Rnordman

Michael Nick

Getting Inside your Buyer’s Head is simple if you think in these terms…Buyer’s, more specifically economic buyers, use a concept called Operating Ratios to help them determine how efficient their company is running. In addition, the economic buyer will use these same ratios to determine the impact on their financial health when they plan to make a strategic purchase. Below I outline a few of the most common ratios you should be aware of and understand why they are important when selling to the economic buyer.

Asset turnover will help you understand how well a company uses its assets to generate revenue. The calculation is to divide revenue by total assets. The higher the number the better. You can increase this number by increasing revenue on the same assets or lowering assets on the same revenue. As a sales professional that can impact Assets, this ratio is important to understand. Remember Assets are on the Balance sheet and include Cash, WIP, Finished Goods Inventory and Raw Materials.  

Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) is simply the number of days it takes to get paid. There are a few different ways companies calculate DSO’s. A common method is to divide ending accounts receivable by revenue per day during the period just ended. Reducing DSO’s will help reduce interest payments when you need to borrow money and increase interest income when you are able to invest. If your products can impact DSO’s in any way it is a great story to tell and discussion to have with a CFO.

Days in inventory shows just how quickly a company sells its inventory during a given period of time. The longer it takes the longer their cash is tied up. To calculate inventory days, divide the average inventory by the cost of goods sold (COGS) per day. You can see that if a company’s cash is tied up they are likely going to be a little hesitant to spend money on products or services you are selling. If however you are able to help turn or manage inventory better your story will get an audience in the C-Suite.

Liquidity Ratios – Are used to determine how well a company can make payroll, payables or debt payments due in the short term.

Key Point:If a prospect is having difficulty making its short term debt payments, they are likely not going to invest in your products or services.

Current ratio is the ratio that measures current assets against current liabilities. Divide current assets by current liabilities. If the ratio is too low i.e. close to 1, then it shows that current assets will barely cover short term obligations. If the ratio is less than one, they are in deep trouble. If on the other hand the ratio is too high that means that your prospects are cash rich. If you are a sales professional this is good, if you are an investor this is not. Investors want the cash making money for them, not just sitting in the bank. Note: The current ratio information by industry is contained on the Inc. website from Sageworks includes the current ratio average by industry.

Quick ratio will tell you whether a company can meet their current obligations quickly. The calculation is as follows: Divide the current assets minus inventory by the current liabilities. If the number is less than 1 then the company is likely unable to pay its bills. I would have to say they are not a good prospect for you.

Ratio analysis is a skill every sales professional should strive to master. It is simple once you understand the line items on the three key financial reports. By looking at something like the quick ratio or current ratio you can determine if a company can pay its bills. If they can’t they are likely going to lay off personnel and make serious cut backs. If profit is declining or inventory is not turning, you can surmise this organization is having difficulty selling its products. If you are able to use the data from business intelligence companies like Sageworks, or SalesQuest to perform a comparison to the market norms you will have a significant advantage over your competition. Even if your competitor develops a Business Case with economic impact analysis, you will hold a significant advantage when you deliver a presentation that begins with what the industry average or norm is for any number of financial ratios.

By discussing your impact on ratios like profit margins, DSO’s, ROA or the Current Ratio in comparison to the market you will display not only your intellect, creativity and knowledge of the market but you will establish yourself as a different kind highly skilled sales professional. Expect a real paradigm shift in the sales rep prospect relationship. You will be seen as more of a consultative sales professional and knowledgeable trusted adviser as opposed to a sales rep.

Michael Nick is the founder of ROI4Sales and author of several sales books including the Amazon top 10 The Key to the C-Suite. Michael is available for speeches, workshops, and seminars. Please visit www.roi4sales.com, or call Michael at 262.338.1851.

The post Why Buyers do What Buyers do appeared first on ROI4Sales.com.

THE SUPERMODEL AND THE BRILLO BOX: BACK STORIES AND PECULIAR ECONOMICS FROM THE WORLD OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Don Thompson

What makes this wonderfully informative book, which could well have been subtitled Adventures Among the One Per Cent, such a pleasure for the rest of us to read is the author’s own peculiar backstory. Thompson is not only an aficionado of contemporary art, he’s an economist, a professor of marketing and strategy at Toronto’s York University. He can thus persuasively set out all the reasons, from aesthetic appreciation to personal aggrandizement, why someone—whether Qatari royal or Western hedge-fund manager—would pay $12 million for a stuffed shark (the subject of Thompson’s last book).

This time around, Thompson deserves full marks simply for his deft rendering of artist Eric Fischl’s domestic pet explanation of the mysteries of contemporary art. Call over your dog, and his response—ears perked, head in your lap, eyes focused on yours—is “linear” and easily understood. Try that with the cat. If she comes at all, it will be via a circuitous route and she will end up with her rear end facing you. Any attempt to understand requires wrestling with “non-linear, indirect, complex, alien” communication: “art is a cat.” But Thompson gets bonus points for illuminating the signature facial expression—puzzled, somewhat aggrieved—of contemporary artists. For them, their work is straightforward: “To the artist, contemporary art is a dog.”

After that, the art and its eye-popping markets start to make sense. Art is now what a recognized artist says is art, meaning (among other things) that a civilian wouldn’t get far peddling a stuffed fish for $12 million, but a brand-name artist, like shark creator Damien Hirst, is limited only by his imagination. Back story is crucial: Elizabeth Taylor’s jewellery sold at auction for 10 times its replacement value precisely because it was once hers. As much as the art itself, as Thompson points out, buyers spend millions for the right to tell a story about it. There are signs, in fact, that the backstory could eclipse brand as a value marker under certain circumstances.

Consider Sotheby’s London sale of Bridge No. 114 in November 2011. It was described in the auction catalogue as the work of abstract expressionist painter Nat Tate, a one-time lover of Peggy Guggenheim who destroyed most of his work before killing himself by jumping off the Staten Island ferry. It sold for $11,200 to a telephone bidder in Australia, well in excess of the pre-sale estimate of $4,600 to $7,700. Except that the artist is a character from William Boyd’s novel Any Human Heart, his name derived from “National Gallery” and “Tate Modern,” and Boyd created the painting. Sotheby’s was in on the deception, donating the proceeds to the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution. Yet, the buyer did not demand the sale be voided. And why should he? With a backstory like that, “Tate’s” painting can only grow in value.

The post Why the rich drop millions on Damien Hirst appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In the interest of saving you and I time, I’m going to spare you a waterfall of statistics that emphasize the importance of growing and engaging a social media following. We all know it’s important; but why and how? First, bear with me as I set up why all marketers have been forced to dramatically change their strategy in the last half decade -- and then I’ll make a point I guarantee you won’t forget.

Problem: Sensory Adaptation

Sensory adaptation is the psychological phenomenon that’s triggered a marketing renaissance in the last decade. A quick example: you know how an hour after you put on perfume or cologne you can’t smell it anymore? That’s sensory adaptation. The smell hasn’t necessarily dissipated, you’ve just gotten used to it and in turn, the smell is less intense.

The same thing is true with advertising. Over the decades, consumers have become increasingly immune to advertising’s powers. It’s not because advertisers are getting worse, it’s because there is so much of it that we as humans have developed abilities to ignore it. Picture Times Square in 1994 versus 2014; proportionately the same thing is happening all over the world. Everywhere we look someone is selling us something -- in essence, we’re all diluting each other’s efforts.

Solution: Permission Marketing

All marketing falls under one-of-two categories: interruption or permission. Interruption marketing is all forms of advertising in which the consumer has been abruptly presented an ad without necessarily wanting it. Billboards, radio, commercials, newspaper ads, email spam, etc. -- all of these things interrupt an otherwise different experience. You’re driving, not looking for ads. You’re reading, not looking for coupons. You’re checking email, not wishing for Viagra spam. Over the years humans have evolved into interruption-based ad ignoring machines. This means this type of marketing is becoming less and less effective per-dollar-spent.

On the other hand, there is permission marketing -- also known as inbound marketing. This is any type of communication from a business to a consumer where the consumer has given permission to the business to talk to them. Examples: 

• A night club regular that gives permission to a promoter to text VIP entrance to special events
• A dieter following a fitness supplement company on Facebook
• A marketer that gives their email to a newsletter for daily tips sent to her inbox

Each one of these things has three things in common. First, the consumer gave the company permission to talk to them. Second, the list of consumers turns into a long-term asset for the business. Third, each person on the list has an exponentially higher likelihood of converting into a paying consumer than anyone presented with interruption marketing.

Why is this the case? Robert Cialdini, renowned psychologist and former business professor at Arizona State calls it The Commitment Effect. People that have in some way made a small commitment to something have a greater likelihood of a substantially larger commitment in the future. This is why the freemium model exists, or why alumni associations ask for larger donations every year. A “follow” on Twitter, or request to be on a mass mailer, are both examples of small commitments a consumer can make to a company that very well might turn into a larger commitment -- such as a purchase -- at a later time.

Lastly, it takes an average of seven impressions to convert a human into a customer. Interruption marketing charges the advertiser every time an impression is needed, while permission-based methods charges you once. After permission is granted, the marketer has access to repeatedly talk to that person for free (or cheap), and push them through the funnel of buying patterns (inform, persuade, remind). The moral of the story is radio, TV, newspaper is out; blogging, opt-in email marketing, Facebook, Twitter is in. 

What Makes People Follow Your Pages ... Duck, Duck, Duck, Duck ...

People don’t Like Facebook pages, follow Twitter accounts, or provide emails to businesses that just talk about themselves. As an example, put yourself in the shoes of a person in the market for a new daily coffee shop. If they find themselves on two different local coffee shop Facebook pages, one that posts daily reminders of their existence, and another that posts daily content for coffee lovers -- which one do you think the person will follow? 

When people give permission to a business to communicate with them, what they really want is to join a community. In the case of the coffee shop, it should be the entrepreneur’s job to attempt to post something that is valuable to the consumer every day, not to the business. Things like funny coffee memes, articles to blog posts about coffee, cool pictures from around the city, food recipes that require coffee, etc. Each of those things is valuable to a consumer in that target market, which in turn keeps your brand top-of-mind despite not constantly talking about yourself. 

The equation is simple. Diagnose your target market and figure out what type of community they’d like to be in. Next, post daily value with that community in mind, instead of yourself. 

The idea is that when the consumer lands on your page they see the last week or so worth of content, relate to said content, and want it in their life forever. Ultimately, they’ll follow your page so you can brighten or enlighten their news feed regularly. (By news feed, I also could mean their email inbox, text message history, Twitter timeline, Pinterest board, whatever.)

How to Convert Those Followers Into Customers ... GOOSE!

At this point you’re thinking “my business needs to make money, not curate daily content for a community.” You’re right. Now I introduce what I call the “harvest” post. This is the reminder to your community that you also sell a product, and the call-to-action to buy it. After seven or so “value” posts, throw in a “harvest” post. I call it a harvest post as a metaphor to farming. A farmer cultivates their crops for many months, then harvests them to sell or eat. In social media, we cultivate our crops by building trust, thought leadership, brand, etc. Once those crops are strong enough, we monetize them. If you attempt to monetize them too early, there will be nothing there -- nothing has been grown enough to harvest.

Your value posts ensure people follow, and stay engaged with, your account. It also makes your business a thought leader on the subject. If “Big Papa” posts awesome fitness tips regularly, his followers will instinctually assume his supplement company is awesome, too. Sales will follow.

Last metaphor, I swear: Do you want to be one-hit-wonder Vanilla Ice, or Eminem? Invest in an asset that you can use to convert leads forever, not expensive one-off mechanisms that spike temporary sales.

Getting the right leads, and only the right leads, from marketing to sales is a tall order. It helps to have a qualification strategy that sorts the ready from the not-ready into the correct buckets. Some organizations qualify leads in multiple stages, for example:

• Marketing-Qualified Leads: The prospect has demonstrated some level of interest or engagement that tells marketing this is a genuine lead.
• Sales-Accepted Leads: Sales accepts the lead and agrees to take action.
• Sales-Qualified Leads: Leads that have passed the point of qualification by the development team or sales, and are moving into an opportunity stage.

We’ll focus today on the nexus between the marketing-qualified and sales-accepted lead, as that’s the common ground for sales and marketing teams of all shapes and sizes.

Define the qualified lead

The “qualified lead” definition is the point at which marketing determines that a lead is ready to be handed to sales. The first, most important thing to do, is to circle the sales and marketing wagons to determine (and agree on) what this means. Without a shared definition, the two teams will be working from different playbooks … and that’s no way to win. Here are seven steps to making sure you get this right:

1. Develop an agreed-upon definition of “Marketing-Qualified” lead

Sales and marketing must work together to develop this definition. Despite the best intentions, marketing often creates a qualified lead definition but sales never sees it – or agrees to it. Unless there is a clear definition and buy-in from both sides, the MQL stage won’t do much for your organization.

2. Use your buyer personas as a starting point

Start with who your target audience is! Reference your target buyer personas in regards to their profile attributes as well as their buying cycle.

3. Get anecdotal feedback from sales

When defining what a marketing-qualified lead is, it’s enlightening to sit down with individual sales reps and ask them: “What is a qualified lead for you?” or “What leads are the easiest for you to call into and qualify?” This doesn’t mean that marketing will have to agree to deliver only these types of leads, but it’s critical to get as close as possible to creating a lead definition that sales is going to be willing to work with.

4. Determine demographic/firmographic qualification factors

Choose factors that are well represented in your customer base already. Demographic and firmographic characteristics commonly used include industry, company size, location, and the buyer’s role, but you should include any factor that makes sense for your unique purposes.

5. Determine behavioral qualification information

People leave digital footprints that show you what they’re interested in, and sometimes you can also see how urgent their issue is. Through observing buyer behaviors, you’ll develop criteria for which actions qualify a lead to speak to sales. For example, downloading certain white papers or attending specific webinars might be actions historically taken by leads who go on to buy. People who spend a certain amount of time on a pricing page and return to that page several times over the course of a day or two may be displaying a sense of urgency. Some organizations ask “Would you like to be contacted by sales?” on their registration forms to make it easy for a lead to self-identify as ready and willing to talk to sales ­– right now.

6. Forecast whether marketing can deliver enough qualified leads

If you construct qualification parameters that are too narrow, marketing may not be able to supply sales with enough leads to fill the pipeline. This is a critical part of the lead definition phase and may require some negotiation between sales and marketing. In some cases, sales will need to accept a broader MQL definition in order to fill the funnel with enough leads.

7 . Revisit the qualified lead definition quarterly

Each quarter, sales and marketing should meet to determine whether the MQL definition should be modified. For example, if you’re launching a new product, you may be able to reach out to a whole new demographic.

The hardest part of this process is usually just getting it done to begin with. But it’s a wise investment of time that will pay both teams back with better-qualified leads, shorter sales cycles, and more sales quotas met.

Agreeing on the definition of a qualified lead is just the beginning; there’s a whole world of new opportunities that opens up when sales and marketing learn how to work together.

Social Value is an important metric for businesses, because it allows measurement of customer impact and behavior by way of socially influenced elements like sharing and page views.

What defines “Social Value”? Let’s use an example: You just launched a new mobile app for 99¢ on the App Store. One of your friends bought it, and absolutely loves it – so much that they talked about it on Twitter and Facebook. It’s very likely that their connections will try out your app based on the recommendations, which in turn generates you more sales and engagement. Social Value is the sum of the above parts that helped contribute to the app’s bottom line, ultimately with purchases.

To measure the “True Value”, the above Social Value is combined with the “LTV” or Lifetime Value (how much money you can expect a customer to spend on your business before churning). For example, imagine a person has an LTV of $43 (how much they’re expected to spend), and that same person has a social value of $53 thorough interaction with their friends that causes them to spend $53. $43 LTV + $53 Social Value = $96 True Value.

The True Value is more important than the Social Value, because it gives you a better estimate on how much a customer affects your bottom line. This is all thanks to the rise of analytics and big data platforms, which make it easier to break down your data to target customers.

Once you’ve got the True Value, you can start determining who your “Social Whales” are – one of your most important customers. These are the people who are most influential to your business socially, and who spend the most money. Most often, Social Whales will comprise of 10% of your total customers, but 10-40% of total company revenue. If you’re using an analytics platform, targeting your Social Whales is relatively simple.

Want to learn more about Social Value, True Value and Social Whales? Take a look at the Infographic below created by Ninja Metrics, a social analytics platform. How do you determine who your Social Whales are?

I kept seeing Team Treehouse ads on YouTube and was curious how they were performing. So I got introduced to Eric who used to work at Treehouse and did all their YouTube advertising. He was very generous to share below what exactly worked for him with YouTube advertising. A channel that is massive and largely untapped by small advertisers. Take it away Eric…
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As a marketer, I’m always looking for the next scalable, cost-efficient channel to acquire customers. Easier said than done, right? How often do you stumble across a Google or Facebook to advertise on? Not too often.

In fact, there are only a handful of internet/software services with over 1 billion monthly active users. Just look at this chart:

Above, we can see that there’s one heavily under monetized platform that just makes sense for advertisers – YouTube.

In the past, I was fortunate enough to see some traction with YouTube ads, but there wasn’t a lot of focus on it because it looked expensive. I eventually decided to take a deeper dive and spent a $50,000 in one month and made almost no money back. Not a good start.

However, the second and third month proved to be different. We were paying a few cents per view and actually generating real click through conversions at an acceptable cost per acquisition (CPA). We’re talking CPAs as low as $5 for paying customers  that have a lifetime value of roughly $250. Throw in the branding aspect of video advertising and you have a real winner.

For one B2B client, they went from acquiring 0 users to 400 users per month in three months. Their target CPA was $30 less than what they were aiming for! With a customer lifetime value of $150, that’s another $60,000 a month for them.

• Here’s an interesting stat that reveals the opportunity within YouTube: Over 1 billion unique visitors a month. ComScore reports that over 89 million people in the U.S. alone are going to watch 1.2 billion online videos today.

In this post, I’m going to share some key insights I found with YouTube advertising so you don’t need to look goofy spending $50,000 like I did. It’s also worth noting that we didn’t spend $50,000 to make $100. If you want to start your own campaign you can use the tips below with a much smaller budget. $50/day is a good place to start so you can collect data. Once you start seeing conversions double down on what works.

Let Me Show You How To Get Started

Step 1: Create Your Video Creative

Here’s a great example from Treehouse:

3 Key Elements for Every Video Ad:

1. Video duration at ~75 seconds.
2. Quality. If you produce a low quality video, how do you think that’ll reflect on your brand? See below for examples of quality.
3. Experiment with new video creatives at least once a month.

A video like the one above can be done by a company like Sandwich Video. They’ve done videos for companies like Airbnb, Warby Parker, eBay and more.

Typically, creatives can cost anywhere from as low as $5,000 to $100,000. It all depends on what you’re looking for.

If you’re up for more animated videos, I highly recommend Demo Duck or Switch Video. Here’s an example of one done by Crazy Egg:

Make sure your creative gives your viewer a reason NOT to click the ‘Skip Ad’ button at the 5 second mark. Be inspirational, like the Treehouse creative or somewhat quirky like the Crazy Egg video.

Things to do before making your creative:

• Look at your competitors to see what they’re doing. Then see how you can differentiate yourself or even steal from them.
• Define the action you want your viewer to take after viewing.
• Minimize waste. Keep your video short and to the point. Remember,  you have 8 seconds to hold your viewer’s attention.

Step 2: Ad Formats – Focus on TrueView

The tests that I’ve run in the past with different companies have all shown me that TrueView in-stream ads are the way to go.

Let’s go over the types of ad formats available to you:

As mentioned earlier, the beauty of TrueView is that you aren’t charged if:

• Your video is skipped
• The viewer watches less than 30 seconds of the video
• The viewer doesn’t finish a video that’s less than 30 seconds.

I’ve found that in-search ads are significantly more expensive and do not generate as much volume.

Step 3: Well Defined Targeting Groups Are Super Important

Targeting groups can be found under the ‘Targets’ tab in each video campaign:

Similar to ad groups, targeting groups are exactly what they say they are – they tell YouTube what to target specifically.  For a quick refresher, ‘ad groups’ are: A set of keywords, ads, and bids you manage together, in order to show ads to people likely to be interested in them.

Keys to success with targeting:

• The more targeting options you add, the tighter your targeting becomes. I’d suggest going with only 2-3 targeting options max for each targeting group.
• Label your targeting groups accordingly so you don’t get lost. For example, if you’re targeting web designers and only focusing on in-stream ads, you can name the targeting group ‘Web Designers – in-stream only’.
• If you’re using display keywords, make sure you theme  the campaign. For example, if I want to target people that are looking for ‘web design tutorials’, I’d focus on keywords like:

○     web design tutorial
○     web design for beginners
○     learn web design
○     learn web design online
○     etc. until I have 20 keywords max.

• Continually remove irrelevant placements and add negative targets. Negative targets are places you do NOT want your ads to show. For example, if you were selling Rogaine, would you want it to show in children’s videos or women’s makeup videos? Probably not.

Step 4: Campaign Settings To Pay Attention To

I highly recommend segmenting your campaigns by theme and even countries in some cases. For example, if I wanted to target web designers in countries that mainly speak English, I might put ‘Web Design – US/AU/CA/UK’.

Here are the settings I typically like to go with:

• Delivery Method – you have the option of going with ‘Standard’ which evenly spaces out your ads over the day or ‘Accelerated’. If you have a bigger budget and want to collect data faster, I recommend going with ‘Accelerated’. If you want to go slow and steady, ‘Standard’ is the way to go.
• Languages – make sure you choose the right one.
• Ad scheduling - you can day part if you wish. For this particular campaign I’ve chosen to show it all days and hours because conversions have been fairly consistent.
• Ad rotation - since I have different creatives/copy right now, I want to be rotating my ads evenly to A/B test. Your other options are to optimize for conversions or views. I personally like rotating my ads initially because I start with a few creatives. Once I feel that the campaign is reaching a point where I’m seeing diminishing returns, I’ll optimize for conversions.
• Frequency capping - this one is important. You absolutely do not want to be the company that hits people with 10 of your ads in the same day. It’s a horrible experience. I like to keep this at 1 usually. This means my ad will only show once to a viewer per day.

Step 5: One YouTube Bidding Tip To Remember

If there’s any tip you need to pay attention to from this post, it’s this one. YouTube advertising conveniently rolled all of their bidding per ad format into one bid. Don’t let that trick you.

There’s a way around that:

After you click on ‘Customize bids per format’, you’ll be presented with more bidding options:

In this case, if I’m doing both in-display and in-stream ads and I care more about in-stream, I’ll just reduce my in-display bid. Better yet, you might create two completely different ad campaigns and have one ad focus on in-display and one focus on in-stream. Generally, bid amounts vary per niche but starting at roughly $.15 and then adjusting according to what Google gives you is good.

It takes a little more work but it’ll give you better CPAs (cost per acquisition) in the long run.

As you continue to adjust your bids, there’s a healthy view predictor that shows how many views you might get based on your current bids:

YouTube will also let you know if your targeting group is too narrow which can be helpful in some cases.

My tip here is to adjust the bids until you get a satisfactory projection and then give it a test. Personally, I like to see at least 4,000 predicted views a day. If on any given day your views drop considerably, you’ll know it’s because you need to readjust your bids again. I recommend you monitor your view amounts on a weekly basis.

Step 6: Make Your Dashboard More Relevant

To change the metrics that show up in your dashboard view, click on the ‘Columns’ button:

The metrics I like to add are:

• Converted views - these are your click through conversions.
• Cost/converted view - your cost per acquisition.
• Impression share – what percentage of available impressions am I taking up? If I’m at <10%, I know there’s a lot of room to grow.
• Conversion rate – keep in mind this is conversions divided by views so this is a lower number. Sometimes it’s easier to divide converted views by Website Clicks.
• Website clicks – number of people that clicked your add and went to your site.
• Video played to: - this tells me how engaging my videos are.

Here’s how it looks:

So how did I make my first $100 with YouTube advertising?

Initially, I was hesitant about using YouTube because of all the talk about video ads being great for branding (which I didn’t care about). But I still thought it was worth a test – that’s the key mindset you need to have going into these. You can’t expect miracles to happen overnight and you can’t expect anything to happen if you don’t have the courage to spend some money.

After playing around with targeting that I thought made sense, I ran my ads for about 14 days before registering my first conversion.

Here are some changes I had to make during my first 14 days:

• Created a few targeting ‘themes’. For example, if I was selling a truck product, I’d think about targeting relevant conferences, how to videos, competitors, and other related products. Keep in mind that initially, you want to start with 2-4 themes. That is, unless, you have a 6 to 7 figure budget to test.
• Searched for traction and eliminated ruthlessly. My goal was to find just one targeting theme that worked. Once I did, I paused the other groups and focused on optimizing one group.
• Made sure I was paying attention to my daily bids. There were a lot of fluctuations and some days I would find myself getting no impressions because I was getting heavily outbid.

From there, I shut down my other campaigns and focused on just one until I could refine it. Then I poured more money into it and that’s when it really started to take off in the second month.

In short, I found some traction, focused on it, started to profit, and then expanded into other areas. That formula has served me well for years

Conclusion

Marketers are just starting to recognize YouTube ads as a profitable and scalable channel in their marketing toolbox. The ones who take advantage of it will get better rates before it will start to get very saturated in the next year or two. Armed with this post, you’ll be able to avoid making the same mistakes I made while testing. Go give it a shot and tell me how it goes for you! Good luck.

Eric Siu (@ericosiu) is the CEO of digital marketing agency Single Grain, which does YouTube advertising, Facebook advertising and content marketing. He also video interviews entrepreneurs like Noah Kagan, Rand Fishkin and more on his blog, Growth Everywhere.

The easiest thing in the world is to have an idea. The hardest thing is to successfully execute on that idea and turn it into something that creates customers and actually turns a profit.

I talk with startups every day, and the one thing many of them have in common is that their self perception is often out of whack with what people actually want or need. Lots of valuable time, money and most importantly, energy, get lost this way via development, marketing and PR.

1. We’re Changing The World!

Not yet you’re not. Your vision includes the potential to change some part of the world and people’s lives, but until you’ve attracted enough customers, subscribers, media attention, or social media swagger to actually start making a difference,  you’ve changed nothing.

Take a realistic look at when that moment will be that you go from the “idea” of changing the world to “actually” changing the world. That’s what you’re shooting for, and if you’re smart, driven and talented you’ll get there.

2. We’re Revolutionary, A First, Unique!

Are you sure? Have you really looked? Are you really as unique as you think or are? Are there others like you out there? Don’t be afraid to look. If there are similar solutions to the problems you’re solving, you’ll be far more successful if you know now, than if you find out later.

If there are, don’t give up. Just play to your strengths. Differentiate. Never give up. Be smarter.

3. We’re newsworthy. The Media Will Swoon When They Hear About Us!

Unless you can clearly tell them why they should, they won’t. Is what you’re doing proprietary? Do you have the patent for it? Are you in a position to license it? Does it solve an existing problem or are you trying to create a market around something that people don’t necessarily need? Do you have a name investor on board? Is what you’re doing so new that it’ll stop everyone in their tracks?

Take off the rose-colored founder glasses you were wearing when you thunk up the idea and created your startup, and look at your business through the eyes of your customers, potential investors and the media. What about you will attract them? What will get their attention? What problem are you solving, what makes you so special?

Now is not the time to be lofty or arrogant. Be realistic. That’s how you’ll be judged… realistically, by people who have no skin in your game other than what you can do for them right now.

If you identify striking comparisons to other existing businesses, take them on in a smart way, and defeat them. All’s fair in love and war… and business.

4. Simply Letting People Know We’re “Coming Soon” Will Attract A Huge Social Media Following!

Do it wrong, and you’ll just be tweeting and pitching about stuff that adds up to a social media and PR snooze fest. You won’t get any attention. People want to see the story start where the story starts.

Start hyping and hit hard during your pre-launch. Tell YOUR story.

Even if your product or service isn’t ready yet, create opportunities for people to care, become involved and build your community so that when you launch you have a base.

It will work, if you do it right, but again, you have to be smart. Alert the media. Let them know your value proposition and what will make you special. Build social media communities of like-minded people who will be willing to wait until you’ve officially launched and/or support you and spread the word during your beta phase.

Set up your social media channels now, before you launch. Share valuable information related to what you’re doing, that will appeal to your demographic.

Start an early sign up page and collect email addresses and cell numbers so people can be alerted via email and text when you’re live.

5. Marketing Our Startup Will Be Somebody Else’s Job, Later On!

You think your job is to build your startup, then you’ll go to a marketing, PR or creative agency and let them take it from there. Or maybe you’ve tried your hand at marketing it and you’re not getting anywhere.

You have to build the marketing in from the start and work as hard at your marketing as you did at starting your business.

The time to bring in a marketing agency or consultant is at the beginning, to help you answer the questions that will be asked of you by the media, influencers, fans, and your future customers before the questions are asked.

Physicists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands were able to successfully "teleport" information over a distance of 10 feet, reports the New York Times.

There's a lot going on in that idea, so let's break it down.

The rules for the subatomic world are totally unlike the rules for our macroscopic world. A particle can be in multiple places at the same time, and can even disappear on one side of a barrier and reappear on the other side without actually traveling through it. This comes from quantum theory, and while it sounds totally nonintuitive, it's one of the most successful models physicists have for understanding our world.

Many scientists around the world today are working to develop "quantum technology," which is simply any technology that hinges upon these totally "abnormal" properties of the super-small stuff that makes up our world. The Mount Everest of quantum technology would be to build a quantum computer that could quickly solve problems that would leave our classical computers stumped. Instead of the standard bits we use in computers today — ones and zeroes — quantum bits, or "qubits," can describe a one, a zero, or any value in between.

If this all sounds crazy or hard to understand, you're in good company with a lot of smart people. Hang in there. A legitimate, functional quantum computer (it's debatable as to if one has actually been built yet) would be absolutely bursting with computational potential.

Back to our Dutch scientists — they trapped qubits in diamonds and were able to establish a measurement of the qubits' spin. This measurement is the acual information that was "teleported," by way of a process called quantum entanglement. To simplify this idea a lot, entanglement is essentially what happens when one particle copycats another, even over a distance. Change the spin of one particle, the other instantly changes its spin to match.

Einstein famously decried entanglement, calling it "spooky action at a distance." But repeated variations of this experiment only lend more credence to it as a completely valid natural phenomena that we are slowly learning to manipulate.

Forget Google Fiber. Once this stuff is perfected, a quantum internet that's built upon it could mean instantaneous transmission and receipt of data around the world or even the universe! In 1964, an Irish physicist named John Bell predicted that this could be used to transmit data across light years of distance.

While 10 feet is no light year, it's certainly a step in the right direction.

Join the conversation about this story »

In a recent survey of affluent people in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Mastercard found that people's definitions of success varied widely depending on where they were from.

The survey looked at affluent people in the region, who are, on average, age 37, have one young child, and have investible assets of at least $200,000. The affluent population is growing quickly in the region, which is expected to be home to 70% of the world's affluent by 2017.

Mastercard found that overall, in addition to finding satisfaction in buying and owning luxury goods, affluent people in the region view "wealth as the catalyst to experience the world."

There are, however, some variations by country, as detailed in the map below:

 More and more, affluent individuals in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are placing value in experiences over things. 30% of the survey's 1,000 respondents rated international travel as their most desired experience, followed by culinary experiences (23%) and golf (12%).

SEE ALSO: 25 Things We Wish Someone Had Told Us At Graduation

Join the conversation about this story »

If You Were In Your Buyer’s Shoes is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

If you were in your buyer’s position right now, what would you do?

Would you buy what you are trying to sell them? Do you believe that what you are selling is absolutely, unequivocally going to help your buyer produce the results that they need right now? If you were your buyer, would you be willing to bet the farm on that decision?

If you were your buyer, would you trust the advice that you are giving them? Would you believe that the person selling (that’s you) has the business acumen and situational knowledge to know what the best course of action is? Would you believe that they are a subject matter expert with advice worth taking? Would you be 100% confident that you have the right partner in front of you?

If you were in your buyer’s shoes, would you believe that the person sitting across from you cares about you and your problem enough to trust them with your business? Would you believe that the solution they put in front of you was exactly what you need, or would you wonder if it was really what they need to sell? Would you worry that the person selling you might disappear after they make the sale?

Would you have what you need to justify a decision to buy from you? If asked, would you be willing to defend a decision to buy the solution you recommend and defend the decision to buy it from you? Would you have the evidence you need to justify that decision to challenges from within your company? Would you be defenseless and embarrassed by the fact that you can’t describe the reasons you should choose the salesperson and their solution over all others?

Big data is useless.

I know what you’re thinking, “Blasphemy.”

The idea that big data is useless goes against everything we as marketers and business people have come to believe over the last couple of years. Data, whether big or small, is only useful when it’s being put to work. There is no inherent value to data. The value comes from the application of what the data says.

For many companies, the focus is on the collection of data. After all, as human beings we are prone to be hoarders. Wired by our survival extinct to collect and hoard for the leaner winter months that may come. So companies hoard data, as much as they can, for the illusive “What if?” scenario.  “Maybe this will be useful someday,” they say.

And it’s this hoarding without application that makes big data useless.

As an agency, we have conversations all the time with our clients around the collection of data. When we ask them how much data they want collected, the answer is almost unanimous, ‘Collect as much data as you can! We want to know everything about anyone! Even if it’s not related to our product or the service we provide.” I’m looking at you here mobile games that ask for access to my phone records. Like knowing that I’m talking to my Dad is going to have any bearing on whether I purchase another level of “Mad Monkey Mayhem.”

Companies think they need to collect all the data they can get their hands on. Not surprising, a rare few companies should be gathering mountains of data. Most though, do not, simply because most companies do not have a plan for what to do with the data they are gathering. They don’t have an idea of how to apply any insights gleaned from the data towards improving their business. Heck, a lot of companies go out and collect mountains of data, only to end up not doing anything because they claim they have too much data to shift through!

At SMED (the agency arm of Social Media Explorer), we recommend identifying the type of data that you actually need to improve your business, and then only collect that information.

Some common data focuses include:

• Improving your customer service experience
• Improving your marketing to make it less interruptive
• Altering your product mix to better serve your customers
• Improving your logistics to deliver products to customers faster

The Negative Side of Collecting Data

Sure there are some big positives to collecting data (as long as you can analyze it), see above. But there are also risks involved with collecting big data. First and foremost is security. Where and how are you keeping this data? Is it in secured space, or just on a company server in someone’s abandoned cubicle? Another major consideration is privacy concerns. People have a limit to how much data they feel you as a company should gather. If you push this limit, you can turn away potential customers and foster distrust in your space. I’m not the only one that has decided not to download a mobile application simply because it was asking for more data than I deemed necessary.

So How Do I Know I Can Collect Data?

This is a pretty easy question. Take a look at the data you want to collect. Do you have a plan for how to apply this data? If not, do you think you’ll have a plan in the next couple months?

If the answer to the question above is yes, then start collecting that data (provided you store it in a safe space).

If the answer to the above is no, then reevaluate whether you really need the data or if you could be suffering from a data hoard attack.

Remember any data is useless without analysis and application. Big data included.

How does your company use, or plan to use Big data? Leave a comment and join the discussion. 

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When you visit a website, your first impression is generally your last. Keeping in mind the fact that a large number of websites today have an ecommerce orientation and function as a call to action for the visitor, it is imperative to have an engaging and creative landing page. This applies to most segments including websites selling products such as clothes, books, and electronics or offering services such as telecommunication, fitness, education and so on.

For those interested in pursuing a career in modeling, there are obviously agents that you can contact directly or through networking. There are also several online platforms that offer you services that will provide you the chance to be discovered and will connect you with potential agents, employers and contractual jobs.

Among these numerous websites, there are some that remain distinct because their landing pages set them apart either through clear and specific headlines, simple and informative content, effective use of images, a clear value proposition and/or a call to action.

Here are five websites that excel in creating front pages that will encourage the visitor to stay and peruse the content, information and services being offered by the web designer.

ModelManagement.com

Model Management maintains an excellent landing page, immediately providing the website visitor about the advantage of using this site and what the platform can do for them. The website makes it a point to communicate how it can make things easier for aspiring models and can help guide them and connect them with the right professionals within the modeling industry.

Elite Model Management

The landing page for Elite Model Management is a platform that is extremely simple yet sleek. The opening page lets the user see the major cities in which they operate. Once the visitor has selected the region of their choice, it takes them to a page where they can view current models, find contact information and read about how to be discovered.

UK Models

UK Models has a very elegant and classy landing page . It is pleasing to the eye and features beautiful models motivating the visitor to feel that they could actually become part of this industry. There are clear and specific categories that provide information about becoming a model, the services offered by this platform, featured modeling jobs, contact information and testimonials from clients.

OneModelPlace

OneModelPlace is another snazzy and specific website calling the visitor to action. The company provides key statistics to convince visitors of their success to date and also post information about existing job opportunities. Information about contests as well as images and news about featured models and professional photographers can also be found on this platform.

TheModelBook.com

This is a complete modeling platform and works as a free community for all those involved in this industry including models, photographers, make-up artists, hair stylists, agencies and other business professionals. It conveys the image of being an online modeling agency which is extremely attractive to someone trying to gain entry into the modeling world.

There really is no such thing as social selling. Because all selling is social. Humans are social animals. They thrive on interaction with others. Humans are deeply dependent on other humans for their survival as well as their emotional health and stability.

In this day and age of email, LinkedIn, Twitter, and all the other mediums that actually drive us further apart, it seems that if you want to sell more stuff and grow your business you would want to connect with others on a human level as to cement the relationship in a positive manner from the very beginning.

In today’s corporate world the new buzz word is “authenticity”. Fortune 100 companies want their employees to be themselves. They are starting to re-examine the strategy of hiring for skill and altering the person. In other words, they know the value of one’s true humanity and how important it is to their bottom line.

So here are 5 reasons why you should start selling like a Human and less like an automated attendant.

1. Your prospects and customers are humans too. In other words they have the same fears, hopes and desires as you do.

2. Empathy. If you do not know why this is important in selling and in business, maybe it is time you learned.

3. Helping them to attain their goals. That company you just called, probably has an entire sales department. They want more business just like you. See number 1 for further explanation.

4. Two dimensional selling (i.e. social media) cannot not convey emotion like a real conversation in person or over the phone. Passion, emotion and humor will get you further than all of your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn followers combined.

5. Perception is reality. Buyers and people alike perceive the internet to be filled with hucksters and con-men. Prove them wrong.

Good Luck and Good Selling!

Are you guessing or do you know how your prospects make buying decisions? If you don’t know, don’t guess. Why? Because when you make assumptions about how your target audience makes decisions, you give up the opportunity to develop a B2B marketing strategy that gives your business a competitive advantage.

You need to create buyer personas that describe your prospects’ buying cycle, the questions they ask and the reasons why they decide to buy. When you have a buyer persona, it’s like going to MapQuest®, typing the “to” and “from” addresses, and getting detailed instructions on how to get from “creating awareness” to “sales.”

I’m not talking about personas conjured up out of the best of “internal thinking,” or what Adele Revella, founder of the Buyer Persona Institute, calls “making stuff up.” This route to personas leads you astray and is often the foundation for lackluster marketing. You need to talk with clients who have recently purchased your product or solution, as well as a few prospects that wandered over to the competition or decided not to buy at all.

What Should You Include in a Buyer Persona?

In a buyer persona, you need to answer the following questions.

What Pushed the Business Leaders to Deal with the Problem?

Business leaders working in lean corporate environments are juggling multiple priorities and have to sift through them to decide which to address first. You want to understand what triggers leaders to move from “living with the pain” to “dealing with the pain.” For example, perhaps their decision to invest in a new marketing automation solution resulted from losing market share to a competitor. Or maybe a lower return on investment at a trade show spurred marketing managers to hire a telemarketing company to build awareness of the company’s trade show attendance and set appointments with decision makers at the show.

What Are Buyers Hoping to Accomplish?

You need to understand what the prospect or buyer wants to achieve. In other words, how do they define a successful purchase? How will their business change for the better as a result of this purchase? In the case of the organization that invested in telemarketing, success would likely be a return of a specific percentage on their trade show investment.

What Obstacles Stand in the Way of a Purchase?

Many buying decisions do not go smoothly from initial awareness to the sale. Obstacles litter the path to purchase—internal politics, budget limitations, and poor messaging that causes confusion about product features and benefits. The more you know, the more you can empathize with the prospect’s challenges and help them through the process.

What is the Buyer’s Journey?

When you’re selling to other business people, it’s usually not one person who’s making the buying decision. There are usually several people who influence the final “yea” or “nay,” and you need to know who they are, the roles they play, and the questions they ask along the way. You may discover that you need to develop a few personas based on the parts that people play. For example, an engineer may be all for a piece of equipment that will make his life easier, but the owner of his company likely will be more focused on the return on investment he can achieve. Each of these individuals needs to be approached differently in your marketing outreach.

How Do Buyers Make the Final Decision?

Last but not least you want to understand how your buyer makes the final buying decision. What features or attributes of your product, service or solution allowed it to float to the top or, on the other hand, pushed it out of consideration.

Creating Content Based on Buyer Personas

Once you understand your customers and every aspect of their buying decision, you can craft content that truly speaks to them, answers their questions and moves them step by step through the buying process. They are a core element of your B2B marketing strategy because fleshed out personas enable you to create content that resonates with prospects, setting your company apart from your competition.

Content is not king.

Yep, I said it. (This guy did, too.)

In the realm of content marketing, the customer is ruler of our domain.

Without falling deep into a series of Game of Thrones allusions, let’s agree that all content must be created with the customer’s needs in mind. Otherwise we are wasting time and resources as marketers.

I’ve already written much on personas and their usages across digital marketing, but it’s tying those personas to user journeys and content that yields remarkable increases in conversion.

Using different exercises to identify content gaps helps you plug the holes in your funnel and get more out of your content.

How to use personas and user journeys for qualitative content auditing

When developing personas we get a detailed picture of who the members of our audience are and what makes them tick.

Most importantly we understand what it is that they need within the context of what our business offers.

Meet Dinky Danny, a persona I created for custom itinerary travel agency Trip.Me.

Click to enlarge image in a new window.

One of the key insights from this persona is that the user wants to feel like an expert before they make their travel decision. He or she is not necessarily just looking for the best deal in price, but the perfect deal … and will likely need content that speaks to every stage of their trip.

But what are the stages of their trip?

Naturally, the next step is a journey-mapping exercise with the goal of understanding the series of needs or activities that a user goes through within her path to purchase and beyond.

Journey mapping is an art and a science that requires identifying user needs and developing them into stages — some of which align directly with business transactional touch points, and some that can only align with content.

Here is an example of the process:

Click to enlarge in a new window.

Alternatively, you can map it to the funnel and align it with the segments you identify in keyword research. I prefer to use that in combination with the ethnographic approach I’ve detailed in the past.

For example, this is the user journey for Trip.Me.

Click to enlarge in a new window.

Through a series of ethnographic research activities, I’ve identified these phases of user activity and what those users are hoping to accomplish. Giving these phases names allows me to then review the content through the eyes of the target segments and see who is accounted for and what need states the content fulfills.

This is a large part of what is done in the qualitative auditing by either a research analyst or a content strategist. Ultimately, this is where content and audience come together.

How to perform a Qualitative Content Audit

Start this process with a crawl using Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider, which automates the collection of some of the required data points, most importantly the list of pages. (Of course, you’ll have to physically review each page as well and keep notes as patterns start to emerge.)

After you’ve seen every page type several times, you’ll start to notice that you can just glance at certain page types without having to spend too much time reading every single word. I’m not saying to perform a lazy content audit; but, for example, a product page is a product page, and once you understand how they have been laid out you’ll have a general understanding of what they are and how they can be improved.

And if a site is too large, then you can perform this with a representative sample of pages.

For each page you’ll want to collect the following data points:

Content ID
This is just an identifier for each page that can be referenced across deliverables as you’re building out your content strategy. These are typically decimal numbers that reflect the site’s structure.

The homepage may be represented as either 0.0 or 1.0, while a first-level sub-page of main category could be 2.10 and its child page could be 2.11.

You can use whatever schema you’d like, just be sure to remain consistent.

Actual page title
This is the title of the page as defined in its metadata.

If these have been written correctly, they can act as a way to jog your memory as to what the page is about. If they aren’t … well then you have your first suggestion of what can be improved.

This can be easily obtained from Screaming Frog. You could also grab the meta description if you like, but in my experience most sites that I’ve worked on don’t have good meta descriptions when we’re in this phase, so I usually skip it.

URL
Where does this content live on the web? Screaming Frog provides this.

Format
What format is this content in: HTML, PDF, infographic, image, video?

This can be parsed from the Content field that Screaming Frog provides, however it is worth double checking by using other fields because sometimes what is identified in the header “text/html” is not.

What is it?
Give a short description of what the content is in your own words. This, in context with the page title, should give you a refresher or flashback of the page.

Target segments
Based on the persona’s user story and needs, you are making a qualitative judgment call as to whether this content will resonate with them. This field can feature one or more personas, or none at all.

This is how we determine from a people perspective whether this content is worth keeping.

Target need state
Based on the user journey, what stage does this content fall into?

Again, you’re making a qualitative judgment call to determine whether the content fulfills a specific need. This time, however, it is somewhat irrespective of who the content is specifically for.

Is it link-worthy?
Would anyone link to this content? This is a “Yes/No” field.

This is also a judgment call based on what you know of the web and what type of content attracts links. A boring product page is not likely to be link-worthy while an infographic or entertaining video is.

Is it share-worthy?
Would anyone share this content on social media? This is also a “Yes/No” field.

What is share-worthy is often what is link-worthy. However, in some cases the converse is true. For example, while you may link to a white paper in an article, you might not share that white paper to your social network.

Is it unique, redundant, or outdated?
Understanding whether content serves a unique purpose or is up to date is incredibly important in developing singular paths throughout the site, as well as trimming the fat.

With this field you make the call as to whether the content is unique, redundant or outdated.

Suggestions
In your professional opinion what are some options for this content? Can we update it, delete it, or repurpose it? Are there typos and grammar mistakes?

Anything you think that should be done with it should be noted here.

The end result of the Qualitative Content Audit is a document that looks like this.

Throughout the review process you’ll begin to get a sense of what you have, what you don’t, and who it serves. For example, I can now filter for Dinky Danny and quickly identify which of her need states are met.

It should be noted that by no means are these data points exhaustive; you can review for whatever qualitative features you deem fit. The aforementioned fields are just those that are most often helpful to my clients and their use cases.

How to choose the right data for a Quantitative Content Audit

Additionally, you will want to pull data so you can support what is working and what isn’t based on quantifiable metrics.

After all, we are digital marketers. For us it’s not just about feelings and empathy for the user, but about hard facts and figures on their behavior.

Quantitatively, you can review whatever metrics are relevant to the business goals. In the case of Trip.Me I’ve used:

• Content ID
• URL
• Organic Revenue
• Request Conversion Rate
• Overall Conversion Rate
• Organic Search Traffic
• Social Traffic
• All Traffic
• Tweet Count
• Like Count
• +1 Count
• Inbound Links
• Bounce Rate
• Time on Site

All of these metrics should be self-explanatory and are not exhaustive. The quantitative data points should be chosen based on what matters most to the measurement plan of the website.

How to perform a Quantitative Content Audit

If you’ve started from the qualitative side you can simply copy and paste the Content ID and URL into this sheet as well. If not, then you start from Screaming Frog as shown above.

You can use Social Crawlytics or Neils Bosma’s SEO tools for Excel plugin to pull the share data and SEOGadget has an Excel Plugin for pulling data from a variety of other SEO-related sources such as Ahrefs, OpenSiteExplorer, Grepwords, and more.

I prefer to use SocialCrawlytics and pull the CSVs from the data providers and just use the VLOOKUP function, as it is often faster than direct data pulls within Excel. However, the tradeoff is that I lose the ability for automatic updates to these metrics at a later time.

I love Excel’s conditional formatting for this part of the process. It very quickly makes clear what pieces of content are the winners (see what I mean here).

Between these two sets of analysis, you can now figure out fairly quickly what performs, what the sticking points are, and what is missing entirely with regard to the user journey.

Now … finding the gaps

In my review of Trip.Me’s content I quickly noticed that most of it falls into two distinct buckets that are very early in their user journey: Explore and Book.

Click to enlarge in a new window.

This makes complete sense as they are an early-stage startup, so for them it’s all about getting transactions.

The transactional phase front loads Trip.Me’s journey, but Dinky Danny specifically wants to feel like an expert. So even if she’s interested in Trip.Me’s tours, or if she happens across their fun Country Comparison tool, she doesn’t have enough information to make her feel comfortable with her purchasing decision. Thus, Dinky Danny will likely head back to the search results and do more research on other travel agency sites and blogs.

While she may ultimately come back to book with Trip.Me, there’s also the possibility that she may end up booking somewhere else that caught her eye during her research process. Therefore, Trip.Me must plug those gaps in order to get better at converting Dinky Danny from viewer to customer.

This is not limited to the travel context.

Here’s a customer journey for a company called Sunrun that offers solar power installations.

Click to enlarge in a new window.

From what I gather, solar panels and power are complicated products to consider and buy, so there is a pretty long sales cycle.

While I don’t know anything about their market segments, I imagine that if Sunrun had no content about installation on their site, the process would feel daunting and few people would signup. But Sunrun is aware of this. They have identified this as a key phase and make it an objective to speak about installation in their messaging, with an entire section of the site dedicated to it.

Click to enlarge in a new window.

Suffice to say, if you don’t have a piece of content or touch point for each relevant phase in the user journey, then you’re missing out on opportunities.

You’re losing out in search because your competitors may have content for this phase covered, with the opportunity to shape how the experience should be. And you’re missing out in social media because entertaining or educational content for each phase can be shared and used for brand awareness.

Identify action items from your content audit

Your content audit should yield a series of improvements you want to take action on.

You should look for the stages in the user journey for which the existing content is inadequate or non-existent. These are the holes in your funnel.

You should also look for things that can be repurposed — like white papers — that can become data visualization, or blog posts that can be updated and turned into evergreen guides that reinforce a user’s need state.

You should look for what content is serving no one in your audience … and prune it.

Finally, you should be looking at what performs best, and at which stages, and create more of it.

In the case of Trip.Me, it made us realize that we should be building more content for the rest of the user’s needs to help with brand awareness and encourage confidence, which ultimately encourages booking. For example, we realized that there were opportunities for honeymoon-specific content that would speak to the Dinky Danny persona.

So this idea …

Became this post …

And has started popping up in many of the site’s assisted conversion paths.

Mind the gap on exit

Once the business goals and the target audience have been determined, every content marketing campaign should begin here.

Content marketing campaigns can otherwise fly blind and miss the mark for users who may have been entertained or mildly educated, but not thoroughly satisfied.

Remember the consumer is king, while content is a jester in his court.

If content auditing and journey mapping are new concepts to you, then you may enjoy these parting gifts that will help you on your way.

• Taking A Content Inventory
• Anatomy of an Experience Map
• How Much of Your Content Deserves the Title “King?”
• How to Do a Content Inventory

And finally, Steve Floyd over at AXZM has prepared the Super Awesome Content Strategy Worksheet, which features the content audit I developed and outlined in this post. It’s yours to download for free!

Thanks to the Copyblogger team for having me.

Before I go, I’d love to hear from you.

• What are some of the issues you’ve been having with your content marketing efforts?
• Have you already done a content audit?
• Have there been any shocking insights?
• How have you leveraged them to get results?

Send me a tweet (@iPullRank) or join the discussion at LinkedIn.

Did you find this article useful?

Then we recommend that you read this article next: Who’s the Hero in Your Business?

Flickr Creative Commons Image via Tom Ellefsen. Banner with text added.

About the Author: Mike King is a Digital Marketing Consultant at iPullRank. He leads teams and offers services covering consumer insights, content, social strategy, and SEO for enterprise brands and startups. Get more from Mike on Twitter.

The post How to Plug the Holes in Your Content Funnel That Are Costing You Money appeared first on Copyblogger.

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A good marketer knows that any successful marketing strategy is not complete without a well-conceived social media plan. A great marketer knows, in depth, the interworking of every social media platform. A great marketer knows exactly how to use social media, why they are using it, and how to be a marketing master on each platform. LinkedIn is one of those platforms and it’s been noted as the “professional” social media platform. LinkedIn has over 250 million users and it’s considered one of the “big four” in terms of social media market share.

There are several ways a great marketer can utilize LinkedIn for marketing purposes.

• Provides sponsored updates so you can get your content and advertisements right in front of your target audience.
• Allows targeted organic posts aside from the targeting included in promoted posts.
• Has a powerful group feature that allows you and others to join or form groups to discuss topics and tactics.
• Provides targeted social reach through many of its features .
• Considered the network for professionals, and when you’re a business looking to fill a position, LinkedIn is a great platform to look for employees to hire.

Sponsored Updates

LinkedIn sponsored updates allow you to raise your company’s brand awareness. Awareness is a big influence on the purchasing decision of a potential buyer. If they are aware of your brand and its reputation before meeting with the sales team, a sale would be better facilitated. LinkedIn allows ads in text only, text/image, and video advertising formats. They offer very precise targeting for sponsored updates where your ad can be placed in front of people who have specific job titles, specific industries, even specific company sizes. You can even set your own budget. You can pay by clicks or impressions that your advertisements receive, so you only pay for results. You can stop your ads at any time with no contracts or commitments.

More Targeted Organic Posts

Everyone can go on LinkedIn and post whatever they may choose at any time, but once you click share you’ll noticed that it is targeted to all followers. If you have, or are developing, a large follower base of many different people. You can target your organic posts similar to sponsored posts. You just don’t have to pay to do so because you are only reaching out to people who are already following you. This is great for marketers if you have offers for many different job titles. For example, you could have 2 eBooks, one targeted at CMOs and one is targeted at CEOs. You don’t want to sponsor these posts but you don’t want your entire follower base to see a post that is meant for one specific job title. You can use targeted organic posts to get your content in front of the right section of your follower base.

Groups

LinkedIn has Groups around topics that you’re interested in. Some of these groups are private though and will require you to request admission based on certain criteria. Otherwise, you have the option to create a fresh, new group revolving around topics already being discussed or a group topic that has not yet been brought to light. These tools can be used as a potential online focus group or a great place for like-mind marketers to share success stories and useful strategies/tactics.

Targeted Social Reach

This is not a direct incentive that LinkedIn offers but from its other abundant features it drives this bonus. From all your efforts of posting, promoting, and “grouping” on LinkedIn, you have exposed yourself to and connected with plenty of people who are looking to do what you do, buy what you have, or read what you share. You have just expanded your social reach in a smart way. You have not just gained a following of masses where people just click follow and never return to your page again, you have created a loyal social reach of followers that continually engage in the efforts you make.

Hiring Professionals

Finally, LinkedIn is a great way to hire professionals seeing as it is the professional network and many people use LinkedIn as an online resume. For us marketers, sometimes we need the help of others and we want professional work done. For example, every online marketer is familiar with call-to-actions and they know successful ones are created professional graphic artists. Let’s say you don’t have a graphic artist and you need one quick. Turn to LinkedIn. They have plenty of them waiting for you to hire and they even display their work on their profiles. Maybe you don’t need a graphic artists, but a social media specialist or an account manager, whatever the title, LinkedIn has options.

Above: A Linked-pen

When you think sales intelligence solutions — data companies that offer names, organizations, and contact information for leads — you typically think of old graybeard companies like Dunn & Bradstreet, founded in 1841. Or Hoovers, its subsidiary, or perhaps Data.com.

But LinkedIn?

According to a new ranking of sales intelligence solutions by 350 sales pros, LinkedIn Premium isn’t just a source for lead intelligence — it might even be the source. In crowdsourced software reviews site G2 Crowd’s latest grid, the Sales Intelligence grid, LinkedIn towers above the contenders, including newer companies like CapitalIQ and DiscoverOrg.

LinkedIn has been more than professional networking for some time, of course, but I still found this somewhat shocking. This reminds me of something a former KISSmetrics manager told me, about a $10,000 data purchase from an old-school business data vendor that turned out to be 80 percent inaccurate, spurring a refund request.

“Buying data is like driving a new car off the lot,” he told me. “The value drops 30 percent right away.”

That’s likely one of the reasons why LinkedIn, while it probably still doesn’t have the broad coverage of the old boys club, is seen as so valuable by sales professionals. Since it is after all a professional networking site, members have an internal incentive to maintain their profiles — and companies have an incentive to maintain and update their profiles — which essentially means we are all keeping our data up-to-date so that LinkedIn can sell access to it.

Crowdsourcing, clearly, is the name of the game.

One type of player that G2 Crowd didn’t include in this new grid, probably because they are so new, are the sales and business intelligence companies that don’t rely on old-school data collection efforts or crowdsourcing. I’m talking about companies like Datanyze, which troll the web for the little code hooks that SaaS companies embed in their clients pages, and provide insightful information based on shifting client bases, or HGdata, which searches the web and the hidden web — PDFs, Word files, Excel documents that are connected to the web — for hints and clues about what software products companies are using.

Other leaders G2 Crowd identified are DiscoverOrg and CapitalIQ, while Lead411, IKO System, and SalesLoft all earned “high performer” status.

“Satisfaction rankings are generated from the user reviews, and market presence is calculated from vendor size, market share, and social impact,” G2 Crowd says. “Based on a combination of these scores, each software solution is categorized as a Leader, High Performer, Contender, or Niche.”

D&B is the world's leading source of commercial information and insight on businesses, enabling companies to Decide with Confidence for over 165 years. The company is a Fortune 500 public company headquartered in Short Hills, New Je... read more »

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network on the internet, with more than 259 million members worldwide, including executives from Fortune 500 companies. Founded on May 5, 2003, by Reid Hoffman and founding team members f... read more »

G2 Crowd is the trusted site for enterprise software ratings and reviews. Our mission is to disrupt the traditional technology analysts by aggregating wisdom from real IT and business users along with social data signals. Compare C... read more »

In the commoditized Technology  industry, timing is everything. Purpose-driven users won’t give your website a second glance unless they feel an immediate connection with obvious benefits.

Consider these tidbits:

• First time visitors aren’t as forgiving as current customers.
• 73% of online consumers get frustrated with websites when content, offers or promotions that appear have nothing to do with their interests.
• Complex B2B solutions aren’t sold to businesses – they’re sold to people.

So how do you keep prospects engaged from the first visit?

1. Don’t write without purpose
Your website’s main goals are to drive traffic and sales activities. But each page also has its own purpose. So, ask yourself, “What do I want the user to do right now?” Browse, buy, call now, sign up or fill out your contact form?

A clear purpose = a clear your message that resonates with prospects.

• Communicate your USP or value proposition early on and above the fold.
• Use benefit-rich headlines to tell the user you can solve her problem.
• Craft clear calls-to-action to tell them what you want them to do next.
• Create and use a Content Standards Guide to help guide internal and external writers. Use it to stay on the right track and keep messaging, voice and tone consistent.
• Make your intent clear with hyperlinks and anchored keyphrases linking to the right pages.

2. Don’t trigger headaches with annoying graphics
Less is always more and in B2B technology and you won’t get brownie points for showing off with edgy, useless or irrelevant graphics.

Compatible design and graphics = trusted messaging

• Have a clear logo and tagline that support your core message.
• Use white space to balance text and graphics.
• Make navigation easy to follow.
• Limit your font styles and sizes to readable, attractive choices that support your core message.
• For each graphical element ask yourself, “Will this enhance and support our core message?” If the answer is No, ditch it.

3. Don’t neglect your user’s experience
Few things irritate prospects more than slow websites that eventually reveal irrelevant content.

Speed and accuracy = a website optimized for usability.

• Optimize graphics, videos and other downloadable content for all types of browsing requests – mobile, laptops, etc.
• Mute videos and make the sound optional upon loading. No one wants to jump out of their skin from an unexpected loud video.
• A pop-up on your homepage? If it subtly shows up on the right-hand navigation, proceed. If it screams, taking up 90% of the screen before the user has a chance to read your headline, stop and reassess.
• Sliders or no sliders? They’re cool, but don’t necessarily help your user’s experience and can even hurt your conversion rates. Proceed with caution.
• Make sure contact forms are functional, easy to follow and only ask for what you need. (This means asking for your prospect’s title, department, company size and annual revenue is probably too much and she’ll abandon the page.)
• Monitor and test sales pages, sign-up pages and landing pages regularly to optimize them.

4. Don’t saturate with branding messages
You may be selling complex B2B solutions, but your end user is still human. To capture and retain her, you must toss out the corporate speak – she really doesn’t care for it.

Customer-focused copy and solution-based content = relevance, engagement and sales.

• Post content that’s easily digestible.
• Mix it up and keep leads and prospects engaged with helpful blog posts, insightful white papers, case studies, videos, infographics or webinars.
• Ask your sales department for feedback: what do prospects ask about the most? What parts of your organization or solutions do they have trouble understanding?

5. Don’t ignore SEO even when you can’t keep up
Tired of Google changes yet? We all are. In fact, as I write this, they’ve just issued another Panda update. But many technology companies still lose out as they ignore some key search tactics.

Consistent and updated SEO = search relevance and higher engagement.

• Don’t lose sight of your competitors’ keyphrases and search rankings.
• Consider revising your headlines and sub-headlines and adding keyphrases.
• Review and update your page titles and meta descriptions and revise any duplicated messages.
• Revise your hyperlinks and craft new ones or add keyphrases to hyperlinks.
• Too busy? Engage an  SEO Copywriter to pick their brain and offload your work.

They key to breaking barriers lies in your website’s ability to quickly connect with prospects. With all these factors in mind, you’ll strengthen your lead generation and ultimately, your sales.

Let me just put this out there: I don’t think you are running a bad email marketing campaign. In fact, chances are you have worked your way through some rough attempts early on and have landed upon a strategy that offers consistent returns time and time again.

What I am suggesting, however, is that the tried-and-true email campaign strategy you are currently placing faith in may be riddled with unsuspected mistakes that are holding it back from generating more leads, more conversions, and more ROI. Browse through this checklist of common errors to see if any of these minor (yet costly) oversights have infiltrated your fool-proof plan:

Mismanagement of Reader Expectations

Email marketing is a delicate practice. Marketers must know how to provide relevant information to the consumer without overloading their inbox with unwanted clutter. When marketers fail to manage reader expectations with each campaign, click-through rates drop, conversions plummet, and ROI starts to dwindle. Therefore, marketers should take the time to monitor email activity and consumer responses so opportunities are not wasted and high-quality leads are not driven away.

Prior to receiving the emails, you should explain to consumers what signing up for email alerts entails, the frequency of the messaging, and any other information that may be pertinent to the decision-making process. This will prevent a consumer from being surprised with regular emails in the inbox and create a sense of trustworthiness in the brand.

To ensure email recipients have appropriate expectations for each email, make the purpose of the message very simple and honest. The subject line of the emails should be transparent and match the content in the body. Rather than trying to trick your recipients into opening the email, only leading to disappointment or resentment, place yourself in their shoes and be respectful of their time and attention.

Segment for Success

If you find yourself swimming in consumer data on a daily basis, you are not alone. Most companies are generating large pools of customer information thanks to the availability of marketing automation and analytics technologies that gather, report, and optimize information constantly. This data may seem overwhelming, but when properly harnessed by the right tools can be incredibly helpful in increasing email marketing ROI.

When you peruse an email marketing list, think of how best to separate the recipients based on a number of differentiating factors derived from customer data. This list segmentation is a great way to create more personalized messaging and content to customers to make them feel special, without having to draft unique content for each reader. The more specific and refined the segmentation, the easier it is to identify trends, address consumer interests or concerns, and build a long-term relationship with higher ROI.

One easy way to segment an email marketing list is by customer persona. Every brand has at least a few customer profiles it is selling to based on product or service use case. Once the personas have been identified, and the list segmented, you should create subject lines and content messaging that appeals specifically to each persona. This means touching on a common concern or interest of a specific group such as “financial tools for small business owners.”

Not Enough Testing

Marketers are no longer allowed to rest on their laurels and slide by with haphazard “Eureka!” moments. To be a successful marketing team there has to be a system of measurement and reporting in place to maintain accountability to the C-suite. While executives are placing greater trust in marketers as sources of high-quality leads and conversions, that trust must be earned with testing and data reports. From these statistics, decision-makers can extract actionable insight to guide future investments and strategies.

For email marketing, specifically, it can be challenging to decide what content should be included in each message. When drafting a blog or whitepaper, you may be able to deliver the key messages effectively while writing for a broad audience. Because emails are designed to appear more personalized to each recipient, the crafting of content messaging is key to lead generation and ROI.

Therefore, marketers often create a few versions of an email blast and test the responses to each to determine which tactic is most effective. Each version should have a slight variation in its presentation to the reader so you know what aspect of the email should be changed to drive sales. For example, test different subject lines to gauge open rates, or switch up the calls to action in the body of the email to monitor responses.

Not Enough Tools

To properly test an email marketing campaign, however, it takes patience as well as marketing automation and analytics solutions to gather the data and report the findings. These solutions will help you identify patterns of reader behavior and create more effective email campaigns in the future. The C-suite will love the reports from these technologies, as they can break down the findings by a variety of components such as channel, conversions, and open rates.

For example, when call tracking technology is used in an email marketing or nurturing campaign, you can add unique, trackable phone numbers into email content to monitor phone leads generated from a specific email. After the test is complete, the call tracking data can be integrated with other marketing automation and analytics tools to provide executives with a complete picture of the testing results so a winner can be chosen.

Call tracking can also work hand-in-hand with marketing automation and analytics solutions to follow the multichannel experience of a customer moving through the sales cycle, as he or she hops between online and offline platforms. Understanding where leads are coming from specifically will guide you toward the most effective marketing strategy based on lead generation and conversions. The more efficient the strategy, the higher the ROI. Hard to argue with that!

When it comes to marketing, there's no end in sight. You can optimize, A/B test, and optimize some more, and there will still be something else you can improve.

The key is knowing what's worth improving first, and which improvements will garner more ROI. So if your landing pages are performing well, it might be better to focus your efforts elsewhere.

But how can you know for sure if your landing page are in good shape? Here are six signs that your landing page needs to be redesigned or optimized to get you as many high-quality leads as possible.

1) Your landing page conversion rate is low

Your first indication that your landing page needs work is that it's not converting leads! If your conversion rate (CVR) is low, it's time to look at the design and content of your landing page.

Landing page CVR = # form completions / # landing page views

But how can you know if your conversion rate is low? Conversion rates depend on many different elements outside the content of the landing page:

• Your industry
• Whether your company is B2B vs. B2C
• The page's position in your buyers' journey (for example, a top-of-the-funnel ebook landing page will have a higher CVR than a bottom-of-the-funnel demo landing page)
• What kind of traffic you're driving to your landing page (paid vs. organic)
• Seasonality
• The age of the landing page

For this reason, it's hard to find benchmark data specifically for landing pages. Your own benchmark conversion rate will be a judgment call as you compare the CVRs of the various landing pages you've created.

For example, let's say you measure the CVR of your landing pages created each month, and they usually average between 50% - 55%. Ebooks yield 65% CVR, and webinars are a bit lower, around 40%. If you create a landing page for an ebook and it only has a 35% CVR, you'd know something's wrong with that page, even if 35% would be a high CVR at another company.

2) Your website conversion rate is low

Another data point to look at is your website conversion rate. 

Website CVR = # of total conversions / # of website visitors

While your landing page conversion rate is more specific, your website conversion rate will indicate whether or not your entire conversion path needs a revamp. According to MarketingSherpa, benchmark website conversion rates are anywhere from 2% to 10%, depending on industry.

This should give you a good idea of what your website conversion rate should be at a minimum -- your goal should always be above average!

3) The quality of your leads isn't that great

Your landing page might be generating leads. But are they good leads? Are your sales reps working those leads and turning them into customers? If not, you may want to:

• Rewrite the copy to be more clear about what the visitor will be receiving by signing up.
• Increase your form length to better qualify your leads. This is a good option for when you're getting too many leads for your sales team to sift through.
• Chat with your sales team to learn what obstacles high-quality leads face. It might be an issue with the offer you're giving away, not just the design of the landing page. The offer itself might not be helping your audience solve any of their problems.

4) Your landing page doesn't pass the blink test

"The blink test" is the commonly accepted 3-5 seconds during which a visitor lands on your website, judges it, and decides if they want to stay there and do something, or jump ship.

Make sure that your landing page passes the blink test. Within 3-5 seconds, a visitor should know exactly what they'll get by filling out a form on your landing page.

You can use services like UsabilityHub and their five second test to determine if anonymous, random users understand what they'd be getting on your landing pages. Or you can print out your landing page, put it under your colleague/boss/spouse/parent/child's nose for five seconds, pull it away, and ask what the page is offering. If most of your test subjects get the answer right, your landing page passed the blink test.

5) You're using a lot of text

A dead giveaway that your landing page needs work is if it includes dense paragraphs of text. Text is overwhelming. Images and white space make website visitors happy. 

Take a look at variations A and B here. Which version is more enticing?

Hint: Variation A, which is live here, is what we're going for.

6) You're missing an essential landing page element

Here are all the elements any landing page should include. If you're missing one, it's a sign that you should take a look at your landing pages and make sure they're following the best practices.

• A headline - says exactly what the offer is.
• An image - shows the offer (if necessary, it's an abstract representation of the offer).
• Text conveying benefit of the offer - concise, ideally in the form of bullet points.
• A form - should be above the fold.
• A submit button - shouldn't say "submit", but instead say "download" or "save your seat," etc.

Want to share this post? Here are some ready-made tweets:

Click to tweet: 6 Signs Your Landing Page Needs to Be Redesigned - http://hub.am/1ip3CCf by @DianaUrban at @HubSpot #webdesign

Click to tweet: Does your landing page need a redesign? Find out here - http://hub.am/1ip3CCf #webdesign #leadgeneration

Click to tweet: Great info here - 6 Signs Your Landing Page Needs to Be Redesigned - http://hub.am/1ip3CCf #webdesign

                                     

by Tim Riesterer

Last week, I had the opportunity to co-present with Thomson Reuters at the SiriusDecisions Summit, one of the leading conferences for professionals tasked with improving the effectiveness of their marketing and sales organizations. As the crowd was primarily made up of marketing operations and automation technologists, it was good to see that sales conversations still got a moment on the main stage. If you couldn’t make it, here’s what you missed:

1) You still can’t waterfall your way to hitting your quota

It seems that the demand generation “waterfall” (MQL, SAL, SQL, etc.) concept from SiriusDecisions has permeated the marketing lexicon of nearly every company. And the work around this – from a model, process and technology standpoint – has transformed the way marketers view the sales funnel in a great way. We, Corporate Visions, use it ourselves (“Are you ready to become a SAL yet?”). But while companies now have a better idea of who their salespeople need to meet with, there’s still the nasty little challenge of making sure your salespeople know what to say when they get there – and that they will say it well.

Thankfully, Jim Ninivaggi, a leader at SiriusDecisions, is doing his best to represent the sales enablement and effectiveness part of the equation. He reminded everyone that the number one reason companies don’t hit their sales quota isn’t because their CRM system doesn’t sync with their sales methodology, they don’t have enough leads or they aren’t active enough on Twitter.

It’s because salespeople don’t know how to articulate value.

And, Ninivaggi caps it by saying the number one focus of B2B companies in the area of improving revenue generation is “enabling reps with the knowledge and assets required for better conversations.”

2) Marketers need a methodology, too

Almost as if on cue, the marketing side of the house at SiriusDecisions launched its Messaging Nautilus framework, which is designed to help marketers apply discipline, rigor and structure to the typically unstructured process of marketing and sales messaging creation – a marketing methodology, if you will.

The Messaging Nautilus is really the combination of previously posted concepts, briefs and templates already produced by SiriusDecisions, but now combined under the banner of an organized approach to messaging development and deployment – from audience identification strategies to content, tools and asset development formats.

There are eight “Messaging Arcs” in the Nautilus, which makes it comprehensive for sure, but complicated, too. Still, SiriusDecisions should be applauded for publicly declaring that product, marketing and sales messaging needs to be audience-centric (not company-centric), focused on business needs (not product features and benefits), and aligned to the sales process (not a marketing communications checklist). Each of the templates identified provides a good starting point for helping an organization rally around a common approach and nomenclature.

The common theme behind the Messaging Nautilus and the Sales Enablement presentations, however, is that both marketing and sales need to be focused on conversations with the buyer that match the buying cycle and that the messages, content, tools and skills training need to work together for greatest impact.

P.S.

You know how people often say, “the book was better than the movie,” right? As a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell, I can say that it was great of SiriusDecisions to book Gladwell as a keynote, but his books are better than his speeches.

Image Credit: Marc Benioff's Twitter account

Salesforce.com and Microsoft have competed with one another for 15 years in the lucrative market for big-business software. But now the enterprise giants are putting their differences aside — at least partially.

The two companies announced a bevy of integrations today, including the capability to connect data from Salesforce software into Microsoft’s Excel and Power BI for Office 365 software. People will also be able to work with Office files inside of Salesforce, too.

Salesforce will make its Salesforce1 platform available on Windows and Windows Phone 8.1 systems to enable people to run its software, and Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365 software will integrate more deeply with Salesforce software.

Interestingly, today’s release makes no mention of Microsoft’s Dynamics software, which competes directly with Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, the company’s core customer-relationship management (CRM) software for tracking leads.

Still, the news speaks to Microsoft’s willingness to go against its own traditions. That’s the whole Satya-Nadella-will-challenge-convention argument.

The moves also align with Salesforce’s previous efforts to work with legacy enterprise technology providers. Last year, Salesforce announced partnerships with Oracle and Hewlett-Packard.

It’s unclear if today’s partnership will ease up bigger-picture tensions between the two partners, which have been embroiled in litigation in the past. (Not to mention that Salesforce’s whole cloud-based “no software” pitch goes right at the heart of Microsoft’s installed-software business.) At one point, Salesforce employees were not permitted to attend Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner conference for this year.

Microsoft Corporation is a public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through ... read more »

With more than 100,000 customers, salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company that is leading the shift to the social enterprise. Social enterprises leverage social, mobile and open cloud technologies to put customers at t... read more »

You already know that highly optimized landing pages are crucial to the success of any paid search campaign. However, even the best landing pages don’t have conversion rates of 100%. Why? Well, because people are unpredictable, and sometimes, consumer behavior defies all logic – frequently due to cognitive biases.

In today’s post, we’re going to examine what cognitive bias is, look at several examples of these behaviors in action, and outline how you can overcome (or at least account for) them with your landing pages.

What is Cognitive Bias?

Cognitive biases are ways of thinking about and perceiving the world that may not necessarily reflect reality. We may think we experience the world around us with perfect objectivity, but this is rarely (if ever) the case. Each and every one of us sees things differently based on our preconceptions, past experiences, and environmental or social factors, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the way we think or feel about something is truly representative of reality.

Simply put, cognitive biases are the distortions of reality through which we view the world.

How to Overcome Cognitive Biases with Landing Pages

So, now we know that we’re all completely irrational, let’s look at some of the most common cognitive biases in action and what you can do to mitigate their impact on your paid search campaigns. Before we go any further, it’s worth noting that there is no single definitive “list” of cognitive biases. Since the term was coined by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the early 1970s, more than 100 separate cognitive biases have been identified, and psychologists continue to explore new behaviors that could be classified as cognitive biases. For marketers trying to get a grip on consumer behavior, this isn’t great news.

Obviously, covering how to account for all known cognitive biases with landing pages is impractical for the purposes of this post. We will, however, look at a few of the most common and how you can try to account for them with well-crafted landing pages.

1. Confirmation Bias

One of the most common cognitive biases is confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is when a person looks for and interprets information (be it news stories, statistical data or the opinions of others) that backs up an assumption or theory they already have. For example, if you presented someone with hard evidence that gender bias exists, and they are already convinced that it doesn’t, they’re much more likely to dismiss the evidence rather than reconsider your opinion.

Common characteristics of confirmation bias include:

• An unwillingness to accept the validity of evidence that defies the person’s previously held beliefs
• Placing greater weight or emphasis on “facts” that appeal to the person’s underlying assumptions, to the exclusion of contradictory evidence
• Actively seeking out information that “proves” the person’s point
• Selective (and often incorrect) recollection of events, facts or statistics

Mainstream news outlets are often guilty of manipulating viewers’ confirmation bias (Fox News is an excellent example of this). As a result, people don’t choose one media outlet over another because of its impartiality or journalistic integrity – they watch the same news channels regularly because their programming appeals to the viewer’s preconceived ideas and opinions.

How Can You Overcome Confirmation Bias on Your Landing Page?

If you’re trying to compensate for confirmation bias when selling to customers, you’ll have to make your prospects doubt the strength of their beliefs. One way to accomplish this by including testimonials from formerly skeptical customers.

Reach out to your current clients and ask them if they weren’t entirely sold on your product or service to begin with, then ask them to provide details about how they came around. Include specific details, such as concerns about pricing, tempting offers from your competitors, and anything else that could dissuade biased customers from converting.

Resist the temptation to badmouth your competitors – this is unlikely to have the desired effect. By resorting to the marketing equivalent of a political smear campaign, you’re positioning yourself in a negative way, which could actually reinforce the very bias you’re trying to overcome.

Another tactic you can use to overcome confirmation bias is by offering a zero-hassle, no-strings-attached money-back guarantee. Online identity theft prevention service LifeLock does this incredibly well with its $1 million guarantee.

Realizing that some customers might be negatively biased about the effectiveness of identity theft prevention services, LifeLock goes one step further than the competition by offering up to $1 million in legal assistance, private investigation services and anything else you need in the event your identity is compromised while subscribed to the service. This not only offers customers a considerable financial safety net, it also speaks volumes about LifeLock’s confidence in its services.

2. Anchoring Effect

Sometimes referred to as the “relativity trap” or “focalism,” the anchoring effect is when consumers focus on a single aspect of a product or service to the exclusion of all other considerations. For many consumers, price is the most important part of the decision-making process, often understandably so.

People experiencing the anchoring effect often:

• Ignore the potential benefits of a product or service in favor of focusing solely on price
• Comparison shop more extensively than other consumers
• Actively seek out money-saving deals such as coupons, sales or other incentives
• Respond well to flexible pricing structures

Many businesses actively exploit the psychology behind anchoring, particularly restaurants. By including a wide range of dishes at varying prices (some very expensive, some much more affordable), they manipulate most customers’ tendency to choose the mid-priced option. People do this because they tend to fixate on the relative savings or difference in price between two options, not the actual prices themselves.

Although the anchoring effect can present unique challenges to marketers hoping to overcome cognitive biases with their landing pages, it’s a double-edged sword – since prospects experiencing the anchoring effect are only focused on one thing, it’s easier to address and deal with their primary objection.

How Can You Overcome the Anchoring Effect on Your Landing Page?

Firstly, let’s say that, for the sake of example, that your prospects are indeed solely focused on pricing. Now we’ve established what obstacle you have to overcome with your landing pages, let’s take a look at how you can actually do it.

Firstly, be as open and transparent about your pricing as possible. That not only means actually including pricing information on your site, but putting it on your landing pages, too. Don’t make a prospect hunt for pricing details – the longer you make them wait (or work), the less likely they are to trust your business. Be upfront, and put your prices right out in the open.

Also, be completely honest with your pricing – include all surcharges, fees, taxes and anything else that could drive up the price. We’ve all been in situations where we “agree” with ourselves to buy something while under the impression it costs one amount, only to be unpleasantly surprised when the price rises due to hidden costs (major airlines, anyone?).

Chicago-based branding agency Caliber exemplifies these principles very well. Unlike many similar agencies that hide their pricing behind “free consultations” and other smokescreens, Caliber openly displays its rate card on its site – and even admits that it doesn’t work with just anyone. As a one-two punch, Caliber also displays a customer testimonial alongside its pricing information – a shrewd move.

3. Ambiguity Effect

Although they might not realize it, many consumers experience some degree of the ambiguity effect, a cognitive bias first identified by Daniel Ellsberg (one of the key figures in the Pentagon Papers scandal) in the early 1970s.

This cognitive bias can be best summarized as the decision to favor a choice with a known outcome, rather than “take a chance” on a choice with unknown probabilities. From a psychological standpoint, the ambiguity effect is closely related to risk aversion.

Common characteristics of the ambiguity effect include:

• A tendency to favor decisions with familiar outcomes
• Reluctance to try new things
• Limited ability to recognize long-term benefits of “riskier” decisions when weighed against the marginal gains resulting from “safer” choices

For example, many investors choose to put their money in “safer” investments such as government bonds, as the perceived return on investment is relatively certain due to bonds’ strength and safety as an investment vehicle. Stocks and shares, on the other hand, often result in significantly higher ROI, but many investors shy away from these investments due to the unknown (or ambiguous) outcome of this type of investment strategy.

Artwork © Jack Hagley

From a consumer perspective, the ambiguity effect can be a powerful motivator when it comes to customer loyalty. Even if a consumer is dissatisfied with a service provider, the perceived risks of switching to another company are often greater than the potential gains of making the switch.

How Can You Overcome the Ambiguity Effect on Your Landing Pages?

To some extent, all businesses have to overcome the ambiguity effect when attempting to entice certain customers, especially startups and very new businesses that do not have an established reputation.

One way to overcome this cognitive bias is by borrowing techniques from great FAQs and incorporating them into your landing pages. This has to be done carefully, as too much text could harm your conversion rates. However, by including some skilfully worded questions and answers into your landing page copy, you could fill the gaps in your prospects’ knowledge about your product or service and make your offers seem more appealing.

An excellent example of this principle in action is a landing page for Unbounce’s landing page conversion course. It presents a summary of information about the course in a conversational way (“What’s in the course?”), goes into greater depth about each of the course modules, and includes information on the type of people who will benefit from taking it.

The page’s copy makes the time commitment necessary to complete the course abundantly clear, further reducing ambiguity about the amount of effort involved. It also includes a simple form and strong call to action (essential for increasing conversion rates), clear directional cues, and a clean, appealing design.

4. Bandwagon Effect

This cognitive bias is closely related to a psychological phenomenon known as herd mentality. Individuals experiencing the bandwagon effect place much greater value on decisions that are likely to conform to current trends or please individuals within their existing (or desired) peer group. From a consumer perspective, this can be summarized as making purchasing decisions out of a desire to have and be seen with “the next big thing,” or to increase their perceived social status by owning a particular product.

Characteristics of the bandwagon effect (from a consumer perspective) include:

• A tendency to overlook product specifications in favor of design/aesthetics
• A willingness to spend significantly more on branded goods
• A strong desire to “fit in” with demographics seen as stylish/trend-setting
• Often very loyal to a handful of recognizable brands
• Significantly more likely to evangelize about brands/companies through social channels

The bandwagon effect is such a common cognitive bias because of people’s deep-seated need to conform and fit in. Many consumers’ devotion to Apple products is a great example of the bandwagon effect in action. Apple has the kind of following that many businesses are envious of, and through skilful marketing campaigns and very clever branding, Apple manages to manipulate consumer behavior like few other companies – resulting in overwhelming demand for the next iPhone or iPad, and the perception that choosing Apple products is a lifestyle choice, not merely buying a new phone or tablet.

How Can You Overcome the Bandwagon Effect on Your Landing Pages?

If your business operates in a highly competitive or crowded market, the key to overcoming the bandwagon effect is how you frame your product or service. In fact, you may want to view the bandwagon effect as a state of mind you can capitalize on, rather than an obstacle.

Imagery is incredibly important when it comes to promoting your goods or services. Again, using Apple as an example, the marketing materials for the iPhone don’t just focus on what it does (though features are important) – they promote an ideal; that the iPhone is far more than just a smartphone, it’s an indispensable part of your modern digital life. With this in mind, use stylish imagery to promote your products on your landing pages, and heavily emphasize how your goods will enrich the lives of your customers. For instance, the landing page for the iPhone 5S leads visitors to a page with a video titled “Powerful”:

In the video, young, attractive people use their iPhones to perform a range of tasks that, in all likelihood, most iPhone users would never bother with (such as using an app as an amp controller for an electric guitar and the phone itself as a virtual violin as part of an art installation), but that’s not what makes this marketing so brilliant. The secret to this video’s success is that it sells the lifestyles of the people in the video – it manipulates consumers’ desire to be cool, to be in a band, to embark on an exciting road trip to a far-away place. In short, it sells an idealized life that buying an iPhone can help consumers attain.

Of course, it’s difficult for some businesses to effectively emulate Apple’s marketing efforts. However, the principles can be applied to virtually any company, with a little creativity. Take Boston-based clothing e-commerce site Ministry of Supply, for example:

Ministry of Supply makes and sells high-end dress shirts and other clothing made from “phase change” materials – fabrics that store or release heat depending on the body temperature of the wearer. These fabrics are also used by NASA in its spacesuits for astronauts. This unique selling proposition, combined with the site’s effortlessly stylish imagery, appeals to their ideal customer’s desire for hip clothes that most people haven’t heard about. These concepts are also applied to Ministry of Supply’s social media presence, resulting in strong brand consistency and high community engagement among its customers – just like Apple.

Admittedly, Ministry of Supply is missing some opportunities to increase conversions as their PPC ads lead directly to their homepage instead of a dedicated landing page, but the same principles used by Apple to exploit the bandwagon effect are being used in a highly effective way by this small business.

5. Status Quo Bias

Many psychologists agree that cognitive biases are based on survival instincts. Our fifth and final example, status quo bias, is a prime example of how our need for stability and routine can influence our behavior.

Status quo bias is a preference for things to stay relatively unchanged. Individuals experiencing status quo bias often perceive any deviation from the “usual” as negative or a loss, resulting in a strong aversion to change. For marketers, customers with status quo bias can be a real challenge.

Individuals experiencing status quo bias are often:

• Hesitant to try new products or services out of a fear of loss resulting from change
• More resistant to traditional sales techniques
• Inadvertently loyal, even to brands offering inferior service

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome when selling to a prospect with status quo bias is the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. People with this cognitive bias may be extraordinarily reluctant to part with their current service provider – even if they’re unhappy as a customer – simply because they don’t want to disrupt the status quo. However, if someone with status quo bias has clicked on one of your ads and ended up on a landing page, you’re already part-way toward overcoming their fears and converting them. All you have to do is present them with at least one compelling reason to leave their comfort zone.

How Can You Overcome Status Quo Bias on Your Landing Pages?

In his best-selling book, “The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords,” marketing expert Perry Marshall explains that writing ad copy that promotes a feature of your product is a mistake. According to Perry, people don’t care about what your product does – they want to know how it will solve their problems. Highlighting the emotional payoff in your ads can convince even the most hesitant prospect to click, and this principle can also be applied to your landing pages.

If you want to overcome status quo bias with your landing pages, you’ll need to focus heavily on the benefits of your product or service. Remember, if a potential customer has already clicked on your ad, then they do want to explore the possibility of using your product or service, even if they may be hesitant to embrace change. Similarly to the FAQ approach in our ambiguity effect example, use language that can directly answer any questions your prospects might have during their first experience with your company. This spares them the effort of having to seek out additional information once they reach your landing page – a crucial step for people with status quo bias, as any obstacle (no matter how seemingly minor) could be perceived as a loss and dissuade them from converting.

One company that accomplishes this very well is small-business project management software platform Basecamp:

Everything about this page is friendly and accessible, from the layout to the language. As in our anchoring effect example, the pricing information is made clearly available from the outset (including Basecamp’s highest pricing tier) which helps to establish trust through transparency, and there are several frequently asked questions provided to enable prospective customers to learn about Basecamp and take action without leaving the landing page.

Of course, these are just a handful of the various cognitive biases your prospects may experience, and it’s impossible to account for all of them. However, it’s worth bearing consumer psychology in mind when making landing pages, as even subtle changes can have a big impact on your conversion rates. Hopefully this post has given you some food for thought.

If you’ve ever seen the inbound methodology, read this blog, or done pretty much anything inbound-related, chances are you’re at least a little bit familiar with the phrase “attract, convert, close, delight.” These four actions describe everything inbound organizations must do to create an inbound experience that serves potential, current, and future customers.

At its core, an inbound experience is a customer-focused way of doing business that is centered on helping people and solving their problems in the ways they want them to be solved. The “attract” and “convert” parts are what you as a marketer are responsible for, while your salespeople help “close,” and your customer service representatives are in charge of “delight” … right?

Well, not quite. In a truly successful inbound organization, customer “delight” is everyone’s responsibility -- not just those people your customers may come into contact with after buying something from you.

At this point, you may be saying something like “Wait, what? How can I delight customers if they’re not my customers yet!?” And you’d be right! By definition, we can’t delight customers if they’re not customers. But the concept of delight -- providing a remarkable experience to users that focuses on their needs, interests, and wishes that leaves them so satisfied, they can’t help but go out and sing the praises of your brand -- isn’t just limited to customers. Great inbound companies focus on delighting potential and existing customers from each their very first interaction with the organization -- and you should, too.

Marketers Need to Delight, Too

It’s time to stop thinking of deligh as a responsibility for onlycustomer service reps. Why? Because every single interaction a user has with you, your co-workers, your website, and your content feeds into their overall experience -- and overall impression of your organization as a whole. The better that experience is, the happier your customers are, and the more likely they are to stick around and tell their friends about the great experience your brand provides.

The goal in providing and accumulating these positive interactions throughout a customer’s lifecycle will help you stand out from your competitors and improve your bottom line. Creating an inbound experience whose goal is both pre- and post-sale delight can make a big impact on your organization’s bottom line and serve as a hefty competitive advantage: happy customers stick around longer than those who have a neutral or negative experience.

In fact, the White House Office of Consumer Affairs found that it costs businesses 6-7x more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one. But despite that fact, only 7% of consumers say that their service experiences with a company exceed their expectations (Source: ECHO and American Express). The writing is on the wall: Successful inbound organizations don’t just focus on attracting qualified visitors, converting them into leads, and closing them into customers. Instead, they aim to provide an all-encompassing remarkable inbound experience for potential and current customers.

But how does one actually go about creating this experience in the first place -- and how can you translate the importance of both pre- and post-sale delight into your own organization? Below are three quick, simple gut checks to use when interacting with prospects and customers to ensure your business is doing everything it can to delight.

Are You Delighting People? Ask Yourself These Questions

1) Are you solving peoples’ problems?

The first (and perhaps most important) thing your organization needs to do is solve the problems your potential and current customers bring your way. Offering your customers a solution to the problem they face or a way to achieve the goal they’re working towards is, after all, why they’ve come to you in the first place -- so don’t leave them hanging! Offer your customers the solutions that most align with their individual wishes, needs, and preferences.

Even though they aren’t paying customers just yet, it’s also important to solve your prospects’ problems. The reasoning here is multifold and gets back to the golden rule: help people and they’ll help you. If you can prove to your prospects that you’re trustworthy and effective when they’re not yet even paying, they’ll be much more likely to want to do business with your organization down the road. All that goodwill generated pre-sale goes a long way towards easily transforming customers into promoters post-sale.

2) Are you providing recommendations and being helpful?

I'm sure you've heared the saying, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

It's one of our favorite adages here at HubSpot that's also applicable to customer delight. Solving your prospects’ and customers’ problems is great in the short term, but what will happen next time they encounter a similar problem or are looking to accomplish a related goal? Going beyond just solving peoples’ problem and handing over information helps them deal with similar challenges down the road.

Empowering both potential and existing customers with education, making recommendations, and helping them succeed are essential to building an inbound experience at your organization. The benefits of enabling people to reach their goals and solve their problems instead of just arming them with facts are far reaching for both your organization and the individual themselves. If your prospects and customers get a constant, positive reminder of your company each time they use your advice and recommendations, your company will become known as a helpful, remarkable organization that customers want to do business with. 

3) Are you enthusiastic, warm, and fun?

Do you enjoy reading the dictionary? What about the encyclopedia? Surely you'd like to hunker down with a thesaurus in your free time?

… Chances are, your answer is a resounding no.

While these massive tomes contain a plethora of facts and figures that would undoubtedly be helpful and solve your problems, they’re more than a little dry and devoid of enthusiasm. The idea of sitting down and flipping through the encyclopedia to learn more about lead generation tactics seems pretty boring and off-putting -- so chances are, it isn’t your first choice when it comes to strategy development.

As marketers, there’s a lot we can learn from these massive volumes -- and not just in their pages of data. No one gets excited about reading the dictionary because it’s boring, dry, and sometimes, obtuse -- so if we want potential and current customers to come to us as a source of knowledge and assistance, we shouldn’t be, either. Make sure that in every interaction with potential and current customers, your company’s voice is enthusiastic, fun, and welcoming. Precisely what ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘fun’ mean for your organization depends on your particular business and industry, but the take-home message is this: if you want to create an inbound experience that truly delights, don’t be a dictionary -- instead, provide a real, warm, personalized, human interaction that respects your user’s time and leaves them happy, satisfied, and educated.

Keep in mind that each gut check above refers not only to the people at your organization who may be interacting with prospects and customers; it applies to the entire external face of your business -- from blog posts to social media messages. Not sure if a particular blog post helps supports your own company’s inbound experience? Run it through these gut checks. Listening in on a sales call and looking for areas to improve? Launching a new marketing campaign you’re not sure is on-target? You guessed it -- do a gut check. Ensure everything your business does delights and contributes to building your own inbound experience.

Want to learn more about specific strategies for delighting both pre- and post-sale? Check out HubSpot’s free Inbound Certification and learn how to cultivate an inbound experience at your company.

Too many organizations miss out on opportunities to turn blog traffic into valuable leads. The reason is they lack clear paths to conversion.

As a content marketing team (for a content marketing software company), we always outline our calls to action. Every blog post, infographic, webinar, eBook, whitepaper, or other asset you can imagine is conceptualized with a call to action top-of-mind. Why? Because without a clear call to action, you underutilize the moment your audience is ready to give you important and valuable information—whether through behavior or actual contact details.

For instance, say your reader landed on a blog post about “content for sales teams.” If they find it useful, he or she might also be interested in the topic “communication between sales and content teams.” A well-placed call to action driving that reader to a gated resource about sales-content communication tactics might be the difference between a visitor and a lead.

And boom, you’ve just performed the magic of content marketing: giving customers the right content at the right time to drive valuable action. This leads to better customer loyalty, improved trust, and eventually increased revenue for your business.

Boom! You’ve just performed the magic of content marketing.

But deciding on a call to action can be tricky. You might not know about every gated asset, where it lives, or what related topic to link to.

To ensure our calls to action are relevant and effective at generating leads, I built a call to action flowchart for Kapost. We liked it so much, we decided to share it with the marketing world as a customizable template.

How Do I Use This Asset I’m Downloading?

Step 1: Fill out the boxes with relevant information to your business or organization.

The Call to Action Tool That Will Turn Your Blog into a Conversion Machine by @jeanwrites

• Complete the campaign names that pertain to your quarter, month, or other interval
• Complete the themes that your content supports
• Identify specific assets that match the tone/topic that can be the destination of CTAs

Step 2: Give the chart to your content creators as a guide.

The flowchart answers a simple question: Does your blog post support a larger campaign or theme that your organization is focused on? If not, can you tweak to better support a campaign or theme? If so, use that larger content or marketing initiative to inform your call to action. If not, that’s okay, too. You can have a call to action plan for those one-off content pieces—like “subscribe to the blog” or “subscribe to the eNewsletter.”

Step 3: Keep the chart up-to-date and relevant.

As your content marketing campaigns change throughout the year, update your CTA flowchart with relevant assets and CTAs. This keeps your content fresh, CTAs lively, and users engaged.

It’s as basic as that.

Here’s a Picture of Kapost’s Internal CTA Flowchart:

When it comes to social media, many individuals fret about having a comprehensive strategy, procrastinate for fear of saying the wrong thing, or in some cases, simply write it off as the domain of ‘marketing’. But LinkedIn is a platform made for individuals to connect with other individuals, so unlike the company Twitter or Facebook accounts, your personal profile is something others can’t manage for you.

But don’t panic, it’s not as daunting as it may seem. An unusual analogy perhaps, but really LinkedIn is just like going to a party, simply another way of connecting with people. So follow these easy steps and you’ll be fine:

1. Find a party you want to go to

LinkedIn is a party you want to go to – a powerful tool, not just for marketing, but for HR and sales too – and with over 300 million users worldwide, it’s a platform serious professionals can’t afford to ignore.

But once you get there, what next? Well, remember why you came in the first place. Why did you sign up to LinkedIn? To attract potential customers, to connect with current clients, to look for new jobs; whatever the reason, find out where those people are. What room of the party are they in, i.e. what groups have they joined? Use the search functionality to find out, and join the same ones. Get yourself in the place you want to be seen.

2. Use connections you already have

Whether at a party, or on LinkedIn, it’s natural to gravitate towards people you already know. The well-known phrase ‘it’s about who you know, not what you know’ transcends into the social media sphere. So connect with existing and previous business contacts, colleagues, customers and work friends – they will help provide ways in to the people you are looking to meet.

Use them to build your profile by asking for endorsements, and more importantly recommendations (short testimonials) – when they come from the right people they can be incredibly powerful. Also look at the content, connections, and groups your connections have to establish what you should be saying and where.

3. Don’t jump in to conversation feet first

It’s a social faux pas to walk in to a party and start talking about yourself. A good party guest will get their bearings, join in conversations, ask questions and get to know people before introducing their own topics of conversation. Well, the same applies for LinkedIn.

In the same way you speak to people on a daily basis, you need to retain some social etiquette. Rather than jumping in feet first and trying to start your own conversation, first join in with other people’s. Find a

relevant discussion, think about what you want to say, and then type away.

4. Introduce yourself properly

When the time comes, you want to introduce yourself properly, give a good overview of who you are and what you do. This is what your personal profile is for. Fill in as many sections as possible. Not only does LinkedIn rank people with a fuller profile higher, it will make it easier for people to understand exactly what you do, what your credentials are, and will make your profile more searchable. On that note, make sure you customise your URL too.

For most of you, you’ll already have a biography and if not, you should certainly have a CV, so don’t worry about what you’re going to write – you have all the content already!

Be careful not to overload each section with information though. Just as party guests don’t want to be bored with every minute detail of your life, nor do your connections on LinkedIn. See it as a summary, and if in doubt, keep it simple.

5. Don’t be too ‘salesy’

No one goes to a party to hear a sales pitch. That’s not to say, people won’t buy goods or services from someone they have met at a social gathering, just that they don’t want to be overtly sold to. The same applies with LinkedIn. Join in conversation, provide interesting comment, and when the time comes (of course) introduce what you have to offer, but don’t go for a hard sell.

LinkedIn is a platform for discussion and nurturing old connections, or making new ones. Its main power comes in connecting with a wider audience, and maintaining awareness of who you are and what you do. That happens through sharing not selling. Remember that and you may just generate some excellent business leads.

Marketing automation is becoming an increasingly influential tool in the content marketing space.

A quarter of all B2B Fortune 500 companies use marketing automation, along with 76% of the world’s largest SaaS companies.

What does it do exactly? I like HubSpot CMO Mike Volpe’s explanation:

“At its best, marketing automation software [allows] companies…to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects to customers and turn [existing] customers into delighted customers.”

With marketing automation, companies can target their content like never before—so it can be a big revenue driver.

But to reap the benefits of marketing automation, you must first know how to create and leverage the segments within your system. Get started by following these three steps.

Step 1: Identify Your Content Themes

If you don’t know what content you have, you won’t know who to share it with.

Review your content resources and start identifying key attributes. Soon, patterns will emerge. Use these patterns to identify big thematic groups under which your content falls. At Kapost, for example, some of our themes include:

3 Steps to Leveraging Segments with Marketing Automation by @lizkoneill

• Measuring your content’s impact
• Building awareness with content
• Enable sales with content
• Drive engagement with content

Once you’ve established the appropriate themes for your content assets, it’s time to dissect your database. Based on your prospect’s behavior and demographic information, which themes do you think will most resonate with them? What related content could you send?

Step 2: Leverage the Prospect Data You Have

To become a known lead, prospects have to share data with your organization. Use this to your advantage.

Segment leads based on important indicators like job title and industry. Map these segments to your personas and target your messaging to the appropriate people. If people in your database are getting content that’s most relevant to them, they’ll be less likely to unsubscribe to your email blasts and more likely to look to your organization for thought leadership.

Step 3: Map Prospect Behavior

Even better than segmenting leads based on prospect data is segmenting leads based on behavior. For example, if a lead signs up for a webinar, your webinar platform can communicate valuable information to your marketing automation software, including:

• Whether or not they actually attended the webinar
• How long they tuned in for
• Did they ask a question during the webinar
• Did they answer a polling question

Although this information isn’t from an official “form field,” you can still build segments based on it. If, for instance, a lead answered a polling question stating that they find content marketing workflows “very difficult,” and you put an eBook out on that topic, you can send them that eBook and reference that they identified content marketing workflows as a challenge.

Daily, your prospects are bombarded with copious amounts of content. What separates the wheat from the chaff is how relevant that content is to them.

If your organization optimizes the segments within your marketing automation system, you’ll be able to share information that’s relevant to them based on an attribute or a specific action—giving them information they care about and earning your organization the opportunity to continue sharing valuable content that moves them down the funnel.

Image Credit: Photo Illustration: Eric Blattberg

Fewer sales making you more money?

That’s one of the rather surprising results of an InsightSquared study of hundreds of software-as-a-service startups. InsightSquared is a business analytics solution for Salesforce, which gives it some very interesting insight into what works — and what doesn’t — for SaaS companies.

SaaS economics, of course, are different from traditional sell-something-once-and-collect-the-cash companies. ARR, or annual recurring revenue, is the key metric, not sales, and that changes everything.

InsightSquared’s data indicates that higher-growth SaaS companies make fewer sales than slower-growing competitors. The reason is that they focus on higher-value deals — 2.8X the size, on average. Those deals take longer to consummate, but they return 170 percent of the effort and resources that goes into them.

Interestingly, the data also shows that top reps at SaaS companies don’t necessarily have better win rates — they just work more opportunities than average reps.

Here’s all the data, in visual form:

With more than 100,000 customers, salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company that is leading the shift to the social enterprise. Social enterprises leverage social, mobile and open cloud technologies to put customers at t... read more »

InsightSquared is data intelligence for small and medium businesses. For decades big businesses have depended on Business Intelligence (BI) systems. Big businesses need BI to analyze historic revenue and profitability, forecast upc... read more »

Box was founded on a simple, powerful idea: it should be easy for people to access, collaborate, and share all their content, wherever they are. Co-founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith, along with our fast-growing team, have since esta... read more »

At echogravity, we often talk about how difficult it is to hire sales people, especially really good ones. Over the years, I’ve probably met and interviewed no fewer than 1000 sales reps/account managers that work in the staffing and services industry. Only a small population of them hit my short list of what I would consider the best of the best – top producer, customer focused, hunting machine and money motivated.

This article is about Kyle Gams, who in my opinion, sits very near the top (likely the #1 position). Kyle is probably the best hunter and business development professional in the IT staffing space – hands down.

The other day, I had a chance to catch up with Kyle over lunch and had the pleasure of learning more about what makes him tick and why he has become so successful in selling IT Staffing Services. If you are a sales rep looking to be the best, a sales manager looking to hire, or are a business owner looking for characteristics that will help your reps be successful, you will want to learn about Kyle.

How did you get into the IT Staffing and Services business? Well, like many others in this space, I randomly fell into it. I received my masters in human resources and utilized my connections through my fraternity. If it wasn’t for you Kevin O’Brien, I wouldn’t be here! (Me and Kyle were in the same fraternity at the same school, but not during the same period of time.)

How long have you been in this industry? Since 1998.

What do you do first thing in the morning? I wake up at 5:00am and am working by 6:00am either at the office, in a coffee shop, or in my car on the way to my first appointment. I have over 100 daily tasks scheduled in salesforce.com, and my objective is to get as many of them done as possible before my first client appointment. These tasks involve either sending cold emails, interview follow ups, responding to an RFP, or responding to internal company communications. I try to accomplish as much as I can in the morning so I can use my day attending to client or consultant needs.

What about the rest of your day? For the most part, I spend no less than 8 hours of face time per day with clients or consultants. Ideally, I want 9am-5pm to be reaction time to deal with the day-to-day activities that come with managing more than 80 consultants across numerous clients. Responsiveness to clients and consultants is considered my highest priority. I leave the strategy and planning of my territory for off hours.

What do you do for lunch? I have a lunch meeting on my calendar every day of the week, scheduled no less than 45 days in advance. My lunch appointments are limited to only a few types of people: clients, consultants, or former consultants (that have previously worked for me at a client). I never eat lunch alone unless there is a last minute cancellation.

So you don’t spend any personal time during the day? Not really. I don’t listen to music or satellite radio while I’m in the car. Travel time is a great opportunity for phone time. When you’re working and building a business, there’s no time for personal affairs. I am a workaholic, and there isn’t a moment in my day when I’m not on the phone, on email, or texting for work. If I run out of emails to respond to, then I’m sending a cold email to the next prospect. My day is insanely busy with activity from when I wake up until I go to sleep.

Why do people buy from you? To be successful in this business, people need to think they can trust who they are buying from. It’s my job to make certain that they can trust me. I never commit to what I can’t deliver. I always keep my promises and give my honest opinion on what I believe; even if it’s not the desired outcome. I believe that if I am honest and trustworthy, I will earn the faith of the people that will make me successful. Additionally, my objective is not to sell IT talent, but to build a long term relationship with the influencers in my clients and prospects. Many competitors and other sales reps in this industry are always trying to sell, but it’s not about the sale – it’s about a long-term, trusting relationship that makes the difference.

How do you hit your next goal? You’ve done so much already. Have you hit the level where you just can’t build anymore? Not even close. I know I can reach the next goal. My potential is to manage more than $30 million in revenue per year – and I’m pretty confident that I can get to $40 million. In order to reach this goal, I need to prioritize my objectives so that I can scale my time on sales activities instead of managing the day to day management of my current book of business. If I was able to transition daily territory management somehow, I know for a fact I could double my territory in two years. That is my goal.

What would your best clients tell me about you? They’re going to say that I am extremely trustworthy, honest, and someone they enjoy to talk to. They also say that I am extremely responsive; almost to a fault. A good CIO contact of mine told me to quit responding so fast to his needs, and that it wouldn’t hurt to take some time in responding. However, it’s important to me to react very quickly to any request or need from clients or consultants.

Does anything rattle your cage? Yes – things that are out of my control. It drives me crazy to the point where I want to punch something!

What motivates you? Money is obviously my top motivation, otherwise I would be doing something else. However, even though the financial gains are great, I also enjoy the fact that organizations trust me with their IT goals. I’m also very obsessive about winning.

Why do you think you are so successful? In all honesty, I think I am a successful because I started in this business as an IT recruiter. I think having the experience in knowing what makes consultants tick, I’ve developed the skills that allow me to better manage relationships with clients and with each individual consultant. Recruiting is a skill set that many salespeople don’t bring to this business. I actually enjoy recruiting more than selling because I get the sense of fulfillment that I am a trusted advisor to people and their career – it’s a reflection of their faith in me. There’s such a great level of satisfaction being at a Christmas party or an event where you can look around the room and see all the people that you helped in their career. That to me is a great personal achievement.

How did you grow your territory so large? Cold calling, cold calling and more cold calling. I am a relentless hunter and always have the next prospect on my mind.

How do you handle rejection? It’s a numbers game really. Without rejection, you can’t enjoy the acceptance or the goals you set out to achieve. I truly believe that if nine out of ten people tell you “no”, the one person telling you “yes” will provide the level of gratification that makes your job worthwhile. It’s keeping the mindset and focus on the one “yes” that helps me easily and consistently move past rejection.

What’s different selling now versus 10 years ago? For the most part, nothing has changed. The main difference is that buyers are more untrusting and carry the baggage of bad experiences with other reps and firms. This baggage taints their view of new relationships. It just ends up taking longer to gain trust and to build strong relationships with new clients.

What do you do for fun? Well you know me, I love to go to concerts. I’ve probably been to over 1000 of them in my life time.

What bands do you like the most? Bruce Springsteen, Drive By Truckers, Jason Isbell, and of course, KISS.

When will you retire? Well, I really can’t because I have children now! If I was single, I would’ve planned on retiring sooner than later, but not anymore.

I know you have another job, what is that? I own a number of properties and enjoy real estate investing. If I could, I would buy more and more real estate because to me, that’s easy money.

What’s your advice to new sales reps entering IT Staffing? Don’t jump in if you aren’t prepared to make it a lifestyle. If you want to have quality of life AND want to be at the top of the industry, selling IT staffing services is not the right position for you. There is very little work/life balance if you want to be highly successful. I’m not saying that the job is not satisfying, because it is – you just have to commit fully to make it in this business. If you are a person that is used to bankers hours, you may want to go work for a bank. I also believe that the harder you work, the luckier you get!