Finding and hiring great salespeople, who will work for you and make you money, is very difficult. But why? Let’s take a look at the infographic below to find out.
The post [Infographic] Why Is Hiring Salespeople So Hard? appeared first on SalesDrive.
Image courtesy of StockImages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
When buyers and sellers talk for the first time, historical baggage and preconceived notions are in play. Many undermine a seller's status:
If early in relationships sellers become subservient, they will be at a disadvantage throughout buying cycles. This may culminate (if the buying cycle goes that far) with buyers that have never heard a "no" from sellers pressuring, asking for better pricing.
Learn how to better position yourself as a SME with your buyers. Sign-up for a sales training workshop to get started today.
Some sellers consciously or subconsciously try to get buyers to like them. In my mind this is a slippery slope and starts setting the stage for subordinate relationships. My objective in talking with buyers for the first time is to earn their respect by having them conclude I'm a subject matter expert (SME) as it relates to sales and sales process. I'm embarrassed to confess that early in my selling career, my objective on initial calls was to earn a second meeting. I had no concept that if a buyer wasn't qualified, I shouldn't be wasting my time.
Sellers with complex offerings are well served to call at executive levels. During these calls buyers will not be asking detailed questions about products. Sellers are SME's in that they have forgotten more about their offerings than executives know. This makes it necessary to minimize product discussions and have high level discussions of desired business outcomes, help uncover reasons they can't be achieved and give executives a conceptual idea of how offerings can be used to improve business results.
If sellers can facilitate discussions that executives can participate in, there is a good chance of earning the conclusion that they are SME's. Being respected and liked are not mutually exclusive. My belief is that outcomes can be improved if sellers focus on being respected first. It allows peer vs. subordinate relationships with executive buyers. One advantage of calling high is that buyers will not waste their time, a concern that competent sellers share with them.
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Persuasion is powerful and when you do it well – it’s a win for your audience, a win for your business, and a win for making the world a bit better one presentation at a time.
However, selling can suck. It might make you feel awkward. It can make your audience feel uncomfortable (or heaven forbid manipulated), but persuasion doesn’t have to ooze sleaze.
These 7 tips are designed to make you persuasive presentation shine (and leave your audience longing to find out more about what you have to offer).
It’s time for research. Before you even think about typing a word of your presentation, you’ve got to spend time getting to know the audience.
Understand their worldview. Who are they? What do they believe about your message? Where do your beliefs align? Where are they different?
When you know what the audience believes about your message, it’s easier to find the common ground. And knowing what you have in common makes changing their beliefs a whole lot easier.
The audience’s result – not your result (mo’ money, mo’ clients, mo’ profits).
It’s easier to persuade when you know exactly how you make someone’s life better. The stunning result that you uniquely provide.
You need to be clear as a bell on the transformation your product or service provides for the audience.
I’ve got a nose for spotting sleazy persuasive tactics from a mile a way. I’m a persuasion cynic.
“Run to the back of the room right now!” – the first person who pops up is a plant. But social proof is an incredible motivator, so other people start to run.
Giving you an incentive to show up at a sales talk (you know…on vacation in Cabo going for the time share pitch), then at the end if you don’t buy the sales dude guilts you by talking about how much he is giving you.
Making people feel guilty, pressured, and manipulated to get what the speaker wants is sure-fire sign of a sleazy tactic in action.
The goal is to for you to feel good about your ask and for the audience to feel like it was the natural next step in your presentation.
How do you do that?
The key to losing the sleaze?
Always be creating a value for the audience.
I recently chatted with a sales person who told me that his persuasive strategy was to completely overwhelm his audience with information so that they don’t have any choice but hire him.
Ick!
The problem is that he has no idea what value he creates for the audience. Overwhelm is not a compelling reason to buy.
To create value, give your best tip away for FREE! Yes, you read that right – give your best idea to away. Give the audience something that they can implement right after your presentation.
When you create value, the next natural step is talking about how you can create EVEN more value. (Need help figuring out what the best tip is for your audience…check out my Presentation Sweet Spot Guide that motivates your audience to action).
During every sales presentation or conversation, there comes a time when you need your listeners to imagine a future with you in it.
Story is the perfect vehicle for time travel.
Stories fire up our mirror neurons.
Well-told stories engage our brains and make people feel like the story is happening to them.
They see themselves in your story.
Not only that human are hard wired to relate a story to themselves. How many times have you told a story only to have a friend say to you “That reminds of a time that I….”?
Adding stories to your marketing arsenal inspires the “Heck, yeah — this business is for me” response!
You’ve created value, proved your worth and engaged your audience’s brains with story now you need to offer up that invitation.
The biggest issue that I see in presentations is that the call-to-action is confusing. Multiple offers. No immediate next step. Guessing to figure out how they can sign up to work with you.
All that leads to too much effort to act on your offer. Clarity is essential about your ONE offer and exactly what the audience needs to do to act on it!
Your offer is an invitation. Some times people accept your invitation and some times they don’t. Just like sometimes your friends want to go grab a drink with you and sometimes they don’t.
Sure, it can be disappointing but an audience knows when your business is riding on a pitch. They smell the desperation and that’s a big turn-off. The best way is to invite them into what you’ve got to the offer, and let go of what happens next.
The goal is to feel good about persuasion and make your audience feel great about what you offer. Your business is built to serve the world and help people.
Go out an give incredibly persuasive presentation. If you need help creating a presentation that motivate action, download the Presentation Sweet Spot Guide for crafting a presentation that persuades and inspires.
In the golden heyday of advertising, art and emotion called the shots. Then the digital wave of internet and informatics rolled in, and now sales and marketing are more scientific than ever: whitewashed in analytics and hightailing it on the sea of precision.
Don’t get us wrong: Numbers are absolutely crucial to tracking marketing ROI and sustaining sales success. But you’ve got to stop letting them dictate your every move. You have to put the person back into your B2B buyer.
Seth Godin tells us that connection is a scarcity in today’s digital economy. And he’s right. There’s an onslaught of information, but a lack of authenticity. That’s why you need to reset the scales and really get to know the person behind those sterile sales analytics: the person keeping your business alive.
This is your buyer. Say hello.
Lift your head up from the numbers for a second (you can get back to laser-focus analytics later) and really see the B2B buyer. You may not recognize him. He’s different than he used to be.
Technology has done wonders for your buyers’ information accessibility – so much so that they’re reaching out to your sales team when they’re already 60% through the sales process. Armed with education, a buyer gets dangerous if you don’t acknowledge his knowledge.
You don’t want to make the buyer wait. With all that knowledge of your industry, offerings and competitors, he’s not going to stand around and beg you to compel him. Bore the B2B buyer, and say goodbye.
This means that there’s a big difference between 1) what we think and 2) what we think we think. Douglas Van Praet, author of Unconscious Branding, puts it nicely:
“Our conscious minds are designed to think up stories to try to explain and make meaning of the hidden forces and hardwired neural programs that guide our behavior.”
You may be thinking that emotional connections only apply to B2C companies like shoe stores and wineries. It’s true that most of the studies on emotion-laden, sensory-stimulated purchases are focused on consumers, but B2B buyers are people, too. Don’t forget that!
A study conducted by Google and CEB’s Marketing Leadership Council found that B2B buyers are often more emotionally connected to their vendors and service providers than consumers are. Here are some of the findings:
And the kicker: DemandGen reports that 90% of business buyers are saying, “When I’m ready to buy, I’ll find you.” This is after they’ve absorbed enough content to feel comfortable approaching a sales team. So whether this comfort-priming content comes from your marketing department, and whether it’s your sales team the buyer’s approaching, is all up to you.
Your sales success undoubtedly depends on the emotional and educational connections your sales reps and your marketing content make with your buyers.
Improve your reps’ connection to your buyers.
Help your reps be cognizant of new B2B buyer behavior so they’re able to connect with the authenticity of true sales enablement.
That number-crunching is crucial to getting results and tracking results. But you mustn’t lose sight of the person behind the numbers: the person visiting your website, downloading your content and buying your products and services.
“Economies are always based on scarcity (hence the term ‘economize’).” There is no market for humming, for example, because everyone has unlimited humming at their disposal at all times. So, in the abundant digital world, what’s scarce? Where is the economy? It’s in connection. Who trusts you? Who wants to hear from you? Who will collaborate and support and engage with you? These are things that don’t scale to infinity. These are precious resources.
In the connection economy, we reward art and innovation and things worth talking about. We seek out transparency and generosity and the long-term. Sure, there are still people who will profit in the short-run by burning the assets they’ve got, but as we get ever more connected, that’s just not going to scale.
Connection and leadership and trust are going to get ever more valuable. Sure, go ahead and shake your head in agreement, but when you get back to work, are you busy working in the scarce universe or trying to build a place for yourself in the new one?”
– Seth Godin, “Scarcity And Abundance In The Digital Age”
The takeaway: Don’t let your sales team be limited by a scarcity of authentic connection with your buyers.
Click below to see how the right sales and marketing technology cultivates that critical connection between your reps and your buyers. It’s time to put the person back into the buyer persona with sales enablement tools.
I recently wrote an article discussing ways to measure content marketing performance in association with brand awareness, thought leadership, and engagement metrics — three important goals for B2B marketers in 2014. But lead generation and customer acquisition are also important goals for content marketing programs; in fact, they are second and third on the priority list, according to CMI’s 2014 B2B Content Marketing Trends report. This tie-in is particularly critical when aligning marketing to the broader sales initiative.
In this article, I plan to dive into techniques for measuring the marketing effectiveness of the content we create for these critical goals, and discuss a model for establishing lead generation and customer acquisition performance metrics that my company uses in the campaigns we run. Hopefully you will find these ideas and tactics to be helpful in your organization’s evaluation of B2B content marketing campaigns, as well.
First off, it’s important to realize that not all content marketing assets are designed to drive immediate, sales-ready leads for an organization. There is a spectrum of content marketing assets, each with its own relationship to prospecting goals and business objectives — concepts that Eloqua did an excellent job of (re-)outlining in its 2011 infographic, The Content Grid.
The important takeaway from this was that content marketers must develop and track the awareness of content assets across a range of buyer behaviors and search objectives. As was also noted in my company’s recent B2B Web Usability Report, 50 percent of survey respondents indicated they visit a vendor’s website three to five times before contacting a vendor.
To give your B2B content marketing program a chance to prove that it is worth investing in, it is essential to track multiple conversion types in your web reporting software, broken down by sales readiness level. One mechanism for doing this is through Goal Tracking in Google Analytics.
Some of the types of conversions we recommend breaking out based on sales readiness include (from highest priority for sales communication):
Implementation tips: Goals across the various levels of conversion action can be established through your reporting software. For more details on this, check out this post on tracking and monetizing your website conversions, as well as Google Analytics’ specific conversion tracking instructions.
Of course, expectations for conversion rates and overall volume per conversion type need to shift, as well. For example, sales-ready conversions will often be lower than the conversion rates and volume associated with more informational or research-oriented conversion types.
The good news is that when B2B marketers define a more comprehensive level of goal tracking through Google Analytics, we can achieve a much greater understanding of the lead generation impact of content marketing performance.
B2B marketers can’t put all of their content marketing assets behind form submissions and pay walls, no matter how much of a benefit this might provide for lead-gen and customer acquisition efforts. (For example, are you really going to require a form submission to view a case study or watch a customer success video? I hope not.) For measuring the marketing effectiveness of assets that are less sales-ready, Google Analytics event tracking is one solution.
By adding a simple piece of code to links associated with images, navigation tabs, graphics, and hyperlinks, B2B marketers can build more effective reports on how visitors interact with their website and content assets. This is invaluable for understanding whether or not the content published online is actually being accessed beyond standard “page views” or “entrances.”
What can B2B marketers measure through event tracking? Consider the following:
Implementation tips: Carrie Hill shares an easy-to-follow tutorial for setting up event tracking in this article and Google offers a more comprehensive resource in its developer center.
A few recommendations to consider:
From the customer acquisition standpoint, marketing automation prospect reports are one of the best tools we have for learning what pages and site assets a prospect has viewed. It’s also the perfect report for demonstrating how impactful content is at turning those prospects into customers.
Here are a couple screenshot examples from marketing automation tools we use on behalf of our client initiatives:
An example of Pardot’s visitor page views report:
Marketo’s activity log report (via Leadsloth):
Reports like these help B2B marketers illustrate the number of times a prospect viewed the content marketing assets they’ve developed. As prospects turn into closed sales, further analysis of these reports can be done to demonstrate the impact of content marketing efforts and their influence on the sales process.
One final report in Google Analytics that might be helpful is the navigational summary associated to content marketing asset activity, which can be found thusly:
Behavior à All Pages à “PAGE” (i.e., web address of content marketing asset) à toggle to “Navigation Summary” tab
The navigation summary illustrates “Next Page Paths,” or the next web page on the site that visitors went during their session. In the screenshot below, I am highlighting pages that visitors viewed, which were specific to products and solutions pages related to the article we developed, as well as pages with direct form submissions/sales-ready calls-to-action.
Unfortunately, this report does not confirm goal completion, but it can help B2B content marketers support the relationship between content marketing assets developed and connectivity to more sales-oriented material.
Social media should also play a strong part in demonstrating content marketing performance. Unfortunately, social share counts can sometimes be seen as more of a vanity metric and don’t really explain the story of how impactful social was (or was not) in lead generation or customer acquisition efforts. For B2B content marketers to truly align social sharing with customer engagement, or even with thought leadership, a deeper evaluation of the people who are sharing your content is required.
Here are a few recommended ways for tracking this performance:
We don’t really use commercial software for tracking social media performance, outside of a handful of SEO tools with built in monitoring solutions. And in these specific cases, I don’t find their monitoring solutions powerful enough in the evaluation of social mentions we need, for content marketing evaluation.
As such, most of our performance monitoring in this area is handled somewhat manually. I am pretty certain more comprehensive social media reporting platforms allow for some type of tracking and archiving of influential conversations and engagement. The key would be defining the objectives of conversations and mentions being tracked. (I’d love to read your perspective and feedback on the topic of commercial social media monitoring solutions in the comments below.)
At the end of the day, the marketing tie-in to the sales process and customer journey are critical. Hopefully these tactics and measurement strategies help demonstrate success in those efforts for your content marketing initiatives.
Did I miss anything? I certainly welcome feedback and perspective via comments below.
Looking for additional guidance on ways to manage today’s biggest content marketing challenges? Sign up for our new Content Marketing Institute Online Training and Certification program. Access over 35 courses, taught by experts from Google, Mashable, SAP, and more.
Cover image via Bigstock
Think content marketing, and immediately a blog springs to mind. But a company blog is only the starting point.
Intelligent content marketing involves not only content production, but distribution as well. Only 36% of marketers feel that they use their content effectively. The need of the hour is a systematic approach to content marketing.
The most important questions are always the basic ones.
Businesses exist to make money. To do that, your website must attract the right kind of traffic and generate qualified sales leads – two of the top metrics that marketers are interested in. The content that you generate, either to publish on your own site or to distribute across various channels, must always tie back to these basic goals of attracting the right traffic and nurturing them through every step of the sales funnel.
An efficient content marketing engine will have content production as one of its key functions. Superior understanding of customers will help you decide what type of content to produce and how you want to communicate to your audience.
Marketers adopt different content marketing formats ranging from social media and articles to annual reports and games. The type of content plays a significant role in audience engagement. The content marketing matrix by Smart Insights is an excellent starting point for marketers to understand the type of content that suits their buyer personas.
A blog forms the core of any content marketing strategy, fueling search engine optimization and the sales process. Develop your blog as your content hub because you own it and it is therefore immune from the caprices of third-party platforms. Hubspot’s 2013 research shows that the company blog is the second most important source of customers, topped only by Facebook. It also appears that the more regularly you blog, the better your chances of finding a customer. 82% of marketers who blog daily acquire customers through their blog as opposed to only 57% who blog monthly.
Invest significantly in your blog – build it on a strong platform, publish great content frequently, and track your results.
Video content is ideal for companies that want to explain complex concepts clearly and want to connect deeply with their audience. There appears to be lots of opportunity for video. In fact, YouTube is boldly predicting that 90% of all web traffic will soon be video content.
Toyota is using audio as an innovative way to introduce their brand voice in a musical way. They are building the sound of their brand in conjunction with Pandora, which holds a ton of insightful information on the music preferences of their huge listener base. Music evokes a strong emotional response, and Toyota’s inspired audio campaign capitalizes on this.
Images can also be used to evoke an emotional response if used appropriately. Buzzfeed overtook The Huffington Post in December 2013 as the top publisher on Facebook, taking the lead with 750,000 more shares. Buzzfeed is a brilliant example of content marketing through images and lists. People love images, especially if they speak to them. Use large images with proper open graph tags in your blog. The Yoast WordPress plugin can take care of this for you.
Curating relevant content for your audience can establish you as a go-to resource for your target market. Some of the most leading Twitterati are excellent curators who have committed themselves to finding great content and sharing it. In fact, the only way to not come across as a self-absorbed, navel-gazing noisemaker is to share other people’s content judiciously. Add your own insightful commentary to the content that you curate and share on your blog and social media channels.
If you aren’t satisfied with the usual formats, Hubspot suggests 14 new types of content for you to try.
The latest Forrester report titled “Put Distribution at The Heart of Content Marketing” highlights the importance of planning for the distribution and discovery of content. 87% of B2B marketers are now using social media to distribute content.
Facebook is the topmost source of customers for brands. And engagement comes not just through posts – companies can even sell on Facebook stores directly. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, and Instagram are all platforms that you should consider to be part of your overall content strategy.
Deeply understand where your target demographic spends time online, the best way to communicate with them (content format), how frequently and at what times you must publish, and how to structure your communication for maximum effectiveness. Are you going to use social media channels only to drip feed your own content and lead the readers back to your blog, or do you want to generate paying customers right there? In addition to amplifying content, social signals will also factor into improving your search rankings, according to Moz’s 2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors survey.
Guest blogging was recently the topic of heated debate in the content marketing community after Matt Cutts talked about how it is being abused to build links. But the thing is, that kind of “guest blogging” was never the right thing to do. The only reason to publish a post on another blog is to build a genuine relationship with the blog owner, and to add value to their readers. Essentially, you are writing for someone else for free, the only compensation being goodwill and opportunity to build your reputation as a subject matter expert. Do it right, and you’ll create some great links while also attracting several new readers to your own blog. Pitch for a guest post the right way to maximize your chances of being asked to contribute.
An ecosystem of vendors is now in place to help marketers drive distribution of branded content. Companies like Taboola, aNEWSme, OneSpot, and Outbrain are all paid services that can distribute your content in either advertorial or native format. Make use of these services to get your content right where they need to be – in front of your target demographic.
Increase your outreach by integrating your content with your PR strategy. Consider reaching out with a targeted pitch to reporters and publications that discuss your subject matter. By being proactive about pitching editors, industry influencers, and journalists, you may be able to get your content featured in some highly coveted spaces. Consider this case study that illustrates how earned media coverage earned 1200 leads in just a few weeks.
To recap, content marketing is not just about publishing content to a blog. Start by figuring out your business and marketing goals, and understanding your customers. Decide on suitable content formats, formulate a content production plan, and allocate necessary resources. Integrate distribution into your content strategy to put your content in front of your target audience.
2013 was the year of content marketing. Hopefully, in 2014 marketers will also pay attention to distribution. Adopt an umbrella approach to content marketing to ensure that you consistently produce great content and also bring it to the people who care.
Twitter's stock collapsed after its Q1 2014 earnings call mainly because the social media company's user metrics didn't meet analysts' expectations. That happened last time, on Twitter's Q4 2013 call, too.
But there was a subtle difference between the two calls. On the previous call, Twitter's investor relations staff tweeted out various charts showing the company's performance over time.
This time around, Twitter IR did not tweet out this slide from the earnings presentation:
It shows the number of timeline views — users who look at their tweet streams, basically. It's a measure of engagement, or how heavily focused on Twitter users are. The good news is that sequentially, timeline views are up. The bad news is that they're actually still lower than they were in Q3 2013. In other words, Twitter engagement might — might — still be trending down.
Right now, TWTR is trading almost entirely on its user metrics, because CEO Dick Costolo delivered good financial results.
On the previous earnings call, Twitter IR tweeted out this chart and it became the focus of an unpleasant discussion between analysts and Costolo on the earnings call. This time around, the chart was only published in Twitter's investor materials, not on the Twitter IR account itself.
And there is an even worse chart in Twitter's slideshow for Q1:
This chart appears to show that timeline engagement among Twitter users has declined sequentially for three straight quarters among international users. That's a disaster. Even in the US, timeline engagement is down in all of the last four quarters bar one.
Clearly, the user engagement issue is not fixed.
SEE ALSO: Twitter's stock plunges after earnings reveal weaker-than-expected user growth
Have you ever wondered how weather and temperature impact a consumer’s buying behavior? Of course, on a hot summer day, many of us seek out the nearest ice cream truck or shop to cool off with an icy dessert.
But did you know that weather can also impact your store traffic and sales volume in particular product categories? When temperatures fall in the winter, your ice cream sales will fall while your oatmeal sales increase. Similarly, understanding how temperature and weather impact consumer behavior is a vital piece in the journey to maximize your company’s sales potential.
Most of us turn on the television every morning to see our local forecast for the upcoming week. However, the Weather Channel can now help marketers learn more than just when it is going to rain.
Marketers can turn to the Weather Channel to understand when consumers are going to buy certain products. Different weather variables like precipitation, temperature, pollen count, and UV Index impact our moods and influence our purchasing decisions.
By tracking every state’s zip codes, marketers can also reach consumers with their products at the right moments. For instance, bug spray tends bug spray tends to sell well in the spring in Dallas when its dew-point is below average.
By tailoring your advertising, you can make it easier to get your products into consumers’ hands. And by effectively using the data that the Weather Channel collects, you will be able to market your products better.
Currently, psychologists and economists have noticed that consumers give into projection bias. Basically, as consumers, we fail to predict how much our current taste and preferences will match our future ones. Thus, we tend to constantly make decisions that might not be best over time.
For example, Projection bias happens when we are grocery shopping and hungry. As many have experienced, heading to the grocery store hungry and without a shopping list can result in unexpected purchases on junk food and other snacks. Ultimately, , our present desire to eat can derail our long term goal of eating healthy.
Temperature and weather clearly play a part in this, proving that purchasing items is not always because of our needs. Researchers have now noticed that projection bias and weather go hand in hand. They can influence when consumers make important purchases like houses and cars.
The terrible winter that the U.S. has experienced this year kept consumers at home and not spending money. Yet, as temperatures continue to rise, consumers are starting to spend again.
When potential buyers feel comfortably warm, they tend to be more interested and want to buy products they see. When thermometers are displaying warm and pleasant temperatures, customers have a better perception of the products they are interested in purchasing. As researchers explain, “exposure to physical warmth activates the concept of emotional warmth.”
The study proved that temperatures influence consumer behavior. The study included three experiments where participants’ purchasing habits were examined between warm and cold temperatures. In the third experiment, where a group of participants were placed in the warmest room, they were willing to pay more for 9 of the 11 products than the other group.
According to the study’s results, the optimal temperature for increased consumer purchasing is 78 degrees Fahrenheit. Store owners should consider setting their thermostats to this temperature and see for themselves the impact that temperature plays on consumer behavior.
To increase sales, consider creating a sense of warmth in your customers’ shopping experiences. By doing this, shopper’s will have an improved sense of comfort and be more inclined to stick around longer in your store. This sense of warmth will also make your customers more inclined to spend more money.
Perception of the product and product placement can also affect whether a consumer will ultimately purchase the item. For instance, the atmosphere of your store may be more influential than the actual products being sold. By creating a comfortable store atmosphere and environment, you will see increased sales — you’ll be making your product better appeal to buyers.
No matter what type of business you own, weather is a large part of your consumers’ buying behavior. Consider your marketing and advertising strategies, and warm your customers up!
There’s a mistake that I see bloggers, website owners and even web developers make all the time.
The problem is thinking that traffic should come before anything else.
And that’s just wrong.
Here’s the truth:
If your website isn’t setup to convert visitors into subscribers or buyers then you’re doing it wrong.
Don’t get me wrong, you need traffic in the end but if your website isn’t converting then you may as well just flush your money down the toilet.
There are a lot of different tools on the market that can help you get your conversion rates up and in this post I’m going to show you exactly what those tools are.
Before we dive into this post…
I get a lot of questions from both clients and readers of my personal blog about how to improve conversions.
Since I use WordPress for almost everything when it comes to my blog and also a lot of our clients are moving to WordPress based systems I tend to write with a bias towards WordPress.
So for this post I wanted to keep WordPress out of it and take a look at tools that don’t need WordPress.
Although if you’re a WordPress user and now thinking you won’t get anything out of this post, there’s no need to worry because all of these tools can be used with WordPress if that’s what you use.
One of the main reasons why most websites don’t convert is because there isn’t a clear call to action (CTA).
A call to action doesn’t look like much but without them you’re going to struggle.
It could just be a button on an opt-in form asking users to sign up or it could be a buy now button for a product. It could even be a download button for a free report.
Whatever your CTA is, it needs to stand out and be clear so your visitors know exactly what you want them to do.
Lead Converter is a very useful tool that you can use to display your calls to action within pages and as a lightbox popover along with a number of other positions on your website.
It’s also possible to use this tool to create surveys which can come in very useful (I’ll talk about some specific feedback tools in a moment).
You also get real-time analytics so you can see exactly what’s happening with your campaigns.
Pricing: free, paid plans start at $5/month
One statistic that has been going around recently is that over 70% of your visitors will never return to your website.
Bounce Exchange uses ‘exit intent’ technology.
This means that when a visitor is on your website and goes to leave the page – a popup will be displayed in an attempt to capture their data.
There are a number of platforms on the market that use this technology but the big difference here is that you get a dedicated ‘Conversion Director’ to take care of the work for you and help you get the most out of your campaign.
This is definitely reflected in the price but having someone who works with this type of thing every day is a valuable asset.
Pricing: starts at $2,995
Exit Monitor is a great alternative to Bounce Exchange that comes in at a much lower price point because you don’t get the ‘Conversion Director’ to work on your campaign.
You can also integrate various applications – this makes it easy to tie in your mailing list provider.
Editing opt-in forms does require the use of HTML/CSS.
Pricing: free trial, paid plans start at $249/month
Analytics packages and other usability related tools can tell you a lot but the data you get is quantitative. And you need that data but you also need to be sourcing qualitative data.
Qualitative data like feedback from surveys and that type of thing will give you a real insight into exactly what your websites visitors are thinking.
Understanding what your visitors want is essential in order to convert them into leads.
Survey Monkey is the tool that I use to collect feedback from readers of my blog.
It’s got a straight forward tool for building surveys that get as complicated as you want to make them.
You can then share the survey through a special URL or even embed it on your site. It’s also possible to collect data via Facebook.
On the paid accounts you get advanced customisation and even A/B testing on some accounts.
Pricing: free, paid plans available
Polldaddy is another popular surveying tool – it can also be used for polls, quizzes and ratings on your content.
It’s owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress so you can rest assured that it’s well maintained.
The great thing about Polldaddy is that even the free account doesn’t have limits. Paid accounts will allow custom browsing, custom URL’s, printable PDF’s and a number of other features.
Pricing: free, paid plans available
Qualaroo is a great tool that will allow you to get a lot more responses to your survey by displaying it in a popup widget at the bottom right hand corner of your website.
You can ask an open ended question or you can display multiple choice options and get the information you need.
There’s even a library of questions for you to include and the popups displayed can be customised with your brands logo.
Pricing: starts at $63/month
Olark is a live chat widget that you can display in the bottom right hand corner of your site.
It’s great at grabbing your visitors attention and get them talking to you.
You can use it to offer live support and choose to switch to offline mode when your team are busy or whenever you prefer to.
When offline mode is enabled it will essentially act as a contact form which makes things much easier for your visitors – they won’t have to hunt around your site for a way to get in touch.
Pricing: starts at $17/month
User Echo is another great approach to customer feedback is the use of support communities.
Setting up a forum for this can be tedious but User Echo allows for easy setup and a feedback tab to be displayed at a fixed position on the side of your website.
You can also use this to operate a helpdesk or live chat system to serve your existing customers better.
Pricing: free, paid plans start at $15/month
As the title of the popular usability book by Steve Krug goes – “Don’t Make Me Think”
It says it all really.
If your visitor lands on your website and doesn’t know what to do then you aren’t going to be helping your conversion rate at all.
The following tools will give you a head start and help you improve usability:
Usability Hub provides one of the most affordable solutions to get in feedback about specific elements of your site.
Just put together a few designs or a mock-up or two and you can put together a test that other users will be able to take part in.
Pricing: free if you do tests for others, paid plans start at $20/month
Understanding how users behave on your site is an essential step to improving usability on your website.
Crazy Egg will provide visual overlays and snapshots of user behaviour – this includes probably the most well-known visualisation, the heat map.
There’s also click-tracking overlays and scroll maps.
Pricing: free trial, paid plans start at $9/month
I love visualisations and this is another tool that gives you access to heat maps that track mouse movement and click-rates.
Another thing that ClickTale does is actually record videos of how visitors interact with your site.
Seeing a snapshot works well but these visitor recordings take things to the next level. They do take a lot more time to sift through though.
Pricing: free, paid plan available
Landing pages are a necessity.
Whether you’re offering a free piece of content like an eBook or you’re selling a product/service – you need to use them.
By landing page, I don’t just mean any old page on your site where a visitor might ‘land’ but more specifically a page that is designed to capture information from your visitor.
Creating landing pages that converted well used to involve hiring a designer or getting a development team involved.
That’s a thing of the past now thanks to these tools that make it incredibly easy to create landing pages:
LeadPages can take care of the hosting of landing pages for you or you can download the code to upload the page to your site.
Or you can use the WordPress plugin – either way, you’ll have a landing page fully setup in an incredibly short amount of time.
The editor allows you to customise almost anything and you have access to an ever expanding selection of mobile friendly templates.
One thing that I especially like is that they include a conversion rate alongside all of the available templates.
Pricing: $37/month+
Megaphone is a solid alternative to LeadPages.
You won’t get some of the advanced features of LeadPages such as LeadBoxes but the price is much more affordable.
Megaphone is pitched as a system that won’t let you mess up landing pages and you get real-time statistics so you know exactly what is happening.
Pricing: $19/month
Unbounce provides you with a straight forward drag and drop editor along with a powerful form builder. This makes it easy to make changes to any of the 80+ available templates.
You can incorporate social widgets, video, file downloads and other important elements.
You get real-time stats built in and also the option to setup your own split tests.
Note: you can now purchase Unbounce templates from Theme Forest.
Pricing: $49/month
If you’re not testing designs on your website, you are missing a huge opportunity to boost conversions.
You can take the data you have generated from feedback, surveys and also your analytics packages and use it to inform design changes to specific pages on your site.
These tools make testing incredibly easy:
The biggest pain point in creating design variations for split testing is actually the time it takes to mess around with the design.
Also if you hired a developer to create the site it can be very costly to get these variations created.
With Optimizely you can just add your URL and the page will be imported into an editor that you can use to easily make changes and generate multiple variations for testing.
Pricing: $19/month
Visual Website Optimizer comes in at a higher price point than Optimizely but you do get access to a lot more features so you will need to take a look at your goals and what you really need – both are really solid tools for testing conversions.
Some of the additional testing features include:
There’s also support for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento and more.
Pricing: $49/month
Content Experiments is a free alternative but it involves a lot more work to setup.
Just add a snippet of code to your website and add the URL’s for your design variations and you will be able to split traffic between those different design variations. This is all done as visitors access the URL for your original page.
It’s a great free alternative but the extra work involve means Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer could work out cheaper in the long run.
Pricing: free
If you don’t have a way to track and monitor your conversions then you are not going to have a clue what is happening at all.
These tools will help you track and monitor conversions better along with gaining an insight into what’s happening on your website.
Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool that is available for free.
The data that’s available here is incredible although the one thing that I find somewhat lacking is its ability to track traffic from social media sites (which Google Analytics does, just not as well as I’d like).
Despite that, it’s well worth getting installed.
Pricing: free, paid plans available
Google Analytics can only tell you so much and just knowing what happened sometimes isn’t enough.
KISSmetrics will tell you exactly who did what on your website. Even if it took them months to make a purchase – you will know who made the purchase and the value of that customer along with all of their historical data. You will know exactly how they interacted with your website.
Pricing: free trial, paid plans start at $150/month
Woopra is another solid analytics package with a similar focus to KISSmetrics.
This system works based on actions which could include; page views, sign ups, downloads and purchases for example.
There is also a free plan available that will give you a quota of 30,000 actions/month which is a great way to get a feel for the platform.
Pricing: free, paid plans start at $79.95/month
I mentioned earlier that I purposefully left WordPress plugins out of this post.
I generally write a lot about WordPress but a lot of questions that I have received lately have been to the tune of “well what if I don’t use WordPress?”
Whichever CMS you are using (WordPress included) or even if you aren’t using any CMS – these tools will help you no matter what.
This is not an exhaustive list by any means – but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere, right?!
I would love to know which tools you would add to the list and why?
Many peer-to-peer startups would like us to believe they are rekindling faith in human integrity. But think twice before you start to feel all warm and fuzzy.
Trusting thy neighbor: It's the supposed premise of so many startups in the "sharing economy." Renting your cozy bed to a complete stranger on Airbnb, jumping in a non-professional's car for an UberX ride, or dropping your pooch off at a nearby home via DogVacay while you're out of town: Each of these acts, seems on its surface to require a hearty scoop of trust.
Even the names this somewhat-recent spate of fast-growth companies, mostly out of San Francisco, coined for themselves seem crafted to channel trust: "collaborative consumption," and "peer to peer" are both nearly as common as saying a company is part of the sharing economy. And it's all so friendly, it's tempting to make claims that these companies have the potential to restore something that's dwindled in modern urban America: trusting fellow humans.
Institutionalizing TrustIt's a dreamy thought. But let's be real: These companies are digital marketplaces designed to scale quickly, easily, and with their only size limit being the population of earth. A recent Wired cover story seemed poised to explore how companies in the sharing economy foster compassion, community, and trust, but it actually surfaced a more complex and compelling argument, one with which I agree: These companies actually have built quite a sturdy backbone of protections for users (certainly these fail from time-to-time, but mostly they exist) that they've eliminated much of the need for that elusive trust by customers. Wired's Jason Tanz writes:
Indeed, for the time being the boundaries of the sharing economy are protected fairly rigidly. If you’ve ever been caught driving more than 20 miles over the speed limit, you can’t rent a car on RelayRides. Aspiring Lyft drivers must pass a background and DMV check and get approved by a mentor, who judges applicants not just on driving ability but on personality. DogVacay hosts go through a five-step vetting process that includes training videos, quizzes, and a telephone interview.
This sort of institutionalized trust can be, as Tanz notes, "in tech-industry parlance, a high-friction affair." Consider the case of eBay, arguably the first major peer-to-peer marketplace. The company had no desire to or interest in forcing every individual who wanted to sell a pair of once-worn Louboutins to become a licensed shopkeeper. So it created another way of regulating members of its community: Peer-to-peer ratings and reviews. And the beauty of the system was that it didn't rely on employees of eBay to monitor every account, constantly. It could rely on light monitoring for problematic activity, along with algorithms that could help flag fraud. Individual buyers and sellers helped this process along, by rating each other and providing feedback to the system. This crowdsourced quality-control would become a hallmark of the sharing economy.
Eventually, eBay could guarantee, based on a combination of these safeguards, every transaction. And “In so doing, eBay evolved from a passive host to an active participant in every transaction,” Tanz writes.
Last week I spoke to John Zimmer, the co-founder and president of Lyft, and mentioned the article. He said that protecting customers by providing safeguards that make them feel safe to open up and trust is "a real responsibility."
"We need to be doing everything we can to provide a platform for users that's as safe as it can be," he said. "We take that really seriously."
In comparing the evolution of the modern marketplace economy to the explosion of institutional banking and insurance in the early 20th century, Tanz continues: “this new system acted as a trust proxy; it didn’t require people to trust one another, because they could rely on a centralized system to protect their interests.”
The digital marketplace as a trust proxy: Now this makes a lot more sense.
In a book he co-authored called The Trusted Advisor, Charles H. Green, a speaker and author, wrote: "The sharing economy is itself a play in a much grander fundamental shift from an infrastructure that protects people from each other to an infrastructure that helps people trust each other."
Over at Forbes, journalist Kashmir Hill argues that much of that infrastructure is in one place: Facebook. That's because it's the preferred sign-in and identify verification of the sharing economy. Therefore, she hypothesizes that "eventually, we will all have star ratings attached to Facebook profiles or something like them, with reviews from many different contexts. This will have some significant (and potentially horrifying) privacy implications, much as Google footprints have in the digital world."
Zimmer, the Lyft president, told me he believes his ride-sharing company would function just as well without using Facebook as an identity-verification platform.
Facebook sign-in or no, I'll buy that small interactions between users of these companies can be meaningful, and therefore exhibit--and maybe even help foster future--interpersonal trust in communities. And perhaps, all those little experiences compounded do mean the industry as a whole is nudging trust. But because there's so much at play that's so highly designed by any given peer-to-peer startup to feel like trust, any real, organic, sense of trust in a grander sense still feels like a hologram.
I recently had the opportunity to see Daniel Pink speak about his latest book, To Sell is Human, at the SAVO Sales Enablement Summit in Chicago. In fact, this was the second time I’ve had the opportunity to hear Dan speak on the topic (although this time I had the pleasure of following him on the main stage). If you’ve read the book, you’ll be familiar with his main tenants but I wanted to share a few takeaways and how they tie into much of what we are seeing at CEB.
The one big insight that Dan emphasized was that “sales has changed more in the last 10 years than in the last 100.” And why is that? Dan shares that in the past, the buyer-seller relationship was one of information asymmetry. We, the sellers and suppliers, held all (or most) of the information. That gave us the power. This is what created the idea of “buyer beware”. But then something happened. Information asymmetry disappeared because buyers had access to information like never before. This empowerment created a different dynamic, one that Dan called “seller beware”. This is what we’ve been sharing with many of you over the years with our research findings on customer buying behavior – the fact that customers have completed, on average, 57% of their buying process before engaging suppliers. We’d absolutely agree with Dan – sales has changed dramatically in recent past because customers are empowered with more information than ever before; that their ability to learn on their own has changed the nature of sales.
Dan went on to share three core ideas, that to him and his research, define successful sellers in this new “seller beware” world. He calls them the “ABCs of Selling”. While inspired by Alec Baldwin’s character, Blake, in Glengarry Glen Ross, he isn’t talking about Always, Be, Closing; rather he uses the ABCs this way:
It’s been interesting to listen to Dan (and read his book), because much of his findings and thoughts align and support the conversations we have been having with CEB Sales members. It also provides additional support and confirmation for the Insight Selling journey many are now on, most especially attunement and clarity. When Dan speaks of clarity, all I think is commercial insight. Teaching customers something they underappreciate or don’t recognize. When I hear attunement, I think the Challenger skill of tailoring, to have conversations that resonate with each individual stakeholder.
What we continue to see in the commercial marketplace is that our sales and marketing organizations HAVE to change approaches and behaviors to grow in a “seller beware” world.
CEB Sales Members, learn more about Challenger Selling, and visit the Challenger Starter Kit for recommended tools and resources. Also, register for one of our upcoming Challenger workshop series on Challenger Messaging or Challenger Sales Process and Opportunity Management.
As a business man and marketer, I want my prospect to find it easier to buy my product or service over any other and my customer to find it difficult to leave me. This applies whether my customer is a business or a consumer. Yet we often complicate the process.
Over the years, marketing techniques and technology have advanced dramatically. We can now use technology to identify, target, and communicate with narrowly focused targets. Yet, because it is easy, the customer is more overwhelmed with people and organizations demanding an action that only benefits them. Many are simply pretending that they have the interests of the customer at heart. Does anyone really believe that these days? So whether you are selling snacks to kids, routers to corporations, or services to government, it is becoming harder even as the ability to reach customers becomes much greater.
Perhaps our marketing techniques are forgetting the basics of business, though. We talk about developing “relationships” between brands and consumers, but this is merely a special case. In fact, whether it is B2C or B2B, essentially, we want our marketing techniques to make it easy to become a customer and difficult to stop being a customer. We can best do this by creating a multiplicity of emotional and practical entanglements. This applies equally well to individual consumers as well as to business customers, though B2B marketing is usually more complex because of the multiple people within one organization and the many ways to reach them.
Marketers tend to think of relationships or entanglements individually rather than as part of a network of interrelated point-to-point or marketing channel interactions. We would do much better to recognize that there is a complexity such that TV ads work with in-store promotion, word of mouth recommendations, and sponsorships for consumer brands, while in B2B businesses, advertising, trade shows, website design, and sales people talking to buyers are some of the many interactions that work together. Of course, there are many more than this at work in all forms of marketing. In B2B, the sales process alone is typically extremely complex, with the seller having different relationships with influencers, purchasing agents, users, and budget holders. For big ticket items, dozens of relationships and hundreds of interactions are common.
The more we have of these, the more secure they are, and the more they interact, making the higher probability of purchase and the lower probability of losing the customer. However, typically, as they increase in number, the challenge becomes in managing them. When the social media group operates independently of the website group, which operates independently of the advertising group, or pricing, or product development, and others, the less likely this is to be effective. When conference organizers, website managers, and sales people and tech support people in B2B companies operate to their individual objectives, then the company may even drive customers away.
CRM systems were the first attempt to address a part of this problem, and marketing automation software addressed a complementary part. However, the limitations of CRM are usually based on both the reluctance of people to enter complete and precise data as well as its ability or inability to put this together with other forms of prospect and customer contact.
If anyone tries to think of each of the individual bricks in a wall, while also envisaging the wall, few can hold a crisp picture of more than four, and no one can hold more than six. This is the issue as marketing connections become so many more, yet no software yet covers more than a small section. In the world of “Mad Men” it was easy, but today marketers have to get so involved in detail, usually still failing to get the “Big Picture,” that business is not well enough served.
Ask most marketers or salespeople about the roles of emotion and logic in the sales process, and they’ll likely tell you that customers buy on emotion and justify those decisions with logic. That perception has been around so long, in fact, that most content marketers (and the sales teams they work with) simply accept it as fact.
But here’s the reality: the notion that emotion is the primary driver of buying decisions is so old-school that it makes overalls, mood rings, and bleached hair seem like modern fashion trends.
Buyers today are much more savvy than they used to be. They heavily research products and services long before they ever contact a sales rep, and they’ve evolved to a point where they can sniff out marketing campaigns aimed directly at tugging on their heartstrings. Frankly, selling solely on emotion — and creating content that’s only directed toward emotional reactions — can make your business seem condescending, manipulative, corny, or slimy.
Now, that’s not to say that emotion’s role in the buying process is totally irrelevant today.
We are human, after all. And emotions will always have some degree of influence over the choices we make. But, in the context of buying highly technical B2B software, we’ve also evolved to the point where we can think on our own, question the status quo, and marry our emotional needs with logical justifications for them.
The post Creating Powerful Content that Appeals to Buyer Emotions and Logic appeared first on KnowledgeTree.
The very first step in your content marketing plan should be to pick your target audience. You’d think this would be common sense; however, the vast majority of small business owners all make one common mistake.
The mistake that they make is to attempt to be to general. They do this because they fear that by really focusing their marketing on one audience, they will “lose out” on the hundreds/thousands/millions of other potential customers that aren’t a part of that audience.
Well, guess what? It never happens!
The reason you don’t lose out is because all those other people would have never found you anyway. There are just too many websites out there for you to rank for anything other than what you are really trying to rank for.
Another excuse that I often hear for not picking a targeted audience is because these same small business owners are afraid that if they get a referral, the potential referral might see that they don’t fit into the target audience and not end up being a client.
This doesn’t happen either. Why? Simple. When someone is referred to you from someone they trust, the referrer wants to look good in the process, so they will most often do their very best to convince their friend that yours is just the firm for them, and because of this, the person being referred is not likely to be put off by the fact that they don’t necessarily fit within what they believe to be your targeted audience.
The reason that picking a target audience is so important comes down to this: the benefits of doing so far outweigh any downside that you can ever think of.
The Hedge-Hog Strategy
In the book, Good to Great, by Jim Collins, he conducted an extensive study on what makes great companies – as opposed to just good ones – and in the book he talks about something he calls the Hedge Hog Strategy.
The point of the strategy is this: you need to find a market that you can totally dominate.
Do you think you could be the #1 marketing agency/consultant/SEO firm for everybody in the entire world? Not likely! There is simply too much competition for you to have any hope of achieving that.
Instead, as Jim points out in his book, great companies are extremely selective about who they are targeting, thereby significantly increasing the odds that they can achieve the #1 position in the mind of their audience.
I agree with Jim Collins and I think that a really killer inbound marketing strategy has to start with picking a very specific audience to create content for. If you have a different opinion, please share it down below in the comments.
Defining your audience is not as hard as you might think. In the next few paragraphs I’m going to walk you through some ideas and strategies that you can use.
First, let’s use Apple as an example, as it relates the the hedge hog strategy.
Do you think that the people who work at Apple are deeply passionate about creating amazing products? I’m going to go with a big “you betcha” on this one.
So, with that in mind, do you think it would make sense that a suitable audience for Apple would be a group of people who believe what Apple believes? Again, I think the answer is yes.
For example, I’m a loyal Apple customer. I own an iMac, a Macbook Pro, an Apple TV, an iPhone, and an iPod mini. Why? Because I believe that ease of use and a killer design is more important than a bunch of technical details that I don’t care about – and I’m willing to pay more for it.
Alienware Hardware Display Page, Notably Different Than The Clean Apple Look
If you go to Apple’s website, you will see that all their messaging is for people just like me. The technical details are there, but they aren’t front and center like they would be with a company like Alienware.
Unlike Apple, Alienware makes PCs for gamers, and these folks are deeply concerned with technical specs and performance. While I’m sure Alienware’s customer enjoy a pretty looking computer, I’m equally sure that aesthetics have very little to do with their buying decision. Theirs is all about performance.
Do you think Alienware cares one bit about regular PC users that don’t play video games? Nope.
Do you think Apple cares one bit about price conscious buyers? Nope.
Both of these companies are successful because they know exactly who their customer is and they direct their entire marketing effort to reaching more of them.
Now that we covered why having your target market clearly defined, let’s talk about how to learn more about them, as well as to establish two way communication.
When it comes to researching and connecting with your target audience, there are several strategies that I suggest you use. The include:
For Twitter, forums, and the social networks, make sure that when you first start out that you spend the bulk of your time answering questions for other people. When you do this, the other people in the community are going to become interested in who you are, and when they do that, they will naturally think, “hey, Dave is a cool guy. I wonder what else Dave has done?” Once you have established yourself as a knowledgeable person, the participants in these communities are going to come and check out your site.
So, with that said, lets have a look at some ways to use each resource.
When I first learned of Twitter, I thought it was a huge waste of time. Now that I’m starting to figure out how to use it, I have actually become a pretty big fan.
When it comes to finding your target audience, as well as connecting with them, Twitter is pretty amazing.
The Top Twitter Page For PC Gamers
For example, let’s suppose that you wanted to find and connect with hardcore gamers. How could you use Twitter to do that?
Well, you could first begin by looking for “best gaming PC” on Google. When I performed that search, that is how I found out about Alienware.
Next, I pulled up Alienware’s profile on Twitter and noticed that they had 62,672 followers while following only 130 people. This tells me that Alienware is an influential brand in this space, and, because they don’t follow very many others, I also know that their 62,000 followers are legit. (whenever you see a Twitter profile that has a lot of followers, it can often be the result of their following a lot of others, just to get them to follow back)
The next thing I will want to know about Alienware is how much social authority they have.
Social Authority is ultimately a measure of influential activity. As such, it highlights content that is successful on Twitter. When you find users with high Social Authority, you’re finding great marketing strategies to analyze and mimic. And we think that this will help you be more successful with Twitter. – @peterbray
To discover how much social authority someone has, I’ve been using SEOmoz’s tool, FollowerWonk. This is a powerful tool that makes discovering influential Twitter accounts extremely easy.
As you can see below, Alienware is the most influential Twitter account for the phrase “pc gaming”. When I sorted by the Social Authority column, Alienware’s score of 61 put them on top.
Social Authority, in its simplest definition, is based upon re-tweets. If your tweets get lots of retweets, you have a high social authority. If you want more details on the science behind this, just read the entire post.
Followerwonk For PC Gaming Tweets
So now that we know Alienware has a high social authority and plenty of followers, the next move is to start connecting with the people that follow Alienware so that you can learn more about them.
To do that, I used FollowerWonk to find people that are interested in Alienware and then I sorted them by social authority. As you can see below, there are two users who actually have more social authority than Alienware. These are definitely people that you want to connect with because they can help you to really understand your audience (by speaking with them), as well as to help you to connect with your audience (by retweeting your tweets).
As you can see below, when I mouse over Anthony Wheeler, his total engagement is 56%. This is a good person to know if you want to learn more about hard core PC gamers, as well as to have the potential to get your content in front of many of them.
Another Example of Followerwonk Capabilities
Even if you don’t have FollowerWonk, Twitter is a total goldmine because it gives you the ability to search the Twitter stream. You can search by topic, by hash tag (#PCGamer) or by user. As soon as you do, you are going to find endless ways to better understand what your target audience is interested in.
For virtually every topic you can think of, there is at least one discussion forum. Finding them is easy. Just go to Google and do a search.
Discussion Forums Give You An Idea of Customer Engagement
When you participate in a discussion forum, you are going to see first hand what your target audience is interested in, what keeps them awake at night, and what they believe.
If your company sells to other businesses, I would strongly encourage that you check out LinkedIn Groups as they are very popular among the B2B crowd.
As you can see below, for the phrase, “marketing automation” there are 209 groups; the first of which is called Marketing Automation Experts. This group has 4,218 members, 142 discussions this month, and is considered to be very active.
Do you think that if you were to join this group that you could learn more about people who are interested in this topic? Do you think you could connect with a few of them? Do you think you could position yourself as an expert (assuming you are) within this community? Do you think that if you did, some of them would want to know more about you?
Each time I’ve started a new blog, I’m quick to incorporate surveys into my auto-responder sequence. I do this because I want to quickly find out who is reading my blog and what they are interested in. The more I learn about my audience, the better chance I will have of creating content that they will enthusiastically share with their respective followers.
For example, because I ask every new subscriber to complete a welcome survey, I have know that 15.9% of my audience are marketing agency owners, 41% are small business owners and 34% are solo-preneurs.
Surveys Give You An Analysis of Your Customers, It Might Be Different Than You Imagined
I also know that lead generation is the #1 challenge faced by my audience, hence why I do so many interviews to address that topic.
Once you have access to this type of information about your audience, you are now in a position to either create more content for the audience you have, so you can expand that audience, or, if the majority of your readers aren’t the exact audience you intended to have, you can now publish more content that will be of interest to your intended audience, as well as to share that content on the social networks where your audience hangs out (which we discovered by using Twitter to ask them directly).
Side Note: Check out this post on How To Know What To Write About.
If you don’t yet know that much about the demographics of your targeted audience, and you don’t yet have a following, don’t despair. There is another way to very easily get the demographic profile for virtually any marketing that you could possibly be interested in.
There isn’t a magazine around that isn’t staffed by a crack team of researchers, all of whom have invested countless hours in market research. You can bet they know exactly who their customer is and exactly what that customer wants to buy.
They know this because they need this information to pass along to their prospective advertisers.
Don’t have the funds for a research team that big? No problem. Just piggy back on the magazines.
For example, when I googled “Field and Stream Media Kit” I was taken right to this page. Once there, all I did was click on the demographics link to learn more about this audience. With just a few clicks of the mouse, I now know the median age, percentage that are college grads, percentage that are employed, percentage that served in the military, etc…
Even Magazines Have Online Options
Let’s suppose that I wanted to know how many people in my local area and into hunting and fishing. How could I find that out? With Facebook, this is actually pretty easy to do. It won’t be 100% perfect, but it will be close enough to help you assess if your size of a certain targeted market is large enough.
To do this, just pretend as though you are going to create a paid ad on Facebook. You don’t have to actually publish the ad, but you do want access to the data that going through the ad creation process will give you.
As you can see below, when I did a search for people that lived in San Diego, aged 37 to 57 (I chose this because of the median age from the Field and Stream media kit), who are interested in hunting and fishing, I see that there are 11,120 people. If that number is too small, or too big, you can easily just make changes to your search criteria, and from those changes, you are likely to make some valuable distinctions.
For example, if I change the gender from men only to men and women, the 11,120 increases to 16,840. So, for this topic, I now know that the ratio of men to women is roughly 3:2. For this particular example, the answer was rather obvious beforehand, but that probably won’t be the case in many other niches you could be looking at.
Facebook Analytics Usually Offers Interests and Engagement With Brands
I’m sure there are more tools than this, and if you have some good ones to suggest, please be sure and share your thoughts down in the comments below.
By far the most common and most expensive mistake is trying to be everything to everyone and that was the whole point of this post. With tools like the ones that I’ve discussed, I hope that you never try to do that ever again because it just won’t work.
The next most common mistake is not taking the time to listen to your audience to really find out what they want. Surveys are a terrific way to do this, and if you do, be sure to ask questions that are both multiple choice as well as open-ended, because, while harder to analyze in aggregate, it’s those open-ended questions that can provide you with some really valuable insights.
It’s also worth mentioning that one of the goals of your initial marketing campaign to your newly defined audience should be to further test and validate your chosen niche.
A marketing plan that doesn’t begin with a thorough understanding of the needs, wants, and desires of a very specifically designed target market isn’t really a marketing plan at all. Instead, it’s more of a hope and a prayer, and when it comes to business, hope is not a strategy.
Getting clear on who your target audience is has never been easier. Twitter, discussion forums, LinkedIn Groups, Surveys, Magazine media kits, and Facebook have made it easier than ever to thoroughly research and connect with your audience. Not making use of these free resources will significantly reduce the effectiveness of anything that you try, and, even worse, could spell the end of your company before you ever have a chance to really get going.
Put the time into identifying your targeted audience and you will have taken a step that so many small business owners don’t put nearly enough focus on, and you will be in far better shape as a result.
Have questions or comments? Please use the comment form down below. We read and reply to every comment.
Thanks so much!
What would happen if every undergraduate student on a campus got $100 in Bitcoins? And what if that campus was the endlessly inventive MIT?
Those questions are behind a new Bitcoin experiment at MIT, which prides itself on pioneering emerging technologies. More than half a million dollars has been raised from alumni to back the effort.
“I was laying in bed one night, brainstorming ideas,” sophomore computer science major Jeremy Rubin told VentureBeat. His initial Bitcoin idea was targeted only at a computer science class, but his collaborator, first-year MBA student Dan Elitzer, suggested they could involve the whole campus. Elitzer is also the founder and president of the MIT Bitcoin Club.
The central idea behind the Bitcoin Project is to work with professors and researchers at MIT to see how students use their Bitcoins when their whole community has them. “We’re trying to seed an ecosystem and see what emerges,” Elitzer told us. “That’s how startups work.”
Rubin said that, with all students involved, there’s “a community with an understanding of Bitcoin,” the first time a community has been so empowered.
The project will help set up area stores to accept Bitcoins. A MIT Bitcoin Expo is scheduled for May 3, with presentations and technical workshops by representatives from the Bitcoin community.
What’s so interesting about Bitcoin? “Unlike every other payment system,” Elitzer told us, Bitcoin “allows provisionless innovation, so you don’t have to go through a central authority.” This, he said, could allow direct interaction between buyers and sellers without the overhead of a middleman.
A Decentralized Stock Market?
“Bitcoin,” Rubin said, “will be the basis for a whole new suite of distributed exchange protocols.” Some of the projects that he thinks could emerge include better ways to exchange money between peers for bill splitting, a decentralized Kickstarter, faster payment schemes, and a decentralized stock market.
Out in the world, Bitcoin has had more than its share of troubles, including a massive implosion at the largest Bitcoin exchange, issues at other exchanges, wild fluctuations in prices, and its role as the currency-of-choice for at least one underground enterprise.
Elitzer acknowledged those as “unfortunate,” but added that “there are lots of very professional people working [on Bitcoin-related projects] that are going to be much better run.” But, he said, the main point of this Bitcoin community is to see what kinds of new structures might evolve.
The logistics are still being worked out, Rubin said, but “any result is a result that will be interesting for the world to see, disappointing or not.”
Funds were raised from about two dozen alumni. Half the funds come from Alexander Morcos, an alumnus who started a high-frequency trading company in New York. The money covers the seeding of Bitcoins among all 4,529 undergrads, as well as related infrastructure and informational activities.
Students can cash out their Bitcoins if they like, and the project intends to have some mechanism for them to readily buy their way back in.
This is not Rubin’s first venture into Bitcoins. In February, his participation in a group of MIT students that developed the Bitcoin mining program Tidbit attracted the attention of the New Jersey division of consumer affairs.
Rubin received a subpoena, apparently because the Garden State suspects that the program could involve computer fraud issues. The Tidbit program is the first to let visitors to a website mine Bitcoins instead of having to see ads. MIT has issued a letter in support of Rubin, and the subpoena is being fought with help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Additional reporting by Eric Blattberg
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One of the most important decisions a marketer needs to make is segmentation – how to determine the essential differences between customer groups and effectively market to them.
Companies use lots of criteria to define these segments – industry, company size, and geography are the most common. If you’re one of the many who have attempted to add buyer personas to these segments, you’ve probably noticed that it’s hard to see how you can to market to all of them.
Sales is lucky. They can identify the needs of one account and tailor the story accordingly. And it’s a lot easier to sell to one person than a group.
So the natural instinct for marketers is to segment more and more in an effort to shape messaging and content for the needs of different buyers.
But that’s a very expensive and ineffective strategy. Here’s a client case that makes the point very clearly.
The building c
onstruction group of Caterpillar hired us to create buyer personas for customers of their compact and small Cat® equipment. In our early discussions, they identified five industry segments that they wanted to research – residential and commercial construction, concrete construction, agriculture, landscape and snow & ice removal.
We counseled them that assigning buyer personas to those five market segments would result in way too many niches to effectively market to. So we set out to to determine the essential differences in their buying decisions.
We conducted interviews with Caterpillar customers using the framework in the 5 Rings of Buying Insight™ to understand who, when and why buyers in each of these segments evaluated their equipment.
At the end of our research, what we found is that Caterpillar had only two types of buyer personas that they needed to target, and industry was not relevant to the segmentation.
One was what we’ll call a “high-information” buyer. These buyers wanted the see a long list of the specifications of the equipment in a format that made it easy to compare different models of machines, including the competitors’.
The other was a “results-oriented” buyer. They had a specific task that they wanted to do and wanted rapid access to guidance on which machine would meet that need.
These two personas were common across all five of Caterpillar’s market segments. No matter what the buyers were using the product for, the key distinction between Caterpillar’s strategies to persuade them is based on their need for detailed information or specific functionality, full stop.
It’s important to note that we didn’t recommend that Caterpillar completely abandon their traditional segmentation. Caterpillar still produces marketing materials for each of these industries. But deep insights into their buyer’s expectations for purchasing their equipment eliminated the need to invest in too many marketing activities, streamlining their content marketing and SEO strategy at a lower than anticipated cost.
For another example, we just published three slides to help you think about whether the buyer persona on our website should be one or two buyer personas.
When you’re segmenting your market, buyer personas should simplify and reduce the number of ways you need to tell your story. If you’re not seeing that outcome, you’re placing too much emphasis on differences in who buys and not enough on how, when and why they buy.
Sales, marketing, and social marketing attempt to place solutions and create relationships by supplying great content, discovering likely prospects, and creating trust. Unfortunately sellers end up closing a small fraction – less than 5% – of those they reach, and marketers and social end up wasting a lot of time and don’t often meet their goals. What’s causing our failure? And is there one solution that can enhance all?
PROBLEMS WITH OUR CURRENT THINKING
Here’s a bit of flawed thinking that exacerbates the problems:
We can facilitate the buying decision and create more success with followers by employing different thinking to save us from
1. Merely guessing at, or manipulating, our results without knowing our true outcomes;
2. Wasting time assuming if we play nice or offer good content people will buy or take action;
3. Neglecting actions we can take to facilitate the decision steps buyers and followers take before they are ready to make a choice.
Let’s look at some new thinking to add to what we’re successfully doing.
WHAT I LEARNED IN THE TRENCHES
We overlook the myriad of things that buyers and followers must contend with outside of the purview of the solution, need, or relationship:
I learned this as both a sales person and an entrepreneur. When Merrill Lynch hired me a stockbroker in the 1970s, I became a million-dollar producer my first year. But I couldn’t figure out why everyone with a need (especially those I had a great relationship with) didn’t buy. Where did they go?
When I started up my tech company in London in the 80s I realized the problem: as a buyer, my direct needs were often superseded by the social, political, organizational, and relational considerations I had to manage. When sellers came to pitch they understood my need and gave fine pitches but had no way to handle the fights I was having with the Board, or the issues the distributor was having with my solutions. Nor did anyone even try.
The sales model, I realized, was not designed facilitate the behind-the-scenes non-need-related issues I had to manage before I could consider buying anything. I then developed Buying Facilitation® to add to the front end of the sales model. My own sales team used it as a front-end to our sales process by first navigating buyers through their change management issues – buyers must do that anyway so we facilitated the stages and steps instead of sitting and waiting for the time it took them to figure it out on their own. That way we got onto the Buying Decision Team early and became great relationship managers. Our sales tripled and the time to close was reduced by two thirds.
The takeaway here for marketers and social is the recognition that we are largely ignoring the hidden, systemic issues going on that are not available to outsiders yet fundamental for any change to happen. That is our Achilles Heel.
WHAT’S THE ROLE OF CHANGE MANAGEMENT?
Buyers and followers don’t know their journey to change when they begin and hence take longer than necessary. But we can help them, and make our value proposition our ability to be their GPS.
There are two elements of the Buying Facilitation® model that can be added to create a ‘pull’ that’s change- and decision-focused.
1. Listen for systems: instead of coding, noticing, tracking details that will help us guess at who’s reading, who’s a decision maker, where they might be in their sales cycle, etc. let’s begin listening for, and designing, tools to facilitate the movement along the decision path that change decisions goes through; let’s ensure the right people are all involved (some not so obvious) and address consensus-building. Currently we now listen for what we want to hear rather than listening for issues with decision making, change or choice.
2. Use Facilitative Questions: instead of waiting until they do this on their own, Facilitative Questions guide people through their buy-in and change management issues (necessary for both small purchases and large solutions) and facilitate the trajectory through their steps. Facilitative Questions are a type of criteria-recognition and choice format I developed.
It’s possible to develop assessments, questionnaires, intelligent contact sheets, CRM tools that provide the capability to lead buyers and followers through the steps they must take, send out just the appropriate data at the right point in the cycle, and facilitate the consensus and buy-in as they ready themselves for change. We can add these to the sales, marketing, and social models to truly serve our buyers and followers and close more. It will be an addition, and the results will stronger relationships and more conversions.
Let’s connect. I can help you develop content, tools, training or questions that will enable a buyer’s buying decision process, as well as speak at your next conference. Contact me: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com, or go to www.buyingfacilitation.com.
How Sales, Marketing and Social Can Facilitate the Decision Path is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com
A counterintuitive idea from recent research shows you how to fine-tune your strategy for presenting your price to customers.
Here’s a question for you:
Is it better to put your pricing on the table first, or to get the buyer to share information about their budget?
The answer: neither. (Sorry, it was a trick question.)
In our workshops we’re often asked, “Should we put our pricing on the table first, or probe to find out what the customer might be willing to pay?” Recent research is fairly clear on the answer. It helps to be the “first mover” – to put your offer on the table before the other party – with one critical caveat: it pays to delay that first offer as long as you can.
Recent research from Columbia University and Universite de Paris experimented with the timing of initial offers. In a series of experiments, they asked buyers and sellers to make the first offer in negotiations, but gave them different instructions on how long they should wait to make those offers. The findings: the best results came from a three-pronged strategy.
According to the research, anchoring a high price with a strong first offer works well in “zero-sum” win-lose negotiations that focus on single issues like price. But these “first mover” results can be improved even further by delaying discussion of price, especially in more complex settings like B2B sales, where it’s critical to fully understand the buyer’s problems, and to introduce unconsidered needs into the sales conversation to create more value for your solution. As the researchers state, early pricing discussions limit the critical flow of information you need to create value: “Anchoring may limit negotiators’ focus on the issues explicitly contained in the offer, making negotiators less likely to consider creative options outside the issues explicitly contained in the initial offer.”
So to maximize the size, profitability and value created from your deal, be aware that the timing counts. When your buyer asks you for price information—even a “ballpark” price—resist the temptation to comply with the request. Instead, acknowledge the importance of price to both you and your buyer…and then negotiate to defer the discussion until later.
There’s a lot of talk going (isn’t there always?) about the seven deadly sins of content marketing. In forums and social media, articles listing these ROI-endangering sins are permeating the content marketing community and stirring up fear in the heart of marketers everywhere.
At CEM, we’re not a fear-mongering bunch. Though meant to be avoided, mistakes are made by everyone. Fortunately, there’s almost always a way to fix them. We want your business to use content marketing successfully without the need to stress over missed details. Mistakes happen, but your bounce back is what people will remember. Today, I’d like to help you recover from any content marketing missteps you may have taken as we review the top six.
“Lazy” content marketing tactics may include inconsistency in publishing, hi-jacked content, and fluff-filled content. Though I doubt it was ever acceptable to make these tactics the “meat and potatoes” of a content marketing plan, an increased focus on quality content means these practices are a virtual death sentence for brands.
While losing credibility online is a rather severe consequence, losing your reader base to boring content is worse. To ensure your brand’s content is value-rich, include the following four elements.
Incorporating these elements into each piece of content will lead your brand on a path to better customer engagement, higher share rates, and more sales.
Between research, marketing, strategy, and implementation, content marketers can quickly find themselves in over their heads. Taking on too much work is a major downfall, particularly because the end product – content – suffers greatly. A fix for this is supplementing in-house content with outsourced content.
Before you have nightmares about duplicate content and reprehensible grammar, listen up; there’s an easier way to get what you need by hiring the right company. Here’s a blueprint of what to look for when searching for a content creator.
Working with a content firm, even as a supplement to an in-house team, is one of the best ways to safeguard the consistency of your content marketing campaign.
In a previous post, I discussed the benefits associated with creating content for your audience at different stages of the buyer’s journey. Failing to create content that speaks to the target audience will provide less-than-stellar results nearly every time. In other words, this is a mistake you’ll want to fix immediately.
A consistent effort to learn more about customers’ needs and wants will prove beneficial for your brand in the long run.
In eConsultancy’s recently released “Periodic Table of Content Marketing,” content marketers are reminded of the impact of quality analytics. Unfortunately, tracking analytics efficiently is a struggle for many brands, particularly small businesses. Between page views, bounce rates, demographics and about 15 other metrics, content marketers are given the insight needed to improve upon existing strategies. To fix this mistake, three actions are needed.
With the right support and analytics team in place, brands are able to efficiently monitor the quality and reach of multiple content types.
As Marketo discussed, an interesting mix of content is more likely to produce a positive ROI. Many brands approach content marketing from a blog-only perspective. In reality, content marketing is a fluid concept, encompassing many changing parts. Correcting this mistake is easy and, in most cases, a time saver. To relieve your team (and readers) from the repetition of blog after blog, spice up your content mix with curated and repurposed content.
So what happens when all this amazing content gets distributed? People respond, but does your brand?
Content marketing is meant to be a two-way street. While brands should focus on creating a steady stream of original content, actively participating in online conversations, responding to comments and engaging with social media users is just as important. Avoid this mistake by taking two crucial steps.
After exploring these not-so-deadly content marketing mistakes, don’t beat yourself up if you’ve made a few – we all have. Instead, treat it as a learning experience and make changes now that will positively impact your outcomes in the future.
What’s the worst content marketing mistake you’ve ever made? What was the result?
Here are five simple steps to help you and your company achieve B2B marketing success:
1. Define: Strategic goals, objectives, strategies and tactics.
Once you define your overall social media marketing goals (increase sales)and determine your specific objectives (grow LinkedIn page followers), take the focus to your strategy and tactics. Your strategy could be creating thought leadership content around X topic and one of your tactics could be posting at least one piece of content every week day. Defining these steps will help you to succeed. You don’t have to be on every platform because not every social media outlet is right for every business.
2. Build: The right person has to be in charge here.
This person will be posting on your behalf and they should know your plan, know your voice and know how to effectively report problems. This person should have a good grasp on the vision, goals, objectives, strategies and tactics in place; and they should be able to measure the success of them.
3. Select: What platforms are right for your company? LinkedIn is one of the top B2B social media marketing tools every company uses. It’s a great place to start to establish your thought leadership. Some B2B companies have also seen potential sales leads from LinkedIn.
Have you given thought to Pinterest? Creating custom graphics and sharing your blog posts and thought leadership pieces with an image to Pinterest might make sense for your company as visual media continues to rise in popularity. Check it out: General Electric is succeeding on Pinterest and Maersk is leading B2B on Instagram. Research begins with Google, we all know that. Participating on Google+ can increase your search ranking and generate leads as well.
4. Create: Blog posts, custom photos, videos, infographics and other pieces of content to educate people on what you do. You should be educating buyers here. Some of your audience and buyers may not be social, but when they search for you, they will find your visual content you are creating. Whether you’re creating demonstrative YouTube videos or hosting live Q&A Twitter chats, the goal is to educate buyers.
5. Embrace. Build your partners into your social media marketing plan as a part of a partner amplification strategy.
Partners can help you to reach new audience members you’re already trying to target within your own industry. You can help each other out. Partner amplification and engagement should be an ongoing priority for your plan.
Remember:
Whether it’s a good B2C or a good B2B practice, what people really want to see is H2H. Bryan Kramer talks about this in his book There is No B2B or B2C: It’s Human to Human: #H2H.
People will always want to talk to other people. While the concept of H2H marketing is nothing new, we should always remember that we are simply people talking to people.
So:
And you will success for your B2B company in the social media marketing space.
57% of the purchase decision is made before a customer ever reaches out to your organization. CEB
The above stat shouldn’t come as a surprise to modern marketing and sales organizations. The way people gather and digest information has shifted radically, and you only need to think about your everyday life—your process for finding what you need—to understand why.
These days, we seek information through online channels—and so do your prospects when making professional purchase decisions. They’re reading trusted blogs, following relevant thought leaders on LinkedIn and Twitter, and using search engines to deliver content that answers their questions.
Basically, your prospects are consuming a ton of content, and, as the stat above shows, that content significantly impacts their purchase decisions.
This finding, along with the detailed research CEB conducted around top-performing sales reps, sparked a book and sales movement called “The Challenger Sale.” Matt Heinz provides a great (and quick) recap of the book here.
In short, authors Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson explain that Challenger reps set themselves apart by educating prospects and pushing them to think about their business in a new way. Challengers “teach, tailor, and take control.”
A key tactic is the way they frame their conversations. In every communication—be it an email, a phone call, or a product demo—the Challenger follows these three steps:
For example, a Challenger might organize a presentation in this way:
The right content provides sales with new insights and quantifies the impact for prospects. Here’s how.
When framing a pitch, Challengers start by finding the most powerful way to present the unique solution provided by your organization’s products or services. What is it that separates your solution from the rest? What’s special about the way it solves the challenges facing the prospect?
Once they have the solution, they look for insights that supports the need for that unique solution. Insight transforms the sales conversation—the rep becomes a teacher, bringing new and valuable information to the table each time they engage with the prospect. The rep must push prospects to think differently about their industry, company, and challenges.
“Challengers aren’t so much world-class investigators as they are world-class teachers.” The Challenger Sale
Coming up with tailored insights is a lot of work. It requires a lot of research and time, something many sales reps don’t have enough of.
However, your marketing team is already putting in time and effort to identify the interests and concerns of your buyers and to address them with insight in the form of educational content. It is these exact insights that your sales team needs in their hands to be effective Challengers.
In fact, content marketers and Challenger sales organizations are operating under the very same understanding: the buyer’s journey has changed and the need for alignment, for marketers to provide sales teams with commercial insights, is more critical than ever.
“Marketing must serve as the ‘insight generation machine’ that keeps reps well equipped with quality teaching material that customers will find compelling.” The Challenger Sale
Content is at the center of marketing, and successful assets educate prospects, challenge them to examine their industry in a new way, and set them up to see your products as the solution to overcoming challenges and taking their business to the next level.
And as The Challenger Sale points out, “there’s vastly greater value in insight that changes or builds on what they know in ways they couldn’t have discovered on their own.” Content makes those insights available and accessible to sales reps.
Challenger sales teams should be using content to identify relevant insights to share with their prospects. Take stats, concepts, and data from an eBook, blog post, infographic, article, etc; then back up those insights shared in a meeting, for example, by sending the prospect the full content piece.
This moves the rep from the dreaded world of “checking in” and “touching base” to having a real reason to reach out—one that is equally valuable for the prospect because the rep is sharing timely insight.
But content doesn’t stop at the insight step of a Challenger play. Think of data, surveys, and industry research, or case studies and testimonials. This content can prove things like: the scope of real concerns in an industry or business, or, on the flip side, the extent to which a product has had a positive impact on customers with similar challenges.
These content assets serve as support for sales. Making the customer think differently, while quantifying the impact, earns the rep trust and respect. Providing evidence that can’t be ignored may make a prospect feel a sense of “rational drowning,” but it is this exact state that must be reached for the prospect to be open and ready to listen to how you/your solution uniquely solves for their problem(s).
The most successful reps are seen as thought leaders, teachers, and industry experts. Without commercial insight, without impact, your solution becomes a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have. Challenger sales reps are only effective with quality content to use in their sales cycle.
Think back to when you needed to buy something from a retailer in your town. You had a need today, so you got into your car and drove to the store. You went up to the counter and there was no one in sight to help you. Finally someone approaches you, long after you started thinking about leaving to go somewhere else. You asked for the item and you were told it was not available. You leave disgruntled after making the effort to go there, waiting too long, and ultimately not getting helped.
This is the feeling potential buyers are getting when visiting many large companies’ websites according to a survey done by Velocify called The Fortune 100 Online Buyer Experience Study. Click here to download the study.
It is unbelievable that in 2014, there are still big brand companies with poor response to people who are looking to buy their products and services.
According to the study, one-third of leads submitted NEVER receive a phone call. You have a potential buyer and you don’t follow up? That’s like trying to win the lottery without ever buying a ticket. You can’t win if you don’t play. As I wrote recently about the power of the telephone - a phone call can get to your buyer faster than anything. Simply by following up with inquiries to your website you will beat the competition.
Next, the study revealed a very slow response for those who were contacted. 67% of the inquiries for this study did receive a phone call – 3-1/2 days later on average! Most of us expect a call within 24 hours, and earlier research has proven that leads coming to your website should be followed up within one minute (yep, that’s right) in order to receive the maximum success. 10% of the companies in the study called potential buyers back one full week later – that is like my retail experience mentioned above – why even bother at that point?
The final step to succeed against your huge industry counterparts is to follow-up more than they do. The study revealed that only 10% of the buyer inquiries in this study received an optimal amount of follow-up, which has been found to be 5-7 calls. This is a professionally persistent number, especially when someone has gone to your website and displayed behavior indicating interest in your products or services.
Bottom line is that 80% of the leads were ignored or they did not get enough follow-up to convert. What that means is that marketing dollars are being wasted, and the big guys are missing out on opportunities literally being handed to them.
There is fantastic news for the little guy – you can do these 3 simple things to compete and win business in a playing field of companies of any size. To review:
If you do these three things, you will be heads above your very large industry counterparts and have a very good chance to win more business.
This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
Lori Richardson is recognized on Forbes as one of the “Top 30 Social Sales Influencers” worldwide. Lori speaks, writes, trains, and consults with inside sales teams in mid-sized companies. Subscribe to the award-winning blog and the “Sales Ideas In A Minute” newsletter for sales strategies, tactics, and tips. Increase Opportunities. Expand Your Pipeline. Close More Deals.
email lori@scoremoresales.com | View My LinkedIn Profile | twitter |Visit us on google+
The post Sell Against the Big Guys and Win appeared first on Score More Sales.
Here is one of the most common business inquiries I receive: “I am about to launch a (business/book/seminar) and want to use Twitter to do it. Can you help me?”
My answer is usually “yes … I can help,” but my advice is rather unsettling. Twitter probably won’t work to help your business unless you follow three best practices first, and this is enough to stop most people in their tracks.
Although it is certainly possible to have a short-term business success on Twitter, it is not probable without months — or even years — of work first. Behind every case study there are three factors at work and these stepping stones are climbed only through a lot of preparation and effort.
Before we get into the details, I want to emphasize that there are many business benefits to Twitter that DON’T require a lot of preparation, You can use it for market research, education, and customer service, for example, without the steps I am about to explain. But if you want to generate leads and SELL something some day, pay attention to the advice below.
I have nearly 90,000 followers on Twitter and I go to great lengths to assure that they are real people, not spammers of inactive accounts.
If I sent out a tweet right now promoting my new book, how many people would actually buy it? Not very many. Why? Your Twitter audience is generally made up of “weak links.” These are people who are aware of you but probably won’t take a strong action like donate to a cause or buy something just because you ask.
Think of this like sales. You have to have a lot of contacts for any of them to turn into leads. You have to have a lot of leads before they turn into a sales call. You have to make a lot of sales calls before you find people who will actually buy from you.
Twitter is much the same way. If you have 2,000 followers, you are not going to sell 2,000 books, You might sell one!
You have to consistently and methodically build a relevant audience of “contacts” before you find those relatively few who will actually buy something. There are many ways to find these wonderful people including mining Twitter lists, Advanced Twitter Search, Twitter chats, and even through Twitter’s advertising programs.
The single-best place to go for resources to build your network is Chapter 5 of the book The Tao of Twitter
So the idea behind sales and Twitter is to turn these weak links into stronger links that will lead to real business opportunities. Now that you have built up a list of people who will have some disposition to be interested in you, you have to get on their radar screen and usually it is your CONTENT that leads to that awareness.
Content can come in many forms. Here are a few ideas about the types of content that can get people’s attention:
Rich content — The most powerful content is original, “rich content” that provides depth and voice of authority. Generally speaking, rich content comes in the form of a blog, podcast or video series. It’s hard work providing this content on a consistent basis but this is the type of value that makes you stand out and create a deeper connections with these weak relationships. Linking tweets to your original and helpful content can spur people to learn more about you.
Content from others — If you do a good job surrounding yourself with a relevant audience, they will also be sending you links to wonderful content through their tweets each day. Re-tweeting others takes the burden of finding content off your shoulders and also compliments others when you acknowledge their good work. Re-tweeting is a superb way to get on somebody’s radar screen!
Contests and games — People love the opportunity to win prizes. Promoting a contest is a great way to create awareness, especially when combined with Twitter advertising.
Personal engagement — Show people your human side whenever possible, If you are tweeting as an individual, mention things going on in your life or tweet a photo now and then. If you are tweeting under a corporate account, think about adding initials to the end of every tweet so people can know there is a real person behind the content.
Social media is SOCIAL. It’s not very effective creating an audience without engaging with them or simply shipping content out there like an advertisement.
When I was starting out in business, I used to attend a lot of live, monthly networking meetings. It would take 4-5 months before people started to recognize me and get to know me. It might take six months before those connections led to a cup of coffee and a real business discussion.
In real life, we build meaningful relationships — strong links — through a series of engagements over a period of time, maybe even years. Networking on the web is the same way. It takes time, patience, and consistent engagement.
Look for opportunities to say hello to people online, to compliment them, to re-tweet something they provide that is exceptional. And always look for ways to actually MEET people in real life. That is the best way to convert those weak social media connections to strong relationships who can help you.
I can’t tell you how many people come to me thinking Twitter (or social media in general) is some miracle cure. It’s not. It CAN work, but you need to have realistic expectations about HOW it works and what it takes to get there.
There is no quick or easy way to create business benefits through Twitter, but I can also tell that if you do the hard work, it’s worth it. Twitter — combined with rich content, a relevant audience and consistent engagement — has helped many people build careers, find jobs, promote causes, discover new markets, hire valuable employees, and yes … even find new customers!
I hope this perspective helps and that you’ll take a moment to share it across your networks as your own helpful content that connects with your relevant audience. After all, nothing says I love you like a re-tweet now and then!
Illustration courtesy of Flickr CC and Grace Smith.
The post 3 Twitter best practices that unlock business success appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.
Marketing business tech tends to get heavy both on the sides of engineering and corporate big talk. This doesn’t make it a good match for those who believe creative, quality content is the key to successful lead generation.
But again, this raises the popular dilemma: Why can’t tech ever substitute for human creativity? Are the two just so incompatible that you either have to wing it with one or the other?
According to Marketing Interactions, the new developments in tech still failed to achieve the goals of marketers and imply that an obsession with the latest innovation only serves to hamper, not help them closer to those goals.
This doesn’t completely answer the almost-cliched question: Why does tech fail so badly at replacing human creativity? It has the tools to research, measure, predict, and yet it lacks the capacity to create engaging content or conversations that result in quality B2B leads and sales.
You’d think with all the information it can get, it would come up with a solution right?
Well, that’s the heart of the problem. It can’t.
No doubt this isn’t the first time you’ve seen proof technology’s failure to substitute something only a human person can provide. On the bright side, that’s why there’s hope for creativity even when tech-based lead generation. There are important gaps to fill and all your tech resources can’t fill it.
Author: Eileen Bernardo
If there’s any constant in social media, it’s constant evolution. That means that to stay relevant and effective, marketers need to stay on their toes. Take, for example, Facebook’s recent decision to shift its feed algorithm to focus on actual audience engagement, or Google’s recent updates to its search algorithm, or the popularity of new social platforms like SnapChat, Instagram, and Vine. Today, I’d like to talk about the latest piece of the social marketing puzzle – predictive analytics.
Predictive analytics, simply put, use past data and statistics to model and predict the future. Among other things, they can allow brands to locate social media users with purchase intent. To understand how this piece completes the picture, let’s quickly review the evolution of social marketing technology:
Following Facebook’s open invite in 2006, organizations began to understand the potential impact of social media on business goals and strategies. As a result, companies like Wildfire and applications like Marketo Social Marketing emerged, providing services to help grow visibility of a brand through increased numbers in a brand’s followers, likes, etc.
Using these applications, Marketers soon realized that social was a place for conversations around their products and services – not a place for one-sided monologues about the virtues of your brand. This led to a shift from broadcasting marketing messages over social, to using social for listening and engagement. You couldn’t just monitor social media engagement; you needed to initiate and respond to conversations as well.
If you take a look at any sales advertisement, marketing campaign, or customer service interaction today, the chances are that social is involved. Today’s best-of-breed social media tools are part of of complete marketing ecosystems, allowing businesses to handle all of their enterprise social needs within one platform – from sales leads to customer service queries – closing the gap between departments and increasing efficiency and conversion rates.
Strategic companies now work to identify and participate in conversations on social – whether these conversations are specifically about your brand, or are simply relevant to your brand and/or audience. Marketers can use social to reach out and develop relationships, offer discounts and specials, resolve issues, make sales, and more.
But change is still the only constant in social media. Take the example of Facebook’s algorithm change. A few months ago, if a consumer “liked” a retail brand on Facebook in order to enter a contest, he or she would’ve started to see updates from the brand, possibly about upcoming promotions or sales. If the brand was lucky, that consumer might have made a purchase – so the contest might have directly led to revenue.
Facebook’s new algorithm prioritizes posts that have a higher percentage of engagement. As a result, users are more likely to see posts with high engagement rates within their personal networks (i.e. posts that your friends have engaged with), as opposed to seeing posts from brands they have liked. For marketers, this means a reduced likelihood of a conversion or sale.
This also means that relevant, personalized social engagement is more important to marketers than ever – and for many marketers, that’s where predictive social analytics come in. As I mentioned earlier, predictive analytics can help companies identify social media users with purchase intent.
Here’s a basic example: Let’s say James proposes to Ann. The next day, Ann shares the news with friends and family through her social networks. She’s likely to use hashtags like“#isaidyes” or “#justengaged”, or phrases like “I’m engaged”. Anne is now (or will soon be) in the market for goods and services like honeymoon destinations, wedding attire, stationary, etc. Predictive analytics tie the social behavior (using those hashtags/phrases) with the future buying behavior (purchasing a wedding dress).
If businesses offering these items can identify people like Ann, they can create targeted campaigns for segments (i.e. display ads for wedding dresses shown to everyone using those hashtags) or reach out directly on social channels to congratulate Ann and build a relationship. Obviously, this increases the chances of Ann choosing their business when it’s time to make a purchase.
So how can predictive analytics can help you meet your marketing goals? Here’s a few examples:
Milestones: James and Ann’s upcoming wedding proposal is just one example of how predictive analytics can help marketers approach their audiences in a timely, relevant way. Moving days, graduations, pregnancies, and new purchases can all be ripe opportunities for marketers. A social search for the term “moving day”, for example, might help utility providers, alarm system installers, and truck rental companies pinpoint users who will need their products/services.
Product Launches: Social data can provide businesses with tons of information to use in launch plans. For instance, Deutsche Telekom-Hosted Business Services (DT-HBS) recently launched a product to provide Voice Over IP (VoIP) phone services to small businesses. DT-HBS was able to use predictive social analytics to locate users in need of VoIP services (by searching for “#VoIP” and “new office” on social), reach out those users, and to identify the influencers in the space.
Sentiment Analysis: Businesses count on social media to provide them with accurate, unfiltered thoughts and conversations around their brand, product, or service – as well as that of their competitors. Sentiment analysis uses sophisticated technology and natural language cues to sort social mentions as “positive”, “negative”, or “neutral”. This can help businesses discover consumer opinion trends about a particular product or service, leading to potentially invaluable insight.
Interested? If predictive analytics sound like a promising addition to your social marketing strategy, here are two common pitfalls to avoid:
Cluttering Your Search Results: Often, less is more. This is especially true when attempting to narrow down or pull actionable results from social media. You might pull thousands (even millions) of mentions or conversations based on your keywords – but how will you know which are relevant? Build your search terms and keywords strategically to ensure you’re bringing in the mentions that matter.
Putting Social in a Silo: Sure, social media is a great conduit for pulling insights and ideas, but it’s not a stand-alone solution. In order to get the results and data you want, you need social media to work in tandem with other technologies and strategies. For example, if you’ve identified that your target audience loves cute animals, you might lead with a pet analogy in a sales email campaign. If your target audience enjoys the outdoors, your display ads might incorporate appealing outdoor activities. Don’t limit the results of your findings to social alone.
So how can marketers turn social data into tangible results and converted dollars? By combining predictive analytics with marketing automation, marketers can locate, target, and ultimately convert leads into paying customers.
Here’s a real-life example: mobile user acquisition network Appia recently released a product allowing developers to monetize their own apps. Prior to the launch, Appia’s marketing team applied data gleaned from social media research to their marketing automation campaigns, and they also reached out to my company, Viralheat. Appia’s team first used Viralheat to research competitor wins and fails, sentiment around the developer space, and what terms, ad types, etc. were resonating in their target conversation threads.
Using marketing automation, Appia’s marketing team was able to turn their social insights into targeted marketing programs. From welcome programs and site activation to nurture and support, Appia used the social insights from Viralheat and extensive marketing automation campaigns to produce and launch their product.
If you’re interested in learning more about predictive analytics, social marketing, and marketing automation, join Sally Lowery, VP of Marketing at Appia, and Jeff Revoy, CEO of Viralheat, as they detail Appia’s journey to success at our LaunchPoint webinar: “The Move to Predictive Analytics”. The webinar takes place tomorrow, Wednesday, April 30th at 10:00AM PDT.
Predictive Analytics: The Next Piece of the Social Puzzle was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com
Spring – what a beautiful time of the year. A glimpse of warmer weather to come. Beautiful days. Life is good. Everyone needs change. Change is good. Change builds character. Change can also be painful.
Is your marketing organization ready for a change? Take a look at five ways to make a change in your Demand Process to drive better results:
1. Get ready to take action
Gather your team together (marketing and sales) and get ready for some analysis and discussion. Appoint a project manager to lead the process. Start with your list of ‘what’s working’ and ‘what’s not working’ and look at the numbers to determine this. If you don’t have the numbers you need to be able analyze demand generation results and processes holistically, make that goal number one. It won’t happen overnight – but you have to start somewhere and numbers don’t lie.
2. Evaluate the current processes
First and foremost, KEEP what’s working. There’s no need to change the strategies that are working – that is an error many companies make. You don’t have to change everything in your quest for optimization of your Demand Process. You need to identify areas that are in need of change but, keep the ones that are working in place. However, you should keep an open mind about to how further tweak current, working processes to maximize effectiveness. There is always room to improve.
3. Quit giving ALL leads to sales
It won’t help the numbers, no matter what you think. Sending leads to sales that are not qualified is a huge waste of time and resources. Not to mention, it may really backfire and annoy your prospects as well. Send only qualified leads to sales, no exceptions. How to do that? Might be time to make a change in your lead process. First take a good look at your lead nurturing programs and scoring methodologies. Perhaps you need to be more stringent with your scoring. Do you downgrade scores over time due to inactivity? Do you accelerate leads when certain actions are taken? The scoring process is never one and done, just remember that and keep refining your process. The better you get at scoring leads and building the right lead process, the better your conversion rates will be. Delivering more leads to sales doesn’t mean more revenue – only qualified leads can turn into revenue.
4. Take a look at your existing customers
Customers are often the most overlooked resource marketing has. Talk to your customers. They purchased your solution after much consideration, right? Ask them why they purchased to gain a better understanding of key differentiators for your solution. Find out what resources or activities helped educate them. Use this information to better understand their buyer’s journey and you will be better able to connect with both prospects and customers in the future.
5. Please quit talking about yourself
Like everyone else in the world, customers buy products based on how it solves a problem. But it’s not just any old problem, it’s THEIR problem. They want to know how your product or solution will make their life easier. So, don’t talk about how your product can perform a ‘certain amazing thing’ that no other product around can….talk about how this ‘certain amazing thing’ can solve the difficult business challenge that they’ve been struggling with for years. It’s not about you, it’s all about your customer.
Author: Sarah Vogel @Sarah_M_Vogel Director of Technology, ANNUITAS
Are you looking for ways to generate more leads? Are you trying to decide if you should allocate more resources to inbound marketing instead of the more traditional outbound marketing that has served you well over the years?
In the last week, as the host of my podcast, I have had the good fortune to interview two ultra successful CEOs. One relies 100% on inbound marketing, and the other, thus far, has relied 100% on outbound marketing.
In today’s post, I’m going to share with you what I believe are the pros and cons of each approach, as well as a hybrid approach that I’ve created.
As the founder of Groove, I’m always thinking about how to generate more of the right leads for my company.
As a content marketer, I know from personal experience that getting website traffic and leads is pretty easy to do once you understand the process. With that said, I’ll be the first to admit that this approach, while very effective in the long term, doesn’t generally deliver immediate results.
As a veteran sales guy, I know from personal experience that prospecting can deliver meaningful results in a fairly short period of time. Although, I must also admit that thanks to the fact that most people don’t answer their phones any more (they let the call go to voicemail) prospecting in the modern era is a lot harder than it was when I first got started in sales back in 1990.
So which is a better use of time? One-on-One prospecting, or content creation?
It’s not just inbound vs outbound – it’s both.
Last week, I interviewed the CEO of a very successful agency and within two years of launching their blog, traffic has risen to about 35,000 visitors a month. With this amount of traffic, the volume of leads is substantial enough that his sales team can afford to be really choosy about who they invest the time to actually speak to.
To achieve this result, in year one, he published about 560 blog posts. If you figure that each post cost about $200-$300 to produce & promote, that means his cost for content & promotion in year one would have been roughly $112,000 to $168,000.
His firm generated $1.2M in it’s first year, so it would appear that this was a good investment.
What isn’t immediately obvious to someone not yet familiar with the benefits of content marketing is this: by creating such a large volume of content, he has turned his website into a very valuable asset.
Relative to his competition, his website is now become an incredibly valuable library of helpful information, and Google is rewarding him accordingly. At the time that I interviewed him, approximately 45% of his traffic comes directly from search engines.
With so many posts now published, not only will the traffic keep on flowing (even if he stopped or slowed production of new content), but his competitors will have to work extra hard and create a huge amount of their own content to ever outrank his site.
As you can see, when it comes to digital marketing, content has become an incredibly valuable asset.
Remember what I said earlier though…success wasn’t instant. Creating all this content and building his website into the incredibly valuable asset that it is today took time.
Earlier today I interviewed the CEO of a 3 year old venture-backed startup. Three years ago, the company was considered a failed investment by the VC and the new CEO was brought in to right the ship.
Last year they did $10M and in the first quarter of this year, they did $3M.
How did they get these results? Did content play a role?
Content didn’t play a role at all. In fact, they don’t even have a blog.
Instead, they have relied on a traditional outbound approach and employ a sales team.
With purely outbound marketing, you rely entirely on your sales team.
In the interview, I didn’t ask the cost of the sales team; however, some simple math tells me that it’s probably a lot more expensive for them to generate leads from outbound than it is for the other company that is using the inbound approach.
Here’s what I did learn. To do outbound, each sales rep they hire must already have an established book of business (warm contacts).
Reps that have this aren’t cheap.
Then, for the cold outreach they do (their warm contacts alone aren’t enough), each sales rep relies heavily on LinkedIn to painstakingly research each and every prospect. Once this research has been completed, the outreach begins with up to as many as 10 cold emails per contact. Each email has just 2 sentences in it has only one purpose: to get a face-to-face meeting.
Meetings generally last 15 to 20 minutes plus the time & expense to physically travel back and forth. On average, the sales cycle is 2 to 3 months.
Thanks to a very compelling product, they are closing about 50% of qualified leads. Perhaps this is one of the reasons they can afford the expensive sales reps.
Given their huge increase in revenue, this approach is definitely working for them; however there are three major drawbacks that I see:
In my case, I want a way to generate highly qualified leads fast and I want to turn my website into a valuable asset that will generate leads on autopilot.
The problem is that my company is not venture-backed, and therefore, I cannot afford a team of writers and a team of sales reps. It’s just not feasible at this point in time.
So, what am I to do? How can I generate highly targeted and highly qualified leads in the short term, without taking away from content production?
For me, the solution is my podcast.
A podcast is an incredible inbound/outbound tool.
By using my podcast as a way to get my foot in the door, I’ve been able to repeatedly establish relationships at the CEO level and since making Groove my focus just 30 days ago, we’ve thus far landed two clients and have a few more conversations now in the works. (The CEO of the venture backed firm is now talking to us about our services as a result of being on the show)
When you use a podcast to get your foot in the door, you are not seen as a salesperson. Instead, you are seen as a journalist.
Rarely, does a CEO turn down the opportunity for exposure, so my ‘close rate’ on invitations to my podcast is quite high.
When you consider how many cold emails it would take for me to get an hour long conversation with a CEO of my choosing, the ROI of the podcaster approach is off the charts.
But there’s more…
Not only does my podcast get me in the door, but it also accomplishes the following additional benefits:
By putting my journalist hat on and using my podcast as a way to get the ear of the CEO, I’m saving a massive amount of time that would have otherwise been wasted sending out hundreds of cold emails. I’m also creating very high quality content that I’ll be able to publish & re-purpose to my hearts content.
Unlike relying purely on content marketing alone, by getting super-specific about the type of company I want to interview (ventured-backed, growing fast, not yet blogging), I can easily generate very high quality leads in a very short period of time.
Want to start your own podcast? I’ve written a detailed post on how to do it here.
Want me to help you launch your own podcast? Click the image below or contact us directly. If you found this post helpful, please share it on your social networks.
In the age of paying for followers and businesses breaking up with Facebook, it might seem like we’re draining the social out of social media. But that doesn’t change the fact that an engaged, interesting inbound marketing presence means a monitored and active social media presence.
For starters, social media is a rich source of data that you can use to inform your marketing strategy overall. Using new and expanded online tools, you can segment your audience based on sales cycle stages, work up competitor surveys, and track high-performing content and social influencers.
But there’s just one thing: you’ve got to actually have some socializing going on! The good news is that you can build a strong, meaningful social media following the old fashioned way and get the old fashioned results: brand recognition, real engagements, and high-quality leads.
In order to turn your social media platform into a source of rich data and lead generation, it’s got to be more social than it is now. Here are four tips for increasing the engagement you receive for each social media platform.
People that follow the top ten brands on Facebook engaged with photos twice as often as text updates. And now that Twitter has jumped on the photo-heavy bandwagon, it’s become a necessary engagement factor. Photos speak volumes, whether it’s a quick snap at a company tradeshow or a custom illustrated infographic. Create and re-share a mixture of both to give prospects an easy way to engage with your company’s social media platform without committing to a contact form or official connection.
A hashtag by any other name will smell as sweet, which explains why Facebook and Google Plus both use some variation of the classic Twitter hashtag. On each platform it works much the same, providing a single keyword that links your update to the global world of updates on that topic. This provides a massive amount of exposure and pushes you into the mix when readers look to get informed on a given topic. Use one or two hashtags or topic tags per update, and go slowly, as research shows that tweets with hashtags have 21 percent higher engagement than tweets with three or more hashtags.
Though scheduled updates often get a bad reputation, they can be particularly helpful for you and beneficial for your prospects. You can schedule your updates for when you know your prospects will be more active and interested, which is especially helpful when you’re on the opposite coast (think scheduling versus live-posting an 8am EST tweet when you’re in an office on the West Coast). Mixing scheduled updates with genuine, real-time updates will hit the middle ground between being a reliable news source and a real, live person.
Social media power users meet and engage online in the same way your personal network meets for live events. In fact, LinkedIn, Google Plus, and Twitter are still growing in B2B networking engagement. The best way to get started is to login to your platform, update your photo, description, and background, and start searching for connections based on topics and location. Use Twitter’s Advanced Search to find specific users who will be valuable to you, and use LinkedIn’s Advanced People Search to seek out prospects based on relationships, location, industry. Upgrade to LinkedIn Pro to have access to users based on years of experience, seniority level, and function within a company.
If you take the time to understand your target market and provide the right opportunities to engage, you can have a truly captivating social media presence.
Is your social media presence as social as it needs to be? How are you going to improve it?
In a completely rational world, facts and logic would always win. Your credibility would rest on the content of your argument and the clarity of your expression.
In a completely rational world, people who think they are better than they are or who fake confidence would be immediately exposed, and people who know their stuff but are naturally shy would still rise to the top.
But the world is much messier than that, and that’s why confidence is a key ingredient of personal credibility. There are several reasons for this:
People don’t make decisions on logic and fact alone. Your listeners are using two mental processes simultaneously to decide whether or not to believe you. System 2 involves the active involvement of their logical thinking processes to weigh evidence and form judgments of the probability that what you are saying is true. System 1 involves the rapid and unconscious reading of cues, and the complex and unknown interplay between emotion and intuition. System 2 is hard work, while System 1 is easy and automatic, which is why it carries so much influence in our decisions even when we try to prevent it.
Uncertainty and subjectivity. Although System 2 might seem to be a superior way of making decisions, System 1 is actually essential to good decisions and the proper functioning of organizations. Organizations exist to combine different specialties and competencies under one roof, so you will likely be speaking to people who are not equipped to fully understand your logic and facts, at least not without putting a lot of time into it. That means that they have to take shortcuts and rely on your judgment. Their confidence in your judgment depends heavily on whether they perceive that you have confidence in your own judgment and competence. Since they can’t read your mind, the only way they have of perceiving your confidence is through the behaviors you exhibit.
When I interviewed executives for my book on sales presentations, several admitted that they don’t have the knowledge to fully judge the accuracy of claims that salespeople make when they present highly technical solutions. So one of their favorite tactics is to ask a couple of questions to “scratch beneath the surface” and judge how confidently the salesperson answers. To some extent, even multimillion dollar decisions are being predicated on the decision-maker’s confidence in their own ability to assess others’ confidence!
Confidence adds to perceived competence. Being social animals, humans are exquisitely sensitive to verbal and nonverbal cues that indicate relative levels of status within groups. Those who act more assertively and confidently tend to be accorded higher status, and in general are perceived to be more competent than they actually are.[1] In fact, while it might seem that overconfidence could be dangerous to decision making, the fact is that overconfidence makes you exhibit the behaviors that others find convincing, so – within reason – thinking you’re better than you are actually pays off in terms of higher influence within the group. It’s called “honest overconfidence” and it works. It leads to speaking up more in meetings, appearing calmer and more relaxed, and seeming more confident in your answers.
What does this mean to you as a persuader? Anything you can do to boost your outward confidence will add to your credibility. Of course, the best and most reliable way is to boost your inward confidence by being prepared and thoroughly knowing what you’re talking about. But because that’s not enough, you also need to get comfortable with speaking to groups, and even in some cases, fake it even if you don’t fully feel it.
You might also like:
Should You Fake It ‘Til You Make It?
Book Review: The Confidence Code
Max Cred Factor #4: Confidence
[1] Cameron Anderson, Sebastien Brion, Don A. Moore, and Jessica A. Kennedy, A Status-Enhancement Account of Overconfidence, 2012.
Finding distributors within your industry can be a very difficult task when trying to use standard marketing tactics. That’s why using inbound marketing to attract distributors is an increasing trend for many B2B businesses. But how do you actually find distributors and why does inbound marketing work so well? Lets take a look.
Business owners are always looking for the next idea or strategy to improve their business; and these owners are looking for these ideas online, so make sure you are there for what they are looking for. Strive to offer insightful information on your website to attract the attention of these distributors. This information should help establish yourself as an industry thought leader. Once you have that established, your distributors will be looking to you for all the industry news and strategies. At that point they will not only start doing more research about your company, but they will have already started building trust with your company because of the insightfulness you have offered about the industry.
Trust is critical when trying to “sell” your partnership to potential distributors. Businesses want to partner with other companies that will help improve their current situation. If they don’t trust you, they will not be willing to partner with you. That’s why establishing yourself as thought leader can do wonders for attracting distributors and ultimately encouraging them to work with you.
Inbound marketing leverages many social networks to get their information out there. The only problem with most of these networks for B2Bs is that they are better designed to reach an end-user instead of a company… except for LinkedIn. LinkedIn is like Facebook’s professional brother. You can create your own company profile and connect with other professionals within your industry. LinkedIn is great for spreading your content via the web and to create more brand awareness.
Sharing relevant resources on LinkedIn groups can help get your information in front of the right crowd. Groups can be thought of as an informal brainstorming session for an industry or idea. If you find the right groups, you could possibly tap into a bountiful amount of business owners looking for partners like yourself. All it takes is one really great piece of information to raise the awareness of your company. So how do you find the right groups?
The best way to find groups for your company is by searching with keywords that relate to your business. So heres an example, lets say you are looking for a distributor in the food service. You could type in a keyword like food service management and see what kind of groups appear. You also need to evaluate how many members are in the group and the frequency of posts. You may think you have found a great group due to its name, but what is it really worth when their are only 3 people in the group. Once you have a couple good groups to follow there are a few strategies you should use. First you should start making connections with the “power players” of the group. Conversate with them and offer good information. Others will see this and possibly start thinking of you as a “power player”. Also if you establish good relationships, they will be more willing to share your information with others within the industry.
When it comes to attracting distributors, inbound marketing is one of the best ways to do so. Leverage tools like LinkedIn to help spread your information of the industry and establish yourself as a thought leader. Once you have accomplished this, distributors will start looking for you to learn more and ultimately may become a partner.
