Late last year, Steve Richard and I had an idea for new research. This would be the third collaboration between The Bridge Group and VorsightBP (after Sales Speaks and Mythbusting Millennials).

Our intent was to survey sales reps, front-line managers, and directors to understand the current state of sales management. By asking similar questions and capturing the variations between their perspectives, we knew there was a story to be told.

As a measuring stick, we decided to include a Net Promoter Score question in the individual sales rep variant.

What we found shocked us.

If I could net it out for you...

This project revealed a disturbing question: Are we a generation of Managers or Leaders? The distance between these two accounts for much of the gap between Promoters and Detractors.

Now is the time to address this and I hope you'll take a look at the ebook and add your comments. Let’s help each other move our industry and profession up and to the right!

Almost every position in every company requires some kind of selling. Here are the essentials you need to know to do it well.

There are thousands of "how to sell" books and training courses available everywhere around the world. However, everything you need to know about selling really boils down to the following simple rules:

The notion that a great salesperson can sell anything to anybody is as stupid as the idea that a virtuoso musician can play any instrument. The more you specialize in terms of product, service, and industry, the more likely you are to sell successfully.

When you're selling, the last thing you want or need is a huge list of sales leads. You only want to spend time on prospects who will probably buy. Therefore, the tighter your target list, the more likely you'll find someone who's actually interested.

Never, never, never contact a prospect before you've checked out the person's LinkedIn profile, researched his or her company and industry, and found at least one good reason why the prospect should to talk with you, today.

Your initial goal is not to sell but to get into a conversation to find out if it the prospect is a potential customer. Therefore, a sales pitch--whether spoken, written, videoed, or whatever--is not just a waste of time; it's actually preventing a sale from ever happening.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with selling for a living or having to sell in order to make yourself or your firm successful. However, most people dislike any behavior that smacks of the showroom. Be yourself, not a clone of Ron Popeil.

When you do get into that conversation, your goal is to find out whether that prospect has a need for what you're offering and the money to buy it. If not, eliminate that prospect from your list. Don't waste your time or the prospect's.

When you're assessing needs, what's most important is always what your prospect's customers need from your prospect to be successful. Your job is to help the prospect meet those needs. Your own needs, of course, are utterly irrelevant.

Selling is not something that you do to a customer. It's something that you do for a customer. This means understanding how the customer buys the sort of thing you're selling and providing assistance as needed to make the purchase happen.

When you've got what you hope is a bona fide potential customer, it's hard to risk hearing a no that smashes your dream of a big sale. Nevertheless, if you don't ask for the business, or wait too long to ask for it, you're going to lose the sale anyway.

The only way to make selling easier is to build up your Rolodex, not just of contacts but of people whom you've personally helped become more successful. Eventually, you won't need to sell any longer because your friends will do your selling for you.

Readers: Is there something in this list that's missing. Leave a comment!

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The word “strategy” is so over-used these days. No doubt about it we all want to have ground-breaking strategies, be thought of as strategic thinkers, and win awards for our companies or agencies with our strategy of the year. But nine times out of ten when I ask someone about their strategy, what they share with me is just a list of tactics. Not at all what I’d call a strategy.

So how and why are we all missing the boat? It turns out there are some common pitfalls among marketers.

1. Diving straight to tactics
A couple emails, a webinar and three white papers do not make a marketing strategy. Take a step back and think long and hard about your goals. Are you trying to find net new prospects? Are you trying to retain existing customers? Is your company trying to gain market share or drive incremental revenue? Odds are your goals are a combination of all of those things. And you can understand why a list of white papers, tradeshows and webinars as a strategic plan will not alone achieve those goals. Instead, start with the goals and think about how you’ll achieve them.

Do you have the contact data you need? Do you have the technical tools you’ll need? Do you have the right people (both internally and externally) to help you execute your strategy? No strategy, no matter how good, will succeed without these foundational elements in place. And most importantly, your strategy needs to define how you’ll Engage with new prospects, Nurture them to become qualified, and Convert them to sales opportunities. A strategy isn’t about how many content offers you can create. It’s about improving your business results.

2. Lack of buyer-driven content
Content is obviously a key part of any marketing strategy. And most marketers have a great deal of content. The problem is that it’s all internally focused. We love to write about ourselves, our products, our solutions. The truth is that buyers don’t care what you have to say about yourself.

A successful marketing strategy includes content that is driven by the buyer’s needs. It speaks to their current pain points and, just as importantly, it’s posted in ways and locations where they are looking, researching and shopping. Without taking that into consideration, your content will not connect with your buyer.

3. Delivering unqualified leads to sales
This is a classic pitfall. Sales screams at marketing for more leads.  Marketing scrambles to deliver more leads, any leads. Sales responds with a resounding “these leads are horrible.” Sound familiar? The issue is all about quantity versus quality. It’s not enough to deliver 1,000 leads a week to sales if 90% of them are no good. Wouldn’t it make more sense to deliver 20 leads to sales that are pre-qualified, allowing for 60% of them to convert to an opportunity?

Today’s marketing automation platforms allow marketers to deliver pre-qualified leads to sales fairly easily, and the details of this are essential to any demand generation strategy. Just because someone attended a webinar does not mean they are ready to talk to a sales person. Take the time to build a process whereby contacts are engaged with buyer-driven content and nurtured until they are ready to speak with a sales rep. That is strategic.

4. No collaboration with sales
No demand generation strategy will succeed without collaboration between marketing and sales. Your colleagues in the sales organization are an excellent resource for generating the buyer-driven content mentioned earlier. After all, they are the “feet on the street” presumably listening to their customers wants and needs. Allow sales to provide input as you craft your audience personas.

Sales is also a must-have for any lead qualification and scoring conversation. After all, how can marketing deliver pre-qualified leads to sales if we don’t know how sales defines “qualified”? Find out who they want to talk to and who they don’t want to talk to and use that to build your lead qualification strategy. (There I go using that word again.)

5. Lack of refinement
As much as we’d all love to think that we can launch a new demand generation program and have it run perfectly, the reality is, this will never be the case. We work for months and months to produce the content, build the process, and align with sales. Yet the work is never done. There is always room for improvement. So before you launch a program, be clear on how you’ll define success and track results accordingly. You may find out that the analysis and tweaking for incremental gains is the most fun of all.

A long list of tactics, no matter how great, does not constitute a Demand Generation Strategy. Marketers need to think about more than how they will deliver their message and when.  It takes much more than that to drive real revenue.

Author: Jennifer Harmel @JenniferHarmel2, VP Strategy, ANNUITAS

As inbound marketers, we love our data. Today’s digital marketing channels let us track and measure more than any channel that came before it, and we’re actually in a position to pick and choose what we track based on how much it can inform our decisions.

We’re able to monitor—down to the minute—website traffic, leads at each stage of the sales funnel, email open rates, email click rates, landing page views, form conversions, blog views and a lot more. Looking at these numbers regularly will provide insight into performance and indicate where there is room for improvement.

As important as it is to analyze performance data from individual campaign components, it’s equally important to evaluate in context, or how the metrics from each component relate to one another. We do this by evaluating a conversion path, which offers new actionable insight used to improve campaign performance.

A conversion path could look like:
Google Ad > Landing Page > Confirmation Email
Website CTA > Landing Page > Confirmation Email
Email > Landing Page > Confirmation Email

HubSpot offers an even more detailed conversion path definition that contains five components:
CTA > Landing Page > Form > Thank You Page > Confirmation Email

For example, we may look at email performance numbers in terms of sent, delivered, bounces, opens and clicks, but we also need to look at the conversion rate on the associated landing page to determine whether those two components—the email and the landing page—are working together to drive conversions.

What is the weakest link in your conversion path?

Taking a holistic look at conversion path metrics identifies weak spots. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

CTA > Landing Page

If your click rate on a website CTA is good, but your landing page conversion rate is not, there is an issue with the landing page. Visitors are clicking on the CTA and bouncing off of the landing page without converting. Here are some possible causes to investigate:

• The H1 on your landing page isn’t compelling
• There’s a perceived disconnect between the CTA copy and the landing page copy, in terms of what the visitor thinks they’re going to get after clicking on the CTA
• Your form is too long or asks questions that aren’t appropriate for the level of the sales funnel

On the flip-side, if your landing page conversion rate is high, but the CTA click-throughs are low, you know your landing page is strong because those who are indeed landing there are converting. It’s a matter of improving your CTA to get more people to that landing page. Some elements to look at include:

• CTA copy
• CTA design
• Button copy or color
• CTA placement

Email > Landing Page

A similar logic applies to studying the conversion path starting with an email. Rather than ending your analysis with the email click-through rate, put that in context with the landing page your recipients come to if they click on the email’s call to action.

If the email open rate is low, take a look at the email’s subject line. I also recommend reviewing your list. If it’s not segmented well or isn’t up-to-date, you might be trying to reach people who aren’t interested in your brand.

If the click-through rate is low, the content of the email is not resonating with the reader. Some possible causes include:

• An offer that is unappealing or unexciting
• The message and offer are not adequately tailored to the target audience
• The call to action is weak and doesn’t motivate the reader to click

If your landing page conversion rate is low relative to the email click-through rate, then there is a problem with the landing page. The email got the reader’s attention but the landing page couldn’t keep it. Make sure the landing page clearly communicates added value over what is explained in the email.

It’s not enough to look at campaign performance metrics as standalone numbers. It’s critical to look at performance holistically to understand how one step in a campaign impacts the next. Doing so sheds more light on how to optimize for conversions and achieve greater inbound marketing success.

photo credit: Stuck in Customs

One of the services we provide our clients is training to improve their sales talent hiring effectiveness.  The facts are stark.  Without a good process most companies have excessively high turnover rates, and the cost of that turnover is great.  National statistics indicate that it costs the employer between 3x and 5x the salesperson’s total annual compensation for each bad hire.  Fortunately there is a repeatable process that if the hiring managers will follow, will produce predictably great results. Here are the steps.

Determine whether you want to be proactive or passive in your approach.

What I mean is this.  Passive is the act of posting ads on job boards or elsewhere and then hoping candidates that are looking for jobs will find yours.  Proactive is the act of reaching out through social media channels like LinkedIn or others and finding people who fit your profile but may not be actually looking for a job.  This approach takes a lot of time and effort but will produce better results.  If you choose this approach, it is recommended that you seek aid from an expert who spends their whole day finding candidates.  You will likely not have the resources to do it on your own.  Most of my clients who follow a passive approach, other than in select, highly sought-after geographies, are disappointed by the results and have far fewer quality candidates to select from.

Create a well-written ad/description of the opportunity.

Regardless of whether you are passive or proactive in your recruiting approach you need a quality description of the position including what experience the perfect candidate would have to prepare them for the position (experience selling to CEOs in a competitive environment for instance); what activities they should love to do (must be comfortable generating your own leads); what is unique about your position and company (why would someone want to work for you?).  The ad is part disqualifier and part marketing document.   If you follow my complete advice then feel free to make the document as marketing oriented as you want, but be prepared to weed out a lot of candidates with the assessment process I recommend.

The hiring manager should be actively engaged in the process. 

Our clients who have the most success in attracting good quality candidates have engaged and active sales managers in the process.  The best sales managers are always recruiting and thinking about building a bench.  It is not just HR’s job to find the candidates.  If the compensation plan is structured appropriately then sales managers will be incented to field a full team and will be penalized if they are missing people from the team, and therefore sales don’t grow at the requisite rate.  Sales managers should constantly be using their contacts to reach out and find candidates.   Similar to the University of Kentucky basketball team philosophy, one has to assume that their best players will move on and will need replaced.

Use a sales-specific assessment to weed out the wrong candidates. 

First, I am partial to the best sales assessment on the market (voted 3 years in a row) Objective Management Group, but I am mostly partial to it because it is predictive and accurate.  It is not a personality test, rather it actually predicts with a high degree of validity (95% predictive validity) who will succeed in your position and who won’t.  Second, you have to use these assessments BEFORE you spend time looking at resumes, conducting interviews and forming opinions about the candidate.  They are huge time and money savers if used correctly, which is at the beginning of the interviewing process, before anyone has spent any time evaluating them.  Do this and you will have so much insight into the needs and skills of the newly hired salespeople that their on-boarding and ramp-up time will be reduced.  They will rise to the top of the pack in no time and it will literally transform your sales team.

Follow a consistent repeatable interviewing process. 

As much as I am a huge fan of using the right assessment, it does not stop there.  You must create a repeatable interviewing process that has four components:

1. Is the candidate who they appeared to be on their resume.   Determine this by asking behavioral questions specifically challenging items on their resume.
2. Have a batch of good behavioral questions designed to be asked of everyone (For example: Tell me about a time when you weren’t reaching your quota, what did you do?)
3. Use the questions provided on the assessment to poke at the weaknesses that the assessment uncovered to see how much of an impact they will have in your situation.
4. Have a list of specific subjective observations to make such as handshake, eye contact, communication skills etc.

As long as you have implemented the use of the assessment, which is completely objective, it is just fine to include some subjectivity.  Just be certain your subjectivity doesn’t trump the other facts.

Implement a structured on-boarding program. 

Even the best salespeople need a structured on-boarding program to understand the nuances of your product or services.  They need stories of customers so they can understand why customers buy from your company.  They need a huge list of good probing, hard-hitting questions to ask prospects, not just the basics.  An example would look like this:  Make sure Day 1 thru 5 are completely scripted – what do they need to learn, who will they learn it from and then set expectations about what they should get out of those interactions.  It is THEIR job to actually get what they need.  In Weeks 2 – 4 set specific weekly expectations.  If they are going on calls or joint calls, what are the expectations?  Then look at month 2 and 3 the same way.  Always be focused on helping them plan out the appropriate level of activity to achieve the expected goal for each time period.  Your plan should be specific to your situation with regard to product complexity etc, but keep in mind that the best salespeople want to get up and running as quickly as possible.  Do not lock them in training for weeks on end.

If you want to read a case study about how we helped transform a client’s sales hiring process read here:  Finding a Better Way to Hire.

If you want to see a sample candidate assessment as I discussed read here: Sample Candidate Assessment.

Power. It’s arguably the most precious commodity of the modern age, and the obsession of brilliant minds around the world. Scientists scramble to harness and hone earth’s natural resources, the brilliance of the sun and the awesome potential of the wind. Engineers run countless configurations to determine the most effective ways to charge our homes and vehicles. For so many of us, unlimited power is a given, something we’ve learned to take for granted

For more than a billion people across the planet, however, electricity is a limited, rare commodity. High schooler Ann Makosinski, 16, of Victoria, Canada learned of this reality and dedicated a science fair project to the situation. Her hand-heat-powered “Hollow Flashlight” was, in her mind, a practical solution to a pretty big problem. To the science community at large, it was a stroke of genius to recognize that power originates within every one of us—every day, all the time. Thermoelectricity took a step forward. Read more...

If you're flexible about your travel, you can score the biggest discounts on your trip. That's not new, but Extreme Hotel Deals offers great rooms—sometimes at posh resorts—for serious discounts. We're talking $10, $20, or $50 a night for incredible rooms—if you act fast and have a bit of luck, that is.

Read more...

"Thank you" can be an incredibly powerful pair of words, especially if the person you're thanking really needs to hear them, or isn't expecting them. In this short TED talk, Dr. Laura Trice muses over the power of saying thank you, and reminds us why we should say it—and ask to hear it—more often.

Read more...

The sales landscape has shifted in the last few years.

Buyers are more informed than ever, competition is stiffer, and products and services are increasingly seen as replaceable, leaving most sellers at a loss for the best way to add value and differentiate.

Yet, some sellers continue to win consistently.

To find out what these sellers are doing differently than the rest, we undertook a massive research effort. In our study, we looked at 700 B2B purchases made by buyers who represent $3.1 billion in annual purchasing power.

We found that the sellers who win harness the power of ideas. And in our new book, Insight Selling: Surprising Research on What Sales Winners Do Differently by bestselling authors Mike Schultz and John Doerr, we share exactly how they do it...

Image Credit: Star Trek

Crowdsourcing software review company TrustRadius revealed its latest marketing automation ranking and buyers’ guide today, and here’s the consensus: Software for the enterprise still lacks the appeal of consumer versions.

“The usability sucks, and the user interface is pretty basic,” TrustRadius CEO Vinay Bhagat told me yesterday. “They haven’t had the same innovation that other products in the market have seen … but removing those incumbents is not a trivial thing.”

Solutions from vendors such as IBM, Silverpop (which IBM just acquired), and Teradata are still not at the level of younger, fresher competitors such as Marketo, Hubspot, and Act-On, in spite all the “consumerization of the enterprise” we’ve been hearing about.

In fact, several well-known solutions ranked below average in usability, according to TrustRadius survey respondents. Only Oracle’s Eloqua ranked very high both in usability and in being strongly focused on the enterprise market.

Part of that, however, might not be the enterprise vendors’ fault. For some reason, enterprise users just seem to be more harsh on their software than employees at smaller companies.

“SMB users are less critical of their products, and the products they use tend to be higher rated, as they’re inexpensive and meet needs neatly,” Bhagat said. “Enterprise products, on the other hand, require configuration and setup.”

Bhagat added that not all the vendors are “super-happy” about where they ended up, but he said “the data doesn’t lie.”

For mid-sized companies, TrustRadius’ data says that Marketo and Pardot were the best products, with customer satisfaction ratings of 4.2 and 4.0 out of 5, respectively. And for smaller companies, Hubspot, Act-On, and Infusionsoft topped the list, with Hubspot getting top honors for an almost-perfect 4.8 customer satisfaction score.

Two interesting aspects of the report highlight emerging trends: an increased segment focus, and a widening division in the market between point solutions and suites, or “marketing clouds.”

“We had a thesis that it was important to look at the market by segment –small, midsize, and enterprise – and when we ran the data, it really rang true,” Bhagat says. “We saw some really stark differences.”

Hubspot, for instance, started out as a small business solution and now has definite aspirations for the enterprise. Similarly, Act-On — which just announced a $42 million funding round —  is specifically aimed at mid-market companies but has been adopted in the enterprise as well. The data shows, Bhagat says, that while both companies have appreciable share in enterprise, usage tends to be more departmental and often in conjunction with other solutions.

For instance, the same company will often use both Hubspot and Marketo at the same time. That’s something we saw in our VB Marketing Automation Index report as well, with a full 58 percent of companies using more than one marketing automation system, and a full 30 percent using three or more.

The other trend is the distinction between single solutions, like a Marketo, and integrated marketing clouds like those offered by Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, and perhaps IBM, which pull together a number of components such as social, marketing campaigns, and analytics into one suite.

“I think it’s a classic debate between best-of-breed and enterprise suite,” Bhagat said, echoing what Act-On CEO Raghu Raghavan told me two days ago. “It’s very difficult to be world-class in every facet … you’ve got competition in every module.”

The market will likely divide between those who insist on best-of-breed for every component of their marketing stack, Bhagat said — and are willing to put up with some integration blood, sweat, and tears — and those who demand everything from one vendor, with one customer relationship, and a single point of interface.

It’s a difficult decision for enterprises, and there’s no one right answer for everyone.

“Oracle, for instance, makes an argument that they are more integrated that Salesforce,” Bhagat said. “But they don’t own a world-class social tool. And Omniture was best-in-breed when Adobe bought it but now faces very stiff competition from Google Analytics Premium.”

Marketo is pretty much the only fully enterprise-focused independent marketing automation platform remaining, with the possible exception of Hubspot. Hubspot, of course, is independent, but more mid-market-focused at the moment than locked in on the enterprise.

That would tend to make both companies appealing acquisition targets, I would assume.

TrustRadius competitor G2 Crowd released its marketing automation report just a few weeks ago, in which Hubspot, Eloqua, Act-On, Marketo, and Pardot received top ratings.

The Federal Reserve has just released its April Beige Book, a collection of anecdotes on economic conditions from business contacts across each of the 12 Fed districts.

According to the Beige Book, economic growth increased in most U.S. regions and consumer spending rose as the harsh winter weather conditions receded.

The word "weather" is indeed mentioned 103 times.

Below is the full text of the release:

What do your sales pipeline stages look like?

How many do you have?

Are they working, does your pipeline tell you what you need to know?

If you’re like most sales organizations your pipeline stages are average. They do just enough for you to track sales, to manage opportunities and to provide a rough forecast. But, also like most sales organizations, when it comes to crunch time, when it comes to the end of the quarter, your pipeline fails you and you’ve missed  your number again. High or low, it doesn’t matter. If you miss your forecast substantially (high or low), you’re not doing your job as the sales leader and that’s because you don’t what’s happening inside your sales funnel.  A big culprit of this “blurry vision” — pipeline stages that are too big.

When pipeline stages are too big, it’s hard to know what’s going on.

When is a pipeline stage too big? When too many sales yes’s need to be achieved to get to the next stage, they’re too big. When too many sales actions and efforts are required or when the stages are wildly complex the stages are too big. When sales stages are too complex, when there is lots of activity, lots of moving parts, big sales stages become an abyss and it’s time to consider breaking them up. It’s almost impossible to accurately know what’s going on when a stage is too big and the result is an inaccurate forecast.

Deals end up all over the place when a stage is too big!

When a stage is too big you don’t have the visibility needed to know where the deal actually is. It’s hard to know if it’s close to moving to the next stage or if it’s still in the beginning. The key is to avoid big stages and break them down in to more manageable stages.

A Good Pipeline Stage Size;

Start with the complexity. If there is a certain complexity in a stage such as a demo, or a trial, consider making the demo or trial it’s own stage. This way you can separate the impact and data results from the trial from the effort required to get a commitment to the trial and from the review phase. The key is to make sure there aren’t too many complex sales efforts in a single stage.

Also, consider length of time. If your sales cycle is a year long. Having a two sales stages that can take 5- 6 months each and two stages that can be done in a few weeks will cause you problems. Deals get stuck in a stage with little visibility and because the stages are naturally long, you don’t find out they are in trouble  until it’s too late.

Activity can also play a role. Like anything, the more parts that are involved, the more points of failure. Consider building sales stages that don’t require too many activities. If there is too much going on in a stage, too many activities that have to be accomplished, one trip up can slow everything to a halt and you may have no idea what the problem is.

Make sure stages align with the buyers journey, how your buyers’ buy. The best thing you can do is to break the sales cycle down so it aligns with the most important and impacting “YES’s” required from your buyers to get the sale. Each “yes” gets you closer and it’s more manageable. (this video breaks down the next “yes” concept.

Let me be clear. I’m not a fan of big, 10 stage pipelines. I personally prefer no more than 6, unless there is a compelling, justifiable reason. But, at the same time, a pipeline with only a few stages that allows deals to become lost or wallow for months, does you or your sales people no good.

Take a look at your current pipeline stages. Are they fluid. Do you find some take longer to move out of than others. Do you know your average “time in stage” data? Is it skewed to one or two stages?  It shouldn’t be. It doesn’t have to be equal, but if one or two of your stages is taking up the majority of the selling time, you have a stage problem and it’s affecting forecasting.

To improve forecasting, you need to know the flow-through rate of your opportunities from stage to stage. If one or two stages takes a long time to leave, rest assured you’re losing deals and slowing down the process.

This is the methodology I use to map sales cycles to pipeline. Check it out. 

Download the ebook

Big data is very much in vogue these days and social media networks are some of the largest sources of big data. There are literally billions of posts, interactions and shares which you can analyze. Buried in this social data are insights that can help you improve your marketing and give you the competitive edge. However, where do you start, what is relevant for your business? I wanted to take a practical look at how you can use social analytics to gain insights and improve your performance. To this end I have included expert tips from people working in social media and marketing

What Do We Want To Achieve And Hence What Should We Measure?

It can be costly and take a lot of time to analyze social data, so what are the benefits we are looking to achieve. Ultimately we want to use analytics to improve our social media marketing performance, this might include:

• Improving audience reach (e.g. increasing followers, amplification of content to more people)
• Positive feedback and praise (eg plus ones and sharing, which is a form of endorsement)
• More engagement in conversations
• Better understanding of our target audience
• Converting people to customers (the key metric)
• Doing better than our competitors

These objectives start to define the social data we need to analyze. This social data falls into three types namely:

• Your own social data: how well are you doing and what can you learn
• Your competitors’ social data: how well are they doing and what can you learn from them
• Wider social data: what resonates with the target audience and what are the trends

Based on your analysis of what works you can build a social playbook, in essence a set of plays that based on your data drives the most engagement and conversions. This playbook should be a source of competitive edge, allowing you to move from data to insights to actionable tasks or plays.

1) Your Own Social Data Analytics

The easiest place to start is analyzing your own social media data. From this analysis you can work out what works best for you in terms of driving engagement and conversions. You can then develop for your social playbook examples of best practice. In simple terms find your strongest performing content, understand why it worked and make it easy for your teams to replicate it.

When reviewing your own social data you need to cover the following areas.

Reach (direct and amplified)

Reach is a combination of your own followers and the followers of the people that share your content, the people that amplify your content. Follower analysis is a reasonably straightforward task, you can use various tools to assess the number of followers on the different social networks and you can start to analyze the nature of these followers such as by region, by job role and by gender. Are your followers the followers you want, are they potential buyers and influencers. Tools like Twitonomy, Twtrland and Followerwonk work well for Twitter and Circlecount, Circloscope and Steady Demand work well for Google Plus. With these tools you track spikes in the number of your followers and assess what caused these increases.

In Google Plus you can use Ripples to see how a post was shared more widely and who helped amplify it. Unfortunately it is less straightforward to review who is sharing your content across all networks and to assess the degree of amplification. In BuzzSumo we have introduced a feature that allows you to see who has shared your content. You can start by doing a domain search for your content in BuzzSumo and then viewing sharers for each article. This allows you to then analyze the people that shared your content and their reach.

Our research shows, not surprisingly, a direct correlation between content shares and the number of influencers that share the content.

Positive feedback

Each network has its own way to allow people to promote or like content such as likes, plus ones, favorites and thumbs up on blogs. These built-in mechanisms are relatively easy to measure.

What is more valuable are positive comments or sentiment. Many of the monitoring tools recognize this and will keep track of positive sentiment. Thus tools such as Brandwatch, Bottlenose and others will provide you with data on sentiment and allow you to drill into this.

Content shares

Shares are are arguably more powerful than likes as the person is resharing the content to a wider audience. This can happen on some networks with a like or plus one depending upon personal settings but sharing is a powerful endorsement. On your own site you may have share buttons and counters so that you can see for an individual content item how it has been shared. It is much harder to see across all content and who shared the content. This is where you can use BuzzSumo. Just type in your domain and you will get the most shared content on your site. For any individual article you can click ‘view sharers’ to see who shared it.

Conversations

This is the direct engagement you have with people on social networks. It is harder to analyze but you can see the number of posts that receive comments and drill down into these discussions. As a general rule conversations and comments are good indicators of engagement.

Conversions

This is arguably the most important aspect to review to assess how well you are doing. A large number of followers is a vanity metric if it doesn’t lead to conversions. You can track clicks through from your links in your social posts as a starting point and with tools such as Oktopost you can monitor clicks through to landing pages and form completions. You can take things a lot further with Google analytics. You can track conversions based on traffic from social networks. You can define conversions relevant to your site such as a purchase or completed an enquiry form. In your CRM you can also track lead sources of conversions.

Summarizing your own social data

True Social Metrics is one tool that will help you pull all this data and analysis together. You can connect your various social pages and also connect your account to your Google Analytics to track conversions or economic value. Below is a sample report.

Whilst averages are important, more important in my view are the actual figures for each post. True Social Metrics gives you this data and identifies your best posts which you can re-sort as follows:

Thus using True Social Metrics will give you a great starting point. However, I would suggest you aim to create a more detailed spreadsheet with the following data for your best posts:

Creating this spreadsheet will give you a great starting point in understanding and evidencing what works for you currently.

2) Analyzing Competitor Social Data

The analysis of your own social data is only one part of the story. Your competitors may actually be performing better than you, so analyze their performance. I think there are two areas to focus on in the absence of conversion data which are engagement and share data.

The good news is that a lot of the data is freely available. You can use free tools for example to review their Twitter or Google Plus performance. You can use tools like Twitonomy, Steady Demand or many others. Below is an example of a report from Twitonomy for Social Media Today and who they engage with.

With BuzzSumo’s advanced features, currently in beta, you can see the networks where a competitor gets most of their shares. In the case of Social Media Today the most productive network is Twitter and the content formats that get most shares are infographics and list posts as seen below.

In terms of timing I can also look at the total shares by the day an article was published. Monday is the best performing day for Social Media Today though interestingly the weekends still perform quite well.

You also need to get behind the detail to look at individual posts and with the current version of BuzzSumo you can review their most shared content and who shared it. Simply type in their domain and search for their most shared posts in the last month. Below are the most shared SMT posts in the last month (nice to see one of my own at number 3).

You can take this analysis further to see who shared the content by clicking view sharers.

Hopefully, this will form of analysis will help you understand what is working for your competitors and identify where they perform better than you and why? You can then assess what can you do to improve your performance such as:

• Put more focus on a different network
• Use different content formats
• Publish on different days
• Reaching out to influencers

3) Analyzing Industry and Topic Data – Find What Works in your Area

The third form of social analytics data to review is for your industry or topic as a whole. From the analysis of your own social data and that of your competitors you will already have a good view on what networks are most used, which influencers amplify in these networks and the types of content that get traction. However, you also need to look at the wider picture.

You can undertake a Topsy search to see what is being discussed in your topic area on Twitter or use other tools to do this across multiple networks such as Brandwatch, Zuum or Bottlenose. You can also use a BuzzSumo search to find the most shared content for any topic areas across all social networks. This will help you understand what type of content and posts resonate with the audience.

You also need to pay attention to general trends and assess if they apply to your industry. For example, researchers for the NY Times discovered longer articles were more likely to be emailed than shorter articles. This is consistent with our own research at BuzzSumo which has found a direct correlation between the number of shares and the length of the article as shown below.

Maybe this opens up an opportunity to produce longer form content. There is also a lot of other general research on timings, frequency and content formats. For example, our research at BuzzSumo has found across all industries infographics perform best in terms of shares.

However, whilst you should be aware of these findings you should not blindly follow them but rather assess whether they apply to your industry.

Build your Social Playbook to Gain a Competitive Edge

Once you understand what works, based on hard data from these three areas of analysis, you can build a Social Playbook, by which I mean a set of best practice examples or plays which are proven to improve your performance.

For example, based on your evidence you can craft examples of posts that are more likely to get maximum engagement and a set of rules or guidelines for your teams to follow.

Steady Demand is a case in point, they analyzed hundreds of thousands of Google Plus posts and demonstrated that posts with three elements (of a certain content length, mentioned people and used a hashtag) consistently outperformed other posts. Below is a live example from their site.

Thus to gain maximum engagement on Google Plus you might be advised to include these three elements.

You need to build a set of plays that work for you in your area. These will address such things as timing and frequency, content formats on certain networks and key influencers on specific networks to engage with. I think it is also useful to build exemplar posts which act as guides for each of the main networks. What better way to onboard a new member of your team than to show them what works. This is not to rule out experimentation but just to ensure the playbook is based on evidence from your social analytics.

Andrew Darling, Director of Global Marketing at TBG, believes harnessing data from social media is now a key task and “being able to gain insight from this data is becoming a secret weapon for marketers.” I agree completely with this assessment. Social analytics can provide insights which you can translate into guidelines and action to give you the competitive edge in your marketing.

Social Analytics Tips from the Experts

I was keen to make this post practical so I reviewed some of the best posts in this area and asked some of the experts in the field for their tips.

David Somerville, Head of Social Media at Fresh Egg sets out three key analytics tasks:

“Ensure you measure the effectiveness of each individual post you make (via each platform), so you can see what is working and what’s not. Measure the engagement levels (likes, shares, favourites etc) for each post then look for any patterns – for example, do your photos always get better engagement, what hashtags are working etc.”

“Ensure your goals are set-up correctly within Google Analytics to track your conversions. By tracking your macro conversions (sales) and micro conversions (email sign-ups, information requests etc) then you can better report on how social media referral traffic is contributing to conversions on site, both last click and attributed ones.”

“Use event tracking on your on-site active and passive social media buttons, so you can then measure their usage within Google Analytics. This is especially useful if you want to test the placement of active social media buttons on a page or see how many people are visiting your site and then going to your social media networks.”

Joseph Parker, Senior Media Outreach Specialist at Digital Relevance believes “the key to successful social campaigns is the research that goes into verifying that those you connect with represent the audience that are likely to convert. Define ‘conversion’ at the onset, and use that as your guide.” Joseph also recommends you use Google Analytics as an “outline” for defining conversions that can be tracked.

Joseph adds once you find key influencers have a good look at who they are following. This could lead you to similar individuals who wield more influence. Joe recommends tool such as Socialbro and Followerwonk to analyze your current Twitter followers and your targeted followers.

Leo Widrich co-founder and COO at Buffer provided a really useful tip in a recent post when he pointed out that almost any report inside Google Analytics can be created as an email report and sent to you in a variety of forms—csv, excel, pdf. He receives his in the form of pdfs. To create an email report just click the Email button near the top of your desired report. The button should be immediately below the report name and next to buttons for exporting and adding reports to your dashboard.

Robin Colner, a digital marketing professional at Digistar Media has pointed out the importance of being able to track links in your posts. “Capturing data on the activity associated with links shared by use of a link shortener is one of the most important data sets to analyze.”

Jennita Sable Lopez from Moz outlined in a post recently on how they analyse their social performance. Using various tools they grab data from various channels and collate this into a spreadsheet as follows.

Mari Smith, a Facebook marketing expert, recently shared her advice on the 5 key metrics to assess in relation to Facebook posts namely:

• Frequency: How frequently you post both daily and weekly
• Timing: What days you post and what times
• Content type: Articles, videos, images, questions or lists
• Length: Check what length works for your posts
• Tags: Do certain tags drive more engagement and conversions

Jeff Riddall at gShiftlabs advises you to look at wider trends beyond your content to know what the customer is looking for across the spectrum – search, local, mobile and social. He advises you to “identify and focus on keywords and content for which you already have momentum – then create optimized content based on these first.” Testing keyword performance and conducting keyword research (including via social channels) regularly is key in his view. I particularly liked Jeff’s advice to “build a rhythm of execution”, it is not about a one-off exercise.

Lauren Mikov, social media consultant and fellow SMT contributor advises you to back up your analytics with in-person data (if that is relevant to the business.) “Often I find that people get so hung up on their data that they forget to track conversions ‘IRL.’ It can be awkward at first to ask “how did you find us?” on the phone or in person, but it can quickly become a habit and give you a concrete way to measure the success of your social campaigns.”

Valentin Boulan at Tamar UK believes in analyzing which social channel is driving most traffic, conversions and revenue to your site, and identifying the strengths and weaknesses for each channel (which is best to drive traffic, organise new competitions, promote new product, etc.)

His advice is to “find who your most active social media followers are – only 4.7% of your following is what drive 100% of your social referrals.”

It's broadly accepted that social media data contains a wealth of potentially game-changing insights.

It's also broadly accepted that getting to those insights is nigh-on impossible without having access to data scientists and huge budgets.

I'd argue that the latter is no longer true, here's why...

Put your hand up if you’ve ever been in this situation: You’re down the pub and you just cranked out one of your top three stories, everyone laughs and then the guy, who you hardly know, pipes up with “It’s funny that, because I once…”

He goes on to tell a story that has nothing to do with what you were just talking about but it’s funny enough and no-one seems to mind the blatant hi-jack that’s just taken place. Except you.

The story he’s just told is proof that he was never listening in the first place, just waiting to talk, it says “I’m not interested in you, I just want the attention of the people around you.” It’s a broken conversation.

Unfortunately it’s all too common an analogy in terms of the way brands engage with people through social media.

Take Habitat’s spamming of totally irrelevant #tags last year as a particularly extreme example but there are others, many others.

Of the brands we speak to very few can tell us what matters to their audience at any given time – and if you don’t know what things your audience cares about, how do you expect to be one of them?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not easy for brands to be relevant to lots of people, at the same time, all the time, but our research shows very strongly that there are a few quick(ish) ways of making a big difference:

Listen for people talking about themselves, not just when they talk about you

If you’re only listening to what people say about you (selective hearing) then you’re only scratching the surface of the value that social data can provide.

Knowing what people think of you can be interesting, but as a marketer that will rarely affect how you deliver the campaign in front of you.

However, knowing what websites your customers really like, or what videos they shared, or what TV shows they watch is likely to be more valuable. 

Use your resources to create things people care about, use social data to work out how

Understanding what role you can play in your customers’ social space is key to being a good listener. 

In most cases this ends up as a mixture between curating content from elsewhere and creating original pieces. Either way if you’re doing this based on gut instinct then you’re missing a huge opportunity.

We ran a few early tests by simply taking the YouTube videos shared by a group of people on Twitter who all shared a common interest, then copying the tags from those videos into a spread-sheet. After about half an hour of work some very clear patterns started to emerge.

Understand your community and reach your audience’s audience

Someone doesn’t have to have a million followers on Twitter to be an influencer. If you look at the people who make up your community on Twitter (for example), you will quickly see that some people are more networked / more active than others.

Just as a good listener in a conversation listens to more than just the words being said (you read body language, read the room etc…), listening to, and coming to understand the makeup of your community is crucial to having constructive conversations with it.

I find a free tool called twiangulate quite useful in doing this over small numbers of people. The point is that by understanding the way your community is connected to each other you can isolate groups and individual who will give you access to far larger audiences.

Isolating these people allows you to be far more specific in how you create and curate content.

Test your hypotheses. Who will define your next campaign?

You’re launching a new product. You have a good idea of the target audience but outside of the focus groups, you have no real large scale information about who will end up being the early adopters and superfans that any new product needs if it’s going to hit the mainstream.

Social listening can play a huge role in helping you build out this picture during the early stages of a campaign, allowing you to tweak messages / change how you’re working with content and be more relevant to the people you want to engage with.

Check out free tools like twtrland as a starter for this.

Demonstrate value from social and make it work on other people’s terms.

Getting of the above done takes both time and resource, and to commit that, you’ll need to prove value.

I’m not going to get into the debate around the ROI of social media here, rather just share a few thoughts around sidestepping the whole debate around what is / isn’t a valid metric.

Using social data as just a new kind of consumer insight can make it quite easy to build a business case without having to prove the value of a Twitter follower or Facebook like.

So, for example if you know that your community likes certain kinds of YouTube videos, then sharing that data with the PPC team can (and in my experience almost always does), open up new opportunities.

Similarly, sharing socially collected data about what sites your audiences like with media buyers or info about influencers with PR teams can generate real improvements in those channels’ performance.

If you can improve the performance of a channel where there is an accepted ROI framework, then you don’t even need to engage in the debate.

The ROI simply becomes the extent to which it makes all the other channels more effective.

None of these challenges are easy to address but as traditional (and digital) media channels fragment further it will only get more important that brands start to change the way they approach social media.

Broken conversations are a waste of time and money and, with relatively limited resources, they don’t need to happen.

By this point it is safe to say the buyer’s journey has changed. Consumers do more of their own research, and they engage with more content to support their decision-making. In fact the numbers look something like this:

• 70-90% of the buyers journey is complete prior to engaging a vendor (Forrester)
• Consumer engages with 11.4 pieces of content prior to making a purchase (Forrester)
• Consumers are 5x more dependent on content than they were 5 years ago. (Nielsen)

So we know the information pool is tremendous and consumers are picking and choosing content to support their purchase requirements, but this raises another question that may be the key to businesses unlocking the power of content:

Why are consumers choosing certain articles over others?

With literally hundreds of pieces of expert, brand and user generated content being published to the internet at any given minute, online consumers have more than just information asymmetry, they have information overload which means they need a way to find the signal through the noise.

On March 25, Inpowered, a company that focuses on the new influence-marketing category released a study that they deployed the resources of Nielsen to perform. The goal of the study was to determine which type of content was most instrumental at various purchase stages of the consumer journey in terms of driving a purchase decision.

In this study Nielsen looked at the three different types of content mentioned above to determine which was most impactful in the buyer’s journey across the three best known stages defined as brand familiarity, brand affinity and purchase intent. Here is a brief rundown of the three types as defined in this study.

1. Expert Content (3rd Party Content which they defined as credible)
2. Brand Content (from the brand or brand employees)
3. User-Generated (Reviews such as Yelp or Amazon)

What Did The Study Find In Terms Of Contents’ Impact on Influencing a Purchase?

If I ever sought to find a study that validated influence marketing (consider the source) this would be the one.

While all three types of contents showed some uplift for the consumer at various points in the sales process, expert generated content proved to be the most effective for giving brands improved sentiment across all three phases of the buyers journey. The results in simplest form across the various stages of the buyer’s journey read like this.

Brand Awareness: Expert content had an 88% greater impact than brand content and 50% better than user generated reviews.

Brand Affinity: Expert content had a 50% greater impact than brand content and a 20% better response than user reviews.

Purchase Intent: Expert content lifted intent over brand content by 38% and 83% over user reviews.

Influence Particularly Powerful At The Onset And At The Point Of Purchase

The study without a doubt revealed the strength of expert generated (influencer) content, but if you read between the lines I believe a stronger correlation can be found. This is in the relationship between the experts and the buying cycle vs. other types of content. Here are my observations.

1. Experts are critical at the onset of a purchase cycle. Since readers trust this group their content often introduces new products and services to readers who may otherwise not be aware.
2. Brand content becomes more powerful the further you get into the sales cycle. While expert content is always preferred, likely for its neutrality, as customers become closer to buying they tend to gravitate toward greater trust in a brand delivered message.
3. Influencers (experts) are far and away the most trusted at the point of sale. Many tend to think reviews can deter purchased but it appears that once a buyer is close to making a purchase they are more willing to overlook negative reviews.

As content continues to become more and more intimately part of the buyer’s journey, brands will continue to need to find the right-mix of influencer (expert) and brand content. Of course more content generally offers more potential visibility, it is more important that brands place content that buyers will trust in front of them at the right time in the cycle.

The performance marketing industry has evolved from affiliate marketing. Do not confuse it with affiliate marketing per se. Performance marketing is a good way to begin earning online either as a publisher or a merchant.

In performance marketing, there is a mutually beneficial business model for merchant partners and website publishers, no matter whether they are in the relationship through affiliate partnership or through direct connectivity.

In this business model, the job of the publishers is to drive traffic to the website of the merchant partner and the publisher is paid according to its agreement with the merchant, which includes sales, referrals and/or leads.

Role of Performance Marketing in Publishing

Performance Publishing is the vertical branch of performance marketing where websites are created with the purpose of selling the services and products of other companies.

Here the publishers are paid only for completed transactions, which is unlike CPM (cost-per-impression) or PPC (pay-per-click) models where publishers were paid for per impression and click basis.

Why is this better?

This is definitely better than traditional affiliate marketing because here there is no scope for seeing inflated or misleading clicks and impressions. A merchant won’t get too elated seeing 10,000 impressions or clicks for a product or service, knowing that there are no sales.

You would agree that performance marketing refines the affiliate industry in a better fashion.

As a publisher:

• You create product / service oriented content.
• You promote the content to targeted markets.
• You generate complete sales.
• You get PAID.

As a merchant:

• You don’t waste money on CPM or PPC.
• You have a clear idea about the number of sales publishers are generating.
• You just pay the pre-agreed commissions after each sale.
• There is no waste of money.

In short -

 publishers SELL + merchants EARN = publishers EARN as well

Have you tried performance marketing?

The post How is Performance Marketing Beneficial? appeared first on Blogging Tips.

Image by Liz on Flickr

This blog post originally appeared in Fortune. View the original here.

They’re the generation brought up on Facebook. Some have never known a world without the Internet. The innermost details of their lives have been exhaustively Instagrammed, and they get their news from Twitter, not TV.

But when it comes to using social media at work, millennials — the generation whose birth years can range anywhere from 1980 and 2000 — can be surprisingly, even dangerously, unprepared. “Because somebody grows up being a social media native, it doesn’t make them an expert in using social media at work,” says William Ward, professor of social media at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. “That’s like saying, ‘I grew up with a fax machine, so that makes me an expert in business.’”

According to Ward, who has 13,500 Twitter followers and teaches a series of popular undergraduate and graduate courses on social media at the university, millennials are lacking in a number of critical areas. While they’re very good at connecting with people they already know, they often fail to understand the professional opportunities and pitfalls posed by networks like Twitter (TWTR), Facebook (FB), LinkedIn (LNKD), and Instagram.

Combined with some of the other predispositions of Generation Me – idealism, entitlement, a need for instant gratification, and recognition — this can be a recipe for trouble. “Companies hire millennials because they think they’re good at social media. Then their bosses discover they don’t have those skills and get frustrated,” Ward says, noting that social media expectations are often higher for millennials than for older workers, who may be just as inept.

For students and recent grads entering the workforce, some social media 101 is definitely in order. In particular, career-minded millennials desperately need to brush up on these five social media skills:

Knowing when to hit the bleep button

Last September, Business Insider attracted attention for firing its chief technology officer, Pax Dickinson, because of comments he made on his personal Twitter account. While Dickinson’s Tweets on women and minorities were especially offensive, the situation hints at a larger issue. Millennials sometimes fail to appreciate that personal profiles can have professional repercussions. Twitter, Facebook, and other networks are largely public platforms; comments made can — and often do — get back to bosses. As the Dickinson case shows, few employers are eager to associate themselves with off-color or offensive content, even when it may be intended as a joke.

Using social media to actually save time

According to a 2013 Salary.com survey, the most frequently visited personal website at work is — you guessed it — Facebook. As networks proliferate — and millennial employees not only check Facebook but also post on Twitter and browse Instagram and more — social media has the potential to be a devastating time-suck. Yet it can also be a time saver in the office. A recent McKinsey report notes that social media has the potential to save companies $1.3 trillion, largely owing to improvements in intra-office collaboration. Internal social networks like Yammer enable employees to form virtual work groups and communicate on message boards. Instead of endless back-and-forths on email, co-workers can post and reply in continually updated streams. None of this is revolutionary, but millennials are often still in the dark on ways Facebook-like innovations are being taken behind the firewall.

Understanding how to crunch the numbers

While millennials often have an intuitive understanding of what resonates on social channels (hard to go wrong with cat GIFs), quantifying what works and what doesn’t is another matter. Should the success of a Twitter campaign be measured on the basis of re-tweets, mentions, replies, referral traffic, or sales leads? What are the best times of day to post on Facebook, and what is the optimum post frequency? Which analytical tools are best for crunching the numbers? While social media is about authentic human interaction, it’s also an arena where data can easily be collected and applied to improve results. Knowing what data to look for, where to find it, and what to do with it separates real experts from mere social natives.

Mastering the multi-network shuffle

It’s one thing to be a Twitter guru or have a huge LinkedIn following. The real talent lies in orchestrating different platforms to work together and in understanding the niche each fills. Visual networks like Instagram and YouTube, for instance, are increasingly the foundation of campaigns by social-savvy brands like Nike (NKE), Red Bull, and Mercedes. Catchy images and videos are, in turn, seeded onto traditional text-based networks like Twitter and Facebook. From there, links lead viewers back to blogs and company pages, sending customers spiraling deeper into the sales funnel. Meanwhile, uniform hashtags across platforms help unify and track the overall campaign. Even millennials with deep social credentials often fail to understand the profound multiplying effects of integrating different networks.

Networking professionally on social media

By the time millennials graduate from college, many have dutifully filled their LinkedIn profiles with part-time positions, internships, extracurriculars and academic accomplishments. But the network’s true job-finding power is often overlooked: Hiring managers and CEOs who would normally be out of reach are often just a connection or two away. In fact, you don’t need to be connected at all. A paid feature called InMail, for instance, enables users to send emails directly to any one of LinkedIn’s 277 million members. Truly enterprising job seekers can hunt down big fish like Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and Deepak Chopra, then send a pitch straight to their inbox. Notoriously footloose millennials — forever in search of the next job opportunity – might well take this tip to heart when searching for greener professional pastures.

Of course, amassing these skills is no short order, and millennials aren’t the only offenders. “The real problem is that we expect people to know these skills without providing any training,” social media professor Ward says. As the number of social networks expands and platforms are used in more sophisticated ways, it’s unreasonable to expect anyone — even the most plugged-in users — to just intuitively get it.

For millennials competing in a tight market, these skills — unheard of just a decade ago — can mean the difference in finding and keeping a job. “Students using digital and social media professionally in an integrated and strategic way … have an advantage,” Ward says. “[They're] getting better jobs and better internships …”

One of the biggest hurdles to launching an inbound strategy for most companies is the existing database of leads. Many of the leads have been accumulated over the years and remained uncontacted except for the occasional sales email, enewsletter blast or tradeshow invite. With a database like that, it’s no wonder marketers who plan to make an investment in marketing software want to make sure they have the right list before they launch.

But saying you need to clean your database before you go inbound is like saying you need to organize your personal contact list before sending messages. It’s not a best practice; it’s a stall tactic. With the right inbound marketing strategy, some contacts will immediately engage with your brand. Other contacts will re-engage over time. Still others will never take action on your inbound marketing activity. This is true for a clean database or a messy one.

The difference between launching with inbound now and waiting until you’re confident your database is in the right place for it is simple: The former will acquire new better leads more quickly while the later makes you work with the same old bad leads you’ve always had.

Making Inbound Clean Your Database For You

We recently started working with a client who, over the years, gained leads through tradeshows and purchased lists. This particular client acknowledged their database wasn’t up to snuff when it comes to having the right contacts and the right information about those contacts. They had even worked with a marketing automation platform in the past that didn’t do anything to improve their list because it was simply used for drip sales emails.

Rather than delay the launch of a full-scale inbound marketing program, this client asked us to help them implement a content marketing, demand generation and automation program that would move the needle immediately. With more than 13,000 contacts, little confidence in the quality of the data and incomplete intelligence, the five-month-old program has whittled down its list of inactive contacts to just over 5,000, while gaining more intelligence on the reactivated leads and generating more than 650 new leads.

How did they do it? The simple answer is they didn’t wait to make sure their database was in the right order before sending that first educational guide to their list. And they followed that first guide with additional educational offers that asked new questions on forms through progressive profiling. At the same time, they promoted their educational offers through blog posts, social media updates and social advertising platforms in order to gain new leads. They went all in for inbound without hesitating—and it paid off.

Gaining New Insights Over Time with Inbound

One of the biggest benefits of this client’s launch into inbound is that, by asking the right questions on landing page forms for educational offers, they were able to update their database with the latest information on many of their existing contacts. Some people changed companies. Others changed titles. Still others were replaced by new people who became leads.

More importantly, these contacts that either converted or simply engaged had their activity recorded. This meant we could begin the process of scoring the existing leads to determine if they were actually the contacts the client’s sales team should get in touch with. Visiting the pricing page or downloading a case study indicated the contact was moving closer to being a sales-ready lead. Plus, new information provided by contacts as they filled out additional forms could help shape sales conversations once the lead initiated sales contact.

Sifting through their database to ensure existing data integrity or verifying contact information would have only slowed down these quick but important wins from inbound marketing.

A Simple Cleaning Solution You Can Take Now

If you’re still not confident with your list or simply want to ensure email deliverability before you start sending email blasts to contacts in your database, there is one some simple cleaning solution that does make sense before you launch into inbound: Email validation. (Full disclosure: Our agency does work with a client that provides email validation services.)

Having your list validated prior to sending that first email from your marketing software can save you from receiving a scary notice from your ESP that your bounce rate is too high. Since the process usually only takes a few business days at most, it can also quickly help you gain internal buy-in when you let others know you’ve done some cleanup work before that first email goes out.

Most database issues will be solved overtime through frequent communication with your contacts through various inbound marketing activities. So if you’re concerned about your database, the best thing you can do is start inbound marketing—the longer you wait the more stale that old database will become.

Multimedia is big in B2B.

According to the 2014 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends – North America report, B2B marketers are using a variety of media types. The top 10 B2B content marketing tactics include online presentations, white papers, videos, case studies, social media, blog posts and more.

If you are experimenting with new tactics, it can become hard to tell your story across all of your channels. The more tactics you have – and the more people who are creating content for you – the harder it is to keep your message consistent.

However, telling a consistent story is vital if you want to raise brand awareness, attract high-quality leads and convert them into customers. The TechTarget Media Consumption Research Brief revealed that 65% of B2B technology buyers review at least four pieces of content before they make a shortlist of vendors. If a buyer sees four pieces of your content – with four unrelated messages – the buyer won’t be able to understand your value or make a business case for your products or services.

Here are four ways you can tell a consistent story across all of your B2B channels:

1. Think of your audience first and your channel second.

You can create amazing ebooks, videos and social content, but if your target audience doesn’t think it’s relevant, you’re wasting your time and resources. TechTarget found that “media is only effective if the information that it features is relevant to their research and is helpful for them during the process.” If your content isn’t relevant, your buyers will search your competitors’ content until they find what they are looking for.

2. Stay focused on your long-term business goals.

Many B2B marketers don’t think about their overarching goals when they create content. They often get caught up in short-term planning (e.g. promoting an upcoming webinar) but fail to think about driving business in the long term.

If one of your goals is to attract more high-quality leads and convert them into customers, then your messaging should focus on moving customers through your sales cycle. Each piece of content should lead customers to another related piece of content where you expand on your story and work on gaining their trust.

3. Create content guidelines.

If multiple people contribute to your blog or other content marketing efforts, then you must create and enforce a style guide. The guide can outline:

Information about your target audience, so contributors will keep your ideal readers in mind when they create content

• Your desired tone
• What topics you will and won’t consider
• Blog post length specifications
• Tips on formatting content for easy reading
• Information on how to submit content to your editorial team or content marketing manager

4. Hire a content marketing manager.

Your content marketing manager will ensure that all of your content tells a consistent story and helps you reach your business goals. They are skilled at planning content strategies and developing editorial calendars. They will also work with your contributors to ensure that every piece of content meets your standards.

If you want customers to follow your story across multiple channels, you must think of the story first and the channel second. For example, don’t rush to the latest social network if you don’t know your story. This will just create confusion. Instead, use the tips outlined above to get a clear sense of your target audience and your message. This will help you to better engage customers and move them through your sales cycle.

I have never been good at fishing and the times I tried to fish I never had much success. The one fish I did catch wasn’t big enough and I had to put it back, I then ended up getting irritated with the midges (little flies in Scotland), so I gave up and went home. It got me thinking of an analogy that fishing and lead generation have a lot in common.

Catching a shark

If you are shark fishing, you need various tools and resources such as a good rod, a big boat and some other people/friends to help out. Much like if your business was to land a big customer (a shark) they will need some good tools (software, great content, inbound website) and resources (a team of people and premises). When you have all the right things, then you have a better chance of being successful. If you are lucky and you manage to catch a shark with your fishing rod and small boat, then you may end up getting bitten by the big shark as you cannot handle it.

Fishing in the wrong pond

If you are fishing in the wrong pond, you will usually get the wrong fish or no fish at all. If you want some salmon and you are fishing in a pond of carp you will not get salmon. Similarly, if you promote your marketing messages in the wrong areas such as LinkedIn groups with the wrong audience, have the wrong social media followers on Twitter, using the wrong keywords in your PPC or search campaigns, then it will result on you not attracting the right catch and not generating the right type of leads.

Using the right type of bait when fishing

The analogy here is the bait is your marketing message – if you are using the wrong type of bait you will attract the wrong type of fish. If you have not worked out who your personas are and use the wrong messaging (which affects SEO terms, content) then you will attract a lead that is not right for your business.

Just get your fish from the fisherman

Fisherman. They use big nets, which in marketing can be website and the right messaging. They have the experience and know where the fish are in the sea. With their big net and knowledge of the area they catch a lot of fish and sell them. The analogy here is you hire a marketing specialist agency, like Sprout Traffic, to generate you the marketing leads that right for your business.

So if your marketing is like my fishing (who doesn’t know how to fish and has failed at catching fish except the really small ones that I had to put back) you will struggle in marketing and feel like you are spending a lot of time being busy without much success.

Finally, you know the midges that bothered me when fishing. The analogy there is they are the sales guys or your managing director that are moaning at you for not giving them leads.

If you want to get started on the first step to catching the right fish, download our essential guide to creating your buyer persona.

Some say that it takes 21 days to form a habit; others argue that is a myth. A recent study by the European Journal of Social Psychology has actually dispelled that myth. The study found that, on average, it takes people 66 days to form a habit. In fact, those studied took anywhere from 18 to 254 days to form a habit—quite a discrepancy from the popular notion of 21 days.

Why all the talk about habits? I will explain, but let me ask a question. How many of you have taken part in one-day training or workshop sessions? You get all worked up with new ideas, new methods, and new tools, and then you go back to work and gradually the interest you developed dissipates, either because of existing work pressures that preclude your ability to use your newfound expertise or because the need or opportunity does not present itself as urgently or frequently as expected.

This problem is common with many training and workshop situations. I know a systems analyst whose employer sent her for expensive training that was required for impending projects. Unfortunately, when she returned to work the project was repeatedly delayed and her newfound capabilities waned. When the project finally launched, she was in panic mode trying to relearn what she’d been taught.

I have seen and experienced the same with sales training. Without ongoing practice and performance measurement, it’s hard to make things stick and ultimately become habit. That’s what I want to discuss here: forming a social selling habit.

I want to be fully transparent. ArCompany and I offer social selling workshops to salespeople and marketers in a variety of industry sectors. However, we do not stop there. If I was a personal trainer, I would not have turned you into a specimen of physical fitness just by giving you a tour of the gym. The same applies to social selling workshops.

The most we can accomplish is exposing participants to new tools, methods, and thinking. It is only through consistent effort and application of what they learned, along with ongoing review and measurement, that the learning becomes ingrained. Ultimately, we are not teaching about tools or technology. We teach so that participants will adopt a new social selling mindset that becomes second nature to them.

I teach entrepreneurship and business model design at OCAD University. We use a number of frameworks in the course but we workshop them numerous times throughout a semester (note, more than 21 days). I take my students from simple models to more complex ones by layering on other factors and attributes to the situation being examined. The initial exposure to the frameworks lays the groundwork and then workshops over the course of the semester serve as practice. What is really rewarding is hearing from my students after they have finished the course that they have continued to apply what they learned and have been successful in doing so; that they use the framework more intuitively—dare I say, habitually.

We hear the same from those we teach about social selling. We know that an afternoon or even a full day’s exposure to our curriculum does not compare to ongoing effort. We take great pride in hearing about their successes and seeing their online presence grow and flourish.

So if you hear people dismissing the idea of a social selling workshop or training session, ask them to clarify what they mean. Are they against workshops and/or training because of their poor track record as one-offs? Or are they like us, championing ongoing social selling development programs?

If a company or individuals take what they are exposed to in the initial social selling session and participate in an ongoing program that sets goals and tracks performance, their social selling capabilities have greater likelihood of becoming habitual and achieving permanence.

It is all well and good to teach someone how to optimize their LinkedIn profile and use LinkedIn for prospecting, but those insights become more powerful if associated goals are developed and pursued. Performance metrics could include such things as network growth, funnel growth, developing prospects into qualified leads, account penetration, InMail open rates, Inmails to Calls/Meetings conversion rates, and, most importantly, closed sales resulting from social selling efforts.

So I was being a bit facetious with my title. Many times people have participated in social selling workshops, webinars, or training sessions, and when they left and returned to work they fell back into their old habits. They claimed that they didn’t have time to adopt everything that they learned. They picked and chose what they wanted to adopt from what they learned, but without accountability, ongoing practice, and measurement, the prospect of them become successful social sellers was unlikely, possibly even doomed.

In order to be a successful social seller, a person needs to go back to work after that first workshop and map out a plan either on their own, with colleagues, or with support from specialists like ArCompany (yes, I was selling there). Like the aforementioned personal trainer example, people are more successful adopting new habits and achieving goals by stating them publicly and having accountability built into it.

We would love to hear from people who have adopted social selling. How has it gone for you? We would like to hear what has worked and/or what you found to be hard about forming the habit. Provided you are comfortable, we would love to hear from those who tried and gave up or simply didn’t achieve the goals they set out to pursue. What prompted you to abandon the pursuit? What obstacles stood in the way of your success? Maybe there is still an opportunity to turn things around, even gradually.

Drop us a line and let’s chat.

Gated content is a term that isn’t heard very often, but everyone knows what it is. For instance, think of Pardot’s whitepaper download form: it asks for your name, company, and email before it allows you a copy of their whitepaper. The key here, of course, is obtaining your email, an easy and surefire way to contact you with further demonstration proposals and sales promotions. Annoying but effective, the tactic of gated content offers a quality piece of content in exchange for a little bit of contact information. Its usefulness to marketers and simplicity to implement has made it a staple of lead generation.

However, the tactic of gating content is two-sided. On one hand, it’s effective for revealing the names of previously anonymous people on the other side of the screen and providing a bit of preliminary information on their interests. On the other, it’s estimated that gating content reduces downloads to an incredible 2-5% of what they could’ve been.

As with all marketing decisions, there’s a tradeoff to be made when deciding whether or not to gate content.

Whitepapers are almost always gated content, but the people who download them are genuinely interested in the topic.

Suppose you do decide to gate your content. You cut your downloads, the visibility of your content, and how much it’s going to be shared. How are you going to make up for the lost leads?

First, keep in mind that the leads that you gather from gated content are likely to be of higher quality, because these people have overcome a barrier (albeit a small barrier) to obtain something of interest to them, thus proving the extent of their interest.

But what about a proactive way to promote these?

Social media proves itself to be an effective channel of distribution for gated content. Twitter is especially conducive to this purpose. If your short, Twitterified hook catches their attention and manages to get them to click, it’s more likely that they will go through with the form on the download page. Intuitively, it makes sense that anyone who clicks the link has already decided that they want to view the content, and as long as the form is not tedious or intrusive enough to turn them away, it is likely that they will go through with it.

However, gated content tends to be less “viral” on social media. This is a direct function of the smaller number of people who will read the content, which is all the more reason to promote the content more heavily through social media.

Of course, there are always people who will bounce at the last minute. Any one of many reasons could explain this behavior. It’s easy to get greedy and go overboard on gating content, and just as easy to go in the opposite direction, not gating enough and ending up with too few contacts.

What are your tips on how to strike a balance between gated and non-gated content?

Optimizing Your Content and Social Media Efforts

Inbound experts agree that SEO is a vital component of the entire marketing process. In our last article we examined how to optimize your inbound program before you ever even write your first word.

Things like site organization, key word planning and creating buyer personas are all part of inbound and include SEO in order to work.

In this installment of SEO for inbound, we will be considering how SEO affects your inbound efforts once you start writing content for your website.

Your blog, your messages on social media and things like your landing pages and call-to-action pages each have a role in your inbound program and without SEO will not drive traffic to your site. In addition, let’s take an intense look at how SEO and your content process affects lead generation.

CONTENT MARKETING

An entire science has evolved around creating content within your inbound strategy. Good marketing skills involve creating content for your blog, as well as different content with special types of visuals and wording for an offer. Then there is action language that pulls a qualified lead through the conversion part of the funnel with a CTA or an email.

Content is what makes inbound exciting and captivating for both your visitor and search engines. It is where your company can begin to bring in and nurture leads to buy what you have sell.

Using keywords as well as a mixture of psychology and methodology for each stage of your buying process is what makes the heart of a marketing expert beat fast and furious. As we stated in our first article on SEO and inbound, there are several points of view on what makes up the lead nurturing process. For argument’s sake, we are going to begin with the offer.

The Offer

Considered the beginning of the buying process by many, the offer attracts a visitor to your website. Maybe they were brought to your site by an email promising a download, or a social media message promoting a checklist.

The offer must contain something of value and is different for each stage of the lead nurturing process.

Would you like to buy a widget?

TOP OF THE FUNNEL OFFERS

A first time visitor to your site who has been attracted there by your offer is usually in the research stage of the buying process. They are not ready to make a purchase. In fact, 98% of users who visit your site are never going to come back, much less give you their personal information.

The offer that a visitor receives at the top of the funnel should be mostly informational or educational, as well as concentrate on your industry as a whole. This is not a good time to point out the advantages of your product and price points.

For example, if you are selling widgets, a top of the funnel offer might be an educational white paper on how widgets are changing the way people do something. It could be a downloadable checklist of the top reasons why everyone needs a widget (not just your widget). Then there is the greatly loved eBook where you might segment the information you give based on where the visitor/lead is in the funnel.

You can also experiment with videos, free trials, discounts and newsletters. They all work, as long as the content is rich and has value.

I just saw a suggested post on Facebook about widgets.When I clicked on it, there was a cool offer; a checklist for organizing my Widgets.

When you are creating your offer think about what a potential visitor/buyer is thinking about when they are doing research on your widget and answer those questions for them in the top of the funnel offer. Use your keywords and action language that compel them.

The actual language you use varies. Unfortunately there isn’t a magic ball that will tell you exactly which words to use. This is where A/B testing comes in. Testing is a great way to identify which wording provides the most click-throughs for your offer.

MIDDLE OF THE FUNNEL OFFERS

A visitor who is in the middle of your funnel is most likely a qualified lead by now. They have given you some of their information (via the landing page that we will talk about later) or they have found your site using different key words that signal they are closer to making a buying decision.

There still needs to be lots of value with a middle of the funnel offer, however you can ask for a bit more information before you give it away too.

At this point in the buying process, a person is assessing the alternatives they have. They are gathering information about the solutions available for their type of problem. If they are on your website, then they are evaluating YOUR solution vs. your competitor’s. This is where the language you use in content gets a little more explanatory than educational.

The potential customer is thinking more about making a purchase. They have evaluated several options. They are ready to ask ask more distinctive questions.

There are a couple of widget-smiths in the area. I saw a conversation about it on Facebook. That widget organization list was helpful. I have room for another widget.

It is also where search terms get a little more involved.

Which widget has the best design?

How do widgets work?

Where do I get widgets in Inboundtown?

Payment plans on widgets?

Craft your blog, offer, landing page and social media plan around the questions your potential buyer is asking.

Using your SEO keywords, a middle of the funnel offer should explain the advantages of using your product. You can still use eBooks at this stage, or delve into the webinar. Actual case studies where your product or service has been used to great gain are a great way to convert middle of the funnel visitors as well. You might also consider an actual video of your product in action.

Once again, keywords and strong action language that is A/B tested is the way to get that “click” and secure more information on your lead.

BOTTOM OF THE FUNNEL OFFERS

The lead nurturing process is critical because most people who come to your website are not ready to make a buying decision. Regrettably, most businesses do not employ any type of lead nurturing process when it comes to inbound marketing. Even more alarming is that they don’t measure their results.

When you nurture leads with great SEO optimized content, and measure as they move through the funnel, you will have actual proof of what language works and what doesn’t, as well as a growing list of qualified leads to work with to grow and expand your business.

Bottom of the funnel leads are ready to buy. At this point they need reassurance and trust, as well as some pertinent information about your product.

I am going to buy a widget today. At lunch time, I am going to sit outside and order one from my phone. 

Widget Price List

Widget Coupon

Widget Deals

These well-qualified leads need an offer that lets them know you are a trustworthy business, as well as things like

• Pricing Sheets
• Product Guidelines
• Business Cases
• Testimonials
• Company Awards and Recognition

The offer pages that you have on your website will be different, according to your visitors and where they are in the buying process. We also suggest having different offers geared to each buyer persona and each stage of the funnel. This is a great way to include evergreen offers on your website that visitors can always come to in the future.

Building offers takes time and practice, but the more offers a website has, the better chances you have of converting that visitor into a closed sale.

An offer can’t stand on its own though. It needs other pages on a website in order to exist, breathe and invite visitors in.

The Landing Page

A well-crafted landing page will do many things for a user.

It will Take them from the idea of an offer to actually receiving it. It should contain a well-placed, concisely worded and strong CTA button – make sure it stands out.

A landing page will stimulate a user mentally and visually.

There should be just one offer or purpose. Don’t confuse your visitor with multiple offers and ideas, or links to different offers. Laser in on the offer, the language and the purpose.

Include other items like customer testimonials, awards and recognitions and sometimes even social media links that build trust and confidence.

Contain a form where the visitor will give some of their information to get something of value.

Have the same visuals and verbiage that got the visitor there in the first place – don’t confuse your potential customer with brand new information and graphic

Be topped by an engaging headline followed by a small amount of content that compels a reader to action immediately – like, within seconds – they NEED what you’ve got.

YOU ARE GOING TO LOVE THESE TIPS ON CLEANING YOUR NEW WIDGET

Did you know that our widget are made from special material?

Widget-smith widgets are hand-made in Inboundtown by smiths trained for years in the craft. Your widget has taken hours to make and is one of a kind. The materials were hand-picked by company owner, Dan Widget, a fifth generation widget-smith who hails from European immigrants.

These tips on cleaning our hand-crafted widgets will help you to take care of what we hope will become a family heirloom.

Here are some great ideas from our friends at Kissmetrics on creating the perfect landing page.

Image Source: Kissmetrics.com

Each of these landing page components is going to be filled with your keyword SEO and strong action language. As with offers, your website should have several landing pages geared to different offers, different buyer personas and different stages of the lead nurturing process.

The Call-To-Action

When a reader gets to your landing page, if they even read the headline you are ahead of the game. If they read your content the odds are that they are going to click on your CTA – it’d better be good. The visitor needs to know what to do next, like now, ASAP!

The words you use on your call-to-action should be short, and inspire the visitor to move through the process, because they NEED what it is you have to offer them.

This is the part of the sales process where you get them from window browsing to actually buying something.

A good call-to-action has several parts:

• Value
• Sense of Urgency
• Ease of Delivery
• A sense of connection between your company and the user

Ask questions, use numbers or statistics, be bold, use testimonials or just be yourself. Your buyer persona and your product will each determine what your call-to-action looks and feels like.

Your website will cultivate many different CTA’s for various offers, landing pages and blogs. Be clever about the CTA and your lead base will increase.

The Thank You Page

Every user who actually clicks on one of your offers and gives you any of their information needs to end their experience with a heartfelt Thank You.

There are many components to a thank you page, however from an SEO standpoint, the object here is purely to delight your visitor. Yes, use your keywords. Yes, try to upsell on another offer. Yes, give your company information if that is applicable.

However a big fat thank you with one or two keywords sprinkled in will do just fine here.

The Email

Sending emails as part of your inbound efforts has come back into marketing vogue. In fact, it still remains the number one way to reach potential buyers.

The information that you collect through your landing pages, offers and call to action pages will all be critical in how you plan to set up and send emails.

Once again, lead nurturing takes center stage with email content and who you send them to. To accomplish this, your email list should be segmented and blasts sent out according to how each segment is being cultivated.

Here are a few ideas about how to divide your email list:

• Identify existing clients
• Know when to convert visitors to prospects to qualified leads to clients
• Design a system for encouraging site visitors to sign-up for your emails
• Make sure that each name in the system has a “begin date” in their record
• As a prospect moves through the marketing funnel and gives you more information, consider adding birth dates and other important dates that give you an excuse to send them an email
• If you can, segment by location, income, marital status, etc.

Having your email list segmented will make it much easier to target the right prospects with the right information at the right stage in the buying process.

Your email list segmentation works a lot like your offers do. The people on your list who qualify as prospects will be sent top of the funnel information.

Middle of the funnel prospects who are actually reading your emails will need to receive more personalized emails that provide explanations and options for contact with your company. If a person has made it this far in your list, and you create awesome emails with links back to your page for new offers, you are probably going to close your sale.

Put each segment on some type of rotation – called drip marketing – which requires a follow up email, or even a phone call, depending on the type of lead.

There are several excellent email marketing companies out there who offer free or low cost alternatives to help automate your email process.

The Blog

The blog has become the central force in attracting potential clients to your website. By writing about industry related topics and including your SEO targeted keywords, your company can use a blog as the jumping point for every other inbound method you employ.

Distribute your blogs across social media networks using a link to your blog page and slowly but surely, your lead base will begin to grow.

These days, no one really knows how long a blog post should be; anywhere from 800 to 1500 words seems to suit Google just fine – as long as the content is original, researched well, has proper links and uses your keyword strategy.

The use of visuals in blogging is also a great way to get noticed. Make sure you name every picture or graphic you add to a blog post using at least one of your keywords – Google ranks using photo descriptions as well.

What should you write about? Go to your competitor’s blogs and see what they are writing about. Review your buyer personas and write content based on the questions they are asking.

Create content that varies:

•             Posts about your industry
•             Posts that are visually heavy
•             Posts that are funny
•             Posts about your company
•             Posts directly related to your products and services

You will find that will good keyword research and buyer personas, finding something to write about isn’t going to be hard.

The Headline

Google loves a good headline. It entices a reader to read your content. If it does that – your headline is working!

• It tells the reader what your content is about. Make sure it’s short, specific and not misleading
• It is optimized for search engines, but only after you have considered your target audience
• It triggers an emotion or a need in the reader

With a little research, you can find some great examples of how to write good headlines, and even headline words that have gone viral.

SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

When you start planning your inbound marketing strategy, instead of running out and signing up for every social media site out there, take a close look at each one and how it relates to your buyer persona and your business.

Cooper Smith of BusinessInsider.com wrote an interesting article on the major social networks called The Demographics Of Social Media Audiences, And The Unique Opportunities Offered By Each Network. In it he sites the big differences in the major platforms available to your company. Take a look at your buyer persona and figure out which social media audience is going to be the best for you.

COMMUNITY BUILDING

An often overlooked part of the SEO domain is putting yourself out there as a part of your business. Building relationships both online and throughout your community is a great way to peak interest and curiosity about you and your brand.

Become a part of a select few groups on your chosen social media platforms and engage well with them. Quality is better over quantity here folks.

THE USER EXPERIENCE

Don’t forget that creating a good buyer persona at the beginning of the SEO process translates to a potential client later on. Optimize your website for search engines, but make sure your visitor likes it first. If your website is so optimized for engines that a user gets very little stimulation, then the entire process it pointless.

You are in business to sell to people, not search engines. Making search that your website and content is engaging for visitors should be your first goal, with search engines coming in second.

Search Engine Optimization in relation to your inbound marketing strategy can be an amazing way to get more traffic to your website. Using SEO both before and after the content creation process creates a great experience for both the search engines and, more importantly, your potential customer.

Creating good content that is geared toward your targeted audience, as well as suited toward web crawlers increases your chances of creating more leads, as well as being included in higher search rankings.

And never forget how your SEO and content efforts relate to your lead nurturing process. The inbound marketing strategy, when used correctly, will create big wins for both you and your customers.

As always, an inbound marketing agent can help you with every step of the SEO process as well as creating your inbound strategy and making it work for your business. Are you the “Master of Your Domain”?

 By Tibor Shanto - tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

I recently saw an ad for a sales program, and that big bold letters enticing me to buy read: “How To Get Ahead Of Your Buyer”. While I get where they were coming from, or more accurately who they were trying to appeal to, but there was just something wrong with the way it was phrased.

I think one of the biggest challenges sales people have is not to get ahead of the buyer, it seems to me that getting ahead of the buyer is the same as “leaving the buyer behind”, a dangerous notion and more dangerous practice.

One of the key things we help sales teams accomplish with the EDGE framework is alignment with the buyer. Executing the sale in a way that keeps you engaged and in step with the buyer, leads to a number of pluses, not to mention more sales.

Alignment is key, it helps you focus and cover objectives, which then allows you to offer practical means of helping the client achieve those objectives. The idea of getting ahead of the buyer has an old school ring of pain and needs based selling.

When you rush ahead of the buyer, because you are familiar with the scenario, you’ve seen and heard it before, you tend to want to “close” too early, usually relying on old school “closing techniques”. In some ways I thought we were past this, but this ad and a recent discussion in a LinkedIn group suggest that we are not. That discussion was based on the question “What’s the best, most effective question you’ve ever asked a client?” Apparently some sales people still ask what keeps the prospect awake at night. With thinking like that, and leaving the buyer behind, sellers move to close too early in the process, you may feel you are done your discovery, but the buyer is still defining and refining their requirements. Moving to close at this stage will at worst make the buyer feel pressured, scare them to compare to others, and at best, slow down the deal, requiring a longer sales cycle, the use of more resources, and less time to spend on other opportunities.

When this happens, and other companies enter the fray, price will not only become an issue, but a central issue. What was your deal to win, now becomes your deal to buy, and there is never money in that.

The flip-side of getting ahead, is falling behind, the relationship approach, “whatever makes you happy, I’ll be here when you’re ready.” The net effect of this again is that the buyer learns whet they require, after all you are there with all the facts and didees, and when they are ready to buy, they do so from the guy asking for the order, not the one waiting.

Work with the buyer, lead the buyer, based on their objectives, your expertise as a subject matter expert, but don’t get ahead, or fall behind, manage the alignment.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto 

In the 2014 B2B Content Marketing Trends report from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, the top challenges that B2B content marketers face include: lack of time, not being able to produce enough content, not being able to create the kind of content that engages, lack of budget, and lack of content variety.

Sound familiar?

Stats like “Buyers are two-thirds to 90% through the sales funnel before they contact sales” (Forrester) and “72% of B2B buyers use social media to research solutions to purchase.” (DGR 2014 B2B Buyer Behavior Survey) have a lot of B2B marketers focusing on content and social media programs that require far more resources and time to deliver leads than most business managers have patience for.

As a long time B2B marketer operating with very little budget (self imposed of course), few resources and huge obligations to produce a quantity of quality content that can attract, engage and convert new business – I’m intimately aware of the top challenges revealed in the CMI study.

Producing high quality content consistently over a period of time is only part of the battle. In today’s age of information overload, amplification and promotion are essential in order for that great content to get noticed. Outside of advertising and the outright purchase of traffic, there isn’t much in the way of organic amplification options outside of the increasingly difficult practice of SEO and the moving target of organic social media.

And yet there is one approach that has been delivering great returns.

One of the most effective ways to shortcut your path to B2B content marketing success is to align with those that already have it.

Consider this: If you can find a way to solve multiple problems for your target audience working with influencers that are already known as experts in those solution areas, your brand will grow your own networks of influence, expand reach to new audiences and increase influence as a trusted authority for what your customers buy. That’s a winning set of outcomes in my book.

To put this approach into action, here are 5 essential steps for tapping into the hidden value of working with influencers for B2B content marketing programs:

1. Influencer Marketing Goals

A big part of identifying influencer content goals is about understanding what’s possible. Here are a few suggestions:

• Change how the brand is perceived
• Connect with a new audience of buyers
• Support thought leadership and PR goals
• Support content, social media and search marketing programs
• Create relationships with industry experts
• Increase the quality of leads
• Shorten sales cycle
• Increase the number of referred leads
• Increase organic media mentions

I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

2. Topic and Content Type Selections

Think of how your brand wants to be known – what does the company, product or service really stand for? Then empathize with your target audience to hone in on what information customers actually need in order to buy from you. Topic selection is about being the best answer for the core questions: How do you want to be known as a brand? What information do buyers need to move from awareness to interest to inquiry?

Understanding your distinct audience groups can reveal content types that resonate best based on platform and buyer preferences. Typically, there’s an anchor piece of content that’s robust like a research report, ebook or white paper supported by complementary content types like blog posts, articles in industry publications, videos, infographics, or sponsored content. Content plans should map topics with content formats and media to provide a roadmap of how the co-created content will be published, promoted, and repurposed.

3. Identify, Qualify and Recruit Influencer Participants

With a clear understanding of the key goals, topics and content, it’s time to find influencers that are already known as authorities in those areas. In fact, your industry participation should have revealed some of the more obvious candidates long before you need them. Influencer discovery tools can be effective at finding and qualifying niche influencers. Examples of such tools includes Traackr, Followerwonk, or GroupHigh.

Once you’ve identified your key B2B influencers, it’s important to qualify them. Balance qualification according to metrics like size of network along with quality of interactions. It’s not enough for an influencer to be dubbed “famous”. They also need to be effective in their ability to influence change of perspective and likelihood to take action amongst their own community.

To warm the waters, create opportunities to engage with influencers, before the ask to participate in your content project. Engage through commenting on their blog posts, connecting on social networks, getting introduced through mutual connections and being useful. Then, learn what they value before soliciting participation. If it’s mostly fame, that’s pretty easy. If it’s a higher purpose, you’ll need to find a way to make a connection between the project you’d like to work together on and that thing that inspires the influencer to do what they do.

The more influential, well known and respected you and the brand you work for are, the easier it will be to secure participation from the top tier influencers. Always work on enhancing your own reputation as you create value for your influencer partners.

4. Create and Promote the Co-Created Content

Once you gain agreement to participate, it’s time to collect content. Usually this can be done via email, but you might need to do it by phone and transcribe the conversation. Understand that most B2B influencers are very busy, so make participation attractive and easy for them. They must see that a nominal effort on their part will result in a substantial return.

Provide information that will make it easy to promote the finished product too, whether it’s a report, and eBook or an info graphic. Pre-write social shares, provide a preview and emphasize success.

Organic content promotion in general can work well with a hub and spoke model where the hub is the focal point for your content on a particular topic and the spokes are channels of distribution for engaging community and promoting content. Those channels are most often social networks, but can include email lists and paid promotion channels as well.

5. Optimize Content Performance

With content performance optimization, it starts with clear goals and identifying the key performance indicators or metrics that you will track to determine that your program is on or off track.

For the influencer(s), track the social shares they make of the content, engagement that results and the performance of their contributions. Do they get mentioned by other blogs, is their content getting on-page engagement via comments or specific social shares? Is the content referring traffic and inquiries effectively to your landing pages?

For the overall content program, monitor promotion metrics like social shares, pickups in industry media and blogs, look at referring traffic sources from social networks, search engines and direct referrals. Evaluate the program like you would any other content marketing initiative to determine the impact on overall program, marketing and business goals.

Establish benchmarks from the start and monitor post launch to determine trends and outcomes. Did the project help change the way your brand is talked about on the social web? In the industry? Were you able to connect with a new audience of buyers? Did the co-created influencer content serve as a resource for other marketing and PR initiatives? What could you do to improve performance?

Collecting content performance information will help you refine your approach in all aspects of working with B2B influencers to co-create content: from identifying influencers to the theme of the content to promotions.

For those that want even more insight into this practice of B2B influencer content, I’ll be presenting on this very topic at the Content2Conversion conference in New York May 6-7 this year: “Influencer Content: How to Win Buyers Hearts, Minds and Wallets with Content Optimized for Search, Share and Sales”. I hope to see you there.

Photos: Shutterstock

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2014. | The Hidden Value of Influencers in B2B Content Marketing | http://www.toprankblog.com

Why do press releases still matter? I tackled this question in an interview with The Pulse Network at the Inbound Marketing Summit a couple years ago.

A post on PR Daily today questions the value of press release distribution, given the declining number of journalists. [link]

So who really does read press releases these days?

In short, the audience is still vast, and it includes all of your organization’s key constituents. Press releases are extremely public means of communications.

• The tens of thousands of credentialed media on PR Newswire for Journalists tally more than one million press release reads each month.
• On PR Newswire.com, the press releases we issue garner more millions more reads each month. Most of those readers find the content via search engines.
• On Twitter, if you search the term “PRNewswire” you’ll see an avalanche of tweets referencing press releases – often several per minute.

Our clients tell us the press releases they issue have resulted in coverage on Good Morning America (with no pitching!), increases in landing page traffic of more than 200%, record app downloads and the generation of qualified leads for sales teams. The key take-away is this: all of your brand’s constituents are reading the PR content you distribute. Failing to calibrate your content accordingly leaves measurable results on the table.

Distribution drives results.

What drives these results? Distribution. Distributing messages beyond the realms of the journalists on your targeted media lists and your brand’s followers on social networks delivers specific and measurable results. Well-crafted messages are found by new audiences, re-distributed across peer and professional networks and are surfaced in search engine results – often for months after the messages are originally issued. Distribution is the key to driving ongoing message discovery and introducing your brand to new constituents.

Disappointing results? Take a hard look at the message.

If your press releases aren’t generating results, before you blame your distribution channels, take a look at the messages. Here are some tips for making your press releases relevant, useful and effective in today’s connected digital environment:

1. Is your content truly interesting and useful to your target audiences? Framing your message in the context of what your audience cares about or will find interesting will enliven your message, and prevent it from reading like a missive from the ivory tower.
2. Do your headlines convey the messages that will appeal to audiences? Headlines aren’t for branding. They shouldn’t be coy. Headlines need to arrest the eyes of your reader, and inspire them to stop, and read your message. Keep the headline short – about a hundred characters. Use a subhead to add the brand mention and additional detail – you needn’t be so mindful of length there.
3. Do you embed specific and measurable calls to action toward the top of your messages? Give your readers a path to take by providing a link to a relevant web page that will further engage them with your brand. Invite them to read an excerpt of a white paper, view a demo or provide robust Q&A that will answer their obvious questions. In addition to courting media coverage, the press releases you issue are also portals for your brand, and can deliver new audiences right to their doorstep. Don’t rely on a link to your homepage that’s buried down in the boilerplate. Make it easy for people to find relevant information, and take the next step.
4. Is the copy you distribute designed to be easily scanned by readers on all kinds of devices, using bold subheads and bullet points to surface key themes? Many people are reading press releases on tablets and smartphones. Organize the body of your press release content into easy to scan chucks, and use numbered or bulleted lists to draw attention to key points.
5. Does your PR team illustrate press releases with visual content, such as videos, images and infographics? We really can’t emphasize the value of visuals enough. Search engines and social networks are increasingly visual, and plain text simply doesn’t carry the same weight. Relying on plain text reduces the effectiveness of messages.

The practice of public relations today requires an increasingly deft touch. PR Newswire’s own distribution network is designed to deliver customized content to the journalists, bloggers, web sites and media outlets that subscribe to our news feeds. Ensuring the content they receive from us is relevant to their interests and areas of coverage is the cornerstone of our media relations programs and services.

Likewise, the development of e-mail pitches and press releases takes a similar deft touch. But don’t leave distribution out of the picture. If your organization wants to increase inbound web site traffic, acquire new followers, find new audiences and earn some media along the way, broad outbound distribution of your messages via a service like PR Newswire will deliver measurable results.

4 Realities of Inbound Marketing You Can’t Afford to Neglect written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

It’s guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Rohan Ayyar – Enjoy!

photo credit: shutterhacks on Flickr

Inbound marketing and social media participation for brands are one of the most effective promotion tactics today. The whole world of marketing is now skewed towards “earning customers” instead of “buy, beg, or buy your way in” that outbound marketers follow, if this Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing infographic on Mashable is to be believed.

The fundamental shift in consumer behavior is certain now: individuals are in control of what information they choose to receive. Not only do they have options when it comes to brands while buying, but they can also choose who they want to hear from.

According to Mashable’s infographic, more than 84% of 25-34 year olds have abandoned their favorite website because of intrusive or irrelevant advertising. More than a whopping 86% of people skip television ads. At least 200 million Americans have registered for FTC’s “Do Not Call” list. Over 91% of email subscribers have unsubscribed from an email list they previously opted into.

Clearly, outbound marketing is having a hard time. On the other hand, inbound marketing works, but only when you go at it the right way.

Here are a few inbound marketing realities you can’t afford to neglect:

1. No one gives two hoots about your brand, product, service or whatever

This one’s hard. In fact, it’s the hardest truism about being in business today. Contrary to whatever you might think about your business, your prospective customers don’t really give a damn about you. It’s a hard pill to swallow. Does it mean all that passion, sweat, blood, and tears you put into running your business are for naught?

Customers aren’t overly concerned about you, and won’t be either, for as long as you beat your big corporate chest with your “campaigns,” you are just carrying out interruption marketing.

What the world does care about is solutions to problems. Your prospective customers are looking for solutions that can make their life better somehow, in some way. Whatever fits the bill – with respect to products and services – takes the cake.

2. Competition has no face

Once upon a time, all that a company would have to worry about – apart from producing goods and delivering services – was competition from similar companies selling similar products. Today, competition comes in new garbs everyday.

First, there’s the information overload that customers are slowly getting immune to (which means that they mastered the art of ignoring what you have to say). Second, the competition comes from smarter and leaner companies that have learnt the art of keeping customers engaged (with inbound marketing practices, of course).

If you’ve ever wondered why all that money being spent on campaigns never managed to bring in a dollar, it’s because of this competition overload. You just have a lot more to do today.

Are you ready to deal with it?

3. Marketing is the new way of giving

Capitalism was almost a result of selfishness. Ayn Rand was a staunch advocate of “self-worth” and “self-preservation.” She wrote whole tomes like Atlas Shrugged to get that point across. That was then.

Capitalism is still about making a profit. It’s just the way profits are made has changed with inbound marketing. This new line of marketing calls for “selflessness.” It calls for giving away more than you ask for. It calls for altruism, generosity, and spreading buckets of value through content, information dissemination, and relationship-building on social media.

Take whatever route you like, just make sure you give.

4. Inbound is harder than outbound

Most rookie entrepreneurs believe that since inbound marketing is relatively cheaper than traditional marketing, it ought to be easier. As they say, “Talk is cheap.” However, it’s easy to forget that work comes at a premium.

Inbound marketing is harder than traditional marketing. As a matter of fact, marketing is always hard as Drew Williams of HubSpot candidly explained. There are a whole lot of things to get used to. Businesses have to produce an unimaginable amount of content. There’s social media, there’s content (which itself stretches into blog posts, videos, podcasts, slide decks, infographics, curated content, and a whole lot more), which companies have to produce at an alarming rate.

Then there are multiple channels to tap into. Marketing itself is now a hodge-podge of tasks, departments and functions. Teams need to put their heart into all of these. They need to learn and use sophisticated tools for manifold tasks ranging from project collaboration to publishing, from web analytics to video conferencing. What’s more, they need to be effective at that, produce results and justify ROI.

How do you go about inbound marketing? What are the biggest challenges you’re facing in getting inbound leads? How do you convert these to sales? Do you have any new tactics or strategies to share?

Rohan works at E2M solutions, a premium digital marketing firm specializing in creative content strategy, web analytics and conversion rate optimization for startups. He is an avid blogger, with posts on Search Engine Journal, Social Media Today and Moz, among other places. Rohan hangs out round the clock on Twitter @searchrook – hit him up any time for a quick Q&A.

Selling products, services or even content to users and potential customers today is never a simple task, especially with the rapid increase in online and mobile shopping. Knowing how to truly connect with your customers to create an authentic relationship and bond is a way for you to ensure you genuinely understand what your loyal followers want from you. Understanding why customer reviews are so important can also give you more insight into your current level of customer service that is provided to those who use your company.

Customer Reviews Give Insight into Product Quality

Customer reviews left by those who have purchased products or services from your brand give you more insight into the current level of product quality you are producing and selling. Knowing how your customers feel about the level of quality you provide is a way for you to make improve your offerings to any item that is not performing well or getting the highest reviews possible.

They Show You What’s In Demand

Reading the reviews your customers leave for you, both good and bad, is another way to learn more about which of your products or services are currently in high demand. Although it is possible to track the metrics of your sales within most shops and eCommerce platforms available today, customer reviews can give a more personal story attached to the items, and is a great way to find additional inspiration for future products or services you may want to offer. Listening to customers can open doors to new products and services.

They Can Be Used as a Tool to Rebuild the Relationship You Have With a Customer

When you receive a negative review regarding your company, product, or specific service, it’s important to consider using the review platform as an opportunity to rebuild the relationship with an individual customer directly. According to SocialMediaToday, 95% of unhappy customers are likely to return to a company for future business if their issue is resolve professionally and in a timely manner.

Understanding the benefit of using a review system to respond to your customers effectively and respectfully is essential, not only to for retaining current customers, but also for generating new leads—because if you don’t listen to your unhappy customers, then they may just speak loudly enough for the rest of the world to hear. When that happens, you might find that the damage done to your reputation is almost irreparable.

Avoid Getting Defensive

Avoid getting defensive or using a customer review platform to berate a customer who has been disgruntled with the services or products you have sold them. Instead, use the platform to respond in a professional manner, offering refunds, discounts, exchanges or additional support. Toyota is a great example of how you can bounce back from a PR nightmare. Always be sure to provide customer support in the form of a representative, phone number or even an email address to work with customers directly.

Avoid Removing Negative Reviews

It is also important to avoid removing or entirely deleting any negative reviews or comments you receive about your business, as this may ward off potential customers who were at one time interested in your brand and the services or products you sell. When you filter content and rid negative reviews, onlookers may believe your brand has something to hide, or does not believe in free speech and voicing personal opinions. Allowing all users and past customers to state their mind openly will keep others from forming negative opinions against your business for filtering and blocking opposing views. Of course, if the reviews are unnecessarily offensive or use vulgar language, then you may need to remove them for the sake of other readers. Use your judgement, and make sure that you’re not just pulling down posts for fear of bad publicity.

When you take the time to get to know your audience by reading any customer reviews your company has, it is much easier to deliver the products and services they are seeking The more time and effort you put into improving the overall level of customer service you provide will also help to increase your online credibility, in addition to your professional reputation—no matter what industry or field you inhabit.

In January I wrote the blog: How to Diagnose if Inbounditis is Killing Your Sales Pipeline, which was published by DemandGen Report. In the article I assert:

"A healthy, driven inbound marketing department is great, but over-reliance on inbound marketing (what I call 'inbounditis') negatively affects the revenue backbone of any company. In fact, it makes the whole sales pipeline sick.

"The three major symptoms of inbounditis are:

1. Deal sizes gradually decreasing as inbound leads increase;
2. High-performing reps avoiding inbound lead follow-up; and
3. The percent of sales accepted leads decreasing while lead quotas increase.”

Several PowerViews' alums also shared their thoughts on the subject:

including AA-ISP founder Bob Perkins who said:

"I will quote a dear friend, Antarctic Mike, who said, 'Finding net new business is the fuel of champions.' I couldn’t agree more. There is something about hunting down new contacts and business that fuels the engine of top sales reps. Relying solely on inbound activity is akin to eating junk food 3 meals a day for a month … it isn’t adequate fuel for high-performing sales reps."

Next up: Kyle Porter, CEO of SalesLoft:

"Less qualified leads in the pipeline! Leads are never more qualified than when you pick them on your own (outbound). With inbound, you are subjected to lead quality issues and you have less control! But you need both! Inbound + Outbound = Awesomebound."

From Matt Heinz, president of Heinz Marketing:

"Inbound marketing can be both highly effective and highly inefficient. If you’re relying on inbound marketing and leads only today, you will soon reach a point at which you can no longer effectively scale your business." You can read the rest of that article here.

Joanne Black, No More Cold Calling AND Pick Up the Damn Phone:

"You Call That a Lead? It's time to change how we talk about sales leads. Inquiries are not leads, and neither are those 'coveted' lists of names. Suggesting otherwise borders on insulting.

"Leads are people who express interest in discussing your product or service. They match the profile of your ideal client. They have budget—and a need. And they want to learn more about how you can help grow their businesses. It is downright misrepresentation when companies position themselves as lead-generation experts. It sounds so good (so easy), and so we jump. That’s how we get our sales funnels clogged with cold leads that waste our time and almost never pan out.

"Good salespeople know how to build qualified pipelines. That’s our job, and we’re good at it. Marketing has its own role to play—an important, critical one. We need their help more today than ever … just not with qualifying leads."

Note: Joanne and I disagree on the definition of a lead and whether or not marketing should be involved in the process of qualifying leads. In my opinion, focusing on budget may not always be the optimal route. I also believe that marketing still plays an effective role in qualifying leads. With that said, Joanne and I see eye-to-eye on the majority of other issues. Her books reflect her insightful level of expertise, and I highly recommend them.

From Chris Snell, Inside Sales Manager, SMB at Care.com

"Here's what I see are the top two symptoms of inbounditis:

1. ISRs (inside sales reps) rely too much on being farmers, and when dry times come (just like they do for real farmers!), they've lost their hunting skills and wind up going hungry.
2. ISRs become slaves to the reactive, and if there's a charge to break into new verticals with new products, you can't just wait for prospects to come, you've got to go out and get them."

Conclusion: Unless you are selling a relatively low-priced commodity, over-dependence on inbound leads to smaller deals with lower-level decision makers. An optimized balance of inbound and outbound marketing techniques, i.e. “allbound marketing,” consistently generates high quality leads that ultimately produce revenue. And that, dear reader, is the bottom and the top line.