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Company leaders and business owners are often worried about overpaying sales reps. This is  especially true for the CEO’s who didn’t ascend to their leadership position through the sales ranks and who are not overly sensitive to how sales compensation is earned. The concern is legitimate if one were to look simply at the outgoing commission cheques on some sales teams, but chopping sales compensation based on number crunching is risky business since it enhances the possibility that sales morale will be affected and sales output will be disrupted. A bigger picture view on sales investment versus return is always more prudent, but there are also several ways for employers to approach sales compensation to ensure that sales reps are paid fairly for their contributions but not overpaid.

If a company’s sales reps can afford to drive Porsches, then the company’s leaders should be ecstatic…if the sales comp plans have been set up properly

Attracting the best sales talent in the business will require that an employer offers not only great career opportunities but also market or better compensation to its sales team. However, there are several important ways to mitigate overpaying sales reps.

1. Don’t employ reps who can’t sell – The notion of sales people who can’t sell sounds silly, but there are lot of them and many companies employ them. One of the key ways to ensure the return on your sales team far outweighs the investment is to employ people who actually meet or exceed sales targets. This is not the case on many sales teams where reps that consistently under perform and are effectively paid a salary for attendance rather than performance.  Under-performing sales staff are expensive on many levels including lost opportunity, management time, damage to company reputation – they need to be replaced with sales professionals who can and will contribute to company success.

2. Tie compensation to the right results - If the sales people are earning high commissions, it should be because they delivered on their goals which in turn should be explicitly tied to overall sales, profit and company goals. Then if the sales reps are happily cashing their commission checks, the company has also enjoyed strong results and the sales compensation will have a positive ROI.

3. High rewards for high performance - Top performing sales people should receive (and will expect to receive) superior compensation for their superior results. Compensating them in-line with their expectations can often be challenging, but since profits are often not linear as revenues and sales increase, the value of an high producing sales person cannot be understated. To ensure the top sales reps are highly motivated by compensation plans that don’t create problems for the finance department, employers can leverage accelerator mechanisms whereby the sales rep earns increasingly higher commissions on incremental sales above certain thresholds.

4. Put in Place Reasonable Parameters - We are not talking mechanisms that cap commissions here – these don’t help a company become an employer of choice and attract top sales talent – we are talking about managing the risk that reps will take advantage of their compensation plan by manipulating the time timing of contracts or chasing windfall deals. These are easily managed if the compensation plans include clauses that allow the sales manager to review unusually large deals or quarterly numbers that weren’t entirely a result of the sales reps efforts and adjust the compensation to a rate that is fair for both the company and the rep – but tread carefully here – the rep will feel entitled to earn full commissions on the deals they have closed and you never want to lose a top seller.

To your success!

The post How to Avoid Overpaying Sales Reps appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting | Sales Recruiter.

In this 4-part CONNECT2Sell series, we’ve examined the five conflict styles identified by the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) and how they can be used to smooth out the rough edges in negotiating. Like it or not, most negotiations have an element of conflict even if it’s nothing more than a feeling. Negotiating, like conflict, […]

In 2012 we decided to discover find who really were the sales and marketing experts, gurus, commentators, authors and spokespeople who genuinely influence the way we think, sell and market our companies/products/solutions,

We used the services of a small team of professional researchers and the criteria we used to benchmark each individual’s impact within the sales space was:

• Social media presence – Twitter/ Facebook/ Klout score/LinkedIn authority.
• Quality, regularity and popularity of written work – books, blog posts, articles, EBooks etc.
• ?Active engagement recognized resource sites.
• And not least, a commitment to continually advance selling and marketing practices.

This year, we have been particularly mindful of the fact that whilst the impact of social media continues to grow, many of the people who have a huge influence on us are not actually actively engaged on say Twitter, Facebook and the like. Conversely, some of the loudest voices in the “social mediaosphere” are not, in reality, saying very much of consequence.

Congratulations to everyone who made the list, and thank you for adding so much value to the way we sell, and market ourselves. VIsit Here

Email is still one of the best ways to reach your target audience, contrary to what you may have heard. In fact, customer acquisition via email has increased by 4X in the last four years.

But it’s not the best way to reach people who don’t want to hear from you. Bad lists won’t just stall your marketing efforts, they’ll actually undermine your business. If you don’t regularly clean your email lists to ensure everyone you email has a valid email address and actually wants to receive your stuff, here’s what you can expect to happen:

1. People will ignore, delete, or mark your emails as spam.
2. Your deliverability and sender score reputation will decline.
3. Your open and click-through rates will drop.
4. Your unsubscribe rate will rise.
5. You might get in trouble with the law.
6. Your boss won’t be happy to see your email marketing metrics start to tank.

Since you probably don’t want any of those things to happen, we’re here to give you info on turning your bad email lists around. In this post, I’ll go over what bad and good email lists looks like, and what steps you can take to transform your bad ones into good ones. By the end, you’ll be in much better email marketing shape.

What a Bad Email List Looks Like

It was bought, rented, or borrowed.

With aggressive goals on the horizon, it can be tempting to acquire email lists the quick and dirty way. But sending emails to people who don’t have a prior relationship with your business will severely hurt your reputation with your prospects, your internet service provider, and your email server.

First of all, any email list that’s for sale or rent is guaranteed to be low quality. Nobody with a good email list would give it up to somebody else because its value would decline as more and more irrelevant content is sent to it.

Secondly, people really don’t like being spammed. Recipients of your emails weren’t expecting to get an email from you -- and they likely didn’t want to get an email from you. Many of them will mark your message as spam, which hurts the Sender Score of the servers you send from. This taints your IP reputation and makes it harder for your future emails to get delivered. Many email service providers will cut off senders that violate certain limits because of the impact on IP reputation and delivery. You’ll also put your company in jeopardy because you’re all on the same IP address, and those can take months to recover.

Plus, you’ll be known as a spammy marketer -- and you’re better than that!

There are other options people can take besides hitting “spam” -- and they can hurt almost as much.  According to the 2014 Science of Email report, The most common responses to unwanted email are, in order: 1) ignore or delete, 2) unsubscribe, and 3) mark as spam. This isn’t good news: ignoring or deleting emails are also terrible for your reputation and can cause you to get caught in spam filters more often and will reduce your conversion rates.

It has steroidal growth.

The size of your list doesn't account for the quality of email addresses on it. Steroidal growth of email lists either means your team is buying or renting email lists, or there are bots filling out your forms. List quality suffers significantly either way.

It's old.

Good email addresses are like bread: they go stale if they’re left alone for too long. It’s not you, it’s them: email marketing databases naturally degrade by about 22.5% every year as contacts switch companies, change Internet service providers, and abandon old email addresses. This is a reality every email marketer faces and it means you have to add more (quality!) contacts to your lists continually.

It has a high bounce rate.

When an email bounces, it means it was unable to be delivered to a recipient’s inbox. Bounce rates are usually high if your lists are full of purchased, invalid email addresses. This is yet another signal to Internet service providers that you’re a spammy marketer, and they can block you so your emails are never delivered.

But not all bounces are bad, so it’s important to distinguish between hard and soft bounces before taking an email address off your list.

• Hard bounces are recorded when an email is considered permanently undeliverable, which can happen if it was sent to an invalid or blocked email address. Your email service provider might automatically remove these contacts from your lists, but double check to make sure. Shoot for a hard bounce rate of less than 5%.

• Soft bounces, on the other hand, are recorded when an email is considered temporarily undeliverable. This can happen when someone has an auto-responder set or their inbox is full. Keep them on your list, but monitor them -- if their soft bounce rate doesn’t decrease, then the email address is probably inactive and you should remove it from your list.

Now that you know what not to have in your email lists, let’s take a look at what makes a list good.

What a Good Email List Looks Like

It is permission-based.

Your email marketing strategy isn’t inbound if it’s not permission-based. Inbound marketing is about trust, value, and relevancy. By only sending emails to people who have given us permission to do so, we build trust and foster credibility with our subscribers and prospects. (Oh, and there’s a law part, too.)

The good folks who build permission-based email lists have opt-in strategies so people subscribe to their emails by choice -- meaning somewhere along the way, they were asked or required to sign up in exchange for the promise of compelling content. (More on opt-in strategies in a second.)

It has organic origin and growth.

Good email lists are built internally instead of being bought or rented. The best way to build email lists internally is by offering awesome, relevant, and helpful content that drives traffic to your site and compels people to give over their information on a landing page form. (To learn more about best practices in landing page optimization, check out our resource on optimizing landing pages for conversion.)

It includes regular and recent emailings.

To maintain clean email lists, you need to send emails regularly and update the lists as they decay over time. This helps to maintain communication with your subscribers so they remember they opted in. Even when people chose to opt in to your list, if they haven’t heart from you for a while, they may forget they subscribed.

Alright, so you know how to spot a good and bad email list. So how does a well-intentioned marketer turn their bad email lists into good ones?

How to Make a Bad List Good

1) Segment the list by email address age.

Segmenting lists by how long someone’s been in your database lets you prioritize sending emails to contacts while they’re still fresh.

Start by digging into your most recent email list and assigning an age to each of your contacts. To do this, use either the date the contact became a subscriber, the last interaction date, the date of the contact’s source, or another age indicator.

Next, decide how refined you want your segmentation to be. The more granular, the more personalized your different campaigns will be. But don’t go overboard – you don’t want to end up with a segment of 10 contacts because the return on effort will be low.

2) Build an opt-in strategy.

Opt-in strategies allow people to subscribe to your emails by choice, which will increase the quality of your lists over time. The first step to creating a successful opt-in strategy is to create helpful, original content that your buyer personas (aka target audience) will love to read on a regular basis. Next, find ways to ask or require people to subscribe to email updates.

• The “ask" method is when you give people the option of subscribing to your content via email, but it’s not required to do so to consume it. A great example would be a check mark on a landing page form asking if you want to subscribe to the company’s blog. At HubSpot, we increased our blog email subscribers by 128% by putting a check box on our landing pages.

• The “require” method means gating premium content offers like ebooks, reports, and templates behind a form that requires this personal information.

3) Create a re-engagement campaign.

Do a chunk of your email subscribers never open or click through your emails? Don’t throw in the towel just yet. First, identify the email addresses who haven’t engaged with your emails in several years and remove them altogether, as they will likely increase spam complaints.

Then, try to reinvigorate the rest of your list with a re-engagement campaign. To do this, create a compelling opt-in email message that gives readers the choice of opting in to your emails – otherwise, they’ll be removed from your list after that mailing. Use this opportunity to ask for feedback, too, so you can learn how to better customize your email marketing to their interests and needs.

And don’t be afraid to get creative! If you want some inspiration, here’s a re-engagement campaign HubSpot sent that increased our email click-through rate by 583%.

4) Remove all the unengaged folks.

Your re-engagement campaign won’t work on everyone. Don’t be sad – when it comes to your email subscribers, you want quality over quantity. Your open rate will improve when you send emails to people you actually want to open your emails. After some time, remove all contacts that still didn’t open your emails so you don’t affect your future deliverability rates.

A report from Experian shows that every dollar invested in email marketing initiatives yields about $44.25 return -- but to cash in on your email marketing efforts, you’ve got to maintain honest, clean lists. If you remember anything from this blog post, here are three things you need to know to determine if the list is quality:

1. Where you got the list
2. Whether you have permission to email these people
3. What expectations the people on your list have for how much email you'll send them

So if you want that kind of ROI for your email marketing, make sure your lists are squeaky clean before your next send.

What’s the most important information that your web analytics tool can provide you?

It’s where your website visitors are coming from.

Let’s look at Google Analytics channels. In many cases, it can tell you where a visitor came from, but in many others, it cannot. Here’s an example traffic distribution.

Do you think this is accurate? Perhaps some Direct traffic should be in Email, or some Referral traffic should be in Social.

To make sure that Google puts it in the right bucket, you need to understand how it interprets your website traffic. Only then can you control how it should interpret it.

All website visits can be classified into one of the three main categories. Let’s look at each one of them. We will also see how you can help Google Analytics categorize a visit correctly.

1. Referer and UTM parameters are both absent

Whenever a visitor comes to your website, their browser sets Referer URL which tells Google Analytics what page they came from. But it’s not always set due to several reasons:

• Coming from a bookmarked URL
• Manually typing URL in the browser
• Mobile apps
• Email clients
• Privacy addons in browsers
• Proxy servers
• Javascript links
• Instant messengers
• Twitter clients
• Links in documents like PDF, MS Word, Powerpoint, etc.
• and many other reasons

In each of these cases, Google Analytics has no information about how the visitor found your website. It then attributes the source of the visitor as direct and medium as none. This visit is then seen in Direct channel.

You should try to avoid this case as much as you can. You cannot control when the Referer is set. But you can add UTM parameters to your URLs and reduce such visits. And we will soon see what parameters to add that work best with Google Analytics.

Note: In this post, I’m going to use Referer, which is the correct HTTP header, but not the correct spelling of referrer.

2. Referer is present and there are no UTM parameters

When the Referer URL is set, Google Analytics does its magic and tries to give you the best insights it can. By just looking at the Referer, it can figure out some information about the visitor.

a. Organic Search

If the Referer belongs to a search engine, Google Analytics assigns the visit to Organic Search. Google maintains a list of websites that it considers are search engines. It includes Bing, Yahoo, etc. Here’s the complete list.

Tip: Try not to have a search subdomain. e.g. search.yoursite.com. You can potentially mess up your organic search reports. There’s a workaround that you need to implement if you do need search subdomain.

b. Social

Just like the list of search engines, Google also maintains a list of websites that it considers are social networks. If the Referer is for a domain that matches one on that list, the visit is marked as Social. You can see all such visits in Acquisition > Social section of Google Analytics.

c. Referral

If Google Analytics fails to categorize the Referer into any of the above channels, the visit is attributed to Referral. Such traffic can be seen in Referral channel and All Referrals report.

3. UTM parameters are present

If you have UTM parameters in the URL, Referer information is completely ignored. It does not matter if it’s present or not.

You can tag your URLs in certain ways and have the visits reported in one of these channels

a. Organic Search

Do you know that you can force some traffic to be considered as Organic Search in Google Analytics.

Here’s a neat trick.

Let’s say your website is a search engine and it’s not in Google’s default search engine list. You want to play nice with Google Analytics. If you add utm_medium=organic and utm_source=your-search-engine-name to the URLs in your search results, visits to those websites will be counted in Organic Search of the respective website’s Google Analytics reports.

But this probably has several unintended consequences.

In short, do not use this. Ever. Don’t mess up your or anyone else’s analytics.

b. Referral

When you set utm_medium=referral, the visits will be shown in All Referrals section and Referral channel reports.

Tip: Do you sometimes find yourself struggling to come up with a value for utm_medium? Here’s a suggestion. Just use referral. If the medium name is not obvious, it’s not a medium. Whatever you might come up with mostly likely belongs in utm_campaign or utm_content.

I’ve made mistakes in the past where I used blog_comments as utm_medium. I was wrong. referral would have been a better choice.

c. Email

People read their emails in all sorts of mail clients, devices, online services, etc. Google Analytics (or any other analytics) cannot possibly keep track of all the email referrers. So if you want to reliably know the performance of your email campaigns, follow these two simple rules:

• Always tag your URLs in emails.
• Always use utm_medium=email. Don’t try any other variation.

If you follow the above rules, all the visits from your email campaigns will be conveniently grouped under Email channel. You can also learn from campaign tagging mistakes that big companies make in their email campaigns.

d. Social

If the utm_medium parameter on a URL is one of social, social-network, social-media, sm, social network, or social media, then the visit is attributed to social traffic. It then appears in Social reports and also in Social channel.

Even though there are several options available, it’s best to just use social. It’s short and clear. twitter or facebook should go in utm_source and not utm_medium.

e. Paid Search

If you want any traffic to be categorized as Paid Search, use either cpc, ppc or paidsearch for utm_medium.

But you need to be careful. For example, you have a LinkedIn ads campaign where you pay for each click. In that case, your utm_medium will be cpc. This is not a paid search, but it will be incorrectly classified as such. So make sure you create detailed reports when it comes to paid campaigns and not rely on just the default channel groupings.

Note: You can configure Google Analytics and change its default channel groups. It will then categorize cpc and others correctly, but that’s a different blog post.

f. Display

Any visits to a URL tagged with utm_medium as display, cpm or banner will be shown in Display channel.

Even in this case, cpm does not necessarily mean Display. It could potentially apply to paid search. e.g. It’s possible for a search engine to charge its advertisers for impressions and not clicks.

g. (Other)

If a utm_medium cannot be categorized into one of the above channels, it’s put into (Other) channel. All such visits show up in Campaigns report. This is where all your custom utm_mediums will fall.

This should be one of your smallest traffic channels. Having a lot of traffic in (Other), but little in Email, Social, Paid Search and Display most likely means you are making mistakes in utm_medium. Traffic that should belong to these default channels is being attributed to (Other).

Final Thoughts

While trying to track every little detail of every campaign, it’s easy to forget the broader marketing efforts. Categorizing all the traffic into a few channels helps you get the complete picture of your marketing campaigns.

You can influence how Google interprets a visit just by adding certain UTM parameters to your URLs. You can use this information as the foundation for building well defined conventions for tagging your URLs. In addition, use a good analytics URL builder that helps you with your UTM management.

Product pricing is a rather thorny issue that most of us deal with from time to time: How much should I charge for XXXXXX? Charge too much and potential customers avoid your brand; charge too little and you’re leaving money on the table. But, how to you figure your product pricing — especially for a new product?

Product pricing

Price is one of the 4 P’s underpinning marketing: product, price, promotion (advertising), and place (distribution/ logistics). In reality, product pricing is integral to market performance including profit, market share, and ultimately success (or failure) of your venture.

Many think consumers make simplistic pricing decisions — buy the cheapest product. And, while that might be true for commodity-type products, that certainly NOT true for differentiated products like the ones dominating store shelves and online etail sites.

In fact, consumers based product purchase decisions on VALUE, not absolute price. And value is a function of BOTH price and benefits related to the product. Basically value is:

value = what you get – what you give up

What you get

You get any number of benefits from buying a brand:

• performance
• convenience
• durability
• bragging rights
• enhanced ego – status
• etc,

What you give up

In addition to product price, you also give up:

• option to buy something else (opportunity costs)
• time
• decision-making effort
• hassle
• etc.

Because consumers buy based on value, product pricing is particularly complex. For instance, Coke might sell for about $.25 when purchased on sale at the local supermarket as part of a 12-pack and $1.50 in a vending machine, and $4.25 at the local theater or sports venue. That’s because you have lots of options that are equally convenient at the supermarket and few convenient options at the sports venue. Thus, consumers have different valuations of the product in different situations.

Product pricing as part of brand image

Product pricing impacts how consumers view your brand — it’s brand image. And, most consumers buy brands based on seeing a brand image that “fits” the way they see themselves. In a way, consumers are consuming the brand image as much as they’re consuming the product itself.

Apple case study

That’s why Apple products — iPad, iPhone, Mac — command significantly higher prices than competitive products, in some cases 30-40% price premiums. Certainly, Apple products possess no better objective quality than competitive brands, so why is their product pricing so high and inflexible (have you EVER seen new Apple products on sale?). In fact, it won’t take long to find serious complaints about Apple performance, from the poor video quality of their iPhone to the poor battery life of their tablets. And, industry experts question the value of Apple products relative to HP and other competitors.

So, why do Apple enthusiasts stand in line to plunk down a serious price premium for the latest Apple gadget? Because Apple products possess the “coolness” factor — something consumers are willing to pay for. Sure, they may not be the best products on the market, but Apple innovations are the first products in tech categories. They invented the MP3 format (at least in terms of being the first to commercialize the technology effectively), the Smartphone (again, in it’s current format with those all important apps), and the tablet. Not only is Apple the first to introduce products we didn’t know we wanted, but soon grow to find indispensable, but their products are intuitively easy to use and sleek — much cooler than boxy, unattractive offerings from other brands. Even their advertising, “I’m a MAC, you’re a PC” emphasize coolness in their juxtaposition of hip actors against a drab model.

Thus, product pricing is more than just pricing as low as possible and hoping to capture market share from consumers looking for a good deal.

Want another example of how product pricing impacts brand image?

Indian jewelry

Cialdini starts his book, Influence, by sharing a story about how product pricing impacts brand image. He relates a story of a shop owner selling Indian jewelry in a little gift shop near an Indian reservation. The jewelry was priced better than competitors in the area and the shop owner couldn’t understand why it sold so poorly. Before leaving on vacation, she leaves instructions for her manager to reduce the price by 50% so she could get rid of it and use the shelf space for something that might help turn a profit.

Upon her return, she found her strategy worked — the jewelry was almost all gone. She congratulated herself for a great pricing strategy and thanked her manager for following instructions resulting in eliminating the poor-performing jewelry. The manager turned the color of a sheet and explained she misunderstood the message left by the owner and marked the jewelry UP by 50%.

Hence, jewelry seen as cheap at it’s original price, was seen as authentic Native American treasures at the inflated price. Consumers gobbled up the now precious jewelry.

Product pricing strategy

So, how do you, a business owner, use these case studies to set prices for your products and services? Well, I think they demonstrate 2 clear lessons.

Consumers pay for brands that “fit” them

In the case of Apple, consumers pay a premium because the coolness of Apple products translates into their image as cool. It’s important to note this works best for products used in public where others see how cool your products are and figure you’re cool, too.

Spending resources to stay innovative, to care about style as well as function, and sophisticated messaging to reinforce the image of your brand pay off in terms of product pricing — allowing you to charge a price premium.

Consumers use pricing to tell them how good something is

Of course, this only works when consumers can’t judge the objective quality of something, like in our jewelry example. But, frankly, there are lots of situations where consumers can’t judge the objective quality of something – especially services. I mean, think of an attorney. How do we KNOW he’s any good? We use his pricing, the opulence of his offices, etc as surrogates for how good he is.

For my colleagues who offer social media marketing or other marketing services, this is a serious consideration. If you give your services away too cheaply, folks don’t expect much in terms of quality and it’s harder to get bigger clients.

Since articles like "The End of Solution Sales" and "Selling is Not About Relationships" were published in the Harvard Business Review, there's been a lot of disagreement in the sales world about what's working and what's not. The arguments behind these articles were steeped in data. The arguments against these articles seemed more based on experience and belief. Which were true? We didn't care one way or the other, but we certainly wanted to know.

So we decided it was time to collect and analyze fresh data to find out what's really going on in sales.

We undertook research from the buyer's perspective to understand what buyers want from sellers and what sellers can do to tip the scales in their favor. To find out, we studied over 700 B2B purchases made by buyers with $3.1 billion in annual purchasing power.

We found that sales winners don't just sell differently, they sell radically differently, and they exhibit a specific combination of behaviors to achieve better outcomes than second-place finishers.

Guess what? It is most certainly not the end of solution sales. Not even close...

—How About Some Crispy, Fried Mealworms?

Before you say “Yuck”, let me tell you why this unusual meal came to my mind.

Rarely do I flip TV channels since we now live in the tablet era. Last week, however, I happened to turn on the television and was just in time for the season finale of Top Chef Canada. Food being one of my biggest passions, I decided to stick around and watch the three finalists dish up their multi-course meal. Interesting show, I have to say, but even more interesting was the creative genius of these master chefs at work. There were some fascinating twists on traditional favourites and others were completely novel creations.

The winner of the competition was Rene Rodriguez, chef and owner of Navarra in Ottawa (must try this restaurant when I’m there next). For the finals, Rene presented two of his signature dishes that are popular at Navarra. One was a steak tartar appetizer and the other, the one that really disrupted my thoughts, was a braised lamb shank in a traditional Mexican mole sauce with parsnip puree. This beautifully presented dish was then topped off with crispy, fried mealworms. I loved the shock on the judges’ faces when he told them what he had put on their plates. I loved even more their sheer delight as they ate and marveled at how delicious this unique dish was! Until that point, I’m convinced they were all starting to look bored and anxiously waiting for a stellar moment on the show. (And I was getting ready to change channels, but I didn’t.)

Overall, the show offered me a wonderful perspective on how to be innovative, creative, and be able to market your ideas to end the boredom your audience is most definitely feeling. Look at what’s happening around us in B2B marketing. While technology and media channels are extremely dynamic and exciting, B2B demand generation campaigns simply can’t seem to keep pace. Every other campaign is lacklustre, boring, forgettable and as a result, ineffective. How can you change that? How can you get your buyers to sit up and take notice? Even more important, how can you get them to stand up and take positive (buying) action? Can you toss some fried mealworms on their plates? It’s an idea…and if you make them taste great (good isn’t good enough), you are steps closer to conversion and well on your way to long-term engagement.

5 Ways to Ignite B2B Demand Generation and Achieve Customer Delight

1. Be Bold, Show Courage, But Don’t Be Foolhardy. Just like Chef Rene! It was a bold move and definitely brave to serve mealworms on the final episode of an extremely tough competition. He took a risk, but it was a calculated one because he was confident of the success of his dish. After all, he serves it as a signature dish at his restaurant. The judges were shocked, then delighted. That’s what you want. You want to disrupt your buyers’ thought process but you want it to be a tremendous and incomparable experience. Otherwise, it would only be a temporary interruption where they take notice but then go back to whatever they were doing and forget about you.
2. Take A Stand. Disruptive marketing is a chance to be strongly opinionated. The important thing to remember is that when you voice your opinion, it must resonate with the values your customers uphold. Take a stand and stick to it because it shows your customers you share their values and care about them. One of the other finalists, Rich Francis decided to go back to his aboriginal roots and served cuisine that is typical of his community. His pickled blueberries were another show-stopper. Rich told the judges he wanted to win the competition for himself and his family but also to be an ambassador of aboriginal cuisine. Now that’s a commitment you can’t help but admire.
3. Speak In A Familiar Voice. As marketers, we are always making the attempt to be heard but often end up adding to the noise that buyers are trying so hard to get away from. When you want to find your voice and showcase your brand personality in a strikingly new and different type of lead generation campaign, it’s important to ensure that your audience still finds it familiar. There is no point in making an impact if the memory and recall of that campaign is not clearly associated with your brand in your buyers’ minds.
4. Strike An Emotional Connection. All three contestants vying for the Top Chef title were passionate about their cooking, and it showed. They struck an emotional chord with the panel bringing each course to the table. When a judge remarks, “I want to take a bath in that soup, it was so good!” or says, “I’m going to tackle him and hold him down until he gives me that recipe for the crumbled onion soil”, or delights in, “What a novel way to cut the richness of salmon with pickled blueberries; I’m going to steal this idea!”—there’s no doubt about it; the chefs stirred up very strong and positive emotions in their audience.
5. Enjoy the Experience, Have Fun and Get Your Audience Excited. Chef Terry Salmond presented hands-down, the best dessert on the show. But when he brought it to the judges’ table, he really piqued their curiosity. It was a caramelized yogurt parfait with burnt onion crumble. How many desserts can you think of that use onion? I had never heard of any and it certainly looked like the judges hadn’t either. When they dug into the parfait, one of them said, “Terry is a master of texture; this is phenomenal”. Now that’s the kind of experience you want your buyers to enjoy—phenomenal. That’s when they get excited and look for more experiences like that. Then they also want to share their experience with others and that’s why one of the judges was so determined to have the recipe for Chef Terry’s one-of-a-kind dessert.

A shout out to Paul Dunay here who nails it in his tips for CMOs on mastering online customer experience.

Is your B2B demand generation stuck in the same old, same old? There’s no need to ditch the tried and true methods and processes that are proven to deliver results. Throw in a good measure of disruptive, innovative marketing to help your buyers kick off the boredom and get interested in your brand. Do you have more ideas on how to do this? I would love to hear from you. Share your thoughts and let’s discuss this on my blog.

Image credit: Shutterstock

I recently started working with a company that built their business from the ground up, bootstrapping almost the entire way. 20 years later they employ 400 people and run a very successful company. The products are amazing and practically sell themselves once their consumer lays hands on them. They are SO incredible that people are blown away by them. The products are actually so spot on that one would think the company’s success was predetermined.

WRONG.

Let me tell you about another business, their perfect product, and a different sort of result. The products are also incredible. When someone sees and touches them for the first time they fall in love. They can’t believe they ever were satisfied with the inferior substitute that they had used prior to this new discovery. They swear they will never use anything but this new, incredible product ever again. But this company isn’t a ‘success’ yet – at least they’re not where they want to be – and I know why, but first let me go back to company #1.

Growing steadily

The first company is a manufacturer aimed at a very specific wholesale sales channel. One reason they have had tremendous growth over the long haul is that their founder and creative director has his finger squarely on the pulse of their end user market: college and high school kids. A long way out of college themselves, the sales and creatives are deeply entrenched in the community they sell to. Subtle trend shifts aren’t missed. The product is built to fit and lead the market. It hasn’t tired or grown stale because it is constantly connected to the marketplace.

The company grows because it’s products are incredibly well received by their marketplace, but more importantly, because those products are sold through precisely the right sales channels to place them AT the place the end user will find them.

Growing bumpily

The second company also manufactures a product for a very specific niche market, and the end result is equally breathtaking. In fact, company #2 makes a product that can honestly be called a market changer. It was created because there was such an obvious gap in the market place that to its founder, it appeared a no brainer. It too was aiming at a non-retail market with a more tricky to reach audience. The difference in the two is that the growth has not been as steady, and frankly easy for company #2.

Why? Well, first I want to share even more of the similarities. Company #2 also has a very strong creative direction; their products are 100% on point. Once in the hands of their hard to reach target end user, that user always falls in love. Always. Despite the fact that the product is more expensive than almost all of its competitors’ offerings, buyers become instant brand loyalists. Yet the growth hasn’t been nearly as steady and robust as it was for company #1.

What Gives?

Here we have 2 companies creating unbelievable products for niche markets, and one had an easier time growing; again, the question is why? Here’s the difference in as succinct a form as I can put it:

Company #1 was immersed in its target market when the company began; the 2 founders were college students at the time of launch, and they never left that community. Because the sales channels were clear – through wholesale distribution – Company #1 worked really hard at building relationships with the vendors and crystallizing that their brand was unique. Vendors bought in. Those relationships have never wavered and have only grown. For each fabulous new product, Company #1 had an attentive audience that bought in immediately.

Company #2 came out of its target market as well, but, because this market is extremely niche and highly professional, staying engaged and inside of it was much more of a challenge. The most obvious difference in Company #2′s market is that there is no clear and singular sales channel. End users buy from a myriad of outlets, including retail and online, trade shows and from sales reps that call on them directly. Growth for Company #2 is much more dependent upon raising brand awareness than building individual relationships, making the task much more frenetic and difficult to get your arms around.

HOW do you raise brand awareness when you’re a bootstrapping start up?

This was the frustrating dilemma for Company#2; how do we grow brand awareness when we lack a large marketing budget? And THAT is the million dollar question, isn’t it?

There were certain things we could not do for Company #2; we couldn’t go back and reformulate sales strategy from the company’s inception, and they didn’t ask us to. But we could work hard to create a strategy for collecting all of the individual brand advocates into a more united and vocal word of mouth marketing source. We could, and did, create a social media presence and begin planting the seeds of a growing online community with like minded values and interests. And we could help them determine the already thriving social communities they need to get involved in. We could and did help them create and launch a campaign that would make their potential buyers sit up and take notice.

Most importantly, we taught Company #2 the value of building social relationships into real life relationships, into willing brand advocates. We taught them how to continue building the community through individual relationships long after we’re gone. Has their job of reaching a hyper niche market become easier? Well, yes and no. Yes, because they now have new tools and tactics to do it, but like ALL word of mouth brand building, turning community outreach into brand awareness takes A LOT of time, and companies still working their way to a solid foundation have less time per employee to spare than anyone.

So, what we did was educate and frankly, create more work for Company #2, but, if they stick with the plan, growth will get easier and happen more quickly.

It's hard enough to get a buyer to commit to a sale. Now try to imagine a buyer who doesn't even know what they're buying from you. Do you think you could close that deal?  With any deal, including the situation above, your focus should shift away from closing and to opening. If you open a deal correctly, your buyer will know exactly what you're selling them and why they need it.  Closing the deal will be the easiest part.  In this week's blog, Hugh shares six steps to closing a deal by ensuring you open properly.

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Ask Me Anythings, or AMAs, have long been a popular conversation format on Reddit. More recently, they’ve really taken off on Inbound.org, giving marketers of all stripes the opportunity to pick the brains of industry influencers and thought leaders.

Annie Cushing, Brian Clark, Avinash Kaushik and other thought leaders in our industry have participated in AMAs on Inbound over the last 18 months. Typically, it’s announced a few days ahead of time and participants come back over several days to answer questions from the community. The content tends to be laser-focused and super-high-quality – they don’t go as off-track as you might see on Reddit, probably due in large part to the fact it’s a niche site and the audience tend to be well-versed in the basics.

Not a lot of questions like “Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?”

Here are some of the most valuable content marketing tips and tricks to come out of the Inbound AMAs, from the generous industry leaders who have given us a chance to ask them just about anything. (Also check out Larry Kim’s best PPC tips from his own Inbound.org AMA and our collection of the best SEO tips from Reddit AMAs.)

What Works Today in Content Marketing?

When you’re just starting out

Choose who you want to reach, and find out everything you can about them. Their problems and desires. The topics that relate to those problems and desires. The language they use when searching Google and social media for those topics. Who else is serving the needs of these people, both with content and with products and services. This is where you always start.

- Brian Clark, CEO of CopyBlogger Media

On the value of content

A piece of content is worth a lot. A year ago or so, we actually came up with a formula: A guest post would give us around 100 signups in the lifetime of the article. We have a 2% conversion from free to paid for Buffer. So that means 2 people will pay. Our lifetime value for a paying user is around $250. So a piece of content was around $500. We don’t use that anymore, but just as an example along which lines we are thinking. Rand Fishkin taught me that content isn’t for direct signups – it’s to create loyalty, branding and familiarity. That’s very much an idea I’ve come around to. So I would rather pay you consistently up front, and have you as a writer create awesome content every week, then always charge per result!

- Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer

Why most content is still crap

As long as people see content as a means to an end (getting higher rankings and distracting people so you sell more stuff) instead of part of the end itself (building strong relationships and an enduring audience who will ALWAYS buy your stuff) it’ll stay this way.

- Ian Lurie, CEO of Portent

On SEO copywriting

What we call SEO copywriting is actually reflecting the language of the audience back at them (when done correctly). This has been the secret to effective copywriting in general for decades before search engines. The key is to quit worry about gaming an algorithm (that’s getting more “person like” all the time) and focus on the language of the audience in order to connect with them, first and foremost.

- Brian Clark, Copyblogger

Do long single-page sales pages actually convert?

Long-form stuff definitely works. But not for complex stuff – it is usually consumer-focused and impulse-buy. It is not against best-practice. It is actually in a long and battle-tested tradition of direct response copywriting. The stuff has been around for many decades with people like Eugene Schwartz. I wouldn’t use it for expensive B2B stuff though.

- Tim Ash, CEO of SiteTuners and Chair of Conversion Conference

Long-form stuff works!

Different Types of Content: Where to Focus Your Efforts

On when to use infographics

I love infographics IF – and only if – they’re done well. I think infographics have been abused and have gotten a bad rap as a result. But when we’re analyzing data from thousands of advertisers and looking at billions in spend, charts are boring. Infographics can really help break down complex issues and visually demonstrate concepts if they’re done right.

- Larry Kim, CTO at WordStream Inc.

The downside of visuals

People misunderstand the power of visuals. Basically they distract the visitor and make it hard for them to prioritize. There is a hierarchy – motion, visuals, text – and stuff at the higher levels will prevent the visitor on focusing on more subtle stuff at the lower levels. So cut back on the motion and the window-dressing – boring works.

- Tim Ash, Sitetuners

On using content for e-commerce

To most e-commerce sites, content feels almost like a distraction. They’re there to sell products, and can’t make a good, data-verified connection between content and sales. So content gets shunted off to the blog, separated from the products, which of course reduces the impact, and makes it seem more like a distraction. Woot.com does the best job by far. Appsumo is purely information stuff but I love their tone and style. Amazon is clearly in the lead when it comes to using user-generated content.

-Ian Lurie, Portent

Effective Content Creation Tips & Tactics

On getting better at content creation

Remember high school English? That’s where you learned how to write (or, you were supposed to—heh). And you learned from doing it over and over again. So in terms of getting really good at producing amazing content:

1. Figure out (research, analytics, what’s got you all excited) what you want to focus on.
2. Make an editorial calendar for yourself.
3. Set aside writing time for yourself. Honor it.
4. DO IT. Over and over. Ask for feedback. That’s it.

- Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic CEO

On the writing process

In general, I write in a 2-step process. The first step, normally in the morning starting at 6:30 is the sourcing process. I find lots of research studies on a topic. Write a few sub-headings and basically make a big mess in a word document. I intentionally jot down lots of things that don’t flow well. This helps me to break the “blank page” syndrome. I do this for around 1 hour or so. Then I go and do other tasks. Then in the afternoon, around 3-4 pm I get back to the post. The great thing is that my brain has by then normally made sense of all the different sections. I then edit and write the actual content in a concise form. In this 2nd phase I’m very focused on the actual wording, the flow and ordering all the research I’ve collected. I then publish that post next thing in the morning after doing a few final tweaks, like adding images, and so on.

- Leo Widrich, Buffer

On repurposing content

Reworking content – something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently – because I think that I’ve been too guilty of always moving onto the next thing rather than seeing all the different ways that a piece can be repurposed. A few top tips:

1. Focus heavily on design (this is my favourite article on the importance of design recently).
2. Think about channels – so for B2B I love repurposing things as blog posts / articles, slide decks, videos, emails etc.
3. Incorporate feedback *explicitly* – i.e. reference the person who gave the feedback – this is a form of ego-bait and it’s worked really well for me in the past.

- Will Critchlow, co-founder of Distilled

Referral Candy repurposes curated content for infographics, like this one

On passion

Don’t pump content. Pump out passion. Passion comes from two things: 1. What you are knowledgeable about and 2. What you love. Big companies stink at both. They are not knowledgeable about local unique situations, people, issues. They are not passionate about it because they don’t live where you live. They have to be generic and passionless. Exploit that. Only write about what comes from the intersection of #1 and #2.  Sure, you are not going to outrank Mr. Humungo. But slowly but surely you will build a local and relevant audience and in the end it is not about attracting 1 million people, it is about attracting the 1,000 that are in your area that want to give you money.

- Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google

On getting people invested in content creation

If you can go to people and say, look, you’ve told us about the time constraints of your job, we know you’re hesitant to commit to anything, but here is an editorial calendar that takes into account your time limitations, and here’s the kind of support we can offer you during the process … and here is WHY we want you to create this content … then you have a solid business case that also seems manageable to the individual.

- Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic

On influencing influencers

The key is to start producing content that is useful and interesting to your target audience.  You have to give them a reason to come to your website. Without that, outreach to influencers isn’t going to be effective. In terms of finding influencers, you can use a tool like SEOmoz’s FollowerWonk – or even Twitter search.

- Dharmesh Shah, CTO of HubSpot

Promoting Awesome Content

5 principles for content promotion

1. Spend at least as much time on planning as you do on the actual promotion.
2. Broaden the list of people you reach out to by segmenting your “content market.”
3. Leverage easier to acquire links to help get the more difficult ones.
4. Engage in your community prior to outreach.
5. Automate low-value tasks (finding contact info, collecting metrics, etc.).

- Paul May, CEO of BuzzStream

On the best inbound strategies for start-ups

Strategically, I believe that start-ups should be building permission assets – groups of people who are excited to hear what they have to say (tactically, I’m a big fan of email marketing). The best ways of building those groups is typically some combination of activity (content production, community management) and channel (search, social).

- Will Critchlow, Distilled

On finding promotable topics

Go to followerwonk and look at the word cloud of the all the followers of the biggest player in your space and then use those keywords to build co-relevant content ideas. Push the content at their followers through outreach and ads. Build the site so that it rewards profile creation, newsletter signups and follows. Keep the conversation going through the relevant social channels and continue to push out shareworthy content. Your community will grow.

- Mike King, ipullrank.com

On email promotion

I. Love. Email marketing! Check out this post that compiles everything I could possibly share with you about it – Email Marketing Campaign Analysis, Metrics, Best Practices. If you are not thinking about the transformative nature of mobile on email consumption and engagement, you are making a BIG MISTAKE.

- Avinash Kaushik, Google

Developing a position statement

Make sure you have a really well thought out positioning statement. This should summarize very succinctly the sets of feelings that you want to engender among your target customer. Having this will not only position you in the customer’s mind, it will help you focus your efforts.  Here’s the template that I use for a positioning statement:

1. For (target segment)
2. Who wants (problem to solve)
3. The (solution name) provides (solution to the problem)
4. Unlike (primary competitor)
5. The (solution name) (primary differentiator).

The key is making this very short…that focuses you and makes it really clear why you’re the right solution. Developing this first will help drive your content strategy and promotion strategy.

- Paul May, BuzzStream

Measuring the Effects of Content Marketing

What metrics can you trust?

There’s a hierarchy of metrics that can be measured. The “best” metric is raw “dollars in the door” (getting customers). If you can’t measure customers, measure leads (which is a proxy for future customers). From there, the further out you get (using proxies for future leads/customers), the more dubious the metric. The motivation behind measurement is to figure out what is working and what is not. Most of the time, we measure things that we think are indicative of the thing we actually want. Because often, it’s hard to measure the thing we actually want.

- Dharmesh Shaw, HubSpot

Dwell time

For sites like my blog (or my BFF Thomas’ most excellent fantastic must read by any digital person site) a very large percentage of people will just come to read the latest post or one post to solve a specific problem. Dwell tells you what that engagement looks like because all web analytics tools stink (natively) at capturing time for single page view visits. I use the data to figure out what content is causing people stay and read. Is there a dwell time that leads to higher conversation rate. Is it correlated to social sharing. Does page speed cause higher or lower dwell time. And at least in some cases to see if dwell time causes me to make more repeat visits (and money!).

- Avinash Kaushik, Google

On monitoring and analyzing advanced analytics metrics

Aside from forensic data dives, webmasters should only spend their time monitoring key performance indicators (metrics on ‘roids) that they care about. So for one webmaster, this might be just the basics. For another, they might be a brick and mortar who only cares about traffic from their sales regions, let’s just say. That will require a custom report using some advanced(ish) metrics.  But I also think that when it comes to analytics, a reporting dashboard should be created that pulls in the data they need (preferably using the GA API), and then formatted in a way that helps key decision makers see what they need to effortlessly. But all too often marketers don’t automate this process and do the same repetitive tasks week after week, month after month.

- Annie Cushing, Annielytics

This post originally appeared on the Insiders section of Inbound Hub. To read more content like this, subscribe to Insiders.

Within the startup community there has been a lot of talk about the rise of agile marketing – a management approach that adapts agile software development methodologies to the planning and execution of marketing programs. Agile marketing’s potential, however, extends well beyond marketing start-ups and in many ways goes hand-in-hand with inbound marketing.

Agile marketing methodology supports ongoing conversion optimization, flexibility, and favors continuous iteration over big-bang campaigns. At its core, agile marketing is about eliminating waste by shortening the cycle time between idea, implementation, and feedback.

This is done by conducting small, frequent tests designed to provide validated learning based on real world results. Agile marketing allows the modern marketing team to adapt to fast-changing market conditions, respond to immediate sales needs, and prove ROI quickly and consistently.

What Is Agile Marketing?

The principles of agile marketing include:

• Validated learning vs. opinions and conventions
• Customer-focused collaboration vs. silos and hierarchy
• Adaptive and iterative campaigns vs. big-bang campaigns
• The process of customer discovery vs. intuition
• Flexible vs. rigid planning
• Responding to change vs. following a plan
• Many small experiments vs. a few large bets

If you have ever worked in a large organization you are likely well aware of the inefficiencies that can plague the corporate environment. Fighting for budget, getting approval, and navigating bureaucracy can turn two month time lines into a 12 month battle.

It wasn’t very long ago that 5 year plans were the norm. Organizations would write detailed business plans, get C-level approval, and then work to stick to the long-term plan. It’s a way of working that can place a lot of eggs in a few very large and very time consuming baskets.

The problem with working in such large batches is that it is difficult to learn if something has gone wrong until a lot of waste has been created. When marketers fall victim to the pitfalls of working in large batches, it isn’t uncommon for them to spend thousands of dollars hiring a creative agency to write a jingle, months perfecting billboard designs, and when the annual campaign is launched, be left wondering if anyone even noticed it.

In fact, very often these initiatives are done in the the complete absence of any defined performance measures. Yet, when another 12 months goes by and the marketing team is deciding which elements of the annual campaign to change, they once again base their decisions on assumptions and intuitions rather that validated learning.

Agile Inbound Marketing

Our approach to agile inbound marketing can be quite a change for those who are accustomed to five year, or for that matter, even one year plans. Instead of working from rigid long-term frameworks, we create flexible quarterly and annual plans with specific targets, executing the work in much smaller increments known as sprints -- a defined period of time in which a team commits to complete a certain work output.

Depending on the scope of work to be completed a sprint typically lasts between 15 and 30 days. This allows us to frequently try new strategies, measure the results, and adjust our path accordingly, moving faster toward achieving quarterly and annual targets.

Typically when new clients come to us for help with their sales and marketing efforts they have identified the opportunity to generate more leads online. The thing is, in a world of instant gratification, people want to see measurable results immediately.

Software Enhances Agility

Agile methodology helps us work with our clients to quickly validate assumptions, gather real market feedback, and use those findings to improve results at an unprecedented rate. We aren’t interested in just moving the needle next year or next quarter, we use the real time power of HubSpot and various inbound marketing strategies to produce measurable results today.

Traditionally, marketers had to perform some sort of voodoo to measure the results of outbound marketing efforts. Measuring the conversion rates of offline sources like direct mail, billboards, or magazine ads is often a shot in the dark. When organizations make the transition from largely offline, interruption-dominated marketing to online, inbound-dominated marketing, they gain access to a wealth of actionable marketing data.

With the help of software, we can measure anything from the impressions, clicks, and conversion rates of single tweet, to the overarching performance of clients’ inbound marketing efforts. This is what gets us excited -- real, measurable results, guided by data-driven decision making.

The speed of production, iteration, and measurement at the core of agile methodology lends itself perfectly to inbound marketing. Agile methodology helps inbound marketers quickly validate assumptions, gather real market feedback, and improve the results of their campaigns at a pace unrivaled by traditional marketing management methods.

Being an introvert in the seemingly extroverted world of marketing might make you feel a bit like a fish out of water. But if you feel like being an introvert is your kryptonite, think again; many of our fellow introverts are thriving in highly-extroverted industries, including marketing.

Take for instance, Mr. Darmesh Shah of HubSpot. Last year at Inbound13, he mentioned in an awe-inspiring keynote that he’s actually quite the introvert. In spite of his self-confessed introversion, Mr. Shah is an extremely successful business man who is also one of the backbones of inbound marketing.

As a matter of fact, introverts make some of the world’s most successful businessmen simply because their affinity for introspection makes them great strategists. Among the world’s most successful introverts are Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and even Google’s very own Larry Page, to name a few.

If you’re an introvert in the marketing world and you’re a little in the dark or apprehensive about how you can be successful, here are a few things you can do.

1. Be Confident. Inbound marketing comesnatural to you. 

Being introverted doesn’t necessarily equate to being anti-social. You don’t have to a be a recluse or have social anxiety to be an introvert. You are simply more in tuned with your inner self and d

o not rely on external stimulation. There are plenty of introverts that have the capability to be (or are in fact) social butterflies. That being said, you can think of your introverted side as an edge in the realm of marketing as opposed to a kryptonite.

Because introverts are quiet and introspective, they tend to be good observers and great listeners. Take for instance, George Stephanopoulos, a well-known anchor and political correspondent whose job is to, well, talk to people. George is a self-confessed introvert but he is one of the most successful television journalist, having hosted some of the most compelling interviews of our time.

George’s introverted nature allows him to empathize with his guests naturally and create a deeper connection that makes his interviews rich and unique. Like him, you can channel the skills that come naturally to you as an introvert towards your marketing goals.

Inbound marketing revolves around the premise of sharing valuable insight to your audience on the problems they encounter and topics that matter to them. Sufficed to say, you can use your innate ability for empathy to walk in the shoes of your audience, tap into the issues that resonate with them, and provide valuable solutions they would definitely appreciate.

2. Do What You Do Best — Think.

Introverts are careful in weighing their options, which is great for creating brilliant marketing strategies. Introverts think first before they do the talking or the doing. They are detail-oriented and tend to form deep connections with people. Use this to your advantage.

Instead of being pressured by the extroverted nature of the industry, just relax and be yourself. Study the prospect or clients’ buyer personas, the nature of their industry, what their audience wants and what they have to offer. Be confident in knowing that you of all people are good at this.

Before creating marketing strategies for your clients, or attempting to close a sale, take a moment to sit down with the information and explore your options. When it comes time to talk to your prospects or clients, you will sound prepared, confident and more importantly genuine — something that doesn’t come as easy to your extrovert counterparts. Remember, introversion can be your secret weapon for marketing success.

3. Scared of phone calls? Do some digging. 

If you’re less than thrilled about picking up the phone and talking to a new prospect you’ve never met, don’t fret. Inbound marketing provides the perfect avenue for salespeople and marketers alike to establish relationships with leads and prospects.

Thanks to the information you have acquired on your landing pages, you can do a bit of digging on the person you’re about to get in contact with and prepare accordingly. This should ease up your nerves if you feel uncomfortable talking to strangers.

After doing your research, break the ice by introducing yourself via email. Send a friendly message to your prospect setting the agenda for the phone call you will be making. Writing them beforehand will also allow you to organize and edit your thoughts, and will give you a general idea of the client’s personality by asking a few questions about them and what their communication preferences are (such as when to call, time of day to call, or the mode of communication they prefer). This can create a feeling of personalization which can contribute to a great first impression.

4. Can’t say it? Blog it.

If talking to new acquaintances doesn’t come natural to you, you may not be comfortable networking and may feel like you’re at a disadvantage when it comes to sales or marketing. Contrary to what you may think, this is not at all a blow to your success. If you’re on the shy side when it comes to networking, fear not; there are better ways to meet prospects and attract like-minded audience. Simply go to your site and start blogging.

Channel your inner self and pour it out on a blog. Talk to your readers as peers and show them the value of your service and expertise. Sharing content of value that resonates with your prospects will draw in the right type leads and build your credibility in your industry without forcing you out of your comfort zone.

5. Engage with your audience confidently.

If you think social media channels are an extrovert’s playground alone, think again. Remember the old adage, “still waters run deep?” This pretty much sums up introverts. Despite the quite nature of introverts, they have a lot of valuable things to say. Take advantage of social media channels to engage with your audience confidently. Organize the thoughts relevant to your industry and use it as your microphone.

There are a number of social media monitoring tools that can help you track the conversations surrounding your industry, from relevant topics to what your prospects are saying about them. Use these tools to participate in the conversation. This will allow you to form a bond with your prospects while everyone else on the social media world becomes more and more familiar with your brand.

Just in case you’re still doubting your potential and success in marketing and other pursuits, here’s something to think about courtesy of Ms. Susan Cain, author of the acclaimed book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.

“Some of our greatest ideas, art, and inventions — from the theory of evolution to Van Gogh’s sunflowers to the personal computer — came from quiet and cerebral people who knew how to tune in to their inner worlds and the treasures to be found there. Without introverts, the world would be devoid of: the theory of gravity, the theory of relativity, Chopin’s nocturnes, and Google…”

Image Credit: SparkCBC, DonkeyHotey

Unless you’re selling low-ticket items that cater to impulse buyers, most of your visitors won’t buy from you immediately after visiting your website.

Smart marketers create sales funnels to turn visitors into leads and nurture those leads into buyers. They encourage visitors to join email lists, request price quotes, or schedule product demos. Those initial steps are essential to identify leads and separate them from the rest of your visitors.

But you can’t stop there…

All of the leads in the world aren’t worth a dime unless you can turn a good percentage of them into buyers.

What’s the best way to do this? Most B2B businesses understand the importance of this, but many struggle with execution. But you use data-driven insights to develop your own lead outreach “best practices” and convert more customers.

Photo Credit: eilonwy77 via Compfight cc

Lead Generation is Just the First Step

“Sales” becomes a multi-step process when you’re dealing with expensive, complicated B2B products. As Neil Rackham explains in his excellent book, SPIN Selling, B2B buyers view selling as less of a transaction and more of the beginning of a new relationship. The psychology shifts as price and complexity increases.

A lot of B2B marketers nail the lead generation part, but they struggle when it comes to follow up and conversion. Maybe they rely on instinct or copy what their competitors are doing. But they could use buyers’ behavioral data to streamline their process.

When you’re selling expensive products or services, even the slightest improvement to your lead conversion-process can result in a significant improvement to your business over time.

Use Data-Driven Insights to Strategically Increase Conversions

If you’re still establishing your business, you might not have the requisite traffic or transactions to extrapolate meaningful insights from your data.

Fortunately, Software Advice, a company that helps buyers choose software to meet their specific needs, published a comprehensive Online B2B Buyer Behavior Report. The Software Advice team analyzed the behavior of over 6 million U.S. visitors who visited Software Advice’s commercial landing pages in 2013. The report shares data-driven insights into when B2B buyers perform research, when they convert into customers, and how to best follow up with leads through strategic outreach.

Even if you haven’t collected a lot of data about your own visitors’ behavior yet, you can benefit from Software Advice’s insights.

Key Takeaways from the Software Advice Report

Here are the salient points from the B2B Buyer Behavior Report:

1. Speed Is Everything

Software Advice drove traffic to landing pages. These landing pages encouraged visitors to submit a form providing their telephone number and requesting someone from the Software Advice sales team to contact them.

The data revealed that the chances of “qualifying” a lead (a term used to indicate when a member of the Software Advice sales team performed a telephone needs analysis and BANT qualification) dropped each second they waited before calling the lead.

If the Software Advice sales team called a lead within 5 seconds of receiving their information, they qualified 30% more leads than their average rate.

A delay as little as 11 minutes proved costly. These leads qualified 5% less than the average rate, and it only got worse the longer the length of the delay. When you’re selling high-ticket items, this could create a tremendous blow to your business.

The B2B Buyer Behavior Report distinguished between two types of lead contacts – direct and indirect – and recommended different approaches for each. Direct contact, according to the report, was when a lead requested a price quote, product demo, or more information. In those scenarios, a swift outreach was instrumental.

If your leads are establishing indirect contact with you (this could be something like submitting their email address to download a lead magnet or access other gated content), there’s less need to reach out to them so aggressively.

2. The Middle of the Week Had the Most Buyer Activity

The B2B Buyer Behavior Report also revealed significantly higher traffic levels, conversion rates, and qualification rates in the middle of the week than any other time.

Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays were Software Advice’s highest activity days.

The demands on your sales team will probably fluctuate throughout the week. Recognizing the importance of a speedy follow-up (see insight #1), you’ll have to ensure you have enough resources available for these high-activity days. If a lead submits a form on a Thursday, but your sales team can’t get back to them until Friday, they’re less likely to quality than if you had followed up on Thursday.

Software Advice also recommended scheduling sales team meetings on Mondays and Fridays to account for higher demand in the middle of the week. These two days are also preferable for sales team members to attend conferences, personal appointments, and take time off for vacations.

3. Buying Activity Was Highest During Working Hours (and Peaked at the Lunch Hour)

Software Advice received most of their traffic – 53% more than their average rate – between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. CST. It wasn’t just traffic that spiked, either. Visitors became more receptive to converting (filling out a form on a landing page) and qualifying between 9 am and 12 pm.

Traffic levels peaked at 12 p.m. Traffic for that hour was almost double the average rate. This suggests that a lot of B2B buyers do research during their lunch hours.

What does this mean to you? Have your sales team at work and ready to go at the beginning of the workday. If you’re on the West Coast, this could mean having sales staff at work as early as 6 a.m. (when most East Coast residents are starting work).

Another key takeaway: make some of your sales team available during the lunch hour, or you risk missing out on the highest-activity time of the day.

Traffic and conversion rates tapered off in the early afternoon and throughout the evening with one exception. Between 9 p.m. and 11:59 p.m. CST, Software Advice’s conversion rates actually increased 13% higher than average.

This time window could be a good opportunity to send emails, whitepapers, and other content designed to nurture leads. Your sales team isn’t around, but you can still make the most of that high-converting window.

4. Conversions and Qualifications Were Seasonal

For Software Advice, conversions peaked during the first few months of 2013. The report attributes this to budget renewals and new funds becoming available.

Something interesting happened during the summer months. Fewer leads submitted forms on landing pages than average, but a higher percentage of them were qualified through a follow up phone call with Software Advice’s sales team. This is probably because the sales team had more time and resources available to focus on fewer leads, making for more effective follow up.

These seasonal fluctuations were unique to Software Advice’s business, so they might not apply to you. Ultimately, you’ll have to collect and analyze your own visitor data to spot any seasonal shifts.

5. Holiday Buyer Activity Was Unpredictable

The B2B Buyer Behavior Report also analyzed visitor data around holidays to determine their impact on activity levels and the ideal lead outreach strategy.

The report found that the following holidays (in the U.S. market) were “worth taking off,” as visitor activity and conversions dropped off dramatically:

Other holidays experienced less dramatic decreases in activity and conversions. If you have the resources available, consider keeping your sales team (or part of your sales team) in the office on these days:

Software Advice also made an interesting discovery about the week before Christmas. They found that, during that week, visitors converted at the same rate as they did on other business days in December. So it would be worth working during that time if you can.

A Lead Outreach Strategy You Can Tweak to Fit Your Business

Creating the best possible lead outreach and conversion strategy is a game of subtle, incremental improvements. It’s this continual optimization, combined with tailoring your website to generate more leads on the front end, that will pay off for months and years to come.

The perfect system for you will depend on what you’re selling and your target market. But you can use the insights from Software Advice’s B2B Buyer Behavior Report as a great jumping off point to establish your own best practices. Then you can tweak your approach over time using data you’ve collected about your own visitors’ behavior.

How do you handle your lead outreach right now? Is there anything you plan to do differently? Leave a comment below and let us know.

Recently I had a chance to talk with Jill Konrath, author of newly released book, Agile Selling: Get Up to Speed Quickly in Today's Ever-Changing Sales World. She also wrote two previous bestsellers: SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies.

Now, Jill is back with a whole new take on sales that stresses the need for agility—a word that isn't used frequently in the sales or business development arena.

---

Jill, what is agile selling? Can you give us a definition?
Jill Konrath: Agile selling is about being nimble in the face of continuous change. It's about being able to adapt quickly to new market dynamics, rapidly launching new products or services, and getting up to speed quickly in a new position.

Agile selling is also about turning yourself into the primary differentiator—a person your prospects and customers want to work with because you personally bring so much value to the relationship.

It's been a good few decades for America's electric utilities: As regulated monopolies, they face almost no competition and enjoy access to cheap credit.

In a new note, a Barclays team led by Y.C. Koh says the industry is finally be facing its day of reckoning, from a source many have long dismissed as an unviable pipedream: solar. Specifically, the threat is residential solar, people creating their own electricity.

To prove that the threat is real this time, Barclays is downgrading its Electric sector rating to Underweight from Market Weight "...The regulatory responses to the growing competitive threat from solar + storage may prove inadequate to address potential strains to the credit profiles of issuers in these states," they write.

There are main two reasons why solar is finally for real, the group says. The first is that for more than a decade, there's been a huge push from governments around the world, and at every level, to subsidize renewables. Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) estimates that the annual output of PV modules increased almost 30x in the past decade, from 1,000MW per year in 2005 to more than 30,000MW in 2013, Barclays notes. With that scale has come cheaper prices for panels.

Here's what the cost curve looks like:

The second reason is the advent of cheap storage. For the past few years, homeowners have addressed renewables' intermittency problem — the wind isn't always blowing, the sun doesn't always shine — by making a deal with her utility: she'll continue to buy their electric power, but she gets to keep her solar panels running when she's not home, and sell any excess power they generate back onto the grid. This is called net metering. 

Net metering has been a boon for incentivizing rooftop solar adoption. But what if you could truly power up your home through a solar-charged battery, and only have to buy utility electricity in an emergency?

As recently as 2009, the all-in costs for such batteries would been as much as $17,000. But with the expansion of electric vehicles, Barclays says the cost of storage has been falling rapidly, and now stands at about $3,700. And it just so happens that the power required to operate an electric vehicle can power the average home for up to three days, Barclays notes, "potentially opening a new use in residential distributed generation systems." Battery costs could come down even further if Elon Musk's gigafactory launches, they add. Yesterday we discussed this idea in detail. Here's the price decline chart:

 

Barclays sees the solar + storage wave has the potential to spread beyond its roots in California and Arizona. Here is their timeline for when solar costs could reach parity in all 50 states:

Cheap solar panels, combined with cheap storage, will spark a grid "defection spiral" that will pry away utilities' grip on the power monopoly. In this scenario, early adopters begin leaving the grid, incrementally increasing utilities' power costs rise — which further exacerbate the shift into solar and storage, and so on.We are already seeing evidence of step 1, as utilities have begun complaining that solar customers are causing electricity prices for non-solar users to go up. 

This is maybe the most vivid description in the note of what solar will do to utilities: 

we envision an electricity market where demand for grid power falls, peak hours shift (perhaps dramatically), and regulatory mechanisms need to be adjusted or overhauled to accommodate some utilities becoming the electricity generators of last resort. We expect the net effect to be higher grid power costs (thereby exacerbating the consumer shift to solar + storage), lower average credit quality for regulated utilities and unregulated power producers, and increased recognition of the long-term threat to grid power.

Whatever roadblocks utilities try to toss up — and there's already been plenty of tossing in the states most vulnerable to solar, further evidence of the pressures they're facing  — it's already too late, Barclays says:

We fully expect utilities and regulators to make a good faith effort to preserve the status quo “regulatory compact,” whereby the monopoly utility provides a safe and reliable service and regulators allow it to earn a reasonable low-risk return. However, we also expect them to be playing a constant game of catch-up as solar develops. The costs of solar and storage technologies are falling quickly and may fall even faster as higher demand builds additional scale. But the cost of distribution grids and thermally generated power are more likely to rise than to fall, in our view. As a result, regulators and utilities will be constantly trying to respond to a moving target, which is precisely the environment where slow-moving incumbents can fall behind.

It's been a good run.

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk Is Making The Most Difficult Bet Of His Career

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk is making the biggest bet of his career

Join the conversation about this story »

If you haven't already, soon you're going to be hearing a lot about a new standard for making mobile phone calls: VoLTE. It stands for "voice over LTE," but what it really means is that before long, your voice calls are going to be transmitted across the airwaves using the same technology the Internet pioneered for data. 

VoLTE, an acronym sure to be coming soon to a mobile-phone advertisement near you, promises two immediate potential benefits to consumers: clearer calls with fewer dropouts and the ability to use voice and data services simultaneously (which some, but not all, carriers offer already). For the carriers, it means more efficient use of their allocated radio spectrum, meaning they can serve more customers without additional network investments.

(What VoLTE almost certainly won't do is lower your phone bill, as carriers have a habit of charging more for network improvements that actually save them money.)

To understand how VoLTE is supposed to manage all these improvements, you have to understand why traditional LTE couldn’t carry voice.

Circuit Switched Vs. Packet Switched

LTE is the current gold standard for mobile data (it stands for "long term evolution"), although you may know it better as "4G." LTE makes it possible to download or stream Internet video far faster than its predecessor 3G networks—but as it stands, LTE doesn't carry voice calls. Instead, carriers with LTE fall back to older 2G and 3G networks for calls.

Voice over LTE will change that.

LTE's speed advantage stems from the way it handles data. 3G network standards like UMTS and CDMA basically open a dedicated channel between nodes to handle voice, text and data, a technique called "circuit switching." This is a simple, but fairly expensive practice in network terms; it's as if you got a dedicated lane for your morning commute that no one else could use. Great for you; terrible for everyone else.

LTE, by contrast, is based on an Internet technology called packet switching. In such networks, a sender divides up any sort of data—email, Web pages, a Netflix stream—into small packets of equal size, each of which carries an "address label" bearing its ultimate destination. The sender tosses these packets onto the network, where they're directed toward their destination at every juncture, or "node." They ultimately all meet up at their destination, where they're reassembled and delivered to the recipient.

This is a lot more like your actual morning commute, in which you have to share the road with everyone else heading somewhere. Like your commute, packet switching sounds a bit haphazard, and it can be—but it's also a fantastically efficient, flexible and robust way of transmitting information. Until now, though, it wasn't any use for mobile voice calls, which still require circuits (and circuit switching).

When LTE debuted in the U.S., carriers had to figure out how to make voice calls work while pushing out 4G smartphones to customers. Most carriers adopted a stopgap measure called “circuit-switch fallback” in which LTE handles all data connections, but phones call back to the 3G network when you make a call. VoLTE effectively obsoletes this hybrid technology.

VoIP vs. VoLTE

You might look at your smartphone and say, “Hey, I can already make voice calls over my data connection! I have Skype and Google Hangouts!” It is true, you can indeed make voice calls using your data connection with these apps, which are referred in the cellular industry as “over-the-top” (OTT) services because they supersede a carrier's own voice and messaging services.

You may be using LTE to make voice calls with these apps, but you're not using VoLTE. Services like Skype, Hangouts, WebEx or Fuze are what is called Voice Over Internet Protocol—VoIP. These services work on your 3G or 4G LTE devices because they use your data connection through the Internet, not the traditional voice network from the carriers.

As U.S. cellular carriers networks evolve, VoLTE will compete with more directly with OTT services like Skype.

Benefits Of VoLTE

T-Mobile is one of the first cellular carriers in the United States to institute VoLTE phone calls on a limited range of smartphones, starting in Seattle. In an announcement last week, T-Mobile chief technology officer Neville Ray described the technology behind the company’s VoLTE offering:

If you’re like me and love digging into the underlying science, here’s how it works. (If this doesn’t interest you, feel free to skip this bit.) VoLTE calls will be carried over IP [Internet protocol, or packet switching] on our LTE network instead of a circuit-switched path on our 4G HSPA+ network. This is advantageous because your phone stays on our wicked fast LTE network to make a call. The tricky bit in all this is the smooth mobility between our various radio layers. Enhanced Single Radio Voice Call Continuity (eSRVCC) is a new LTE Advanced function and we’re excited to be the first to deploy it in the U.S. All of this basically helps ensure that your capable phone won’t drop a call if you leave an LTE area and it switches to 4G HSPA+ or 2G coverage.

Technologies like Enhanced Single Radio Voice Call Continuity are fancy terms used to described the central tenet of VoLTE. For the first time, voice and data will be living together in harmony on the same radio layer, meaning that smartphones won't need to displace back to 3G or a different spectrum frequency to handle both capabilities.

What this means is that, as LTE is expanded in the U.S., old 3G networks like CDMA or HSPA+ will wither away. Verizon said last year that it will begin phasing out its 3G network at the start of 2014 and other U.S. carriers are planning similar rollbacks. The future of voice and data in the U.S. is LTE (and future advancements, like LTE Advanced), and carriers see no need to maintain costly old infrastructure.

The cellular operators are just starting their marketing campaigns around the evolution of LTE. T-Mobile claims what it calls “HD Voice” (clear voice calls over cellular) and Verizon claims to be rolling out what it calls XLTE, which is basically just extra spectrum for its existing LTE network to operate. Sprint’s Spark network isn’t an advance of LTE either, just a new mode of how it aggregates its various spectrum and varieties of LTE (TD-LTE and FD-LTE) into a more efficient package than its previous 4G offerings. 

Smartphone manufacturers will benefit by the ability to trim how many radio receivers they place in smartphones. Instead of needing to support disparate networks with a variety of chipsets, they can just rollout phones with chipsets directed at specific carrier spectrum requirements. 

For consumers, the benefit is harder to see. VoLTE will fix the unwelcome problem of not being able to use voice and data on a phone at the same time for some carriers, and calls may be clearer and less prone to be dropped going forward. VoLTE is an important evolutionary step in mobile computing, but it's still possible that many consumers will hardly notice the change.  

A user who buys from your site once is a first-time customer. When this first-time customer comes to your site for a second time and makes a purchase, she becomes a returning customer. And if she comes back over and over again to buy from you, she is termed a repeat customer – the bee’s knees of all customers!

Many retailers, startups, and service providers still seem to need convincing on the value of a repeat customer and pour most of their resources into new client acquisition. If you’re one of them and “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” doesn’t seem to ring true to you, here’s a humble attempt (backed by data and research) to sell you on the idea.

Repeat Customers Spend More Than First-Time Customers

The fact that repeat customers have bought more than once from your store probably puts them at a higher lifetime sales and revenue number than a brand new customer who’s just bought once from you.

Bain & Co. studied the online shopping habits of 522 users and found that in the apparel category, a given shopper’s fifth purchase was 40 percent larger than his or her first purchase, and the 10th purchase was a whopping 80 percent larger in value than his or her first one.

Research by Adobe shows that average revenue per visit increases exponentially with each repeat visit, and repeat customers already account for significant chunks of revenue for online businesses worldwide.

· 41 percent of total online revenue in the U.S. (even though only 8 percent of U.S. customers are repeat customers)

· 26 percent of total online revenue in Europe

· 16 percent of total online revenue in the U.K.

Repeat Customers Are Less Price Sensitive

Most of us assume that all online shoppers are typically bargain hunters and will switch services for the teeny-tiniest drop in prices. While this does remain true in the case of first-time shoppers, once a customer has had a few good experiences shopping with you, price stops being such a big issue.

To test this statement, John Dawes from the University of South Australia conducted a study among long-tenured and short-tenured customers of an insurance company to see how they responded to pricing changes (in their premium amounts in this case). Dawes found that customers from the long-tenure group (i.e., customers who have been with the company for a long period of time) were half as sensitive to a change in price as compared to a newer customer.

This is a very important characteristic that allows you to make pricing decisions based on the length of your relationship with your customers.

Repeat Customers Are Your Most Staunch Brand Advocates

We all like to be regarded as “Walking Wikipedias” by our friends and family. It’s basic human psychology. Respect from peers makes us feel good. When we stumble upon something that we like, we tend to share it with our friends to gain their approval – a result of this behavior is the social media phenomenon that has engulfed the planet over the last decade.

Once customers have used your services a few times and had no problems with it, the likelihood of them spreading a good word about your business goes up exponentially. Without any effort from your end, a satisfied repeat customer will happily tell their social circle about how wonderful your product/service is and how they had a great experience with you. Certain industries like technology and restaurants enjoy higher levels of advocacy than others; but in general, having a customer “market” your brand for you free of cost is the most utopian scenario for any business owner.

Repeat Customers Lead to Lower Marketing Spends

This might seem a little counterintuitive to you. Here I’m telling you why you need to focus your marketing efforts on existing customers, while in the same breath I’m telling you that repeat customers reduce your marketing spend.

Well, it’s simple. Once a customer has shopped with you a few times, that person requires a lot less convincing to come back to your store and shop again. The award-winning textbook Marketing Metrics says that the probability of making a repeat customer buy a product are between 60-70 percent, whereas the chances a new customer will buy your product range between 5-20 percent.

Boston Consulting Group carried out a study where it found that the cost of marketing to existing customers is about $7 whereas the marketing cost per new customer averages at around $34.

Less convincing required = less marketing expenditure.

Now That You Know…

So hopefully you’ve abandoned your bush-chase and are considering marinating the bird in hand. Here are a few tangible, sales-focused ideas on how to keep the joy of retention going and customers coming back.

1. Know your customers. Be obsessive about data. Collect every actionable data point with respect to the transactional and behavioral aspects of your customers, mine data submitted by customers on forms, and ask them to update their profiles to give you a better idea of who your customer is.

Use readily available CRM tools to analyze the data and identify patterns from it, and take relevant action to keep the customer sticky. There are advanced e-commerce tools (such as Shopify) available now that help integrate your CRM process with your point of sale software for synchronized online and offline operations.

2. Make someone accountable for retention. Most organizations have teams and clear responsibility flows for the key functions that keep the business going. Now that we recognize and acknowledge that retaining customers is important and a full-time job, get a team or at least a dedicated staff member to manage customer retention for your business, full-time. This will do three things:

· It will create a sense of accountability in the team/person and they will take customer retention seriously.

· It will force the organization to set aside a respectable budget for customer retention.

· It will ensure your repeat customers get the pampering they deserve with someone working ‘round the clock on keeping these valuable folks coming back to you.

3. Set up a loyalty program that rewards repeat purchases. Having a dedicated loyalty program is like having a readymade market for your future sales. It could be in the form of reward points that can be exchanged for future purchases, it could be discounts on future purchases based on past purchase activity, or it could be tangible things like free products bundled with a paid purchase.

Loyal customers do not just buy more from you; they buy less from your competitors. In a study by Zendesk, 54 percent of customers said they would increase the amount of business they do with a company in return for loyalty rewards. Forty-six percent claimed to have already done that.

The airline and credit card industries have purified the concept of building successful loyalty programs into a fine art.

4. Let repeat customers be the first to know. Whenever you come up with a new product, event, or distribution channel, make sure you inform your repeat customers before the launch. Prep them to spend on the upcoming event and you have a ready sales funnel waiting for you. Offline retailers do a great job of this with exclusive preview sales for customers who are members of their loyalty programs.

5. Create referral schemes. We spoke earlier about how people enjoy being perceived as disseminators of valuable information among their peers. A referral program feeds into this need for people to be seen as offering value. The Zendesk study mentioned above also substantiates this fact – 78 percent of loyal customers spread the word about their favorite brand and influence others into trying it, too.

When a repeat customer refers a friend to buy from you, reward both parties – the customer who did the referring as well as his or her friends who bought from you via the referral, a la Dropbox.

6. Explore subscription programs if it suits your line of business. The benefit of subscription commerce is that you only have to spend once to lock in the customer for a set of repeat purchases. The amount spent on customer acquisition is well covered in the price, and the model ensures that the customer does not lapse before a pre-defined period of time.

JustFab and Dollar Shave Club are great examples of successful subscription e-commerce models.

Over to You

With so much data available in support of customer retention, you would think companies would be falling all over each other to pamper existing customers. But in reality, this is how global marketing spends are currently skewed:

Source: McKinsey

Just about 12 percent of marketing budgets are dedicated to customer retention. If repeat customers are such an important part of your business, shouldn’t you focus a lot more on how to keep them happy and shopping with you for as long as possible?

The numbers are right here in front of you!

For more on how to implement customer-centric marketing, watch the Online Marketing Institute class, Four Ways Marketers Can Be Customer Centric.

We're pretty excited about New Matter, a company launching a crazy-affordable 3D printer called the MOD-t via this Indiegogo campaign that kicked off today. In the short time since the campaign's been live, it's garnered a whopping $100,000 of its $375,000 goal.

The first thing that merits your attention is the cost of the device itself. The regular retail price for this thing is $249, but if you want to get on board early, there are a limited number of units available at $149 and $199.

Compare this to the price of devices by 3D printing hardware company MakerBot, which could easily be considered "the Apple of 3D printing." They start at $1,375 for its Replicator Mini. The Replicator Z18, MakerBot's top of the line model, is $6,500.

So how on earth is the price for the MOD-t so low? We spoke to New Matter co-founder, president, and CTO Steve Schell to find out more.

"In order to create the low-cost hardware, we invented a new mechanism that drives two of the three axes of the machine," he told Business Insider. "Pinion rods drive the build plate, and this unique mechanism has cost advantage because it makes for fewer overall parts. We’ve designed this for high-volume manufacturing and prepared to invest in tooling and injection molding to drive cost down."

In simpler terms, the New Matter team has boiled down a 3D printer so that it operates just as effectively with many fewer parts, and having fewer parts reduces production cost like crazy. But can a 3D printer really be effective at this cost?

Again, here's Schell:

"In terms of the key specs that matter, we’re matching state of the art and print speed," he said. "We're not trying to compete on performance, but we are generally matching the specs of other printers at a much lower price. There will be a number of users who graduate into a higher-end printer."

So the MOD-t's biggest selling point is that it's a 3-D printer for people intrigued by the technology but aren't willing to drop a four-digit sum for it. If and when their experience with the MOD-t should whet an appetite for more advanced 3-D printing capabilities, consumers can then spring for something pricier and more advanced.

The low-cost hardware is only one aspect of the company, however. There's an expansive app-based experience too, connecting designers and MOD-t owners, making it a snap to print out objects from a curated selection of 3-D models. The obvious comparison here will be to MakerBot's own Thingiverse, a repository where creators share their 3-D files for others to modify and print at home, but Schell isn't a big fan of Thingiverse's implementation.

"There are a large number of mediocre parts on Thingiverse," he said. "There are a few gems as well, of course, but it's difficult to find them because they're lost in a sea of mediocrity. By curating our collection, we hope to provide quality downloads."

If you like the sound of all this, check out the Indiegogo campaign right here. 

SEE ALSO: A review of Microsoft's new Surface Pro 3

Join the conversation about this story »

Do you know what a salesperson looks at first when they look at a batch of leads that has been delivered to them from marketing?

We’d like to think it is the lead score, since we worked together (and yes, this is an assumption) to build out a scoring system based on the title and level of the buyer, basic company background, and activity-based (and sometimes channel-based) components. When added together, these factors should add up to a minimum requirement for that lead to be passed over to sales. So what’s the problem?

Sales isn’t necessarily looking for more leads, but rather more leads from companies they feel are in the “sweet spot.” If they find one good company in every ten leads, then they will need twenty leads to find two companies that they feel they can sell to. That’s why they want more leads … in order to cherry-pick the best ones from the companies they want to be calling on.

That’s the first thing they look at … the company a lead is coming from. They want to know if this is a lead from a company that is likely to buy.

Sales has been taking this account-based approach for a long time, but most marketers are focused on ‘net new’ names, or lead volume as an indicator of success. In fact, according to some preliminary results from our currently in-progress B2B Enterprise Demand Generation Survey, ‘net new leads’ was the most-measured KPI with 72% of marketers tracking it. If we want to be truly aligned with sales, then an account-based approach to marketing might be the right strategy for your team — and perhaps the KPI to shoot for should be new leads from target accounts.

How do you get started?

Build a target account list

Take a look at your best customers, and identify what they have in common. Are they all from a select group of industries, with certain minimum revenue thresholds? Are they all using the same CRM system, or ERP? Did they just receive a round of funding, or report earnings that were in line with expectations? Identify their common ground, and then search for more companies that share similar characteristics to build your target account list.

Adjust your lead scoring to add bonus points if a company is on your target list

Your sales team would rather get a manager or director from a company on the list than a VP from a company that will never buy. Target account leads should bubble to the top faster than ones from other companies.

Leverage your target account list in your demand generation efforts

When considering sponsorship at a live event, look at last year’s attendee list. Are at least 40% of the companies there on your list? If not, then maybe it’s not the right event for you – even if you have always attended that show or consider it to be “important to the brand.” Also, when negotiating for content syndication programs or email list rentals, see if you can limit the leads you receive to come from only target accounts. These vendors may resist you, because many are not set up to operate in this way, but work with them to find a way to focus on target accounts. Consider lowering the title minimum to include manager and higher from target accounts, rather than director and up. The CPL might be higher, and your reach may not be as wide, but in the end the quality of leads coming in will make sales happy because they are from the accounts they want to be selling to.

Consider investing in account identification technologies

Look at the technologies that will shine a light on target account activity on your website, or that will identify a visitor from a target account when they fill out a form using their personal email address. When you understand the web traffic sources (or paid ads) that are driving the most traffic from your target account list, then you know where to increase your spending next quarter. Also, people often lie on forms, which can impact lead scoring. With backup identification at the corporate level, you can more easily identify the accounts where there is likely an initiative you want to know about.  They may not be ready to engage yet, but with a little bit of knowledge you can drop employees from that account into a nurture program which will solidify your place at the table when they are ready to talk.

Sales doesn’t want to spend time calling on leads from companies that are not likely to buy. Understanding and acting on your target account list may decrease the overall quantity of your leads, but if the quality is there the impact will show in your pipeline and revenue numbers.

Author: Jason Stewart @jstewart_1 is VP, Demand Generation, ANNUITAS

I used to be fat.

How fat? How about 42 inch waist at age of 13?

I couldn’t find any pants that would fit me right off the shelf, because the length of the pants would almost always be too long for the waist that I had to get.

Thanks to the annoying cool guys in junior high school who tormented me about my weight, I managed to lose all the weight eventually, to a 31/32 waist that I now have.

(But now, THEY’RE FAT! Haha! Revenge! Thank you Jesus! Anyway.. you can read my weightloss story here.)

Of course, when I show people before and after pics of me, without fail, I get people asking me “can you help me lose weight?”

If you need to lose a few pounds yourself, there is no magic: eat less, move more.

But of course, that’s a loaded question. How exactly do you motivate yourself to move more? What do you like to do? Run? Swim? Dance? Hike? Eat less? Are you ok with eating less? Can you cut out sugars & fats? Can you develop a patter of eating just healthy veggies?

Online marketing is no different: people want the same results – more sales, but the path you take might be different.

That’s where the metric of conversion rate comes into play.

But people (especially newbies) ask me the same ol’ question: what’s a good conversion rate?

(Conversion Rate = Number of Actions / Number of Visits)

That’s like asking a fitness trainer, “is losing 30 lbs good?” That depends – how much did you weigh before? How fast did you lose it? Did you lose fat or muscle? and so on..

“Average conversion rates” are myths.

Why on earth do people publish conversion rates?

My guess? Get attention (i.e. links to their sites).

Conversion rates are all relative and the only way to tell if you’re “good” is relative to your past performance.

And you should never compare your results to others (different brands, or worse, different industry) because no two marketing campaign is ever the same. IN another words, conversion rate isn’t a social metric – it’s metric you use against your past.

Here are 5 VERY important factor that determine your conversion rate (and has nothing to do with others).

1) Copy

I say it over and over again, copywriting can make or break your marketing campaign.

“Pen is mightier than the sword” isn’t some cheesy slogan by some pen company to sell more pens.

There are companies like Amazon and eBay that have built multi-billion dollar empires based on copies.

In the book Cashvertising, which I highly recommend for beginning copywriters, there have been authors who 2x, 3x and even 10x, their book sales just by changing the copywriting (mainly the titles).

If you ever do email marketing, you know that subject is probably just as important as the body of the email.

Without copywriting, how do you entice people to read your message.. let alone convert them?

In another words, other than targeting, your copy will almost always be the biggest determining factor in your conversion rate.

2) Brand

I’ve had this problem many times in the past with my solar customers.

SolarCity is the 800 lb. gorilla spending multi on PR, advertising, community outreach, content marketing, etc.

If you’re a solo solar installer who happen to get in the game last 2-3 years, there is no way you’re going to have the same conversion rate online as on SolarCity.

The more branded, you are, the higher the chance of conversion.

Imagine you walk into a store and see two kiosks, side by side, selling almost identical products. Same shape, same color, same packaging, same material, same kiosk, but different name.

One is a well known international brand that’s been in the market for decades… the other one? Some unknown brand that you’ve never heard of.

Who will have a higher conversion rate?

3) Desire

This is one area where brand might not necessarily have the unfair advantage.

Now, suppose you’re in an industry where they don’t HAVE to have you stuff right now.

Like solar panels on your roof for instance: you don’t HAVE to have it.. it’s a nice to have (since it’s a long term investment). But I don’t NEED to have it RIGHT now.

So when the desire comes up, you as a marketer, better jump ALL over it (i.e. which is what search marketing achieves).

If not, you have to develop SOME kind of interest, get that lead, and nurture that lead.

But in certain cases, there is no need to do any kind of nurture.

For example, supposed you fell flat on your face while skating and need a emergency dentist in Brooklyn.

You need relief now , and the one who’s going to get you as the dental customer is the dentist that’s the most readily accessible.

Brand isn’t going to be an issue because the primal need to avoid pain is so great, that no amount of logic or marketing power is going to work.

Even though this is a “equal” playing field in terms of conversion rate, now this area can get quite “bloody” because now this area becomes a bidding war zone.

Imagine if the life time value of your customer is in seveal thousands of dollars.

Your cost per click (if you do pay for them) will be quite high (as in $10-$30 CPC). But at the same time, your conversion rate can be as high as 20-50%.

4) Friction

MacDonald’s has an insanely low friction to purchase: you state the number of combo meal you want, give them cash, and in 47 seconds, you get your product.

5 star restaurants in 5 star hotels has insanely HIGH friction to purchase: you have to make an appointment and dress up.

Of course, ideally, all businesses should have low friction and make it easy for their customers buy, but in some businesses, that is impossible because of legal regulations, financial checks that must be performed, human processing, etc.

Here are some ridiculous frictions that i’ve seen people put on their website

• Captcha on contact forms – Just delete the spam when you get them. Don’t make it hard for people to contact you.
• Hide the “about us” page, or use stock photos – Did you know “about us” page is 2nd most visited page on most websites? They want to know who you are. Remember, people do business with people, not websites.
• Insane number of fields on the contact form page – Come on, I just met you.. you expect me to give you my social security number on date #1?

(The picture above is to explain the relative differences, not to say that all leads cost in $30s or $40′s).

Lower the friction, the higher the conversion rate.

But higher the friction, the better quality of the lead because they’re jumping over hoops and hurdles to get to you.

For example, an ebook or whitepaper download is a very LOW friction activity – i don’t need to give you a credit card, just my name and email. Conversion rate can vary wildly, depending on what it is that you’re offering.

But if I have to give you my credit card number for you to give me something, that requires that a) you convince me that I need your stuff, b) i trust you with my credit card number, and c) I take another step to complete the transaction.

5) Quality of Traffic (i.e. distribution effectiveness)

Remember, not all traffic quality is the same.

a) New vs. Returning

Conversion rate on traffic (i.e. real people) who know you, trust you, and have done business with you is going to be 10-100x higher than cold traffic.

Which is why lead nurturing, re-targeting, and follow up email marketing is so vital to your marketing process, because at some point in your life, all your warm network will be depleted.

b) By Devices

People are more likely to buy on more “buyer” friendly devices.

C) Traffic Channel

Key Takeaways

Conversion rates are meaningful ONLY to you, and should be measured against your other marketing channels or against the past.

As I always say, don’t assume and test everything.

Most companies can rattle off their competitors at the speed of light -- you battle with them to win deals every day, after all.

But you might be missing some key competitors that are impacting the growth of your business and taking away what I like to call "internet market share."

Meet Your Content Competitors

Your content competitors are the people that you don't sell against, but with whom you compete for "space" (read: visibility) on the internet. In some ways, they're even more dangerous to the growth of your business than your regular competitors, because 1) they often go unnoticed since your sales organization isn't competing with them for actual customers, and 2) they might have different business models that enable them to compete on content in a way you can't.

Some examples of this would be a hair salon competing against InStyle magazine over the term "hot haircuts for summer 2014." Or an inbound marketing software company competing against a marketing agency for the term "how to get more website leads."

How to Beat Content Competitors

Of course, you'll first have to figure out who these content competitors are. I've written out a guide to performing a competitive content audit so you can learn who these people are, and figure out how to compete with them. Completing that is your first step.

But you might not actually have to compete them. A lot of these content competitors might be viable content partners -- or even business partners -- you should be tapping into.

Let's take that example above as a for instance. Competing with agencies on the term "how to get more website leads" is competition that actually doesn't bother us. We want agencies to write about inbound marketing so they can deliver inbound marketing services to our software customers, which makes them more successful, and in turn makes our software a key part of our customers' business growth. And they want us to write about inbound marketing so they get clients that have the software they need to make their engagement successful. Some of those agencies even become full-fledged agency partners of ours, which makes them a true -- you know -- partner.

Even if you don't take it so far as to build business partnerships with would-be content competitors, look for content co-creation opportunities in these competitive scenarios. The people who are rubbing up against you in the SERPs should be the people writing for you on your own site, and vice versa. You play in the same space, you have something to offer one another -- but you're not competing for the same customers. It can be a win-win for you both, and turn into a lucrative co-marketing relationship.

If you can identify those content competitors that should really be content partners, you can find opportunities to expand your footprint together instead of fighting each other for rankings.

But the Media Companies Make It Hard

These are the ones that are operating on a different plane than you. They're a bunch of journalists whose business model is based on content. Content is their product. The more they publish, the more they rake in. It's hard to compete with that.

But companies are starting to see that. The trend toward brand journalists is rising, and more and more companies are bringing journalists in-house to work as content marketers, writing the kind of content that transforms their business blog into a media property. We've gone from businesses thinking like publishers, to businesses thinking like media companies. And one option you have is to compete with those media companies if you find yourself bumping elbows in the SERPs.

Another way to deal with these instances is acceptance. You don't actually have to compete with every single SERP listing that isn't yours or a partners. One, because you might drive yourself crazy if you do. But more importantly, because it might not actually drive a lot of business away from you. Remember -- at the end of the day, you're not competing for customers with these people. The traffic these media sites are usurping from you in the SERPs, if any, could end up being unqualified traffic that won't turn into customers. The vanity traffic that, while nice, you don't actually need if you're focused on growth. 

Your marketers are typically capable of producing good marketing material. From website content, blog articles, social media updates, online advertisements to emails, surveys, newsletters, brochures and eBooks. As a business owner you review the material and most of the time you’re happy with what they’ve produced. It is well designed, it has your brand name and logo, it describes your product / brand clearly and it is interesting. You believe your company has produced a great piece of marketing material. But there’s one problem: this material might not be good enough for your buyers.

It may not generate new leads. It may not convert your existing marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads. Essentially, it may not be successful in moving your buyers forward on their buying journey.

So, what’s missing from your content marketing?

Buyer-centricity

You had great design, good logo placement and excellent product descriptions and that’s great but these are important to you, not your buyers. It doesn’t matter to your audience that your content looked great.

Your buyers will only pay attention to your content if it is relevant to them. With so much content in the online world and target audiences dismissing everything except what they want to see, relevance is key to engaging your buyers and generating results from content marketing.

We outline the main steps to take to ensure you are producing buyer-centric content:

1. Know your buyers

It all starts with an in-depth understanding of your target audience. You must know exactly the role(s) you target, the verticals / industries they are in, their company size(s) and their locations to begin with.

Then build your buyer persona, which essentially is a complete profile of your target buyer. Your buyer persona should capture further detail about your buyers such as their buying process, events that trigger action and other stakeholders typically involved in the buying process.

2. Pinpoint the problem

Knowing your buyer profile isn’t enough for successful content marketing. It is important that you understand exactly the problem your buyers face which you solve with your product or service. Speak to your internal customer experts such as salespeople or customer service officers or even existing customers, to understand the core problems faced by customers, that brought them to you.

Through a detailed understanding of the problem your buyers face you can also work out what they need to solve the problem, i.e., your solution package. With this knowledge in hand you can tailor your content to address the exact problem and need your buyers have.

3. Target them at different stages of their buying journey

Once you understand your buyers’ problem and need, your content will undoubtedly be more relevant to them. But for ultimate buyer-centricity your content marketing strategy must take into account the stages your buyer goes through in their buying journey.

It is widely known that buyers go on a journey to make a purchase. In the simplest sense, there are three main stages: Awareness, Consideration and Decision. Again, draw insight from your internal customer experts or existing customers to map out the stages your buyers go through when buying your product or service.

Then, work out the questions or concerns your buyers have at each of these stages. Your content can then be centred around topics that address these questions or concerns.

Of course, buyer-centricity doesn’t stop after content has been produced. You must then share and promote this content using a distribution strategy based on your buyers’ online behaviour. Therefore, in your buyer persona, it is important to note your buyers preferences in terms of the platforms they most visit and the social networks they mainly engage on.

To learn more about content marketing mistakes, refer to our blog on the top 9 mistakes commonly made by organisations. Or, to gain a deeper understanding of buyer-centricity, download our whitepaper on the Buyer’s Journey below.

Reliable, sound and detailed insights about your audience predicates a high performing content marketing program. Without access to this mission critical information, we lack the necessary data to make informed decisions that will result in meaningful interactions with our customers.

Imagine an interior designer creating a theme for your new house without understanding your vision or taste. How would you feel about your investment advisor allocating your money without first learning about your goals or appetite for risk. Would you allow your travel agent to book you on a trip not knowing about your interests in rest, activity or adventure?

Likely not, so why would you treat your content marketing program any differently? Without detailed insights about your audiences, what they like to read, where they like to read and how that impacts their decisions relative to your brand, you are unable to build a customer-centric editorial strategy.

For most of us who are active content marketers, we have dealt with the perplexing challenge of building predictability into the content creation process. Have you ever wondered why a particular piece of content performs exceptionally well one week and something similar on the surface completely bombs the following week?

Our natural response would be to assume that there was something flawed about the editorial nature of the second piece of content. What if the challenge was further compounded by the notion that you are speaking to multiple audience segments and you mistimed the publishing period, reaching the completely incorrect target?

As an example, at Atomic Reach our audience consists of bloggers, publishers and content marketers. All are in the business of producing high-quality and relevant content, but their needs from the information we provide or stories we tell are quite different. As such, if those two pieces of content were both written for publishers but we pushed the second article to a place and time when bloggers are interacting with us, then of course it will fail regardless of the content’s quality.

Furthermore, the notion that our target segments represent groups of buyers reflecting multiple classifications complicates the challenge.

Consider an interior designer trying to segment on a demographic basis when it is plausible that a first time home buyer in their early 20s may have the exact same taste as a third time home buyer in their early 40s. That is not to say that demographic data is not valuable. When used conjointly, demographic information is a critical part of the targeting and segmentation mix, but in isolation communicates just part of the story.

For marketers, psychographics provide a useful layer of information. Psychographic analysis is the practice of “classifying population groups according to psychological variables (as attitudes, values, or fears)”.

Demographics tell you a little about the who and psychographics tell you a little about the why. From a content marketing perspective the story is still incomplete.

We make dozens of choices daily, many initiated in response to questions being asked of service providers who are able to cater to our needs because they have invested the time to understand who we are and what we seek.

Consider three individuals in a technology retail store, each interested in purchasing a laptop (I know, why are they in a store and not buying online?) but let’s put that aside for now.

Buyer one is a 21-year old male artist, feels that hardware design is important and is starting a career in graphic design. He is a first time buyer and the volume of choices is overwhelming. For this exercise let’s assume that buyer one is a Suspect and will take time researching before he decides on a laptop.

Buyer two is a 23-year old female, is also an artist, started taking graphic design seriously as a teenager, cares about hardware performance over everything, is an experienced designer and is not as price sensitive as buyer one. She knows a lot about technology and has very specific buying needs in mind. She is ready to purchase, making her a well-informed opportunity.

Buyer three is a 40-year old male, a senior business development executive at an advertising agency, feels that hardware design is important, is price conscious, wants a light-weight, high performance machine, but is not very technically inclined. He too is information seeking and equally confused by the overwhelming number of choices as buyer one. While the data suggests that he is in the same category as buyer one, his age (demographics), tastes and needs (psychographics) demonstrate that he likely fits into a completely different segment.

Interactions in these circumstances are inherently more successful than an online environment, resulting from the nature of the physical context: face to face. By asking a few basic questions, the sales representative can quickly assess the buyers’ needs and determine where they are in the purchase cycle and the appropriate course of action.

Imagine what could be accomplished from a content marketing and targeting perspective if you had access to information of this nature. At Atomic Reach we refer to this data layer as Audience Sophistication. While we believe that traditional data sets are important, we prioritize audience sophistication over everything when developing our content marketing and targeting strategies.

For those new to the practice, Audience Sophistication stratification is a science, analyzing and grouping your respective audiences based on the sophistication levels at which they engage with your content. As an example, we map our audience across four different sophistication levels:

• General
• Knowledgeable
• Specialist
• Academic

Based on the analysis of their level of knowledge relative to the content we are producing, we worry less about the demographic data. This is because we learned that when it comes to content consumption ones age or gender does not have any bearing on the level of knowledge one might have. Furthermore, we are able to map sophistication bands to our sales funnel. As an audience member increases their preferred sophistication reading band, the closer they become to a legitimate prospect. General audiences are typically Suspects who are in the education process, while Specialist audiences are typically ready to purchase or repeat buyers. Equipped with this information we can begin to make informed decisions about how we produce our content relative to the intended target.

The benefits of this approach are numerous:

• By prioritizing audience sophistication we are establishing a new lens through which to view our audiences and their relationship to our content and brand
• We can begin to segment our audiences based on how they read, where they read, the topics they find most engaging and map those interactions to our sales funnel
• We are able to become more sophisticated and targeted about the social network location, day of week and time of day that a target audience is present
• We benefit from being able to replicate our editorial style specifically for the target we are pursuing, thereby, building performance predictability into the tone and structure of the content during the creation process

While these are just few of the benefits and are the ones that will drive time and cost out of your content production environment, the performance results are equally compelling, significant increases in pageviews, unique views, time on article and social interactions.

Consider this article as a case in point. If you are still reading, you are likely an experienced and astute content marketer, perhaps a member of the Content Marketing Institute, seeking technologies that will ingest more science into your content model and ultimately, help you drive more inbound leads from your content marketing efforts.

In case you are wondering, this is an optimized article geared towards a Specialist audience and receives a Score of 75.

The recent announcement by Whole Foods to revise its earnings outlook has investors worried about the price of its stock. I think they should be paying more attention to the prices on its shelves.

A blog item in the Harvard Business Review examines two events that caused Whole Foods to revise its sales and earnings projections for the third time in six months. The first cause, competition, is coming not only from natural chains including Sprout, but also major rivals such as Kroger, Target and Walmart, many of which offer private label organics that are price competitive.

Which leads to the second cause of Whole Food’s problems: It has, as author Rafi Mohammed put it, a “poor pricing image problem – the rather unflattering ‘Whole Paycheck’ moniker – which it needs to and can reverse.”

True enough, the company is aware of, and trying to fix, the problem. But an interview with co-CEO John Mackey indicates that the approach is more product-specific than holistic – cut prices on a few items and people may buy more. The problem with that approach is it doesn’t quickly solve the broader perception issue: Many people simply avoid Whole Foods based on the belief – not firsthand experience – that it is too expensive. Yet its house brand, 365 Everyday Value, is price competitive.

When pricing becomes a problem that hinders operations, it can be resolved solely by analyzing category and SKU level information, but that is not the optimal path. Real insights into a pricing strategy occur when the company takes the same product movement data and connects it to the customers actually making the purchases.

Whole Foods would be better off with this approach because it would then understand the underlying dynamics of how its customers shop and how specific item pricing affects not only the movement of the individual product but also of adjacencies that are more subtle and harder to pick up in traditional basket-level analysis. For example, higher prices on one item may prevent the customer from buying a complementary product on that shopping trip, effectively doubling down on the problem.

The insights can, on another front, also inform Whole Foods on the needs and preferences of its regular and not-so-regular customers, so it can identify the items shoppers are willing to spend more on, and those they purchase based almost entirely on price. These items could surprise you. A shopper may not budge on a brand of tea, but will easily switch cereals to save 30 cents.

Once a pricing strategy is developed, Whole Foods can incorporate it into the features that remain true to the brand and define its inherent value – features such as quality food, knowledgeable staff and easy-to-navigate stores.

People line up and buy at Whole Foods because it stands for more than food, so simply dropping prices doesn’t solve its perception issue. Rather, it should view pricing as an opportunity to shape the full customer experience – price, advice, product preparation and product assortment. In other words, give shoppers a reason to want to pay more (an exclusive experience), and deliver value where it needs to be evident.

And since I brought it up, let me emphasize that assortment is a dominant factor. Many major, and not-so-major, grocers may be adding organics, but Whole Foods’ deeper product mix and data should give it a head start in optimizing its own assortment.

This leads us back to price, because unique products and unique experiences translate to reduced price pressure, and that is on the shelf as well as on Wall Street.

Author: DJ Waldow

 “We don’t have time for a long email, and neither do you. It’s very important that we all stay focused and get to the bottom of this Jay-Z / Solange / Beyoncé situation. We’re collecting clues, so if you have any tips please tweet them to @Eat24 with #Eat24Investigates.”

This was the opening paragraph from Eat24’s May 16^th weekly coupon email.

Let me break that down into some bullet points for you:

• Opening paragraph
• Weekly coupon email
• From a company who facilitates food pickup

The first three lines of this “weekend coupon” email had nothing to do with a coupon, or food, or restaurants. Not only did the opening paragraph not include the central call-to-action (which was to use their new coupon), it detracted from the CTA by asking readers to tweet about a trending topic – Jay-Z and Beyonce, of course. But as you can see from a Twitter search of the #Eat24Investigates hashtag, lots of people are playing along. And having some fun…with a company.

Awesome. Amazing. Human.  It reminds me of the “Fitbit 2013 Activity Summary” email I recently got (minus the unicorns, rainbows, roller skates, and dinner plates, of course).

But the fun/human-ness didn’t end there – the email continued:

“So let’s order delivery this weekend, because French fries exist, and because Queen Bey needs us. Oh, and here’s a coupon*!”

If you scroll to the bottom of the email to see what the asterisk is all about, you get this:

Eat24 figured out a way to make people actually read the fine print. How? They made it unique. They made it fun. They made it human. And while the connection may seem random (dogs?), they tied it all together: “fetch you things (mostly food)…” Brilliant. Also, the coupon code (“Willow”) is apparently the name of a dog.

Bonus: Notice the opt-out language? “Please stop sending me coupons.” Ha!

To be clear, this email was not just a bunch of references to pop culture and dogs. It may have broken a few email rules, but it also included a very strong, very clear call- to-action. See below:

 

As I’ve mentioned, this was Eat24’s Weekend Coupon Code email. (Side note: the subject line for this email was “Your Weekend Coupon,” and I would be interested seeing some A|B subject line tests. “Your Weekend Coupon” while clear and obvious, does not scream HUMAN like the rest of Eat24’s marketing. I wonder how the open/click/conversion rates would change with a subject line like, “Jay-Z. Beyonce. Dogs. And Your Weekend Coupon.” Just a thought.)

Anyway, Eat24 doesn’t just keep things human in their email campaigns – they bring the fun to their social profiles too. Take a quick glance at their YouTube videos. Better yet, peruse their Facebook page (oh wait, they “broke up” with Facebook. Ha!). Their Twitter account is amazing too (be sure to look at replies). All of their social channels have a similar flavor.

Oh, and just to prove they actually interact on social media, I tweeted to them. The ensuing conversation was pretty awesome. They’d already won my heart, but this Twitter exchange made me love them even more.

Human Marketing. Who Cares?

Let me direct your attention back to my last sentence. The (human) exchange I had with Eat24 on Twitter made me love them even more. I had a conversation with a company* on social media, which led me to become an even bigger advocate for them. Think about the power of that for a minute – a company was able to win me over by relating to me. It started with that amazing “weekend coupon” email, moved onto Twitter, and now I’m sharing it with you…in this blog post. Powerful stuff.

*To be clear, there is a human (or team of humans) behind the @eat24 Twitter handle. I think.

I know what you might be thinking: “That’s great for Eat24, but how does it help me do my job better?”  How does infusing human-ness into your marketing campaigns help with what matters most to the C-Suite? Does “being human” drive more revenue for Eat24? More orders? More partnerships?

Confession: I don’t know.

I’m not sure if Eat24 knows, either.

To be fair, it’s not easy to split test “human” vs. “non-human” emails. That being said, I do feel confident that from a consumer standpoint, we’d all prefer fun and human over dull and robotic.

Good marketing is about storytelling, not selling. Good marketing is about relating to people on a human level, not treating them like a number. If done right, good marketing will lead to excitement around your product or services which (fingers crossed) leads to more sales, more revenue.

What do you think, oh fellow human?* Agree? Disagree? Drop us a line in the comments below.

*Opinions from robots are also welcome.

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The Best Example of a Human Email…EVER. was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Here’s a hard truth about marketing …

You can produce tons of B2B content – even great content – but if it’s not relevant to your target audience, you’re wasting your time and resources.

In the latest TechTarget Media Consumption Research Brief, B2B technology buyers stated that “media is only effective if the information that it features is relevant to their research and is helpful for them during the process.” If your content isn’t relevant, they’ll search elsewhere to find answers.

The #1 way to improve your marketing ROI is to align your content with what your audience wants to know during each stage of the sales cycle.

Below are the key traits of early-, mid- and late-stage leads, along with examples of B2B content that will move them through your sales cycle.

1. Early-Stage Leads

Who are they? Early-stage leads are gathering information about a challenge that your product or service addresses. They may not have a full understanding of their problem or know exactly what they need. Early-stage leads often don’t have buying power but are compiling information for their bosses.

What types of content do they want? Early-stage leads are looking for information that will educate them about their challenges. You don’t want to push your solution at this stage, but rather to educate leads so they will see you as a trusted advisor. Provide them with educational white papers, case studies, articles, blog posts, videos or webinars.

2. Mid-Stage Leads

Who are they? Mid-stage leads have identified their problem and are researching solutions. They have probably visited your website, subscribed to your e-list or downloaded your content.

What types of content do they want? Leads at this stage want proof that you can solve their problems so they can build a business case for your solution. Provide them with content that demonstrates your ROI, such as case studies or video testimonials.

Mid-stage leads may also want to learn about more about your solution. Now is a good time to provide them with demo videos, product brochures and data sheets. Just be sure that all your content focuses on your customers’ needs and the ROI you can help them achieve.

Webinars and white papers can also educate leads as they move further along your sales cycle.

3. Late-Stage Leads

Who are they? Late-stage leads are customers who are ready to speak with a sales representative. They’re in the final stages of their research and are comparing you to your competitors.

By this stage, you’ll know who has the power to buy your product or service. However, you may learn of other stakeholders – such as end users, financial directors or senior executives.

What types of content do they want? Leads at this stage have key questions that could make or break the sale. They may ask why they should buy your product over your competitors’ products. They also need proof that your solution is reliable.

Your content at this stage should answer these questions. You can provide late-stage leads with a comparison of how you stack up against your competitors. You can also offer them personalized webinars or one-on-one product demos.

You should also create customized content for all the key stakeholders you will meet during this stage. For example, CEOs need proof of your ROI. Meanwhile, end users want to know that your product will make their jobs easier.

Of course, you may find overlap between these areas. The key is to create content for all your leads so they can find the information they need to make informed buying decisions.

And 6 Free Platforms to Measure Them With

Everyone wants to get on board the Inbound Marketing train these days.

It is a powerful medium to:

• Reach your audience
• Build relationships and nurture potential customers through the sales funnel
• Humanize your brand as more than a page on a website
• Leverage and build brand advocates out of current customers
• Position yourself as an industry leader

We conducted a seminar recently at Inbound Marketing Agents and found that business owners are hungry for information about the entire inbound process, from beginning to end.

Some of the most commonly asked questions we got were:

• “Once I get my inbound program up and running, what do I measure?”
• “What numbers am I looking for?”
• “Why do I need to analyze anyway?”

There are many reasons to conduct analytics on your Inbound Marketing Strategy.

Measuring your potential ROI isn’t as difficult as you might think.

It depends on having a good plan in place, choosing and using the right points to measure, and then actually assessing your metrics on a regular basis to see what is working for your business.

Kicking off your inbound marketing metrics, in addition to any online marketing presence isn’t a quick process though. So don’t be daunted by all the moving parts.

Establishing your business presence online is a delicate courtship that involves your website, your potential customers and the search engines.

Getting found, building trust and then actually making some sales is going to require planning, patience, and above all…time. It can sometimes take several months before a site will begin to notice the changes they desire – and that is if you are approaching it correctly.

The first step, however, is to define some goals based on your business, your brand, your product and your company culture.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO ACCOMPLISH?

Before you jump into the online marketing waters, it’s a good idea to set some goals regarding what you actually want to accomplish with your inbound marketing campaign.

Your goals, as well as your planning will determine what you measure and the success you have along the way.

Sure, your CEO might be thrilled to learn that you’ve had 10,000 visits to your website this month. He will, however, be even more thrilled to learn that three months ago, before you started your inbound marketing campaign, that you only had 3,000 visits a month.

Do you want:

• More brand awareness?
• More product awareness?
• An increase in website traffic?
• An increase in sales?
• To build a database of emails or leads?
• To increase customer engagement?
• To build customer loyalty?

Each of these reasons is a valid and important goal for creating your online presence. Each also has different metrics and analysis that come with it when creating a marketing plan.

Once you figure out your company’s goals for actually being on the web, then you can figure out which statistics are most important to you.

There are gobs of stats that you can track.

Here is a simple list to start with.

12 INBOUND MARKETING METRICS YOU NEED TO TRACK

1. Overall Traffic

First, set a goal for the increase in overall site traffic that you want. If you are currently receiving 500 visits a day, and want 5,000, it will be easier to measure your success if you have an objective in mind.

This is an easy statistic to track on most all platforms and can set the standard for future goals that you set.

Example: Increase overall traffic to site by 2,000 visits per day by the end of first two months of campaign

2. Referral Traffic

What kind of traffic do you get from social networks like Facebook or Twitter? Measuring this number will tell you the effectiveness of things like your blog distribution as well as your social engagement.

When your referral traffic goes up, you know that:

• Your content has value
• People like what you have to say and want to get to know your brand better
• Your audience is sharing your information

When referrals are coming to your website, it gives you a great opportunity to capture their information and turn them into leads for eventual conversion in your nurturing funnel.

Set a goal for this number as well to make measurement a little more quantifiable.

Example: Increase referral traffic by 25% in 1st quarter

3. Email Collection

One of the best ways you can measure your social media and blogging efforts is by the number of email addresses you capture once someone comes to your website. It is also a fabulous way to nurture these visitors into your sales funnel and turn them into qualified leads.

Using your social media platforms and a good content strategy, you can build a database of emails that acts as the best sales tool you have.

As long as you provide your email list recipients with a way to “opt-out” of receiving your emails, and send quality information to them within your inbound marketing campaign, your email list is an invaluable way to measure the success of your online marketing efforts.

Example: Increase email database to 2,500 contacts within six months of campaign launch

4. Ecommerce Sales

If you are actually selling products or services on your website, you can measure how total strangers were brought to your site from social networks and how they were nurtured through your sales funnel, as well as how long it took them to convert to a customer.

This visitor to customer metric may be slower for some types of products, but is a great measurement for determining slower seasons for some industries, in addition to how long it takes your customer to actually make a buying decision.

Example: Increase social network sales by 10% within six months

5. Increase in Brand Mentions

Another measurement tool you have to determine how well your brand is doing online is the number of mentions your brand has across social platforms. After all, the more mentions your brand has the more awareness and reach you can create.

This can be a difficult goal to reach. It is up to your followers to actually mention you in their shares. However, actually asking for a mention is a good way to increase your numbers.

Example: Increase brand mentions by 20% within the first six months of campaign

6. Coupon Redemptions

A very trackable number is the redemption of online coupons. You can directly attribute who redeemed the coupon and which social network they found it on.

These metrics can tell you which social networks are actually working for you and which to steer your valuable time away from in the future.

Example: Redemption of 500 coupons from social networks within first 3 months of campaign

7. Growth in Brand Following

Although some believe that this metric isn’t necessarily tied to direct revenue or sales increases, it does indicate how well your brand appeals to the online public, or how relevant your content is to those who choose to read it.

If your numbers are increasing you can bet that you are doing something right. If the number of your followers is decreasing, it might be time to take a look at your goals, your content and your overall campaign and do some tweaking.

If, for example, your overall goal is to increase brand or product awareness, an increase in brand followers will be important to you.

Remember that choosing the right social media networks is important. You want to target the networks that your ideal buyers hang out on.

Example: Increase brand followers on Instagram by 10,000 in 2nd quarter

8. Returning Visitors

Studies show that 98% of visitors to your website will never return again. A returning visitor is a valuable commodity.

It shows that you are creating:

• Deeper engagement
• Stronger relationships
• Interest in your product or service

Better than just website visits alone, return visitors are not strangers, but more likely to become leads.

Example: Increase return visitors from Facebook by 20% in 3rd quarter

9. Bounce Rate

A little bit more complicated, but no less important to measure is your bounce rate.

Who is leaving your site and what page did they leave from? Did they enter your website directly through your home page?

If you are getting a high bounce rate from your home page, you might consider a re-design to make it more appealing.

If visitors are bouncing quickly from a landing page, then maybe it’s not that well designed or doesn’t have a clear conversion path.

On the other hand, if your pages have low bounce rates, it means that you are doing something right.

You can compare this number with metrics like “average time spent on page” and determine exactly what is making your users want to stay and what is scaring them away.

Example: Decrease bounce rate on Landing Pages by 25% in 3 months

10. Conversion Rates

Are your website visitors actually making any purchases?

You can figure out this number with a simple equation:

Rate at which your visitors are converting = Transactions ÷ Visits

You can examine your conversion rates by channel – organic, email, referral – to determine where you are getting the most out of your time and money.

You might possibly even want to consider increasing your budget in those areas for more revenue in the future.

11. Leads

How many of your visitors are actually converting into leads?

There is also an easy formula for this metric:

Rate at which your visitors are converting = Leads ÷ Visits

You will also want to determine:

• What is a lead to your company?
• When do they become qualified?
• At what point does the marketing team hand them off to your sales force?

The way you set up your lead nurturing funnel will answer these questions for you.

12. Revenue

This is an important metric to determine not only for your inbound sales process, but to keep your CEO happy.

Keep in mind, however, that it is going to take some time to establish a realistic number.

As you begin your inbound marketing campaign, you are going to be doing things like:

• Conducting A/B testing
• Determining which social channels work best for you
• Figuring out the best and most relevant content to post
• How to best nurture your leads down the funnel

While you are tweaking all of these different moving parts of your online presence, your revenue numbers might not look as good as you would have hoped. Be patient. Keep in mind that ROI will improve as you wrap your head around the entire inbound process.

To determine revenue use this formula:

Revenue per Channel (organic, paid, direct, email, referral) ÷ Visits per Channel

With those metrics in mind, and taking a little time to get started, you will have a pretty good idea of how your website is doing in just a few months.

But just how do you go about getting started with all of these metrics?

While there is no inbound magic wand to wave around, there are lots of platforms available to you for getting started with your analytics.

By far, we recommend marketing automation which makes measuring each of these stats much easier and does it all in one place. There are lots of free platforms to begin though.

TOP 6 FREE PLATFORMS FOR MARKETING ANALYTICS

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics has become the go-to site for free analytics.

It is simple to use and easy to set up.

To get started, visit the Google Analytics page and set it up in three simple steps.

With Google Analytics you can track things like page views, visitor demographics and even conversion rates.

By setting goals in certain areas, you can compare several layers of data at once.

For example, if your buyer persona includes males and females between the ages of 25 and 35 who live in Atlanta, you can track their specific traffic on your website.

By setting up goals, you can also better manage and calculate your company’s ROI.

2. Woopra

Track over 40 different types of stats with Woopra, including usernames and IP addresses as well as visitor paths and geographical information.

Although this service is still in beta-testing, the research shows that this new platform is going to be a great free alternative for website analytics.

3. Piwik

Unlike other analytics platforms, with Piwik you own the information created for your company.

They are also easy to install like Google Analytics; just embed a small piece of JavaScript on the pages you want to monitor.

Developers will like this platform because they can build custom plug-ins for even more laser-focused metrics built just for your company.

4. Clicky

Track websites with up to 3,000 page views a day with Clicky.

One drawback is that their information is only available for 30 days, so gathering it and keeping track of it yourself will be important. For a free service, they are average at best. However their paid service has many very cool features.

Their customer support is also apparently very responsive.

5. StatCounter

StatCounter has a great track record for high accuracy on their information.

By using a combination of logs, cookies and browser information instead of server information like other platforms, their analysis tends have a higher quality.

If your site is larger, then you might want to consider their paid service, but for smaller sites with low traffic, StatCounter might be for you.

6. ClickTale

ClickTale’s free version only tracks sites with 400 page views per month. Their solution, however, is very visually oriented with graphs and pictorials of results rather than numbers, which could be a plus for people who don’t enjoy graphs and sheets of numbers.

Another unique ability of this option is the ability to record a visitor’s path throughout your website.

They also offer “heat” maps with information on which links are most popular on your site. In addition, with ClickTale, no JavaScript encryption is needed.

Getting started with your website analytics may seem like a big task. But setting some goals for what you want out of your website, and then measuring a few simple items at first is a straight-forward way to begin.

There are also some free platforms available out there that will do just what you need as a beginner in the analytics department.

As we stated earlier, marketing automation is the way to go once you get your inbound train running at full speed. But for now, let us know in the comments if you have any questions.

You can also download our free e-Book The Science of Enterprise Lead Generation and learn about the Inbound Process and how to nurture leads through the funnel using social networks and great content among other things; as well as measure it all with your new measurement tricks!

Photo Credit: Flickr – Calflier01 

Imagine, for a moment, you’re at a party where you don’t know many people. You’re happy to mingle with other guests to pass the time, since you’re a sociable sort with (ordinarily) plenty to say, but you’re rather quickly finding that you’re having to force conversation when none arises – you’re interjecting in exchanges others have, chiming in without warning, because you fear you won’t be noticed or asked to join if you stand idly by.

Of course, you take it all in stride because you know it to be the nature of these sorts of get-togethers, where friends of friends of friends meet for the first time; but wouldn’t the whole experience be easier if you had a clue who to approach and what to say right off the bat?

Wouldn’t your conversations be more genuine, more productive, if you’d prepared by building relationships?

Build relationships through social selling

This, in many ways, is the problem social selling solves. It allows for a level of service and personality that cold calling precludes, for communications between brands and buyers that are nuanced and customizable, and tailored to specific interests, needs and industries. Its benefits are legion: according to InsideView, businesses with active blogs generate 67% more leads than their less-connected peers, and using Twitter can drive 2x as many leads. Even tech giant IBM reported a 400% increase in sales through a first-quarter social selling program in 2011.

Herewith, a few ways your business can leap ahead with social selling:

Listen twice as much as you (speak/tweet/post)

Buyers won’t take kindly to brands or salespeople who aren’t willing to hear them, so make it a point to reach out to customers personally if they should ask a question, make a complaint, or raise an issue. Tag them in your posts and keep an eye to the hashtags they use. Be vigilant as to the topics or solutions that come to trend, so that when the time comes to approach them on social to introduce your product, you can speak their language; you’ve shown them that you listen and are invested in solving their problems.

As this piece from Tech Cocktail points out (http://tech.co/yes-increase-sales-revenue-use-big-data-social-selling-5-insights-2014-04), members of your social networks aren’t likely to all be in the same place in the buying cycle. This means you should vary the tone and aim of the pieces of content you offer. Give whitepapers here, links to webinars there, with an eye to early and mid-funnel materials especially.

Make personas a priority

It’s imperative that you be personal and tailored in your communications with social media users, so DO YOUR RESEARCH. Look up individual users if they should reach out to your company or express a grievance with a competitor. Come to them armed with information about their companies, their pain points, their status as buyers.

Also consider your own persona as a salesperson, or user of social media. What are your interests? What are your specialties? Where do you see yourself best utilized? Prospects won’t trust an approach by a person who looks only to sell, sell, and sell, so build out your “curbside appeal,” as Gerry Moran, Head of Social Media Marketing for SAP in North America, puts it in his piece “The Cure for the Common Cold Call Is Social Selling.”

Share other things of interest to you, of general interest to your followers. Moran suggests tweeting 10 times a day, with smart, helpful, early-to-mid funnel related content; updating your LinkedIn profile three to five times daily by sharing articles, research graphics, SlideShare presentations, and videos; and blogging one or twice a weekly.

Put relationships ahead of product

At the end of the day, you’re as much an educator as you are an ambassador when it comes to representing your brand on social. Don’t just hawk your wares; really work to show why they could be useful, and how your prospects can benefit.

From Moran again, quoting an IDG figure: “89% of buyers say vendor-provided educational content is acceptable on social networks…so using social media to distribute this content to build your reputation is a solid cure to the common cold call.”

More suggestions from Gerry Moran:

• Be efficient and smart in the touches you make/interactions you have: follow customers on Twitter; retweet and Favorite their content; place them on public lists; comment on their blogs; contribute to conversations in shared forums (LinkedIn groups, message boards, and so forth) and pass on links to 3^rd party content; “like” material they share.
• Open up a line of communication with customers. Pose questions to them and “mention” or ”reply” to them thoughtfully. Once a dialogue has been started (and only then), connect with them on LinkedIn.
• Fall back on your existing network and connections. “When a shared and trusted contact brokers a meeting, you will have an increased chance for success. By increasing the size of your network with past and current coworkers, you can increase the pool from which you can pull to make these warm referrals.”

So there you have it. As always preparation is half the battle; and success lies in the collision between preparation and opportunity. Take the time to create and foster relationships, and you’ll reap the rewards of social selling.

Do you have a social selling success story to share?

Are you struggling to meet your lead generation goals? Are you ready to learn how to generate leads with a scientific approach to content marketing?

With content marketing, it is possible to build a lead pipeline with verifiable results. So put on your lab coat and let’s get started.

An overwhelming 80 percent of the most effective B2B content marketers cite lead generation as a primary goal of content marketing, according to the B2B Content Marketing 2014 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report published by the Content Marketing Institute. What are the key steps that these effective content marketers take?

1) Determine Your Lead Generation Goal

The first step in this scientific process is to determine your lead generation goal based on your company’s revenue goals. HubSpot simplifies this process with a free inbound marketing traffic and leads calculator. It will help you determine:

• The number of leads you need to generate each month
• What your conversion rates need to be
• How much traffic you need to get to your website

TRAFFIC X CONVERSION RATE = LEADS

Once you have determined your lead generation goals, you must track your progress. There are many marketing automation platforms that provide dashboards with real-time reporting that take the mystery out of tracking traffic and leads, but you can setup your own using Excel spreadsheets and graphs.

2) Perform Content Analysis

Now you have your lead generation goal established, and you have a method to measure your progress toward your goal. Time to figure out how to hit your goal.

Choose the right topics to drive traffic to your blog

This post will teach you how to create engaging content that drives traffic. Once your think you are on the right track with content creation, it’s time to perform content analysis so you can confirm what is working and what needs modifying.

Establish your content metrics

Content cannot be measured with a single metric, because no one data point can successfully or satisfactorily tell you whether your program is working. – Jay Baer, ConvinceAndConvert.com

If you are using HubSpot, you can easily measure your ROI for every inbound marketing campaign. If you are doing your analysis manually, here are some items to analyze to determine which content is helping you hit your lead generation goals.

Consumption. This is a fundamental content metric and can be easily derived from Google Analytics or a similar program. This metric tells you how many people consumed your content. Ideally your posts drive a lot of traffic to your blog and have a high conversion rate.

Sharing. This metric tells you how often visitors share your content with others. Make it easier to drive this metric up by making social sharing easy on your blog.

Conversion. This metric tells you how often your content visitors turn into leads. Some key questions to ask are:

• Which topics converted more visitors into leads? The majority of your content should revolve around the topics that get the most consumption and conversion.
• Which days are best to publish your content? Your analytic tool should be able to tell you which days are your prime publishing days.
• Which content formats convert the best? Do your visitors prefer posts with infographics, how-to posts or opinion posts?

Try different combinations of the items above and look for trends, then approximate the number of leads you can expect to generate from each post. This will help you figure out how often you need to publish to reach your lead generation goal.

Sales. This metric tells you how often your leads become customers. It is easiest to measure this by using a CRM and tracking which downloadable content each potential customer consumes.

You will need to combine your analytics numbers with a good dose of common sense to identify patterns in the data. Use this information to test different content marketing variables and drive up the ROI of your content marketing efforts. Don’t get mired in analysis paralysis, you need to keep moving to generate results.

3) Brainstorm Content Campaigns

It is time to unleash your inner creativity and do some brainstorming. Develop a list of content campaigns and working blog titles that align with the most successful topics and formats you found from step 2.

Concentrate on content with a proven lead generation track record. Gather many ideas at first then narrow them down to a few GREAT ideas. You want to end up with a handful of winning strategies.

Need to get your creative juices flowing? Download the free report, The 30 Greatest Lead Gen Tips, Tricks & Ideas. This free report helps you come up with winning content marketing strategies to generate leads quickly.

4) Create Content & Monitor

The last step in this scientific process is to produce new content for the campaigns you identified in step 3. Create this content in-house, hire guest bloggers, or outsource to talented ghost writers. Professional content writers are familiar with lead generation strategies and can produce content that increases traffic and conversions.

For best results, monitor traffic patterns and lead generation continually. Reevaluate your content marketing strategy whenever leads dip below your established goals. If you are consistently meeting your lead generation goals, consider adjusting your goal upward and challenge your team to improve your metrics.

You do not have to be a scientist to learn how to generate leads from content marketing, but it does help to think like one.

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