sales rep responsible for closing the deal. To complicate things further, some organizations send the high quality leads directly to the closing sales rep, bypassing the inside sales team. Here are some ways you can model this:

o Estimate the average lead consumption by closing sales rep (direct high quality leads)

o Estimate the average lead consumption by inside sales rep. Also estimate the number of appointments set by inside sales rep and the corresponding lead-to-appointment ratio

o Articulate the lead consumption equilibrium between inside sales and closing sales reps. One straightforward version is “X number of Inside Sales reps for Y Closing sales rep”.

Considering the above factors, come up with lead consumption forecast with all (or a subset of) the following components:

1. Lead consumption by seasoned closing sales rep (direct lead allotment)
2. Lead consumption by new closing sales rep (direct lead allotment)
3. Lead consumption by the inside sales team (for generating appointments)

Pros of the Sales Headcount-based forecast

The advantages of Sales Headcount-based forecasting are that it:

• Is based on the reality of actual lead consumption during the comparable periods
• Enables scenario analysis based on headcount projections and efficiency variations

Cons of the Sales Headcount-based forecast

The disadvantages are:

• This estimation can get very complicated, requiring committed analytic resources
• In some organizations, lead consumption history is difficult to get from sales organizations.

Your forecast: blue skies, green lights, and enough qualified leads.

Concluding thoughts

While we explored the two different methodologies, the main takeaway should be – Start with something to forecast your lead requirements. Forecasting (and the subsequent analysis of results) is essential for building up marketing’s credibility in your company, aligning sales and marketing, and evaluating how well marketing’s programs and campaigns are working. Select the methodology that is easier to implement with the resources and information available to you, and add layers of complexity over time to make the forecasting more accurate.

If your situation permits, we recommend doing the forecasting using both methodologies. This will give you a range in lead-requirement forecasts that will make you extra confident. You can then translate that confidence to your future marketing budget and resource asks.

What’s your experience with either of these methods?

“Persona” is a term that’s gotten very popular in marketing in the last few years. In ancient Latin, the word meant “mask.” It may have evolved from the Etruscan personare (“to sound through”), which referring to the theatrical wooden mask in which the mouth was made to strengthen the sound of the voice.” In literature and the theatre in the last century, the word came to express the concept of a “literary character representing voice of the author.”In Jungian psychology, it’s used to denote the social mask one shows the world. And it’s also a film by Ingmar Bergman. Words such as “personality”, “personify”, and “personal” all stem from the same roots.

In our marketing world, the concept of a “buyer persona” is the practice of distilling a group of people into a single essential representation with an identifiable pattern of assets, attributes, and activities. The idea is to determine who is most likely to find your products or services desirable, and then to focus on marketing to them, using their common characteristics to guide your efforts.

This has always been a good idea; media buyers have long made a science of figuring out where to place advertising so that it’s most likely to be exposed to proven potential buyers. Some years ago I sold newspaper advertising in a mid-sized blue-collar town. A little research showed that demographically speaking, the citizens were less likely have college educations, more likely to have done military service, more likely to have larger families, more likely to enjoy outdoor pursuits such as fishing and hunting … and more likely to buy used vehicles. When I shared this data with car dealerships in my territory, they began advertising to that demographic, and the result was higher sales. Everyone was satisfied.

As buyers moved online, it became possible to identify more traits and characteristics that gave valuable clues to who those people were and what they cared about, and marketers began refining demographic, firmographic, and psychographic profiling to include more of these factors. The pictures that began to develop had more depth and nuance, and went beyond a target demographic to more personalized … personas. The result can be marketing that feels to a prospect as though the marketer is paying attention to them and understands them at least a little. It can be the beginning of a mutually satisfying relationship.

Creating personas may sound complicated, but it doesn’t need to be. You can look to your own customers to help you, and take this proven series of seven steps:

1. Look at the data to determine your best customers

Begin the process by looking at data that represents your current customers. Try to find the customer segments that are the most valuable to you by looking at revenue, gross margin, sales cycle length, customer lifecycle, and so on. Look for your most profitable customers.

2. Look for common traits among your best customers

Analyze the list of best customers by searching for common traits: company size, location, the buyer’s role, industry, existing technology, and possibly problems faced are all examples of potential common characteristics. As an example, one of Act-On’s’ customers analyzed their own data and discovered that most of their best customers were companies of a certain size using a particular CRM technology. Knowing this let them tailor marketing approaches to this specific group.

3. Meet with individual sales reps to get anecdotal feedback on the data

Nobody has better information than your own people on the front lines. The most successful salespeople have an instinct for whom to focus on. Talk to them, and let those conversations refine the initial profile of the target buyer that you gathered from data. Plus: Sales has to buy in to the personas you create in order to trust the leads that result from the process, so get their input early and often.

4. Determine whether marketing can/should target a persona

You might have nailed the absolute killer persona, but what if there are only 200 of them? If you’re selling a very big-ticket item and your goal is ten sales a year, maybe a target of 200 is enough. But that’s not the case for most of us. Before finalizing personas, make sure you’ve agreed on a profile that fits a large enough group to be worth your time to market to – and that can be reached with the marketing capabilities you already have.

5. Map the buying process of your target buyer personas

Talk to your sales reps and your existing best customers. Analyze your online tracking data, and the patterns of interaction and engagement with your assets. Outline the steps the good buyer takes from the status quo until they purchase your product. This insight into the buying process will allow you to create highly effective sales and marketing messaging, programs, and processes. For example, many companies create content for each stage in the buying process to first attract the buyer, then to help the buyer move to the next stage in their process, with additional content for the final decision-making stage.

6. Publish the target buyer personas internally

Once the target buyer personas, journey, and attendant messaging are agreed upon, you need to distribute this information to sales and marketing to ensure that everyone is targeting the same buyers. This also keeps communication channels open so that when new patterns emerge, you’re more likely to hear about them.

Some companies go as far as to give each persona a name and a backstory and create a picture or drawing of each one. Do whatever it takes to help people adapt to using personas. Your creative team in particular – the ones creating email messages, infographics, writing web copy and white papers, particularly need to understand who they are writing for.

7. Optimize the target buyer persona definitions quarterly

Each quarter, sales and marketing should evaluate the current buyer personas by reviewing data and anecdotal feedback to determine effective they still are. The market is dynamic; your personas will change over time.

Part 2: Closed-Loop Marketing – Sales and Marketing Have a Conversation

Inbound marketing is changing all the time.

It’s kind of like how an eight year old girl plays dress-up. You see her in a ballerina out-fit and then you turn around and she’s a rock star.

Google has the same compulsion to change. They are constantly tweaking their algorithm; mostly to cut off the illicit activities of those on social media who are trying to rank, swipe and link in ways they really shouldn’t be. Their changes are more animalistic in nature; hummingbirds, penguins, panda’s and such.

Closed-loop marketing is the next change (evolution) in inbound marketing. It takes components that have been there all along, adds them together with proven online methods, and sprinkles in a few fresh ideas. It turns a formerly straight line method into a circle.

3 THINGS WE COVERED IN OUR LAST BLOG

1. We Defined Closed-Loop Marketing

A fancy way of saying that sales teams and marketing teams can work together using the data and insights that the marketing team gleans from their analytics, and the things sales learns from the street, closed-loop marketing:

• Attracts more visitors to the company website
• Nurtures them along the lead funnel
• Closes more sales
• Aligns the sales and marketing teams
• Understands the importance of existing customers

Marketing and sales work together to establish sales goals, as well as marketing goals. Using a concept known as Smarketing the new team collaborates on content and analyzes results together to increase overall leads, close more sales and increase company revenue.

By working together, each team can gain a better understanding of what is working with a company’s inbound program and lead nurturing strategies, as well as what the sales process is like, and attain more business growth.

2. We outlined what you need to make closed-loop marketing work

Basically, it requires connecting your customer relationship software (CRM) and your marketing analytics software. We also told you that there are ways around using paid CRM’s and analytics. Then we told you about the importance of using your website as the main stopping point for all of your marketing efforts. Using your website as your marketing hub is the best way to measure and track all of your marketing efforts.

3. We explained the closed-loop marketing process step-by-step

Using the HubSpot method, we showed you the four steps that make up a closed-loop marketing process. These simple four steps include:

Step 1: Visitor Arrives on Your Site

Step 2: Visitor Browses Your Website

Step 3: Visitor Converts Into a Lead

Step 4: Lead Becomes a Customer

Making the visitor, the lead, the customer the most important component of the entire marketing process, closed-loop marketing changes things. Not only do you bring in leads by mere attraction, your current satisfied and delighted customer also becomes a brand advocate, nurturing leads for you and bringing them to your website as a new a completely different means of lead procurement.

WHAT’S NEXT?

You might have a good analytics program in place. You also might have some type of automation working for you to increase your leads. Then there is your content, SEO and nurturing of leads, based on your buyer persona. For closed-loop marketing, though, there are more elements to the process.

There is the union of the sales and marketing departments.

For now, let’s take a look at the concept of Smarketing: how your marketing and sales teams work together to truly bring more sales to your business.

SALES AND MARKETING AGREE TO AGREE

In many companies where there is both a marketing team and a sales team there exists a sort of tense arrangement that, “You’ll do your job and I’ll do mine.” Sales might scoff at marketing for their creative spirit. Marketing might turn their noses at sales for being so arrogant. 

Stereotypes aside, there is truth in the personality types that gravitate toward each career, as well as a sense that their own efforts contribute more than any other to the company’s success. It can be hard to settle on an idea that in truth it’s everyone’s hard work and expertise that contributes to the overall revenue and sales success of a company.

Closed-loop marketing asks very kindly that everyone get along so we can all go about the business of doing just that – growing a business.

WHAT THE CONVERSATION LOOKS LIKE

The sales team is the front line on the street for a business. They represent a business’s face and how a business grows revenue. Without the sales team, there are no sales. Therefore, the marketing team needs to provide the sales team with certain information in order to do what they do best; possibly even do it better.

The marketing team is the front line on the web for a business. They represent the business’s brand and are a part of the revenue process in terms of attracting visitors to the company website and converting them into leads. Without the marketing team, there are no leads. It goes to say that the sales team needs to provide the marketing team with information as well, so the marketing team can do what they do best; possibly even better.

This is business synergy at its best.

8 THINGS THAT MARKETING AND SALES NEED TO TALK ABOUT

1) Lead Goals

Your sales team needs a certain number of leads from the marketing department every month to have the biggest chance of success. If anything, the sales team needs to plan and prepare for what the marketing team might be anticipating. 

For example, if the marketing team is about to launch an e-Book that is very valuable to middle of the funnel leads, the sales department is going to need a heads up.

As such, in order for the sales team to be able to close a certain number of leads, the marketing department is going to have to deliver a certain number of leads to sales every month.

Each team should set a goal for the number of leads they need each month in order to best do their job. Every month, the sales and marketing teams should set goals and even boost goals to eventually increase revenue even more by working together.

A closed-loop marketing program can help a business attain more revenue by simply setting goals in different categories, tracking the data, and making changes where necessary.

2) Define a Qualified Lead

When the marketing department delivers leads to the sales department, they need to be qualified. What information would sales ideally like to have on a lead when it gets to them? It’s important that your sales team have as much information as possible about the leads they’re pursuing.

The landing pages on your website will contain conversion forms a lead must fill out before they download an offer or other content. As a lead is nurtured through the sales funnel, they will be willing to give you more information as they receive additional valuable offers that answer their questions about your industry, your product or your pricing.

The size of a lead’s company, their position within it, and the problems you might solve with your product are all relevant and helpful pieces of information to gather. The more information that’s available to your sales team, the more effective their approach can be.

When sales gets qualified leads, they have a better chance of closing sales.

3) When Leads Switch From Marketing to Sales

A lead starts out in the marketing department as a stranger to your company’s website. Lead nurturing is a vital part of success in the buying cycle, so it’s no surprise that setting established responsibilities for each team is a part of the closed-loop process.

Your sales team needs clear, concise communication about which leads they are responsible for maintaining. At which stage of the buying cycle would they prefer to get the leads that the marketing team has attracted and begun to nurture?

Make sure that there are no leads that get ignored or lost!

4) How Your Business Does Inbound

In addition to knowing which leads each is responsible for, your sales and marketing teams should also communicate what methods you’ve established for lead nurturing.

Whether your methods include providing additional educational content at the top of the funnel, or product-centric content at the middle of the funnel, knowledge of each method will help each team have a clearer picture of the overall strategy and how to be most effective within it.

While total knowledge is next to impossible, providing your sales team with a concise, general outline of your marketing and lead nurturing practices will help them do the most efficient and effective job for your company and your potential customers.

5) The Company’s Social Presence

For your sales team to function efficiently at their jobs, they need to know the outlets from which your leads are flowing. If you have leads coming from a particular offer, your sales team might be able to offer insights as to how the offer is performing based on the leads they close.

• Did the new customer find the offers useful?
• Were leads turned off by an e-Book?

Even though you have a good analytics program in place, there is nothing better than the word from the street about what’s working. Tell your sales team about your Twitter account, your Facebook page and your Google+ circles.

In addition, sales might want to have a presence on the social networks your company has chosen and even engage there as the faces of your company.

6) The Word From the Street

Your marketing and sales teams should know which types of content are generating the highest-quality leads for your company. Did someone from the sales team hear from several potential customers that a particular whitepaper is very popular? This would be great information for marketing.

Communication with the marketing team about which types of content and which topics of interest generate the best leads can hone in on those mediums and produce a more effective marketing effort. This knowledge will also help the marketing team save time by showing them the outlets where they are spending too much time and yielding less quality leads.

When marketing and sales understand the unique challenges each faces, the business as a whole is in a better position to help the buyer make an informed purchasing decision – with you!

7. Improvements

A sales and marketing team that has a deep alignment with each other has a better chance  for increasing overall company revenue. This is why it is vital that both teams commit to working as parts of a unit.

Being open to a little constructive criticism might be painful at first. However, it is definitely considered taking a hit for the greater good.

What are some ways that your marketing team can further assist and bolster your sales teams efforts?

Perhaps your sales team could gain deeper understanding of your marketing efforts so they can better integrate those efforts into their own conversations and interactions with qualified leads.

Maybe your sales team has key insights into lead nurturing content from which your marketing team could benefit.

Constant communication between the two teams is vital to building a cohesive, efficient and successful unit. The willingness to communicate this information is imperative to making the closed-loop marketing process work.

8. A Written Agreement

When your business gets ready to align marketing and sales, perhaps it would be a good idea to have a written agreement between the two teams that establishes basic standards, number of leads and reporting alliances so that the new relationship is not nebulous. 

A smarketing agreement can set standards for the new alliance as well as pave the way for better undertstanding and a team-focused spirit rather than taking sides.

Closed-loop marketing takes the traditional sales funnel, which pulls customers in one end and spits customers out of the other end and instead turns it into a circle. Using analytics and a good alliance between sales and marketing, this method can increase overall revenue for your company.

But we haven’t even gotten to the best part yet. The most amazing part of the closed-loop marketing process is the customer. Instead of being thrown out of the end of the funnel your current customer help you with your sales process. You might be surprised. Check out part three of our closed-loop marketing series: How Delighting Your Customer Can Increase Your Leads.

Photo Credits: Closed-Loop Marketing Visual – Thanks HubSpot!

Other Visuals – www.freedigitalphotos.net – Stuart Miles

Episode #413 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

I have been a fan of the social media management platform, Sprinklr, for some time. Ragy Thomas leads the organization and he has had an illustrious career in the digital marketing space. This past week, Sprinklr held an event in Toronto (of which I was one of the speakers) and the line-up of brands that attended are a testament to how strong of a platform they have developed. Ragy is not just a social media technologist, he also had a huge impact on the world of email marketing. Prior to founding Sprinklr, he was president of Epsilon Interactive, a division of the world's largest marketing services company. During his tenure as president, Ragy led his division of Epsilon through rapid growth to approximately $100 million in annual sales worldwide spread across 11 countries. His prior start-up experiences include email marketing companies Advaya and Bigfoot Interactive, where he was the Chief Technology Officer. Advaya was sold to Bigfoot Interactive in 2001. Bigfoot Interactive was sold to Epsilon in 2005 for over $120 million. His insights on digital marketing, technology and start-ups are profound and relevant to every marketer. Enjoy the conversation...

You can grab the latest episode of Six Pixels of Separation here (or feel free to subscribe via iTunes): Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast #413.

Tags: advaya advertising podcast bigfoot interactive blog blogging brand business book business podcast david usher digital marketing epsilon interactive facebook itunes marketing podcast ragy thoman social media social media management sprinklr twitter

For years, when asked whether I thought China would experience a hard landing, I would simply answer, “I don't understand China. Making a prediction would be pretending that I did, so I can’t.” The problem is that today China is the most significant macroeconomic wildcard in the global economy.

To understand both the risks and the potentials for the future you have to reach some understanding of what is happening in China today. Last week we started a two-part series on what my young associate Worth Wray and I feel is the significant systemic risk that China poses to global growth.

Join the conversation about this story »

1. Update Your Customer Support

E-Commerce sites are increasingly turning towards integration with online customer service platforms to provide their visitors with personalized shopping experiences. Technology has evolved to the point where personal shopping widgets are capable of mimicking a traditional shopping experience by providing all the comforts, conveniences and choices that customers have come to expect.

Customer service is now geared towards individual users on a personal level. The responses that are generated are relevant, accurate and related to the customer’s browsing behaviour and expectations. Personalized customer service is capable of updating shoppers on upcoming promotions, and responding to queries and comments by way of a virtual personal shopper on site.

2. Explore the Option of Self-Service

As an e-Commerce site owner, personalized self-service technology is a guaranteed way of increasing customer engagement, generating greater returns on investment, and enjoying higher conversion rates. There are many nifty tools available in the world of personalized customer support. These include branding to reflect your company’s style, and pop-up ads that are enticing and relevant to the buyer’s needs. Since the level of personalization and self-service is geared towards maximum satisfaction, there are no limits on what is possible.

E-Commerce sites have started to introduce instant coupons to provide instant rewards when visitors provide their information. Plus, it’s now possible to promote related products (in addition to what customers prefer) with call to action oriented content. There are no limits on the possibilities available with personalized customer support, and it works to bolster the internal management functions and the external customer support operations. For example, certain questions and queries can be escalated to live chat agents as opposed to forums, FAQs and the like. Full integration with multiple chat providers is possible with personalized customer support platforms. This allows customers to engage with Live Chat at their convenience.

3. Enable Maximum Engagement

All of the data points towards increased conversion rates. SAS recently released a white paper that revealed conversion rate increases of 9% to 25%. There are 3 major benefits to personalizing your customer support services. These include insight, relevance and measurement. Viewed holistically, each of these integral components allows for maximum engagement with your customers, essential data collection, relevancy of marketing efforts, reduced costs, greater customer loyalty and higher levels of customer retention.

4. Avoid Losing Potential Leads

Measurable benefits include reductions in shopping cart abandonment, increased self-service rates and higher acquisition rates. This all translates into greater online sales revenues. The net effect of personalized customer support is that customers are more engaged during their shopping experience and they really feel that their business is valued. By providing customer-specific support, e-Commerce sites guarantee higher levels of engagement and brand loyalty. The net effect of personalized customer support is that it drives revenue growth.

5. Well, You Got It…Personalization is Essential

In spite of the fact that marketers appreciate the value of personalization, it is necessary to collect the right data and know precisely what to do with it. This has led to a personalization conundrum of sorts: 95% of marketers don’t know what to do with the data they collect, 39% believe that insufficient real-time data is collected, an equal number are unable to make their data actionable, and 26% don’t even use personalized data at all. Fortunately, there are many ways to personalize online shopping and customer service to make the customer feel more engaged. It all begins with a singular focus: the customer!

Preliminary Insights into the ANNUITAS Enterprise Demand Generation Study

Last month ANNUITAS launched a Demand Generation Research project focused on large enterprise B2B organizations. The thought behind the research was to get very narrowly focused on how large enterprises are approaching Demand Generation and what kind of success they are having. We are still gathering research (you can still participate, and possibly win a ticket to Content Marketing World by clicking here), but wanted to share some of the preliminary findings.

One of the more obvious standouts in the early data is the continual struggle of marketing and sales alignment. Time and time again when I speak with clients, prospects and other organizations at conferences I am asked the same question: how can we get sales to buy into what we are doing? This questions is typically followed by “our organization is so sales-focused, and they just won’t listen.”

In looking at some of the early data, I am beginning to understand why:

• Only 25.5% of organizations describe the design, review and approval of Demand Generation Programs as “collaborative and aligned”
• 54.5% either update or pass their Demand Generation programs to sales for review before the campaign gets launched. This means that there is no involvement of sales in the planning or development of the programs
• Only 43% of marketing teams involve sales in the creation of personas
• Only 36.4% of organizations have a common set of KPIs that both marketing and sales use to measure success.

Even with this preliminary data, the numbers are a bit startling as it shows that for all of the questions about how to involve sales, and for all of the trouble that marketers say they are having in engaging with their sales people, the truth is that marketing is not taking the necessary steps to ensure they are getting sales buy-in.

While there have been volumes of pages and presentations given on how to align sales and marketing, the data shows quite simply, that marketing must do a better job in taking the necessary steps to ensure there is a joint approach to Demand Generation. Simply “informing” or providing a brief is not aligning with sales.

If marketing truly wants alignment and sales buy-in, it means starting from the beginning, having sales representation as an active participant in the planning and development of strategy, and the implementation of a Demand Generation Strategy with a common goal. Without this, any attempt at alignment is a waste of time. It’s not them…it’s you, marketing.