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We like to ask this question: “When did you discover you loved selling,” in our behavioral-based interviews. If the candidate is high in Drive, we usually see/hear the following kinds of responses. It should not take the person long to … Continue reading →

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GUEST POST

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Cisco thinks that as many as 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020.

To put that in perspective, that’s nine devices for every one of the eight billion people expected to be on the planet. Your phone, the fitness device on your wrist, your doorbell, the thermostat in your hallway, the smart TV in your living room, the car in the driveway, the Amazon package at your doorstep, and even your family pet — all connected to the world and beaming data home.

So what does this mean for developers? How will it impact how we develop software and applications? What kinds of things will developers need to consider when building things for the Internet of things?

Let’s have a look.

Knowing Device Platforms

The Internet of things will involve billions of devices, many of them tiny. So developer knowledge of device platforms as well as an awareness of how to build applications on those platforms will be critical.

There are already numerous operating systems to choose from for devices. Google recently launched KitKat — a slimmed down Android — which is designed to run on a broad range of entry-level devices that have as little as 512MB RAM. With Android now accounting for 81 percent of the smartphone market, it will probably play a big role as a device operating system.

Open source will play a big role in these platforms too, from open source hardware specifications to open source software running on devices. A team at Spark recently built an open source version of the Nest in under a day. It wasn’t as beautiful, but it worked.

Discovery and Integration

With 50 billion devices out there, vendors will have a tough time anticipating how those devices need to be integrated with others.

This will need to go way beyond just machine-machine communications (M2M). Rather than just being able to communicate with other devices of the same type, we’ll see devices connecting almost organically with all kinds of other devices nearby. These devices will need to be self aware of their environment and able to connect with other devices.

This is one reason API languages like RAML, which enable discovery and can describe how an API behaves, are so important. If a device can broadcast what it can do and how it can be interacted with using a common machine language, then devices can integrate together by themselves at runtime, to communicate, share data, and even control each other. Imagine if that thermostat in your hallway was able to tell the lights in your living room to dim down when it gets too warm in the house.

APIs are going to be highly disruptive, as I recently detailed, so it’s critical that companies put API strategies in place now to reshape their platforms and products to be API-friendly.

Knowledge of protocols will also be important, especially those that can support devices running on low power with tiny capacity and latency issues. Many protocols already exist today such as MQTT, CoAP, STOMP and AMQP.  I think it’s likely that HTTP-based protocols will win out due to their pervasiveness and the ability to easily integrate with the web-oriented applications that companies are already building today.

Smarter Software

These billions of devices will be self-learning and will adapt to your needs and preferences. The Nest is the hottest thermostat on the market today – it knows what temperature you like at home, how to turn the heating off when you leave home, and that it should adapt heating and cooling based on energy price spikes. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich recently described how Intel wants to “make everything smart,” including ear buds, watches, coffee cups, and even diapers that signal parents when it’s time to change the baby. Imagine what it could be like by 2020.

As we write software for these devices, we’ll need to make learning algorithms, recommendation systems, and machine learning part of their software makeup in order to improve the user experience over time.

Real-time Programming

50 billion devices will need to react to events and to each other in real time.

The automatic changing of your home thermostat setting based on what it knows about you could provide a signal to other devices in your home that you are too hot or cold, and they should react appropriately. Maybe your utility company should know ahead of time what your thermostat is about to do so it can prepare for the increase in energy demand.

The wearable devices on your body might want to provide a personalized experience too. FitStar can already pair with your FitBit wearable activity tracker to personalize your workout based on how you’re progressing. Each move and repetition is constantly adjusted based on what you did just a second ago.

Reactive programming and event-driven applications that are driven primarily from events outside of their environment will play a part in how we develop for these devices. Languages and frameworks that are designed to scale and handle real-time events efficiently like Java, Scala, Akka, and Node will be used to build highly reactive devices that can scale to high numbers of concurrent events occurring out there in the world.

All of these events will need to be handled and processed too, which means we’ll need to understand how to build systems for pipelining, processing, and analyzing large amounts of data using technologies like Hadoop and Storm.

Dustware

We’ll also need to prepare for “smart dust” — tiny devices so small they are invisible to the eye but have enough RAM and wireless capabilities and can run tiny operating systems. Imagine trillions of these tiny smart devices the size of dust particles floating around the planet, perfectly capable of gathering data and sending it back to a base station.

A story from ReadWrite a few months ago described a fictional scene where soldiers in the future use smart dust to check all corners and alleyways of a city for hidden militia and explosives. The dust can “track movement, biometric indicators, temperature change and chemical composition of everything in [the] city.” The scene in the article is fictional, but the concept of smart dust is not. It could also be used in other ways like monitoring global temperature and pollution, innovation in the medical field, or even planetary exploration.

It may take longer than 2020 to see the smart dust concept realized. In the meantime, developers can be sure they will be challenged like never before in building the applications and platforms to support those 50 billion things.

[VentureBeat will be talking about how data can help various industries gain competitive advantages and lower costs at our DataBeat 2014 conference on May 19-20 in San Francisco.]

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James Donelan is VP of Engineering at MuleSoft, provider of the world’s most widely used integration platform. Follow him on Twitter @jdonelan.

The "Focus Movement" is being embraced by entrepreneurs big and small. The payoff? A more productive workplace.

As you read this article, chances are yourbrain at some point will start sending you distracting, and familiar, messages.

"Hmm, I wonder if I have any new emails or texts?"

"What are my customers saying about us on Twitter right now? I better check!"

"Oh yeah … I've been meaning to read up on that new Sonos sound system on Amazon."

If you're still reading, congratulations! You've been able to overcome--at least momentarily--one of the most insidious, productivity-sapping maladies afflicting today's managers: cognitive overload.

Business owners don't have to be reminded how their lives are being taken over by email, texting, Facebook, Twitter, the Web, and other annoying electronic static. (That on top of the usual day-to-day tasks, such as laundry, kids, and … showers.) Email alone is overwhelming. Icebreaker, a consulting firm, reckons you spend about 28 percent of work time managing it. The typical CEO gets about 200 to 300 emails per day. Some chief executive clients of Icebreaker had banked up to 70,000--yes, 70,000--unread messages.

How big a problem is this? Some estimate, as you will see later, that distraction costs hundreds of billions of dollars a year in lost productivity. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, says a worker distracted by something like a Web search gone wild or a new text popping up on the phone can take about 25 minutes to return to the task at hand. What's certain is that the subject of digital distraction and lack of focus in the workplace is getting the attention of not only authors and researchers but businesses large and small. When Inc. called the CEOs of fast-growing companies such as Instagram, Box, and Zumba, they were all eager to be, you guessed it, interrupted for an interview. In other words: The lack of focus on the job is a big concern for them.

In fact, these entrepreneurs are part of an emerging trend. Call it the focus movement. Those three companies and other successful startups are joining corporations such as Google and SAP in a grand experiment: testing new ways to mitigate cognitive overload and put the spotlight on what's important. At Google, employees take courses that help sharpen attention skills. At smaller companies such as Zumba and Box, the founders have devised their own methods, including putting aside large blocks of time to reflect, far from the madding crowd.

Why is focus so important to success? Academics such as Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel say the best way to understand your competition, learn from your employees, chart a long-term strategy, or innovate is to have the mental discipline to home in on what really matters to your business. Only by intensely concentrating can you link new ideas and facts "meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory," Kandel writes in his 2006 book In Search of Memory. Simply put, if you have the presence of mind to absorb new data, trends, and events--and then synthesize them with what you already know--you will be more likely to formulate the breakthrough idea.

Juggling digital tasks certainly doesn't help with that process. In 2009, researchers at Stanford University's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab gave cognitive tests to 49 subjects who spent a lot of time surfing the Internet, watching TV, and hanging out on Facebook. They gave the same tests to 52 people who multitasked significantly less often. The conventional wisdom, at the time, was that the Internet actually sharpened cognitive skills: fast-fingered gamers would make great fighter pilots and brain surgeons, the digital cheerleaders said.

But wait! To the researchers' surprise, the heavy online users actually scored poorly. Among other things, they had less control over their attention and were much less able to distinguish important information from trivia.

"They're suckers for irrelevancy," says Stanford communication professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Everything distracts them."

So what's to be done?

Science shows that there's only one near-universal strategy to improve focus--practice doing it.

Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, explains: The more you focus, the more your brain releases a chemical called noradrenaline, which helps you concentrate on the task at hand.

Says Merzenich: "If you're constantly on alert rather than buckling down and shutting out disruptions, you can weaken the physiological processes that keep distraction under control. Simply, you can program your body to produce less noradrenaline if you never force yourself to focus."

The first step in this focus training, some experts contend, is to understand your own cognitive processes.

Leading this camp is Harvard-trained psychologist Daniel Goleman, best known for his 2005 blockbuster book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. His thesis: self-awareness, altruism, personal mastery, and empathy are strong indicators of human success. More recently, Goleman became interested in the topic of focus. "Clarity," he says, "begins with realizing what we don't notice."

In his latest book, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, Goleman explores why people become distracted in the first place. In layman's terms, he explains that the prefrontal cortex of our brain, the outer layer that controls your executive functions--concentrating, planning, and synthesizing--is in a constant tug-of-war with the deeper, more atavistic sector where your impulses arise.

Think of it as a good and bad angel sitting on either shoulder and whispering into your ears.

Once you understand that the primordial part of your brain--the mischievous part--wants you to be distracted, the challenge is to find ways to ignore that dark angel on your shoulder. Every time an urge to switch your attention arises, you need to muster the wherewithal to pull yourself back to the task at hand.

One approach to improve your concentration, says Goleman, is to make yourself aware of the three basic types of focus you apply from time to time: inner, other, and outer. Inner focus is the ability to listen to your deepest self, your "true north." Who are you, what are your values, why are you doing the work you're doing?

Other focus enables us to zero in on what others are saying, thinking, and feeling by not only paying attention to words, but also picking up on nonverbal signals, such as facial expressions and body language. Outer focus is the ability to look at what's going on in the world at large, assimilating only what's relevant to your business.

Entrepreneurship professor Steve Blank, who teaches at Columbia, Stanford, and Berkeley and has co-founded four Silicon Valley startups, including MIPS Technologies, says Goleman's framework is perfect for entrepreneurs.

Blank says leaders who can focus inwardly have a competitive advantage: They can function in turmoil--like great generals who can see through the fog of battle. "When a company is young and growing, it can be chaotic. In the same way, a good general knows a battle never goes according to plan so he needs to have the composure and focus to do triage in real time."

Other focus helps leaders pick up on the employee who says everything's OK but whose body language suggests that there indeed might be a problem. Outer focus--keying into what's going on in the outside world--fits, too. Blank has seen many startups fail because the CEO didn't absorb and integrate external signals. Think of Research in Motion's BlackBerry missing out on the later stages of the smartphone revolution, he says, adding that "the Apple and Samsung managers weren't smarter, they were just focused differently … they focused on broader issues, like the importance of being able to search the Web on a smartphone."

Then there's the Google approach to focus. The company took the topic seriously enough to start offering a course on it in 2007, and so far has put 1,500 of its employees through the multi-hour sessions. Search Inside Yourself, as the course is called, is the brainstorm of Chade-Meng Tan, a software engineer who was Google employee No. 107. Meng, as he's known around the Mountain View campus, came up with the idea in 2003 when he was taking a walk and suddenly knew what to do with the rest of his life: "I realized I wanted to create world peace in my lifetime," he says. "I also realized that I couldn't spread goodness without profits."

Moving to the HR department, Meng, whose title now is "Jolly Good Fellow," created a curriculum around attention and self-mastery that's loosely based on Eastern religious teachings. The goal: to improve performance. The course has taken off, and now Meng has a best-selling book, Search Inside Yourself, endorsed by Google chairman Eric Schmidt and by John Mackey of Whole Foods Market. Two former U.S. Presidents--Carter and Clinton--and President Obama have praised his work, and the Dalai Lama hugged him on his 40th birthday.

The gist of the Search Inside Yourself course is simple: to make everyone more compassionate, which is good for business. (Treating co-workers kindly results in happy co-workers, which means more productive workers.) But here's the catch. Becoming more compassionate, Meng explains, requires the ability to focus deeply and constantly on yourself and on those around you.

At Google, employees who take the class first spend an entire day practicing better focus. For example, when they find their attention wandering while reading, they practice bringing it back to the page.

"It's like doing bicep curls for the mind," Meng tells me. "If you keep bringing your attention back, you begin mastering the ability to focus, and before long, you can come to attention on demand." Employees also learn meditation techniques to clear their heads of distractions.

Another Google focus exercise: Meng has someone speak for three minutes and then asks the listener to repeat what the speaker said. Meng says some Google employees use this technique in a work setting by saying: "What you just told me is important. Would you mind if I repeat it back to you?"

Google, of course, has a very West Coast, youth-oriented culture. Would such an approach to focus fly in a more traditional company? Well, yes.

SAP is a $23.4 billion-a-year German enterprise software company known for no-nonsense managers like Peter Bostelmann, a German industrial engineer who has been at SAP for 15 years. He has become a self-described "mindfulness ambassador." After taking Meng's course in San Francisco, Bostelmann decided to offer it at SAP.

Senior executives were skeptical but let Bostelmann take the idea for a test drive. So far, he has trained 75 people, and survey results were impressive. His students gave the course a 6.4 on a scale of 1 to 7. He's now offering the course in other SAP offices. "We didn't call it meditation," he says. "We called it attention training. The term mindfulness sounds too touchy-feely."

Formal courses aren't the only way to improve focus. Some successful entrepreneurs have figured out their own ways to deal with information overload. Alberto Perlman is the founder and CEO of Zumba, the dance-exercise company and Inc.'s 2012 Company of the Year. To survive the flood of emails he gets, Perlman schedules an hour or two each day to apply what he calls the "four D's": do, don't do, delay, and delegate. By taking one of these actions with each email, he can get through 150 in an hour or two, with a little help from his assistant. Next, Perlman weeds out everything he doesn't have time to do. "I decided that I only had time for three things: family, work, and exercise, in that order," he says. "If something doesn't fit--like going out with the guys or doing a hobby--I don't do it." He also disconnects completely from work for 24 hours each week, spending each Saturday with his family instead of answering emails or fielding calls.

For some, a day away from the bustle of work isn't enough.

Aaron Levie is the 29-year-old CEO and founder of the billion-dollar cloud-storage company Box--and Inc.'s 2013 Entrepreneur of the Year. To free up time to reflect, Levie breaks his workday in two. He spends the first half of his day, from 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., in back-to-back meetings, making sure the company is running on all cylinders. He then takes a dinner break and a nap. His second half of the day runs from 8:30 or so in the evening until 2 a.m. (It perhaps goes without saying that Levie doesn't have kids.) During this quiet time, he does deep and strategic thinking--and cleans out his inbox a bit. "The night work gives me the time to focus on emails and texts, and on setting up for the next days or weeks," he says.

Mike Krieger, the co-founder of the wildly popular social-media app Instagram, which was acquired by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion, took a novel pro-focus approach. When he and Kevin Systrom launched the company in 2010, he had a blanket "no meetings" policy. He turned down every request from outsiders. "A no-meeting policy," says Krieger, "simplified life, sort of like Steve Jobs wearing the same black turtleneck each day, and it means saving lots of time by not having to decide whether or not to take meetings." But Instagram has grown beyond the startup stage--it employs more than 50 people and now takes meetings from outsiders. And like Levie, Krieger stresses the importance of being able to focus on the long term. Two things, Krieger says, have really helped him: "I make intentional free time--marked out on the calendar as 'Mike time'--and then I make sure to schedule a follow-up on what it is I want to focus on."

So is this infatuation with focus just another fad--or will it be with us for the long run?

Well, consider this. Nine years back, info-tech researcher Basex surveyed 1,000 office workers. It found that distractions cost U.S. companies $588 billion per year in lost productivity. That's quite a price to pay to let your employees chat each other up and shop on Amazon. And the tsunami of digital distraction isn't going away anytime soon--not in your lifetime, anyway.

Our verdict? Goleman, Blank, and the Jolly Good Fellow are really onto something.

When Will Shakespeare wrote his classic play, “Hamlet”, he had his protagonist declare, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” In our businesses there’s absolutely no question about how we need to be…and not be. If you want to be consistently great at sales and produce huge revenues and profits for your business:

• When you meet someone new, BE interested; DON’T BE interesting.

• BE a questioner; DON’T BE someone who “shows up and throws up”.

• BE about focusing on your prospects’ challenges, needs, thoughts, feelings and goals; DON’T BE about yourself, your commissions or your ego.

• BE focused on and communicate what’s in it for your prospects if they take advantage of your product or service; DON’T BE the person who tries to educate people on every last detail of what you have to offer.

• BE a helpful problem solver who helps people do what they want to do; DON’T BE a person who tries to convince people to do what you want them to do.

• BE the person who helps your prospects move past the obstacles they see in their paths to having what they want; DON”T BE the person who “handles” “overcomes” or “crushes” objections.

• BE a relationship builder with everyone you have sales conversations with, whether they say yes or no; DON’T BE the salesperson who goes into the witness protection program after the sales conversation, never to be heard from again.

• Be prepared, confident and fearless in every sales conversation; DON’T BE scared, nervous or concerned about what people might think.

• BE honest, transparent and clear; DON’T BE tricky, evasive or slick.

• BE fun, valuable and vulnerable; DON’T BE icky, scary, pushy or aggressive.

• BE willing to invest liberally in yourself, your business and your sales education; DON’T BE penny wise and pound foolish.

Follow these guidelines to be and not to be, and your success in sales is assured!

Good Selling!!

If you have any questions about sales or want to get better at it, you can talk to THE Sales Wizard at Red Cap Sales Coaching for 45-minutes, and there’s no cost, obligation or pressure! Just CLICK HERE, take 5 minutes to complete the quick survey and we’ll get together for a friendly chat!

Problem: Most salespeople certainly don’t get enough referrals and often the referrals they do receive go nowhere. How many times have you called a referral, failed to get through the gatekeeper, and left a message that never gets returned? Perhaps you’ve even gotten through to the referral, only to be met with a cool response? We all know that referrals are the best source of new business, by far, so why does this happen?

Analysis: First and foremost, salespeople don’t ask for enough referrals. There are several reasons for that. Sometimes it’s perceived as a “begging” activity, and few of us want to be seen as needy. The second reason is that they have experienced poor results in the past when calling referrals.

Here’s what often happens. The salesperson is thrilled just to get the name of a referral and sprints to the phone to make what amounts to another cold call. Often the referral hasn’t heard of the salesperson or her company or was simply doing the referring source a favor by saying, “Okay, tell her to call me.” Then he put it out of his mind.

Solution: Upgrade the quality of your referrals. Ask your referring source to do just a little extra work for you. When you get a referral, ask a couple of quick questions to upgrade the referral.

First question…

“Why do you think so-and-so would be interested in my product/service?” This will help you understand what the prospect’s pain is.

Next question…

”Can I ask a favor? Would you feel comfortable calling so-and-so and telling him a little about my company and see if he’s even interested in talking to me?” 90% of the time the referring source will be glad to do this.

And finally…

“Thanks. When can I call you to find out if so-and-so will talk to me?” This puts the ball in the referring source’s court to turn the “cold” call into a “warm” call. And the referring source, since he’s close to the prospect, usually will strongly urge the referral to take your call. If the referral doesn’t want to speak to you, you don’t have to make a cold call that is probably destined for a negative result anyway.

Now when you call the referral, he’s familiar with your name and is expecting your call. Here are a couple of questions to break the ice. “Mr. So-and-So, this is Mike Smith with ABC Company, does my name ring a bell?” His answer will tell you whether or not he remembered his conversation with the referring source. Next question: “What did Jeff tell you about me?” Or, “Why do you think Jeff wanted me to call you?” These questions will take all the pressure off you and get the prospect talking.

From there, based on his answers, begin to ask your qualifying questions and try to get an appointment if the pain is real and he wants to fix it. The bottom line is to get your referring source to do a little more work and your referral business will increase tremendously.

Good Selling!!

In order to have any type of success in sales one must achieve and establish a high level of credibility in their prospects and customers eyes. Credibility will diminish risk and build trust. Overcoming and reducing risk is the biggest obstacle all salespeople face in achieving and surpassing their goals.

Credibility is one of those things in life and in business that has so much of a grey area that it can be a bit tricky to fully comprehend. I define credibility as the attributes and components of an individual’s believability.

The three main components (and there are many more) that can boost one’s credibility are;

1. Doing what you say and saying what you. This is borrowed from the manufacturing industry. Somewhat along the lines of an ISO quality standard. It has always been my belief that having a sales process is vital to success. But rarely, I have I seen one in writing. A reminder to all that when X happens, you should probably do Y. It doesn’t have to be so cut and dry, but just some basic guidelines for the staff. Flexibility and nuanced personalities will always have the upper hand.

2. What others say about you. Personal and professional references and testimonials are extremely valuable. They can go a long way in building credibility and trust. Social media can really help drive this component of credibility. Having a solid testimonial page on your website. Recommendations on LinkedIn. Having your customers talk about you (in a positive light) on Twitter, FB, etc. But there is something endemic that decreases trust and credibility with social media. What I am speaking about is that over the last 10 years, buyers and people in general, have come to be more suspect of what they see and read on-line.  In other words, their BS radar is highly sensitive. How do you solve this riddle you ask? Less 2 dimensional interaction and more 3 dimensional interaction. Now, before I get a hundred calls and emails (please..) I know that many companies, including myself, have clients and customers all over the country and the world. But, for the many, many that work only locally, get out take someone to lunch. Meet them with NO agenda for selling. Go to more industry networking events, trade shows. When buyers see you as another business person your credibility becomes much more entrenched, faster. This is accomplished through face to face interaction.

3. Communication. I know there are libraries of books dedicated to just this one topic of. So instead of boring you with my thoughts and definitions, I am going to share a story. Several years back I had a long time customer open a new store in Atlanta. After we installed his equipment and everything was hunky dory. We were standing around chatting about this and that and I asked him if he was going to put a big sign on the back of the building (facing the expressway).  Being from a smaller town outside of Atlanta he said he didn’t know of anyone he should call. Now me, always trying to help my customer and a friend that has been in the sign business for 30 years. I gladly referred my friend. When I left, I called my friend to tell him to contact my customer ASAP. Here is where it gets interesting. My friend and my customer go their wires crossed about when they should meet. Several months later I asked my customer what happened. He simply replied, thank you for the referral, but this is why I never refer anyone to anyone. So you see, know matter how solid the referral and relationship, stuff still happens. Communication should be open and free flowing at all times.

So, if you want to reside in the castle of sales success, learn to build credibility and trust easier and faster.

Good Luck and Good Selling!

Things have really changed for your neighborhood sales guy. They have a bad rap these days and I can’t help but feel sorry for them. I mean, think about what pops into your mind when you think about sales people in your everyday life – ulterior motives, rushed, only care about the deal, relentlessly nagging calling, telling you what you want to hear instead of the truth. So…what happened? Has it always been like this?

Before the advent and proliferation of the internet, sales people had two jobs: be a trusted industry advisor, and be a personal conduit for purchasing solutions or products. When Joe Shmo thought that he might need to update his thingamajiggy with a whatchamacallit, he would reach out to local sales guy Tom and discuss the early problem, what it meant, what possible solutions there could be, etc. Tom acted as a trusted advisor (hopefully) and educated Joe and, eventually (maybe), sold him the whatchamacallit.

Now, things have really changed. Not buyers, they haven’t changed at all – they still move through the same stages of buying that they always have. But the way they buy has. With the mammoth digital river of information at our fingertips (that would be the internet), Joe Shmo is so empowered to research his problems and solutions that he doesn’t want need Tom for that anymore. Now, don’t get me wrong – sales people are still incredibly valuable and do serve as trusted advisors. But the fact is, not as much as they used to and not before the later stages of the purchase.

Which brings us back to the bad rap – when sales (or sales-like messaging and content) inserts itself prematurely into the buyer’s journey, things get ugly. It’s annoying. It’s awkward. It’s unnecessary and people don’t like it. It can actually turn a prospect off and lose a sale. Imagine, if you will, a grown man walking into a nursery and proposing marriage to a baby. The absurdity! It’s just way too early. Or, picture meeting someone at a bar, only to have them ask you to elope five minutes later. Creeper! Your spidey-sense would go off, and rightly so.

So it’s not that these sales people (or messages) are wrong or hell-bent on annoying us, they just have bad timing. And it is marketing’s new role to be a digital wingman, helping to ease prospects through their journey (self-led) until they’re ready for a date with their dream spouse sales person.

If your prospect is looking for anything other than the proposal you put on the table – you have already lost. Stop reading, go home, and promise to never do that again. Your buyers have a certain concept of what they need. Whatever that concept is, is rarely shaken at the proposal stage. If someone other than you shaped that concept, then walk away. Nothing we can share with you will undo the stupidity of failing to invest that time up front, and no magic in your proposal will undo the foolishness of letting your competitors shape your buyer's concept. Assuming you HAVE been the one to shape their concept of what they are looking for, in this blog, Hugh will show you how to put your most persuasive proposal on the table.

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I attended Socialbakers' Engage London 2014 conference and heard Sam Wilson, content strategy and social media head at Woolworths in South Africa, give some sage advice on social media management with a small team.

Sam's small team of four predicates a need for teamwork and common sense decision making.

Here are some of the takeaways offering a reminder that good staff working on sound principles can make for an effective social presence.

Engagement can be fun and keep sentiment positive in this customer care channel

Sam gave a few examples of simple tactics to keep the mood light.

Unfinished sentences are great for...

...engagement. Yes, they can be cheesy, but they are unmatched for generating a response.

See below which was posted around the launch of the Flavour Society, a monthly journey through different tastes and smells.

#badpunwednesday

Fans are invited to take part and the best (worst) is mocked up with a product from one of Woolworths' ranges.

This is fun and generates interest in a product, as you can see in the comments below.

Sam's nine lessons to learn on social

1. A brand isn't a person - deal with it.

First person pronouns need to be avoided. No matter what message the brand is trying to get across, it can't be anthropomorphised.

2. The brand is always Goliath; the consumer, David.

Another thing to just accept. The big corporate will always be seen as such, and this needs to inform a realistic approach to social management.

3. Speed is everything.

Whilst Woolworths knows it can improve, as social care is currently only Monday to Friday, nine to five, it is aware speed makes a difference. Enquiries can be handed over to the wider customer care team where appropriate.

Getting a reply out to a customer, even if only 'I'll get back to you on that', is important.

4. One release then split into chunks.

Part of Sam's job is to look through wider content and press releases, highlighting 140 character tranches that can be used in chunks on social media.

5. Use your influencer network.

If influencers are associated with your brand, make sure you use them for greater sharability or to increase reach.

6. Don't feed the trolls or lose your cool.

A common rejoinder for social media managers, but an important one.

7. Be thorough and transparent.

Whilst speed is important, rushing and not fact checking or proofing will make things worse.

8. You don't own the conversation just because you started it.

If you want your audience to talk about handbags, so you ask them about handbags, and they start talking about shoes, you can't say 'sooo, back to handbags'.

You must be prepared to give up control.

9. Be respectful.

Dealing with the passing of Nelson Mandela is a good case in point. In the time leading up to Mandela's death, Woolworth's had been planning an unrelated ad campaign with a choir signing James Brown's 'I Feel Good' within a Woolworths store.

Upon the death of Mandela, this was obviously not going to be appropriate. The company didn't want to get too involved with this news event, as it could appear insincere. However, ultimately though Woolworths isn't a person, it is made up of people and those people thought something should be done to commemorate Mandela. So the video was changed to feature a song from Mandela's tribe.

The result was a popular video with no negative sentiment from Woolworths' audience. The website and social profiles also showed a black banner for Mandiba, and demonstrated that a brand can be respectful without crossing the line into exploitation.

Social and content must be integrated

The social team sits with the content team.

Social feedback on broader trends can be delivered to Woolworths buyers if appropriate, to change the product mix accordingly.

Senior management

Social earns its stripes when dealing with reputational issues. It at this point that senior management truly realise the power of the channel.

Sam said "I wish marketers would have to prove the value of billboards in the street, because to me that's just as difficult or easy as proving the value of social."

Google has housed its productivity apps under the Google Drive label since launching it in 2012, but no longer. The search giant on Wednesday unbundled new Docs and Sheets apps—for text documents and spreadsheets, respectively—and will shortly also release Slides, a PowerPoint rival, into the wild as well.

It's not entirely clear why Google is backing away from its monolithic Drive approach, although it's apparently fairly serious about nudging users into the new standalone apps:

If you don’t have time now, over the next few days you’ll be prompted to download the apps when you go to edit or create a document or spreadsheet in your Drive app.

Google, however, also made clear that Drive isn't going away, so the strategic direction here is a bit murky. Some have speculated that Google wanted to unlimber its apps to compete more directly with Microsoft Office (now available for the iPad as well as on Windows devices) and Apple's own iWork productivity suite—primarily Pages for documents, Numbers for spreadsheets and Keynote for slides.

So let's have a quick look at how Google Docs and Google Sheets stack up against their rivals.

Google vs. Microsoft vs. Apple

• Price: Docs and Sheets are free (presumably, Slides will be as well). So are Apple's offerings—at least to buyers of new iDevices. Others pay $10 for Pages, Numbers and Keynote—each—so that's $30 for all three. Office for the iPad, meanwhile, is technically free, although the app limits you to read-only document access until you pony up for an Office 365 subscription, which will set you back $70 a year. (You can use the more limited Office Mobile for free on Android and iOS so long as it's for personal use.) Winner: Google, with Apple a close runner-up
• Offline use: Google launched its Docs and Sheets apps with a new capability Drive didn't offer—the ability to create and work on documents offline. Office for iPad allows similar access; so do the Apple productivity apps. Winner: a three-way tie
• Device availability: Google's apps run on all Android and iOS devices, but aren't available for Windows Phone devices. Pages, Numbers and Keynote run on all iOS devices, but not Android or Windows Phone. As for Office—well, let's just say that in classic Microsoft fashion, you're stuck with a hodgepodge of different options, including full-fledged Microsoft Office for Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets; Office for iPad for, well, the iPad; nothing for Android tablets and the stripped-down Office Mobile for smartphone use (iOS, Android and Windows Phone). Winner: Google
• Features: This gets messy fast. Docs and Sheets are relatively full-featured on Android devices, but on iOS they're considerably pared down—for instance, offering no support for images, tables or hyperlinks. Apple's iWork suite, meanwhile, generally wins high praise for its plethora of formatting options and tools such as interactive charts. Reviewers have generally praised Office for iPad (with the caveat that it's mainly for existing Office 365 subscribers), although they have been less kind to Office Mobile; full-fledged Office on Windows 8/RT, meanwhile, has no real commercial competition. Winner: Apple, with Microsoft a close runner-up

The Great Unbundling?

It's hard not to notice a parallel between Google's move toward standalone productivity apps and hinted changes at its Google+ social network. Following the abrupt departure of Google+ chief Vic Gundotra earlier this week, rumors have swirled that the company may be unwinding its social tentacles from the apps and services it has enwrapped over the past year or so.

Perhaps there's a larger unbundling trend afoot at the Plex. 

Image by Flickr user Adam Hyde, CC 2.0

I was reading this blog post interview with Paul Greenberg over on Hubspot’s blog about defining customer engagement and one of his examples stuck out to me. The essence of it was “don’t make decisions for your buyers.” Instead, let them choose.

Regardless of how much research you’ve done, the number of personas you’ve created, you can only know so much. Each buyer is an individual, a human. While your content marketing programs lay down the bread crumbs they can choose to follow, it’s what happens next that’s critical.

Paul Greenberg defines customer engagement as:

“the ongoing interactions between company and customer, offered by the company, chosen by the customer”

The point is choice.

While marketers plan out their content strategies and map content to buying stages – which they must do – they need to also realize that these are starting points…that flexibility and agile response are the keys to becoming truly relevant.

One of the biggest complaints I hear from marketers today is that content isn’t necessarily resulting in prospects choosing to “do” something. Most of the time it’s because the choice of what to do next isn’t obvious, or if it is, it’s not relevant given how they interpreted what they just viewed based on where they are in the buying process.

So your audience either clicks around trying to find something that extends the dialogue they embarked upon, or they move on.

The problem I see is is caused by the way marketers have decided to align content to buying stages. Rather than introducing flexibility that more than one choice could exist, we’ve ended up trying to dictate what’s next by offering content that we think is a logical and linear progression.

Marketers remain under the illusion that they control the informational exchange.

This is a big misconception. In an informational environment now driven by choice, why do we think limiting choice is the way to go?

I get that marketers have budgets and that developing content has its limits, but we need to make decisions about how we’ll offer our audience options. We also need to pay careful attention to what their choices in relation to those options can tell us.

There are a variety of ways in which choice can manifest. Here are a few examples.

Option 1:

• Prospect engages with an article about a topic
• The “see also” options include a video, a link to register for a webinar, and an infographic

Offering choices based on format can help you discern which type of content the prospect prefers and how much more time and attention the person is willing to invest, should all three be versions of the next topic on your list. Sometimes it’s the format that matters.

If this prospect only looks at infographics, then how serious are they about learning what they need to know to buy? Most infographics are lightweight data presentations that lack context and depth.

However, if this prospect registers for the webinar and attends, the behavior can tell you something quite different.

Option 2:

• Prospect engages with a blog post
• The hyperlinks in the blog post offer three different perspectives related to the topic in the post – all the links are to articles displayed on web pages, removing format as a factor in selection

In this case, the topic they select to click on can provide insights to the person’s view on the topic and what the situation they are facing may look like (if you’ve written content based on depth of persona knowledge)

If they click on more than one, this could indicate they have a higher urgency for learning more about how to solve the problem or meet the objective that’s the focus.

Choice is Also Insight for Marketers

It may seem like allowing buyers to “choose their own adventures” is a lot of work, but what you can learn by analyzing their choices can become input to improve the way your content addresses the buying process across stages. Offering more options can also result in speeding up the learning process, hence the decision cycle.

If marketers want to build higher engagement with buyers, letting them lead the way through how they use your content can transform your marketing performance.

It’s definitely worth thinking about.

The world of business is built on words. Just think back on your entire career. Making the sale was a matter of using the right words. Leading your employees was the matter of using the right words. And the same holds true for websites.

Some people don’t think the words on a website matter. But they do. Your company website is the first — and sometimes only — impression a prospective client gets on the way you do business. You make the sale with images, organization, and words.

But does that mean you can just slap your sales presentation on your home page and call it a day? Maybe post your latest press release? Definitely not. It means you need to take a careful, specific approach to the words on your website.

Professional words, professional results

If you want your website to generate leads and close business, you need to use the right words. And while that might sound like an easy day at the office, it’s easier said than done. Here are five things you didn’t know go into a website re-write:

1. You’ve got to use the right tone. Formal, or informal? Scientific, or warm? The tone you use and the sentences you construct affect how you are perceived by your customer. The only way to make sure that the right message gets across is to research your target customer and write to them, specifically. And if you don’t use the right tone, you risk not making the connection with your audience.
2. You need to talk about the right thing. Many businesses start off talking about the history of their company, its track record, and its experience. And while these are important factors, it’s not what your customer wants to hear. Many company websites don’t communicate the simplest of concepts — like what they do — quickly enough. The honest truth is that your customers don’t really care about you — until they understand what it is that you can do for them. Talking about the right things from the start — that is, your customer’s problem and the solution they’re seeking — puts your value front and center.
3. Some SEO is not so straight-forward. Keyword research is common practice, but the best SEO practices don’t stop there. Enter: “concept SEO.” When your web page shows up in the search results, the prospect evaluates the keywords they’re looking for and the words that surround it. Keywords are still important, but even more important is the context of those keywords. Professional copywriting seeks to maintain this balance of SEO keywords and rich context.
4. Too little research creates a skeptic, too much research overwhelms. The internet provides an endless supply of statistics and information on just about any topic (llama statistics, anyone?). So how do you know which of your statements require back-up research and which don’t? Professional copywriting and website rewriting takes this question into account and helps you understand which claims warrant background information and which can be accepted as common knowledge.
5. Appropriate linking saves updating time. The nature of your website is that it will change and grow outdated over time. One of the surest signs of an outdated website is an abundance of broken links and expired images that detract from your authority. Handing your website rewrite over to professionals ensures that the links that are used will be consistent and reputable, thereby reducing your long-term maintenance costs.

The words on your website matter — and that’s why you need to make sure they’re carefully written by a professional. The more focused, professional, and on-brand your website rewrite, the better the ROI you’ll get on the entire redesign project.

photo credit

What is inbound all about? Not just inbound marketing, but inbound sales and inbound services, too. Do you think you could explain it in 30 seconds or less? Give it a try. We can wait ...

Yep, it’s harder than it sounds! The world of inbound is a big one -- and its constantly growing and evolving. Industry experts are seeing things like social media engagement and remarkable content play a greater and greater role in attracting the right traffic to websites, while “faceless” corporations who neglect their potential and current customers are quickly losing ground.

And it’s not just marketers who are using the inbound methodology. While marketers continue to develop strategies to draw the most qualified visitors and contacts to their sites, sales and customer service representatives are beginning to use the inbound philosophy to close more of those qualified contacts into customers and delight them into promoters.

So what is inbound all about today -- and what do you need to know to do it correctly? Regardless of whether you’re in marketing, sales, services, or another part of your organization, there are three key mantras you must know to be successful with inbound. Let’s take a look at them.

Inbound Mantra #1: The buyer is a person. Treat them like it.

To do great business in today’s world, we need to go beyond just focusing on churning out any piece of content and closing as many customers as possible. Now we’re not saying content and customers aren’t important -- just that the focus has shifted to creating the right content that'll attract, convert, close, and delight potential and existing customers. We need to treat our prospects like real people with real wishes, dreams, challenges, desires, and dislikes. We shouldn't ignore them -- we should help them!

Help grant your potential customers’ wishes, achieve their dreams, overcome their challenges, and satisfy their desires with the content you create. And to do this most effectively, you can’t just create any content. You need to create content that will appeal to the specific prospects you’re trying to attract, convert, close, and delight. 

Inbound Mantra #2: The buyer holds all the power. Don’t fight them; empower them.

Today’s customers are empowered and in control of the entire buying journey -- and the best ones expect more than ever before from the businesses they choose to engage with. So inbound must last the entire customer lifecycle. 

In 2014, simply creating content to be found isn’t enough. To be a successful inbound organization, your business must create content to nurture and engage customers throughout their entire experience with you. You must create targeted content based on who your ideal customers really are and where they are in the buyer’s journey.

Inbound Mantra #3: Make life easier for your buyers -- not more complicated.

It’s not enough to know who you’re trying to attract, convert, close, and delight. Buyer personas are important, but you also need to know where your prospects are in the buyer journey, what those personas are looking for help with, and what they want that help to look like. Whether pre-, mid-, or post-sale, make your potential or existing customers’ lives easier by not only creating content for them as people, but making the content actually interesting, relevant, useful, and easy for them to access.

For example, if a plumber is trying to get more leads from his website, it won’t do him any good to showcase reviews of his service on his homepage if potential visitors are looking for a guide on how to fix a leaky faucet. Don’t make your prospects hunt down answers hidden deep within your site, on social platforms they don’t use, or leave them looking for content that doesn’t even exist in the first place. Know what they want to see and make their lives easier by providing it to them in an easy-to-access way.

Follow the Golden Rule

Regardless of what your role is at your organization, these three mantras will help set you up for success with inbound. The common theme between all three is that successful inbound strategies should follow the golden rule: do unto others as you’d like to be done unto yourself. To be successful with inbound, treat your potential and current customers with respect: help them, empower them, and enable them.

At the beginning of this article, we asked you to explain what inbound is all about. You may not yet have the perfect, 30-second-flat answer composed, but by now, you’ve hopefully realized that inbound is all about creating marketing, sales, and service experiences designed with real people in mind. 

To learn more about the fundamentals of a successful inbound strategy and how to attract, convert, close, and delight your future and current customers, check out HubSpot’s free inbound certification series.

Here’s the story of a sales and customer service experience I had with Gigya that I think we can all learn from. Developing the right strategy and tactics to grow revenue is challenging. I’ll run you through the story quickly, and offer a summary below. Feedback welcome.

Chapter 1. A Gigya sales rep follows up on my request for a Demo. Days before the demo my assigned rep calls and requests answers required for the demo. A bit intrusive, but I answer a few questions and show enthusiasm for the demo.

Chapter 2. Demo day arrives. We kick off the call with more questions about our business, followed by a PDF presentation. What? PDF? Really? Any demo? Buhler?

Chapter 3. PDF is packed with customer logos and diagrams of how social works. The big push is Social Login, as if it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.  Please. Do I need this? I’m dreading this pitch.

Gigya Sucks 4. I ask to skip the PDF. Just the demo of the product please, I politely ask. NO CAN DO I learn. “We need a Tech Person on the call. Next week. Say Tuesday?”

Gigya Sucks 5. The rep calls back and states: “Byron, I need confirmation that you intend to buy our product to confirm the demo next week.”

Gigya Sucks 6.  I decline. I hang up. And I’m frustrated that I’m apparently not worthy of seeing the product. The end.

Situation:  Gigya, like all SaaS models–and businesses for that matter–need to quickly find the buyers with the time, need, money and authority to purchase their product.  Spending too much time with the wrong customers will tank sales. Spending not enough time with the well matched customers will also tank sales. Finding the right formula for success is challenging.

Complexity: Marketing tactics have greatly improved over the years, so leads are easier to generate for certain products and services. Qualified leads however are more difficult to acquire, requiring advanced methodology and technology.  Sales and marketing managers need to make key decisions on where to spend and how to manage the process.

Solution: Gigya has it all wrong. Selling is not about fitting the product into the customers business. Instead, it’s about how the customer’s needs fit with the product—and that’s up to the customer to figure out, not Gigya.

Gigya needs three levels of engagement if their product is, in fact, that amazing:

1) Demo the product to the world, perhaps in groups at certain times of the day. Showcase a few problems that Gigya solves in freakishly amazing ways.

2) Tease this concept: “That’s just the beginning—put us to the test with a custom solution and we’ll show you how our technology and methodology will WOW you.”

3) For those that agree to the next step, this filtering would suggest a more serious lead, worthy of higher level “Tech Players” getting involved to improve the chances of closing.

What are your thoughts?  Do you think Gigya can improve their sales strategy? Look forward to hearing from you.

Suppose your lead generation process is like a simple craftsman’s shop. Potential customers see its windows and you, the owner, represent the lead generation process as you address anyone who finally manages enter the door. So far, business has been good. You’ve had a good number of ERP leads for the day.

Suddenly, another one comes in. This one is different? You want to know how? Everyone’s starting at them with a loss for words. Is it a lord? Is it a king?

No, it’s a big brand! Think Apple, Facebook, or even Google itself! They’re in your shop, in your lead generation process, and they could be a potential customer. It’s so sudden, so shocking. It’s almost impossible!

But then again, it isn’t. Unfortunately, the lack of belief is exactly why some ERP companies feel unprepared to pitch themselves when an industry giant miraculously winds up at their own doorstep.

No matter how unlikely, the shock of seeing a famous company or brand coming through your funnel shouldn’t be enough to cripple your process. You’re exercising plenty of marketing discipline and best practices to generate ERP leads. You’re supposed to brace for the unexpected. This shouldn’t be an exception.

With that said, here’s a short list of things to NOT do when a big brand suddenly becomes a possible ERP lead:

• Don’t panic – Yes, you want a sale out of this company. It could be a turning point in your own history (and even theirs). However, don’t start thinking of several ways your lead generator could screw up. Tell all people on the floor to calm down and keep doing business as usual. It’s best to assume these prospects need to be qualified as normally and professionally as they want.
• Don’t throw a party – Forget counting chickens before they hatch. Not every representative of a big brand would like a party thrown just because they gave you a phone call or filled out a contact form. You can do that after you’ve closed the deal. Don’t still your lead qualification process with too much excitement.
• Don’t freeze up – This is similar to panic but instead of erratic actions, everyone just basically freezes up. Your quality analysts don’t know what to do. Everyone is looking everyone else without a clue. What’s really wrong with this picture is that everyone would’ve known exactly what to do if they were just processing ‘regular’ ERP leads.

Alongside Don’ts, there is one big Do. Do get a grip on your lead generators and sales reps. If you’ve got a decent enough sales process, it should be enough to at least connect and qualify with anybody without a fuss. That includes people who represent industry giants.

Author: Tania O'Connor

I’d been a marketer for 17 years when I joined Marketo. In my previous job, as a marketing director at another company, I’d inherited Marketo’s marketing automation platform. The power, functionality, and scalability was pretty exciting stuff, I have to say, for someone used to grappling with the limitations of Email Service Providers and Google Analytics.

So, although I wasn’t going to be my company’s primary Marketo user (we had a digital marketing manager for that), I decided to learn Marketo myself. After watching many hours of videos, and reading many articles, and building many test campaigns, I’d learned so much about marketing automation that when it was time to launch our first campaigns, I didn’t know where to start.

Eventually, I realized that if you want to get started quickly with marketing automation, the information you need to succeed is actually very simple. Today, I’m a Business Consultant at Marketo, and I speak to many new marketing automation buyers about their paths to success.

If you’ve just purchased marketing automation, and you aren’t sure where to begin, here are nine things to keep in mind. Some of these tips will help you from the get-go, others will help you succeed later on your path.

1. Install Tracking Codes

Tracking codes allow you to track visitors to your website, and also to cookie anonymous leads. If you don’t install tracking codes, you will be missing a huge opportunity for reporting on some key metrics: unknown leads and website performance.

2. Organize and Standardize

Organize all of your marketing automation activity in folders, and follow a standard naming convention. This may sound like (yawn) housekeeping, but it’s surprisingly easy to forget. Keeping everything standardized and organized will make your life much easier when it comes time to review activities and understand your reports.

3. Implement SPF and DKIM Protocols

Implementing Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) protocols will hugely improve your email deliverability. SPF systems prevent spam by verifying send IP addresses; DKIMs do the same by associating domain names with email messages. If you haven’t implemented the correct protocols, these two systems may prevent your messages from reaching their destinations.

4. Look at the Big Picture

Marketing automation works best when you have buy-in from the entire company – after all, the entire organization is going to benefit from the results. I would advise getting sales, marketing, and senior management together to agree on strategy for segmentation, align on lead definitions and handoffs, and decide when flags for follow-up should be sent to sales. Once you have a plan, periodically reconvene to review the results and tweak your approach.

5. Map the Buyer’s Journey

At Marketo, we map out the “journey” our leads take during purchase decisions. Set up your marketing automation system to track where people are in the process, and what triggers their progression towards fulfilling your call-to-action. To start mapping your own buyer’s journey, check out our cheat sheet here. These maps can be incredibly useful in improving your conversion rates.

6. Use Marketing Automation Yourself

Often, those in management positions are not the power users of your marketing automation, but that shouldn’t prevent you from getting to know the system yourself. I used to use it for my own internal bulletins, simply to keep my basic knowledge of the technology fresh (of course, it was also fun to measure and track what content engaged employees best). This also helped me to understand the results my power users got with our marketing automation, and made it easier for me to make smart suggestions.

7. Share Your Data.

Don’t keep your results to yourself – share reports with your executive and finance teams. If you regularly evaluate and demonstrate the value of your marketing activities, it will streamline the approval process for resources and budget going forward. This is another case for #5 – you’ll be much better at explaining those reports with other teams if you’re regularly inside of the platform yourself.

8. Consider Campaign Placement

When you first start building campaigns, you’ll want to start small and move quickly. But as you become more comfortable with these campaigns, consider the advantage of creating them within programs – rather than creating “orphan”  campaigns. Sometimes you just want to get a message out the door, and one quick smart campaign later you’re done.  But it’s much easier to report properly on ROI metrics if you are creating marketing campaigns that live inside of programs

9. Assign Costs

When you assign a cost to each marketing initiative, you can then compare several marketing initiatives against each other. Your company may decide that everything you do in your marketing automation system should have an assigned cost. Even with email campaigns, which don’t have a “cost” in the traditional sense, I suggest designating a standard cost for each email you send out, and logging it against those programs.

Those are the top nine tips I like to share with new marketing automation users. Readers, what would you add? Share your thoughts (or questions about these tips) in the comments below!

 

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Just Bought Marketing Automation? 9 Pro Tips for Success was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

4 Ways Creativity Can Help Generate Online Sales written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is from Ryan Ernst – Enjoy!  

As digital marketing and advertising has evolved throughout the years, function has slowly gobbled up form, one clicks, like, page view and web lead at a time. It’s 2014. And Don Draper ain’t walking through the doors of your boardroom with a storyboard anytime soon.

But creativity and imagination still play a huge role in digital marketing – a role that can drastically boost online sales in any industry. They’ve certainly helped our business grow.

When it comes to marketing your company, showing off your services and products in a clever manner is a key component to capturing the imagination of the consumer. Creativity will instantly distinguish you from the competition. Not only will your brand appear to be a trendsetter, it will be.

Below, we’ll highlight four creative ways that can help your business generate online sales. They should be key not just to your strategy, but to your overall digital marketing mindset.

Stunning Graphics: Having compelling graphics throughout your website and social channels is an absolute must. Invest in graphic design work, photography and above all else, attention to detail. All will provide you with returns. When a visitor comes to your website and sees amazing imagery, they will be captivated by your company. Implementing a creative strategy with graphics will help you soar past the competition and result in more people inquiring about your company. You’ll regret not implementing this creative strategy sooner.

Video: A study by eyeviewdigital.com shows that using video on landing pages can increase conversion by 80%. Videos increase the length of time people stay on your page, giving your brand message longer to sink in. This rich form of media on your website will make your company seem larger while clarifying your overall brand message.

Copywriting: Have you ever taken the time to examine the verbiage on your website? Is it clear and concise while helping the visitor navigate through exactly what they are looking for? Keep in mind, you’re losing a reader with every sentence. Keep your image simple and keep the most important information at the top. We strongly recommend setting up a Google Experiment within Google Analytics platform where you can test two different pages to see which one performs better. This will help you gauge which messaging resonates the best with your web audience!

Personality: Let’s face it, so many website are dull and boring. When a brand actually conveys its true personality, the consumer will be more connected with it. In the bio section of your website, in addition to professional photos, add an interesting fact about each associate that actually has some personality! This is also a great conversation piece when meeting with your customers.

Keep in mind, sales is sales. Watch any great salesperson and you’ll see the way they capture the imagination of the person to whom they’re selling. Creativity always will have a place in that process. It might not have the direct correlation in an uptick in business as spending more money on advertising. But in the long run, creativity will make people connect with and share your brand. That means more clicks, more likes, more page view, more web leads. And more sales.

 

Ryan Ernst is the Director of Communications at The Connor Group.

The Internet of Things has been hyped for 15 years, but until now technological realities haven't supported technological possibilities. 

Today, given the confluence of cheap semiconductors, telecom operators with excess capacity and a new generation of open source data infrastructure, IoT is not simply possible, but probable. The question is what developers will do with it. Ultimately, as I've written, big money awaits developers who can turn IoT's Big Data into cross-device services.

But before we get to this point there's plenty of money in data management and analytics. In fact, as new research from Morgan Stanley posits, IoT services depend on the industry first maturing around IoT data management and, in particular, analytics.

In The Beginning Was The Data

The Internet of Things forces developers to approach data management very differently than the old world of structured data. In the IoT world, it's implausible to rely on a constant, "fat" connection to the Internet. As Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond describes:

Architects designing systems of record [e.g., ERP and CRM systems] can usually count on a local network connection with a relational database management system (RDBMS) and don’t think twice when designing for a beefy application server.

These design sensibilities don’t work when building thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of edge nodes to connect to systems of operation. Network bandwidth, memory, power, and compute are necessarily constrained at the edges of the connected world.

So what should a developer do? Focus on learning new data technologies like Hadoop and NoSQL, according to Hammond:

The major hurdle that traditional development shops struggle with in the [data] analysis layer is the volume of the data that edge nodes emit, and the speed with which it must be processed. As a result, we’re seeing increased deployment of NoSQL database management systems...where developers collect data and make it ready for analysis.

This move toward more modern data infrastructure is a big opportunity for vendors in the machine-to-machine data market. But it's not just data management vendors. It's also those who provide enabling cloud infrastructure. In particular, Amazon's recently launched Kinesis service offers a holistic approach, given that it includes high-speed data ingestion plus connections to S3, DynamoDB and RedShift for storage and data analysis. In many ways, developers can increasingly shop for IoT infrastructure on Amazon just as they shop for books and clothes.

Seeing Into The Data

Data management is a big market. But it's still one step removed from the end user and, hence, not the biggest market IoT will enable. For developers looking to cash in on the IoT gold rush, analytics offers an even bigger lottery. Morgan Stanley places the analytics opportunity squarely in the middle of the IoT monetization timeline:

This jibes well with Cowen & Co. analyst Peter Goldmacher, who argues that for Big Data, "The bigger category of winners are the apps and analytics vendors that abstract the complexity of working with very complicated underlying technologies into a user friendly front end." While we have a host of companies like Palantir and Tableau that have sprung up to help users analyze and visualize their data, IoT remains relatively uncharted territory, largely because most business intelligence or analytics tools are stuck in outdated relational database models.

Splunk probably gets organizations closest to real analysis of IoT data, given that its genesis is in analysis of machine data. Splunk has already extended its technology to embrace Hadoop, offering Hadoop analytics through a product called HUNK, and will almost certainly look for other ways to extend its reach into unstructured data, which is growing at twice the rate of structured data and already accounts for 80% of all enterprise data, according to Gartner.

Opportunity In Analytics

IoT data doesn't fit neatly into the tables and joins of traditional data management technology. Therein lies the problem. Virtually all business intelligence and analytics companies are SQL-based and rely on neat-and-tidy relational database technology. This isn't going to work in the big data Internet of Things economy. Across the board, such tooling needs to be re-architected. Some vendors have tried to skirt this requirement by embracing ODBC-based connectors to modern data management technologies. But this results in a flattening of the richness of unstructured data and ultimately won't work. 

All of which means that there is a huge need for a new breed of business intelligence or, more particularly, IoT intelligence. We need new analytics tools capable of ingesting and processing the diverse, unstructured data that fuels IoT. Consider this your next billion-dollar startup idea. You're welcome.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Inbound marketing has a few key advantages over outbound marketing – it is cheaper, it yields leads of higher quality and it is quite easy to measure. And while outbound marketing still enjoys popularity, inbound marketing is the buzzword of today and it will continue to get more popular in the future.

In inbound marketing, you attract unidentified visitors towards your website. But in order to be able to grab their attention and engage them, you need to learn more about your visitors and offer them useful information relevant to their needs. Data, technology and measurement are the secrets to converting inbound leads into revenue. With the help of a good marketing automation solution and a few powerful tips you can improve your conversion rates significantly.

Here is how you can successfully engage your inbound leads and convert them into paying customers.

1. Web analytics

You should use web analytics wisely, as this is a powerful tool to gain an insight into what your customers are searching for, what content to use to engage them best, what types of content they never click on, etc.

Armed with this data, you can segment and engage your inbound prospects in a much more successful way.

2. IP analytics

If you want to identify who your leads are, you can get help from an advanced marketing automation tool with an IP lookup function. This will help you learn the name, contact details and much more useful data about your potential customers. In the case of B2B, you can learn about the company size, industry, its annual revenue etc., all of which will be helpful when pitching a sale to the particular lead.

Some tools even allow you to build visitors’ profiles and track each one of their visits on your website, what they did and what they were interested in. And this leads us to the next tip.

3. Learn what your prospects search for

With the help of the data you gather through sales intelligence, you should be able to determine what your potential customers search for and meet their expectations. Also, do not forget to speak the same language as your prospects – do not rely only on what you think will be relevant, use the intelligence data wiselyand offer the appropriate content.

4. Serve relevant content dynamically

This point corresponds directly with the above two. With the IP data gathered about each lead you can segment your audience into groups and offer those groups the relevant content they search for. For instance, depending on whether the visitor is representing a small or a bigger business, you can have different landing pages served dynamically. You can tweak the message, the graphics, the whole user experience on the basis of their expectations and requirements.

5. Use tools for multivariate testing for your most important web pages/landing pages

You should not forget to test your landing pages and the other key pages of your website. Regardless of whether you choose a free or paid testing tool, you should conduct comprehensive testing to see which of your link baits and proposals work and which do not deliver the desired results. Do not make changes blindly; always base your decisions on hard data and thorough analyses. Good marketing automation tools offer you with comprehensive analytical options, so make sure you make the most out of them.

6. Use your inbound marketing data to enhance your outbound campaigns

The knowledge gained from your inbound marketing can be implemented in order to fuel your future outbound campaigns. You could, for example:

• Target your inbound leads with tailored ads.
• Use the data gathered from the IP lookup to expand your outbound database.
• Repurpose and leverage the content you use for inbound marketing to fit your outbound campaigns.

7. Use the lead intelligence in your CRM

Your sales team can benefit a lot from the lead intelligence and knowing the history of each individual prospect. You should integrate your marketing automation solution into your CRM system in order to grant your sales team this advantage. This way, your sales representatives will know everything about each individual lead – the pages they visited, the emails they opened, etc. and they can even track their activity on your website in real time. On the basis of this data, sales will then be able to create unique messages and custom targeted offers.

8. Monitor the inbound marketing campaigns closely

Even if you have created powerful inbound marketing campaigns, they will still need to bring you revenue in order to be successful. Thus, you should monitor your campaigns closely and know that your money is spent well. Using the analytical options of your marketing automation solution, you should pay attention to the following:

• Compare the number of leads against the numbers for the previous year.
• Track the rate of leads converted into opportunities, and the rate of sales conversions.
• Track the increase/decrease in the number of customers.
• Monitor and analyze your conversion metrics.
• Compare the quantity of nurtured against new leads.
• Track the number of leads by products.
• Check the amount of leads each source generates – email, website, paid ads, events, etc.
• Check the actual sales figures and revenue amounts generated by each lead source.

Your inbound marketing campaigns must be properly organized and tracked in order to ensure that they bring you the desired results and revenue. Your marketing automation tools can assist you in both structuring as well as monitoring your campaigns. They can also give you insights into which parts of your campaigns can be improved in order to attain better results and which lead sources bring you the highest number of conversions and the most revenue. This way, you can focus only on the winning strategies and refrain from investing in campaigns with low ROI.

Throughout my undergraduate career, I was "that" student.

No, not the teacher's pet. No, not the one who skips class on the regular. I was that student who showed up to class 10 minutes early and took a seat in the front ... just to debate my professors.

While my undergraduate experience was instrumental in understanding the fundamentals of marketing, it didn't teach me much on marketing today. Marketing curriculums have yet to catch up with the constantly changing industry landscape. And this led to many tussles in class.

In fact, there was once a hashtag started about me and a particular professor who spent countless class hours debating social media -- he was of the belief that it was a "fad" that would be quickly gone and good-ole billboard and TV advertising would reign once more.

Since leaving school and beginning my career in the "real world," I've had to learn about modern marketing on the fly. But I don't think future students should have to wait until their career begins to get the same education.

That's why I put together the following SlideShare based on a previous post for all you current and future marketing graduates. Below is a list of 21 things you actually need to know before entering the real world of marketing. There's also some insight from other marketing professionals included and take-home resources -- so you know this isn't just me avenging my past educators. ;)

What Today's Marketers Have to Say

"Being in a communications role is no excuse. As a social media marketer, I would spend time every day looking at and interpreting data. That's how I knew if my channels were effective and my tests were contributing to growth." 

Brittany Leaning, Social Media Expert, HubSpot

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"Land your dream internship but only interacting with your direct manager? Not helpful in the long run. Meet people! Talk to people in different departments, grab lunch with someone new each week, ask lots of questions, and absorb as much as you possibly can." 

Taylor Haney, Community Specialist, MITX

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"Education doesn't stop after commencement. Read books. Lots of them. Subscribe to as many relevant blogs as you can. Consume as much information as you can on a daily basis. Be the first at the office to try new platforms and technologies. This is how you'll get ahead." 

John Bonini, Marketing Director, IMPACT Branding

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"Speaking up shows that you're actively engaged and establishes your presence. If you have trouble with speaking up, ask a manager or other colleague to ask for your opinion directly so you can practice getting a word in." 

 Farah Hussain, Senior Marketing Manager, PayPal

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"Marketers often fall victim to the cobbler’s children syndrome when marketing themselves. Produce and curate quality content and proactively engage on digital channels. In essence, be the community manager of your personal brand." 

 Dave Cutler, Director of Content & Marketing, MITX

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"I've interviewed a lot of students, and the ones who blow their skills out of proportion get canned immediately. Employers know you don't know everything. Show a genuine curiosity to learn & to further hone your skills to actually become an expert at something." 

 Sasha Hoffman, Head of Strategy & Partnerships, Plastiq

Your Take-Home Reading

• What Your Traditional Marketing Education Didn’t Teach You About Marketing Today
• How to Be the Best Intern EVER
• How to Write a Standout Resume and Land Your Next Marketing Job
• A Free, Customizable Template to Help You Prove Marketing ROI [+ SlideShare]
• Creating Marketing People Love: 29 Tips From Industry Experts [Slideshow]
• How to Master Non-Awkward, Effective In-Person Networking
• HTML Decoded for the Plain Text Marketer

Have any additional tips for this year's marketing graduates? Is there anything else you wish you'd known before graduating? 

 

 

You've heard it said many times: prospects have access to so much information these days that by the time they call a provider, they're at the end of the sales process. They know—or think they know—exactly what they want. They do not need any more information.

That depends. They don't need you to explain all the features and benefits of your service. They do, however, want your insight and ideas, says John Doerr in his podcast interview Buyers Want and Need Insight from Sellers.

In fact, it is that quality—educated me with new ideas and perspectives—that separated sales winners from second-place finishers, according to research in Insight Selling, written by Doerr and Mike Schultz. Second on the list: sales winners collaborated with buyers.

Expand your horizon when looking for investors and look abroad for buyers with cash.

Middle market business owners want to secure the maximum price for their company, and in doing so, should strongly consider international buyers.

I worked with the CEO of a successful oil & gas services company, who also held a patent on a new type of equipment used every day throughout the industry. The owner knew most oil & gas services companies were selling for 4 to 6 times annual profits (EBITDA). However, he also believed his patent added value to the company and thought his company should be worth much more than the industry standard.

While we looked both domestically and internationally, when the deal closed, the company sold to an foreign buyer for 9 times forward earnings, or 15 times the annual profit (EBIT) it had made the previous year--a great valuation and a win for the owner.

Expand Your Geographic Scope

You might be able to sell your business for a significantly higher value to an international buyer as did my client. International companies tend to pay more for technology transfer and for access to new markets for their products and vice versa. This naturally creates more demand for the product or service which equates to a higher value. There may also be a discrepancy between international and domestic markets-domestic market values may be down when international values are up. Overall however, more buyers at the table means more offers and more competition. This typically adds up to more money for the seller. The international buyer is likely to pay more if they fear a competitor is going to close the deal. They may also be the only buyer out there. An experienced investment banker can help you find these international diamonds in the rough.

The first thing to do is to change your marketing plan. Entering into an international business arrangement can be challenging, but it doesn’t need to be. The ideal way to market your company internationally is through a worldwide organization, such as Globalscope Partners, which is made up of 34 advisory firms in 25 countries. Globalscope facilitates M&A activities in the international space. The organization enables members to market companies worldwide and offers invaluable insight on how to conduct business in different parts of the world.

Working with an organization such as Globalscope Partners also enhances the ability to communicate with buyers appropriately, so that:

• Language barriers are eliminated.
• Cultural differences are recognized, so we can customize marketing programs and our selling process for different regions of the world.
• There is no confusion regarding currency or financing arrangements.
• Top, qualified, international buyers come to the table.
• Both buyer and seller are comfortable with the negotiating process.
• The seller receives top dollar for their business.

When you sell your business, you want to tap into the largest number of potential buyers possible who have the potential to offer the best pricing and terms for your company. To ensure you accomplish these objectives we recommend including international buyers in the mix.

Author: Brian Kardon

We’ve all heard (and will continue to hear) about the increasingly prominent role of the Chief Marketing Officer, or CMO. This is clearly a win for marketers, but with increased prominence comes increased scrutiny from your Board of Directors – especially for venture-backed companies.

Earlier this week, Lattice Engines, NEA, and Sequoia Capital brought together expert CMOs and marketing executives to discuss that very topic: how Boards of Directors are changing the way they evaluate the success of marketing.

I had the pleasure of moderating a panel with two expert practitioners – Sanjay Dholakia, CMO of Marketo, and Sharmila Mulligan, founder and CEO of ClearStory Data and formerly a CMO herself – and two partners from leading VC firms – Mickey Arabelovic of Sequoia and Pete Sonsini of NEA.

At the discussion panel, titled “The CMO Revolution: From Focused Expert to Empowered Leader”, our audience of marketers were treated to countless insights and observations from our panelists. Here are a few of my favorite takeaways:

1. Conversations, Not Campaigns

Today’s CMOs need to adapt to the changing way that buyers make purchase decisions. Your audience is now researching products and services before they speak to sales, which means marketing has a lot more influence. Your audience no longer wants to be sold to; they want to be engaged with.

“There are three fundamental mind shifts that CMOs have to make today. It’s no longer about finding customers; it’s about being found. It’s about conversations, not campaigns.” – Sanjay Dholakia, Marketo @sdholakia

2. Use Your Data

Now that everyone has access to “big data”, it’s the way you use your data that will differentiate your company within your space.

“Data matters for companies of all sizes. It used to be that startups had no data because they didn’t have any customers yet. Now there is enough data to make decisions from day one. CMOs today need to have a balance of both technical skill and creativity to raise awareness.”  - Pete Sonsini, NEA @psonsoni

3. Maintaining Your Seat at the Table

In order to maintain marketing’s seat at the revenue table, marketers should report to the board in a consistent, holistic way, focusing on both strategy and technique. What are the marketing team’s high-level goals, how is the budget being spent, and how does this position your company within your industry?

“Be consistent in how you report to the board each quarter. Board presentations should always include two to three slides from marketing. The first slide should cover the art of marketing. What’s the company’s positioning and value proposition? The second should cover the science. Is marketing investing in the right areas? Is sales getting what it needs? The third should cover what’s happening in the market with competitors.” - Sharmila Mulligan, ClearStory Data @ShahaniMulligan

This is also why organizations need to pay more than lip service to alignment between marketing and sales. Smart CMOs secure marketing’s place at the revenue table by making that alignment a part of daily life.

“Marketing and sales need to be held to the same number. Marketing needs to have a number assigned, or a quota just like sales. If sales and marketing are not aligned, it’s a complete miss.” - Sanjay Dholakia, Marketo @sdholakia

4. Don’t Worry About Being the “Perfect” CMO

The panelists seemed to agree that there’s no exact set of skills or traits that make up a “perfect” CMO. That said, companies should look for certain qualities in their marketing leaders – whether those qualities are encompassed by one person, or a balance of people within the organization.

“There’s no formula for the perfect CMO. Start with the core of the person. The underdog mentality is key – someone who is always trying to improve, driven, likes to get their hands dirty and doesn’t quit.” - Mickey Arabelovic, Sequoia @Sequoia_Capital

“Stop searching for a CMO who offers the perfect blend of art and science. It’s better to have a healthy tension. Build a team with skill sets in both areas.” - Sharmila Mulligan, ClearStory Data @ShahaniMulligan

At the end of the discussion, at least one thing was clear: the role of marketing is changing at a rapid rate, especially when it comes to tech companies at the forefront of marketing innovation. My biggest takeaway from our session was that, with all of the advancements in marketing technology, the growing harmony between art and science, and the rising prominence of the CMO, it’s never been a better time to be a marketer.

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What the Board of Directors Expects from Marketers Today was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

After writing SNAP Selling, I was continually accosted by salespeople who said,

“Your advice on selling to crazy-busy buyers works great. But, I’m frazzled too. How can you help me?”

I was stumped. I had nothing to offer since I wasn’t a time management guru.

Then one day it hit me. I was looking at things all wrong.

It wasn’t about being more productive. Instead, it was about keeping up with everything that was so overwhelming.

Customers were changing. New products and services were constantly being introduced. Companies entered new markets. Salespeople took new jobs. The economy was up. The economy was down. New technologies had to be mastered.

Salespeople even had to learn new ways to capture and keep the attention of today’s savvy prospects – at the same time they had to make their numbers.

No wonder they were frazzled.

Trying to keep on top of all that new stuff – and learning new skills at the same time was too much. And worse yet, there was no relief in sight.  But not everyone was struggling; a small subset was doing quite well.

What attribute did they possess that others didn’t?

They were agile learners, quickly able to get up to speed when things changed. They could become competent in new positions in record time. They could instantly adjust to changing market dynamics.

As a result, they got quick wins, which gave them confidence, which led to more business. In essence, their short-term success was the key to their long-term success.

That’s why I’m making this bold prediction.

In today’s sales environment, your learning agility is your only sustainable competitive advantage. Master rapid learning strategies and your career success is virtually guaranteed.

Go figure. It’s not a skill anyone ever talks about. Nor is it even a sales skill. Yet it’s critical to your success. And truthfully, it can be learned.

How do I know? Because, as I explain in my new book Agile Selling, it’s my core strength. I’ve spent a lifetime mastering rapid learning. And, until recently, I never realized just how much it contributed to my personal success.

I honestly believe it’s far more important than anything I shared in Selling to Big Companies and SNAP Selling. If you loved those books, which many of you have, I know you’ll find it hard to imagine. But it’s true.

In the upcoming weeks I’ll be sharing more articles on the four aspects of agile learning that I cover in my new book:

1. The agile selling mind-set
2. How to learn new info quickly
3. How to pick up new skills fast
4. Success habits of agile sellers

Hopefully it’ll give you a good taste of what’s in Agile Selling. As you know, I truly want you to be successful. And, learning how to learn – rapidly – is the master skill, the one that dominates them all.

As a follow on from a post I wrote in March, eight best practice tips for writing effective email copy, I’m tackling the wonderful topic of campaign effectiveness. 

This is quite an interesting topic, and not just for email marketers.

Taking a very safe wild guess, I would estimate that most people who have access to an email address have received an email as part of a campaign.

So basically anyone who has signed up to Groupon, Asos, Econsultancy …

I could go on. But I won’t. Anyway...

As with all marketing activities, email campaigns can only really be improved by comparing results from email activity with intended goals. By using this approach it is much easier to identify the areas that are underperforming, and try to improve them.

Since only 8% of UK consumers are reading every marketing email they receive and only 43% read less than half of emails sent by marketers, I think it might be safe to say there is currently room for improvement. 

Therefore, it is vital in planning stages to consider specific goals for each campaign.

Different campaigns may have different metrics dependent upon the aim behind them and ‘conversions’ may be defined differently around this.

A conversion for anything that is commerce enabled is likely to be related to purchases and assigned a monetary value, whilst in some B2B nurturing campaigns, a white paper download or call-back request may be the best measures of conversion and therefore campaign success.

For other campaigns which are engagement driven, conversions may be a little more difficult to define; consider tying up with other channels for this.

For example, the number of social shares or time actually spent on your website in addition to opens and clicks. With advances of many ESPs and other analytics packages, it is relatively straightforward in many cases to view the bigger picture.

To create an estimate of campaign response you can use a spreadsheet model. Set this up to show a best and worst case scenario.

For each, the diagram below gives an example. It shows that with a 100,000 list, modelled response of sales can vary between 149 and 26.

That’s a massive overall attrition, but it shows the value of working hard to maximise opens, clicks and landing page response. 

Activity and engagement goals

If you are a retailer or you run a transactional site, there will be additional goals you’ll want to set according to developing customers along the loyalty ladder or customer lifecycle:

• Convert prospects into buyers.
• Convert first time buyers to repeat buyers.
• Reactivate lapsed purchasers.
• Increase penetration amongst demographics. 

Even for non-retailers, you can still model a conversion trail from initial subscribers through to active customers. It’s worth recognizing the different stages of your customer lifecycle and mapping your communication plan accordingly to push recipients through your sales funnel.

For more complex B2B organisations it’s particularly important to track the influence of email on conversion, as for higher value sales it’s probable that the final conversion will come from another channel and possibly even another person entirely.

Tracking engagement over time through a lead nurturing programme will give a good gauge on this, so you should consider mapping out the key stages in your buying cycle and then looking at different and enticing content to edge the recipient onto the next stage.

Value goals

You will also want to evaluate the relative value generated from a campaign, different lists or segments to compare them and isolate problems.

• Value objectives.
• Increase revenue/profit per email or thousand emails.
• Increase purchase frequency.
• Increase average order value (AOV).
• Increase range of categories purchased.
• Maximise lifetime value of list member. 

Benchmarking capabilities

As with other aspects of marketing, you will improve your results if you take time to look beyond your own campaigns at competitors in your sectors and innovators in other sectors.

Dave Chaffey, author of Total Email Marketing, devised the model CRITICAL. He explains: 

A simple but practical approach to assess the types of capabilities you need to assess are ‘CRITICAL’ factors for email marketing success. CRITICAL is a useful checklist of questions to ask about your email campaigns.

CRITICAL stands for: 

• Creative – This assesses the design of the email including its layout, use of colour and image and the copy.
• Relevance – Arguably, the most important factor. Use the following question: “Does the offer and creative of the email meet recipients’ needs?”
• Incentive (or offer) – The WIFM factor for the recipient or ‘what’s in it for me?’ What benefit does the recipient gain from clicking on the link(s) in the email?
• Targeting and timing – Targeting is related to relevance. Is a single message sent to all prospects or customers on the list, or are emails with tailored creative, incentive and copy sent to different list segments?

  Timing refers to when the email is received – time of day, day of week, point in the month, even the year. Does it relate to any particular events? There’s also relative timing: when it’s received in conjunction with other marketing communications (this depends on the integration).

• Integration – Are email campaigns part of your integrated marketing communications? Questions to ask include: Are the creative and copy consistent with my brand? Does the message reinforce other communications? Does the timing of the email campaign fit with offline communications?
• Copy – This is part of the creative and refers to the structure, style and explanation of the offer together with the location of hyperlinks in the email.
• Attributes (header attributes of the email) – Assess the message characteristics such as the subject line, from address, to address, date/time of receipt and format (HTML or text). These can also influence deliverability of the message if they contain the wrong structure or keywords identified as spam.
• Landing page – The effectiveness of the landing page in terms of communications’ consistency and simplicity. 

Auditing and benchmarking email programme effectiveness

In our Best Practice Guides we advocate assessing your current digital marketing capabilities using capability maturity or stage of adoption models.

We first used this approach in our Managing Digital Channels Best Practice Guide. Econsultancy subscribers have told us that they find these useful since they enable organisations to:

1. Review current approaches to digital marketing to identify areas for improvement.
2. Benchmark with competitors who are in the same market sector / industry and in different sectors.
3. Identify best practice from more advanced adopters.
4. Set targets and develop strategies for improving capabilities as part of an improvement roadmap.

Evaluation glossary. DMA definitions for email marketing evaluation

Unfortunately, all email broadcasting systems use slightly different definitions of measures, so it’s important to understand and define a standard for a consistent comparison.

Without this you may notice a change in your company benchmark if you change platforms. This may not be due to a change in performance; purely a change in how performance is shown.

The DMA standards defined by the Email Marketing Council are a good place to start.

(These are actually just handy to remember, if you're ever not sure.) 

• Hard bounce rate. The recipient does not see the email due to invalid email addresses, domain failure, ISP blocked etc.
• Average hard bounce rate - the number of hard bounces divided by the number of emails delivered (%).
• Soft bounce - the email address is valid but the recipient does not see the email because of a temporary delivery problem, inbox full, server down etc.
• Average soft bounce rate - the number of soft bounces divided by the number of emails delivered (%).
• Average total clickthrough rate - the number of total clicks divided by the number of emails delivered (%).
• Conversion rate - the number of ‘take-ups’ resulting from the email activity, e.g. number of completed transactions from a cart or downloads of a whitepaper. Only includes data that is clearly based on known responses to emails.

  For our purposes, that means data received within 90 days of the issuing of the email campaign. Responses after this date are not included.

• Deliverability - there are two main ways in which deliverability should be measured:

1. Returned email deliverability. Volume of emails sent less the number of bounces (soft and hard bounces) received.
2. Inbox deliverability. Volume of emails delivered to the inbox as opposed to the spam folder or not delivered. Email certification company Return Path refers to this as ‘inbox placement rate’ or ‘acceptance rate’ – the percentage of emails that make it to the inbox.

For more email best practice advice, check out our recently published Email Marketing Best Practice Guide.

The sales landscape has shifted in the last few years. Buyers are more informed than ever, competition is stiffer, and products and services are increasingly seen as replaceable, leaving most sellers at a loss for the best way to add value and differentiate. Yet, some sellers continue to win consistently. To find out what these sellers are doing differently than the rest, we undertook a massive research effort. In our study, we looked at 700 B2B purchases made by buyers who represent $3.1 billion in annual purchasing power. We found that the sellers who win harness the power of ideas. And in our new book, Insight Selling: Surprising Research on What Sales Winners Do Differently by bestselling authors Mike Schultz and John Doerr, we share exactly how they do it. Learn more and order your copy of Insight Selling now: http://bit.ly/1j5Cvil

We’ve always trusted family and friends for recommendations. Marketers are finding ways to combine this age old referral process with social media. It’s also called crowd sourced marketing. This is where the social media “crowd”, shares your content and conversations for free on a global web.

According to a report by Nielsen, 77 percent of consumers are more likely to buy a new product when learning about it from friends or family. Use these social media tactics to reach prospects through digital “world of mouth”. This will amplify your leads, prospects and sales by tapping into the power of the online crowd.

1. Go above and beyond realistic expectations

Exceeding expectations will always be the best way to earn referrals. Focus on establishing clear expectations and blowing them away before you dive into social media. Don’t promise anything that’s out of your scope or processes. A dedicated customer support staff is one way to communicate expectations. Answering calls and social media inquiries in a timely manner will keep most complaints under control.

A personal connection is the best way to earn trust that will last after the buying process. Getting to the point where you discuss interests or even spend time together is the goal. This type of connection will make them feel comfortable with referring your service to a friend.

2. Add rich pins on Pinterest

Tap into Pinterest’s 70 million users to increase referrals. Target added Rich Pins to their strategy and within the first six weeks they had a 70 percent Pinterest referral increase, according to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. Rich Pins allow additional information to be included with a pin.

The most effective Rich Pin for businesses is the product pin, which includes real time pricing and availability information, interested pinners get notified if a price drops.

Follow the 80/20 rule, 20 percent of pins should be products. The other material should be inspiring and useful information for your audience. These pins will be shared at a higher rate and increase word of mouth marketing.

3. Implement a Facebook referral promotion

Facebook has implemented changes to increase referrals with the popularity of mobile usage. The changes have been effective, a report from Shareaholic revealed referrals from Facebook have grown 48.85 percent since September and represented 17.41 percent of all website referrals in November.

A Facebook referral promotion is a strategy leveraged by companies to earn referrals. A referral promotion is created by offering a base reward, like a coupon, for any user who completes a sign-up process. The user then earns credits toward a greater reward, like a gift card, as he refers more people to enter the promotion. This earns word-of-mouth referrals as people discuss the prize at hand.

4. Share industry insights on LinkedIn

Social Sharing Platform Buffer experienced a 4000 percent increase in blog referral traffic from Linkedin over the past year. This is credited to Linkedin being the third-fastest growing social network and Buffer’s update and sharing strategy. Linkedin reported 6 out of 10 users are interested in industry insights.

Offering original research and industry wisdom will get people talking about your content. This conversation drives people to your website and locks in loyal readers. A customer is much more likely to use a service if they get value from the company’s blog and social pages.

5. Create and promote giveaways and contests

Ask customers to provide leads in exchange for raffle tickets for a gadget, tablet or industry tool. This leads to referrals from customers familiar with your service and product. A Facebook contest is another great way to create buzz and bring in leads.

Dove created the Real Beauty Should Be Shared contest where entrants shared stories of people who represent real beauty. User-generated contests take away the cost of a prize item and gets people talking about your brand in a positive light.

6. Create an internal sharing network

According to Jack Morton Worldwide, 49 percent of U.S. consumers say friends and family are their top sources of brand awareness. Employees often have more robust and active social accounts than employers. Encourage employees to share company content with their personal network. This comes back to that 80/20 rule, don’t expect employees to share content if it’s constant promotion.

An organized system for internal sharing is the social tool Addvocate. This makes content sharing user friendly and more effective with analytics.

7. Update in time of crisis

The social media platform Buffer faced a social-media crisis when their system was hacked in October. The company had to put their own social media advice to use. Users began tweeting and posting about spam and other issues. Buffer responded with a support tweet 16 minutes after the initial complaint. The reaction from customers was overwhelmingly positive and earned Buffer some positive press.

When mistakes happen, be prepared to update customers of exactly what happened and what you’re doing to correct the situation. This creates a positive memory despite a negative circumstance.

8. Ask for referrals on social media and return the favor

It’s essential to consistently ask for referrals. This seems obvious but 72 percent of marketers still don’t recognize and leverage the value of customer referrals, according to research by Loyalty 360.

Asking over social media takes little time and clients will feel more obligated to respond to keep their account looking fresh. A referral request can be attached to any email or built into a PPC ad. However, offering an incentive will increase the conversion rate. Similar to a Facebook referral promotion, offer discounts or rewards for referral traffic.

Think about colleagues and friends that could benefit from your client’s services. This quid pro quo effect increases the chance of a referral. 85 percent of fans of brands on Facebook recommend brands to others. Use Facebook as a medium to promote your clients to others and the same will happen in return.

9. Follow and engage in social conversations

You should already be engaging with the social media audience. Positive feedback is easy to handle, but responding to negative comments is warranted if validity is there. Companies like Zappos and LifeLock make a point to promptly respond to users on their Facebook pages. This strategy provides consistent customer service while increasing the brand’s buzz.

Fans recommending brands on Facebook do so because of either the quality of the product or based on the customer experience.

10. Identify influencers

Reaching out to the influential figures in your customer circles is the best free promotion available. Tools like Topsy and Followerwonk show the most-shared tweets and bloggers or executives with the largest social following. Make a connection with these influencers and show how your product provides value for their followers. This will provide target audience exposure that can’t be duplicated by another method. Pinbooster allows marketers to analyze their Pinterest campaign, identifying the most shared pins and highly influential pinners.

The only constant is change.

From technology trends to changing business models to evolving consumer behaviors, there’s a lot to consider in order for today’s marketers to really have a handle on what’s important about what’s next.

Old digital tactics and mastering individual channels are being overcome by the need to create a common brand experience across the digital experience on and offline. Customers expect to access and consume information across platforms, apps and devices and in order for brands to “be the best answer” wherever buyers are looking, they’ll need to figure out what’s next and where to focus.

To capture some of what’s important for digital marketing in 2015, I reached out to some of the marketers I’ve worked with and come to know over the years. It’s an inspiring collection of marketing brain power and experience represented by brands like Cisco, IBM, Dell, Google, Intel, Marketo and LinkedIn as well as industry thought leaders like David Meerman Scott, Ann Handley, Jay Baer, Ekaterina Walter, Mark Schaefer, Ardath Albee, Brian Clark and many more – 21 in all.

Business content has to be more than informative. It should entertain too. That’s why I asked each marketing smartie to share a “selfie” of themselves to go along with their 2015 prediction. A surprising number have never taken and published a selfie before, so you’re seeing them here first.

From content to mobile to ads to humor to being more human – this post covers a variety of important areas of focus for digital marketing in 2015. Dig in, learn and enjoy:

Ann Handley  @annhandley – Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs
Is it 2015 already…? And I just learned to routinely write 2014 on my checks…(darn it!)

So here goes: In 2015, I’m thinking about two things:

1. We’re taking the notion of “”brands are publishers”” and pushing the boundaries of that further.

How that plays out: We’ll focus on enormous empathy and customer experience (and not just more blog posts). (That doesn’t mean blog posts aren’t important, for the right company and the right customer. But it means we consider if that’s the best approach, rather than making a post the default.)

We’ll focus on more relevance and new inspirations (rather than just the tried and true).

And we’ll focus on being generously useful. 2015 really will be the year we create and curate content our customers will thank us for. Which leads me to…

2. Marketers become ridiculously proud of their writing!

In our online social world, we recognize that all marketers are writers. Everybody writes, and that’s true whether you are the Chief Content Officer or Marketing VP or the mar-com manager. Our words are our currency – they tell the world who we are, as Beth Dunn points out. They can make us look smart or they can make us look stupid – and so being able to communicate well in writing isn’t just nice; it’s necessity.

Are you thinking writing doesn’t matter in our video/podcast/Instagram world? Actually, it matters more. Good writing is like an iceberg – use your best words to convey depth under the surface. That means you’re got to choose those words well, and write with economy and the style and the end reader in mind (there’s that empathy thing again!). That’s true whether you’re writing a listicle or the words on a Slideshare deck or the opening paragraph Lee wrote at the top of this post…

Jay Baer @jaybaer – President, Convince & Convert
It’s already happening, but 2015 will be the year of paid amplification. With content marketing reaching near-ubiquity, the success pendulum with swing toward boosting consumption of content. That will put a new focus on math, testing and optimization as content production and content distribution become equally important.

Mark Schaefer @markwschaefer – Executive Director, Schaefer Marketing Solutions
As far as 2015, there is a vast change on our horizon that will be led by augmented reality and wearable technology. This change will be so profound in fact, that I think we will look back at this revolution as something that is as important as the Internet itself.

By the end of 2015, wearable technology should be gathering enough steam that we will begin to see some early marketing applications. What does marketing look like when the Internet surrounds us like the air that we breathe? Fascinating to think about.

Pam Didner @pamdidner - Global Integrated Marketing Strategist, Intel Corporation
Marketers have been advised to create and tailor different formats of content with customized copy for highly fragmented marketing channels from TV and print to various social media platforms in order to reach their target audience. It’s the right thing to do.

Digital marketing will continue to morph and promotion channels will be further fragmented. The major change for 2015 is NOT about digital marketing. The major change will come from Marketers by Going Back to Basics: reevaluate the target audience, determine what works and what doesn’t. Re-prioritize and be smart about resource allocation and investment.

Mike Stelzner @Mike_Stelzner – CEO, Social Media Examiner
Major change in digital marketing: Those that pitch are becoming ignored. A little bit of selling here and there is great, but those marketers who do nothing but sell, sell, sell, are gonna get ignored, dismissed and overlooked by consumers and prospects. Get cracking folks, it’s time to actually care. That means dedicating more resources to things that are harder to track, like answering customer questions and providing more value online.

Brian Solis @briansolis – Principal Analyst, Altimeter Group
I’d love to say that by 2015 we will truly see digital strategies that are integrated across social, mobile, advertising, marketing, comms, et al. But, we won’t. What we will see though is a more conscious effort to bring disparate groups to the table to learn how to collaborate across screens, channels, and moments of truth to deliver ONE experience to customers wherever they are in the lifecycle.

John Jantsch @ducttape – Founder, Duct Tape Marketing
I believe organizations will go deeper into overall strategy with digital marketing – Chief Digital Officers will help organizations lessen their focus on demand creation and heighten it on organizing an end to end customer journey through digital storytelling tactics.

Bill Hunt @billhunt – President, Back Azimuth Consulting
In 2015 companies will stop treating digital marketing as a tactic and embrace it as an ecosystem. The ecosystem will enable a singular goal of attracting, engaging and retaining new and existing customers by providing information and content that gives them everything they need to locate, purchase and use their products and services. The days to preaching to customers rather than exciting and informing them are rapidly coming to an end and marketers that can effectively connect with prospects will win.

Joe Pulizzi @joepulizzi – Founder, Content Marketing Institute
In 2015 we will see a large move among brands to buy media companies, flush with cash and short on patience to build loyal audiences.

DJ Waldow @djwaldow – Digital Marketing Evangelist, Marketo
2015 will be the year of HUMAN for digital marketers. Gone are the days of corporate-speak messaging and dull, boring campaigns. Instead, we’ll begin to see more marketers incorporate human-speak into their messaging – videos, pictures, humor, and human!

Ekaterina Walter @Ekaterina - CMO, Branderati
In the age of infobesity and increasing digital noise, visual storytelling will continue to emerge as a strategy for not only standing out, but also for nurturing and growing vibrant and engaged communities. The ability to craft visual stories that inspire emotion and spark the movement will help companies get noticed and amplify their message throughout those communities.

Brian Clark @brianclark – CEO, Copyblogger Media
2015 will continue a trend that has caught steam this year, which is mixing paid media with owned media to accelerate content distribution. The best “native” advertising helps build an audience into a a long-term business asset, and that’s a goal worth spending on in conjunction with owned content creation.

Jason Miller @jasonmillerCA - Senior Manager, Content Marketing, Marketing Solutions, LinkedIn
Coding will become a necessity for digital marketers. As the modern marketer strives to understand how social, content, demand gen, PR, and SEO call all work successfully within a fully integrated marketing strategy, the next skill is to add coding to their resume/ LinkedIn profile. The ability to understand how front end wed development and coding can affect, enhance, and optimize a content strategy will become a necessity for marketers instead of a nice to have.

Susan Emerick @sfemerick - Manager, Enterprise Social Strategy & Programs, IBM
Employee Advocates will humanize digital marketing experiences on behalf of their brands, outperforming traditional media investments. This will require digital marketers to once again rethink and reshuffle the budgeting decision deck.

David Meerman Scott @dmscott - Keynote Speaker and Bestselling Author, Freshspot Marketing
In 2015, digital marketing will converge with digital selling in a meaningful way. Marketing (one to many) and sales (one to one) are beginning to use the same techniques of content creation and real-time engagement. The best organizations will not run marketing and sales as separate “departments” but will merge the two functions into one customer facing organization focused on revenue generation.

Ardath Albee @ardath421 – CEO, Marketing Interactions
Marketers will become obsessive about becoming relevant to their audiences and buckle down to do the work that informs the development of a digital strategy.

Tim Washer @timwasher - Senior Marketing Manager, Social Media, Cisco Systems
As brands strive to create authentic connections online, especially with Millennials, more will understand that a clever laugh or the vulnerability of silliness is the most efficient path to earning trust and loyalty. Mark 2015 as the year of humor in digital marketing.

Tom Webster @webby2001 – Vice President, Edison Research
My top change/trend for digital marketing in 2015 is the rise and eventual preeminence of mobile data. Clickstream data simply misses too many elements of the consideration and purchase process, and gives things like social media, word of mouth, and traditional media/advertising short shrift. But as a call to action from social media, a party, the radio, or a billboard arise, today’s smartphone-equipped consumers can take actions in the moment in a way that can be directly attributed to the medium that drove the action, without friction.

Consider this—I’m walking around town, listening to online radio over my phone, and I hear an audio ad for a product that might interest me. In the past, were I to hear that ad, I’d have to remember the name of the company, then go home and use a search engine to learn more about the company before an eventual purchase. Who gets the attribution credit in that scenario? Search, sadly—and a most undeserved credit it would be.

But the continual removal of barriers between message and action that mobile gives us (for those who begin to think that way) will begin to restore the balance of the Force for attribution, and digital marketers can start to get away from channel-based thinking and move towards a more human behavior-centered model, with mobile serving as the unifying principle to unite offline and offline marketing.

Adam Singer @AdamSinger – Analytics Advocate, Google
Digital analytics sophistication and (effective) usage increases: we know from research, talking to users and being an active part of the industry that marketers are increasing emphasis on measurement. Our team even launched a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) to provide a free and robust resource to educate marketers and help them succeed. An ever-expanding mix of devices and channels is creating even greater pressures for digital teams to quantify their efforts, but the technology is here and the market demand for talented analysts & data-savvy marketers has been in place long enough that 2015 is the year digital measurement finally comes of age. Smart brands have already formalized their efforts across organizations and efforts. If you’re not there it’s time to catch up.

Connie Bensen @cbensen - Global Social Content Strategy, Innovation & Governance, Dell
My prediction for 2015 is that the digital marketer aka Social Bizologist (the person guiding the integration of social into the business functions of an organization) will be asking for an end-to-end content solution. We need a tool that can facilitate content efforts from ideation to publishing while tracking the usage and performance of content across the customer journey. This will allow for ease in repurposing, localization and accommodate real-time efforts.

Lee Odden (hey, that’s me!) @leeodden – CEO, TopRank Online Marketing
The convergence of marketing, public relations and advertising will accelerate even faster in 2015 and beyond as agencies and internal corporate organizations fulfill each of those roles. Content creation, search optimization and social media will be less siloed as specific departments and treated more like skills that exist across the organization. Optimization will move beyond individual tactics and focus more on overall customer experience across channels. Marketing is everybody’s job and more companies will leverage internal resources through social business and collaboration platforms as well as participation marketing with their community to integrate scaled content creation and social media engagement.

As you can tell, each marketer that shared insights here brings their own experience and perspective as a flavor to their prediction. Each has their own bias but collectively, I think this group represents a great cross-section of ideas that we, as marketers, need to consider for the rest of 2014 and into 2015.

What do you think the most significant changes and important trends will be in 2015? What is it about digital marketing that will be most important for your business and customers in the coming year?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2014. | 21 Digital Marketing Trends & Predictions for 2015 | http://www.toprankblog.com

If this month’s roundup of AWeber integrations had a sound effect, it would be a George Takei-style, “Ohhh myyy!”

“How can I grow my email list?” is the #1 question we hear, so to help you tackle that challenge, we’re highlighting seven awesome apps that easily plug into your AWeber account.

To determine the best fit for your needs, we asked these services’ head honchos the same questions you’d want to know, like what makes their service stand out and what benefits can you expect. Plus, we rounded up the pricing info, special offers, setup videos and how-to’s so you can get a head start on building your email audience.

We’ll let the honchos take it from here …

1. Unbounce

Honcho: Oli Gardner, co-founder of Unbounce. Twitter: @Unbounce.

Who is this app best suited for?
Unbounce is designed for marketers doing email marketing, paid search (PPC), lead generation, content marketing (ebook/webinar registration pages) and any other situation where a dedicated landing page can be used to create a high-converting destination.

What sets Unbounce apart from other, similar apps?
One feature that sets Unbounce apart is Dynamic Text Replacement, which lets you pass URL parameters to the page where they are dynamically included in your headline (or elsewhere on the page). You can send traffic from hundreds of PPC ads to a single landing page (as opposed to having to build many pages), and you can also pass parameters from a link in an email to personalize the page content. The page builder itself allows you to customize any element on your page.

What benefits/results can marketers expect from using this integration?
By connecting AWeber and Unbounce, marketers have complete end-to-end control over their campaigns. You can easily add a form to your pages to collect leads, and they will be automatically sent into your AWeber account in real time. And because Unbounce is a WYSIWYG drag and drop page builder, you can build your pages without any technical help from developers or I.T.

Why should AWeber customers connect to Unbounce right now?
AWeber customers should connect to Unbounce so they can immediately benefit from improved conversion rates, automated lead capture, faster campaign setup times and freedom to work independently from I.T.

What’s the pricing model? Is there a special offer for AWeber clients?
Unbounce offers a 30-day free trial, with packages starting at $49 per month (New Businesses & Entrepreneurs level). There’s also a free plan that displays an Unbounce branded footer. The AWeber-Unbounce integration works with all plans. BONUS: Sign up here for a new Unbounce account and save 50% off any Unbounce package for 3 months, after completing your free trial.

Create your account with Unbounce here

Get step-by-step help integrating AWeber with Unbounce

2. Launch Effect

Honcho: Peter Kang, co-founder and principal of Barrel (created Launch Effect). Twitter: @LaunchEffect.

Who is this app best suited for?
Launch Effect is a WordPress theme that’s best suited for marketers and entrepreneurs who need an elegant landing page to collect emails, track referral links, and tell a succinct story of their product or service. We also added Paypal integration so users can collect payments with Launch Effect as well.

What sets Launch Effect apart from other, similar apps?
Launch Effect’s referral tracking is a unique feature that’s not common on other landing page apps/themes. Also, our integrations with email marketing tools like AWeber and web font services provide a great deal of functional and design flexibility. We’ve also received great feedback on how well-organized and easy it is to customize the landing page style through WordPress.

What benefits/results can marketers expect from using this integration?
Marketers can use the Launch Effect-AWeber integration to pass along information collected from the custom landing page form (the form builder is a Premium feature). They can use this to segment lists and gather information beyond the name and email.

Why should AWeber customers connect to Launch Effect right now?
Any AWeber customer looking to create a landing page for a new product or interested in validating an idea can save time and money by using Launch Effect. Rather than taking weeks to get a custom design created, it’s easy to set up a great-looking Launch Effect site in just a few hours.

What’s the pricing model? Is there a special offer for AWeber clients?
Launch Effect has a free plan (Lite) and additional features available at Premium levels ($35 for one site and $65 for unlimited sites). The AWeber-Launch Effect integration works with all plans. BONUS: Use code AWEBER10 for a Premium account and take 10% off your Single or Unlimited license.

Create your account with LaunchEffect here

Get step-by-step help integrating AWeber with LaunchEffect

3. Instapage

Honcho: Tyson Quick, CEO of Instapage. Twitter: @Instapage.

Who is this app best suited for?
Small to medium sized businesses that are investing in online advertising, especially PPC.

What sets Instapage apart from other, similar apps?
Instapage is built with simplicity in mind while still providing complete customization and easy to use A/B testing. You don’t have to be designer to get quality results, however you still have enough flexibility to launch a custom campaign that perfectly matches your brand.

What benefits/results can marketers expect from using this integration?
Marketers using Instapage can expect higher conversions as a result of increased advertising relevancy and ongoing A/B split testing.

Why should AWeber customers connect to Instapage right now?
The majority of your advertising budget being spent sending clicks to your homepage is wasted. Expect to drastically boost marketing ROI by sending clicks to targeted and more relevant landing pages instead.

What’s the pricing model?
Instapage offers several pricing tiers, ranging from a free page and $14 per month starter plan to the Unlimited plan ($179 per month). The AWeber-Instapage integration works on the Basic plan ($29 per month) and above.

Create your account with Instapage here

Get step-by-step help integrating AWeber with Instapage

4. SumoMe

Honcho: Noah Kagan, Chief Sumo of AppSumo.com (the team behind SumoMe). Twitter: @AppSumo.

Who is this app best suited for?
List Builder by SumoMe is ideal for someone with a WordPress blog or website who values growing their email list.

What sets SumoMe apart from other, similar apps?
The main reasons people love the List Builder app by SumoMe are:

• Mobile optimized. Nearly 50% of traffic is mobile and most email popups, are not.
• Smart Mode. Figures out the ideal time to ask people to give you their email address.
• Free. No surprise costs. Spend your money on more important things like tacos.

What benefits/results can marketers expect from using this integration?
Most marketers after integration see nearly double their daily email list growth.

Why should AWeber customers connect to SumoMe right now?
Because List Builder by SumoMe is the easiest integration with AWeber to significantly increase your mailing list. Oh yeah, it’s completely free too.

What’s the pricing model? Is there a special offer for AWeber clients?
SumoMe is free to install and use. Install SumoMe by May 8 and AppSumo will invite you to a private AWeber customers-only list-building webinar exploring how they’ve grown to 700,000+ email subscribers. Sign up for that exclusive webinar here.

Create your account with SumoMe here

Get step-by-step help integrating AWeber with SumoMe

5. Lander

Honcho: Fernando Florez, Marketing Manager at Lander. Twitter: @LanderApp.

Who is this app best suited for?
Lander works for all types of businesses from small, medium to even large companies. So, whether you’re a business owner or online marketer with lots of coding and graphic design knowledge or not, Lander has got you covered. If cost-effective PPC campaigns and lead generation is your goal, then Lander is the right platform for you.

What sets Lander apart from other, similar apps?
Lander’s user experience is much more natural and intuitive. No need to waste time and money on graphic designers that often have little to no conversion experience. Lander makes creating professional looking, results oriented landing pages easier and faster than ever.

What benefits/results can marketers expect from using this integration?
Time is money, so an uninterrupted free flow of contacts and data between your Lander landing page forms and AWeber lists is a huge must. This integration lets you synchronize your landing pages and email marketing campaigns. There’s no need to spend precious time manually importing leads directly into your AWeber account, since the data will flow freely between the two.

Why should AWeber customers connect to Lander right now?
You need to capture qualified leads, so you need landing pages to do that. However, you also need to close the loop and target those subscribers with new email campaigns pushing them further down your sales pathway. Integrating Lander with AWeber is a quick, convenient way to accomplish both tasks simultaneously.

What’s the pricing model? Is there a special offer for AWeber clients?
Lander offers a 30 day free trial on all plans, which range from the $9 per month Starter plan to $130 per month Pro plan. The AWeber-Lander integration works on the Small plan ($50 per month) and above. BONUS: Use the code Aweber15%x3 and save 15% for the first 3 months, after your free trial.

Create your account with Lander here

Get step-by-step help integrating AWeber with Lander

6. KickoffLabs

Honcho: Scott Watermasysk, co-founder of KickoffLabs. Twitter: @KickoffLabs.

Who is this app best suited for?
Businesses that want to increase leads by growing the size of the email list with landing pages, contests and lead capture widgets that work with their websites.

What sets KickoffLabs apart from other, similar apps?
Most competitors focus on landing pages. We do that, but also look more completely at the entire campaign. That’s why we integrate directly with our customers’ main websites, add word of mouth marketing via our unique Viral Boost system, and integrate with AWeber to handle autoresponder sequences that are sent out when someone fills out a KickoffLabs form.

What benefits/results can marketers expect from using this integration?
Your customers are everywhere. Our goal is to make it easy to capture leads from Facebook, WordPress, Shopify, etc., then add virality to your email list with referral tracking. Most customers see an instant 30% boost in conversions because of this compared to using a more traditional lead capture form.

Why should AWeber customers connect to KickoffLabs right now?
In minutes you can create a landing page connected to AWeber and publish it to your own domain, Facebook and WordPress. Once published you can start on the path of having your leads generate more leads for you. We also make it easy to setup multiple campaigns all pointing to the same AWeber lists. This way you could have a general signup form, be running a contest, or offering a discount for referrals. All of the additional leads just funnel right back to your primary lists on AWeber.

What’s the pricing model? Is there a special offer for AWeber clients?
KickoffLabs offers a free starter account (branded, single page) and feature plans ranging from $29 per month (Starter) to $99 per month (Business), all with a 30 day free trial. The AWeber-KickoffLabs integration works with all plans. BONUS: KickoffLabs is offering three new AWeber customers six months of free Premium plan service. Mention the AWEBER promotion when creating your new account.

Create your account with KickoffLabs here

Get step-by-step help integrating AWeber with KickoffLabs

7. OptimizePress

Honcho: James Dyson, creator of OptimizePress. Twitter: @OptimizePress.

Who is this app best suited for?
OptimizePress is best suited to entrepreneurs, online marketer or anyone who wants to easily create powerful landing pages, sales pages or any kind of marketing page inside of WordPress without being a designer.

What sets OptimizePress apart from other, similar apps?
The flexibility of the OptimizePress platform sets it apart from other similar apps. Our templates can be easily customized and you can add, move or change elements on any page to fit your brand and product message. There’s also nothing quite like it available for WordPress that allows you to visually see how your pages look without the need for previews.

What benefits/results can marketers expect from using this integration?
You can instantly connect your OptimizePress site to your AWeber account. This means leads from landing pages and opt-in forms you create within OptimizePress are easily sent to the AWeber list of your choosing. If you’re using our membership plugin you can automatically send your buyers through to any of your AWeber lists after they purchase. No need to re-enter code from AWeber each time you setup a new landing page or opt-in form, resulting in faster deployment of pages and more subscribers!

Why should AWeber customers connect to OptimizePress right now?
So you can easily send through your leads and subscribers to AWeber and utilize the power of email broadcasts and follow ups to build a better following for your brand.

What’s the pricing model?
OptimizePress offers its Core Package at a $97 one-time charge and additional feature packages are available. The AWeber-OptimizePress integration works with all plans.

Create your account with OptimizePress here

Get step-by-step help integrating AWeber with OptimizePress

What’s Next?

We never said it would be an easy decision. All of these apps excel at helping you grow your lists and your business in tandem with email, so from here it’s all about which is the best fit for you. We hope this is a valuable starting point.

Plus, we’re adding more integrations all the time, which you can see here in our App Showcase and in our monthly apps roundup posts (April apps roundup, March apps roundup, January apps roundup).

Drop us a comment and let us know which apps you’re using, how they’re working for you and what other integrations you’d like to see.

Are your business problems unique?

Of course they are.

Worried that digital marketing isn’t being customised to your needs?

In my posts, I like to answer real questions that I hear from CEOs and I was having a conversation with a prospect the other day where I was explaining the benefits of inbound marketing.

I was describing how the inbound marketing methodology works and his concern was that it was not unique to his business problems and challenges.

His challenges were to increase awareness of his product and increase sales and leads.

I believe that your business won’t succeed online in 2014 without a content marketing strategy.

According to research conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, 88% of UK businesses use content marketing but only 7% say that it is very effective.

Take a look at the slides below for more information.

Content Marketing in the UK: 2014 Benchmarks, Budgets & Trends from Content Marketing Institute

So what’s going wrong?

Could it be that the strategy is not customised for their business?

I would say that it needs to be customised to the needs and wants of your customers. Your prospects and customers have a set of unique problems related to the products and services that you offer.

Let’s look at this in greater detail below.

The Inbound Marketing Methodology

The Inbound Marketing Methodology is a proven way that turns your website visitors into leads and then customers. This methodology is based on consumer behaviour.

Your customers don’t want to be marketed to anymore, they want to do the research themselves and make their own decisions about whether your product or services will solve their problems.

Inbound marketing’s foundation is about being helpful and answering your customers’ most asked questions and addressing their pain points.

This is no different to what your sales people have been doing in person for years.

The problems people have haven’t changed but the way they seek out the answers that have.

So this is where the confusion sometimes comes from. CEOs like you hear this and think well that’s not how our prospect’s behave and this not unique to our problems.

Let me tell you straight, this is exactly how your prospects are behaving. I would agree that the methodology alone is not unique to you but the framework and strategy is.

Why you need a content marketing framework

You need structure.  A content marketing framework will give you that structure. This for me is why only 7% of businesses are saying it is highly effective.

They create content on a whim and just talk about the latest news of their business.

They may even have a content calendar.

This doesn’t interest your prospects.

You need a framework that you can build your unique business challenges around and create content that is unique to your business needs.

Things your framework should consist of:

• Content that attracts and answers only your prospects questions
• Email marketing that helps to address pain points and is personalised to your prospects needs
• Ebooks, whitepapers and unique research
• Forms that help you to segment your audience
• Calls to actions that trigger a response from only people who need your services
• Landing and sales pages that talk to your prospects

Why your strategy will be unique

Although you have a common framework and methodology, the actual substance of the strategy is unique to your business. Learning more about what your customers’ needs are and listening to the questions they have only makes your solution even more unique to your business.

By segmenting your audience you can personalise each piece of content and every email that you deliver so it talks specifically to the people who are most likely to buy your products.

For example, every email you send as part of your nurturing process will answer a unique question or address a unique pain point.

Your strategy is built around your unique sales process, as every business does this in a different way.

So you see, there is nothing generic about it at all.

Key take aways

There is an old saying that content is king but I like to think more of it as context is king. Although a framework or methodology may be used for many businesses, it is the content that you create to attract and engage only the people who are most likely to buy from you that is unique.

The questions you answer via email and social media will engage and connect only with your audience.

The ebooks and whitepapers that you create will only interest your buyers, prospects, customers and patients.

Now it’s your turn

I am looking for your help with understanding the things that make you think that the marketing companies offer you are not unique to your problems.

What makes you think services are not unique to you?

Let me know in the comments below.

Source: 88% of UK business use content marketing.