There are many places in this world I hope to one day experience. On that list was Sofia, Bulgaria. I use the past tense as I’m so happy to report that I had the opportunity to visit this beautiful city (and country) for the DigitalK conference. What a great event!
I presented on topic that I refer to as “A Prelude to Innovation.” It’s meant to spotlight the important actions and events serving as the introduction to innovation itself. Shortly after my talk, I had the opportunity to meet Vassilena Valchanova to answer a few of her questions. Our conversation led to an incredibly thoughtful article that I wanted to share with you here.
Even though the context of the article focuses on customer experience and marketing, you can substitute those monikers for innovation, transformation, or any role or industry.
It’s very honest and candid advice. I hope it helps you.
Figure Out How The World is Changing and How To Be More Relevant as It Evolves
by Vassilena Valchanova
I am often amazed by how approachable big keynote speakers can be. It took about 15 minutes for Brian Solis to reply to my twitter-invitation for an interview at DigitalK. 4 hours later, we were sitting in the rooftop bar of his hotel. We talked about consumer experience, storytelling, and the skills marketers need to develop.
The context of the marketing world today
I’ve been following Brian Solis ever since, in university, I stumbled uponPutting the Public Back Into Public Relations. Turns out this was in 2009 – a whole eon in the digital world! So I started by asking what has remained the same in marketing since then – for better or worse. We started off with the worse.
The digital world has evolved. There are many new channels, devices, and platforms. “Marketing is good at scaling to these new possibilities, but is not good at adapting culturally to these new channels,” Brian explained. “[Marketers] are still creating messages, using brand guidelines, preparing statements approved by legal teams and execs. We’re not humanizing any of this to be relevant to human beings.”
Why does this happen, though? Because marketers only think about market share, target audiences, and stats in reports. We lack the customer understanding needed in the digital age where the distribution of power has shifted in favor of users. “Marketers don’t know customers, don’t think like customers. Although they all our customers. But when they go to work they become marketers and they forget almost how to be human.”
The reason for that is “the fallacy of busy” marketers fall into. “They have a campaign to plan. They have metrics they have for you. They have meetings. And so they find excuses not to branch into new directions because they’re so busy on all these other fronts.”
The solution, according to Brian, is having the discipline to discern between urgent and important, the strength to say no. “The thing that I always recommend is asking what would happen if you really didn’t send that e-mail newsletter. What would happen if you didn’t create that app? What if you took time to figure out what’s the next smart move? You have this thing I call “the fallacy of busy” where you get so consumed by everything you have to do that you don’t allow yourself time to invent or time to learn or time to experiment.”
Don’t get so consumed by everything you have to do that you don’t allow yourself time to invent or time to learn or time to experiment.
From awareness to understanding the full customer journey
Brian Solis is not the type of person who’d just pose a hard problem, so we moved into talking about solutions. There’s a lot happening that’s putting marketers in the corner. But they can learn and adapt.
The transition is visible in the startup world where “constraint forces creativity”. The availability of large budgets or lots of time are a luxury here, so marketing needs to scale very fast and drive users. The goal is speed of execution and driving tangible business results.
“Whatever you call it – agile marketing, growth hacking – it’s designing marketing for intent,” says Brian. “That way marketers start to become a much more strategic asset in any organization. They are focusing on business level deliverables that executives can appreciate.” Then marketing can expand its relevance and its worth by looking beyond the top of the funnel – focusing on the entire customer journey.
The key to doing this is for marketers to understand their customers well. “There’s a movement called micro-moments now. Micro-moments reveal how people go through the customer journey starting with [a smartphone]. I think 90% of customers start the journey on the mobile phone.”
Micro-moments give marketers a new level of understanding customer needs and how to serve them better. “It’s very insightful because then you can start to experiment with very specific strategies for marketing that are different than what you might do normally. And so that starts to put marketing on a path towards customer experience. Then you find that you’re getting new expertise and you’re also becoming a resource to other parts of the organization that you weren’t partners with before.”
Focusing on customer experience gets marketing from a simple awareness engine to an integrated part of the full business funnel.
Consumer experience as the way forward
Ever since publishing X: The Experience When Business Meets Design, Brian Solis has been the herald of this elusive concept – customer experience. I was curious to learn what made him venture into this direction of research.
“It’s a very personal endeavor. I started writing because, as a human being, everything that we do on [our smartphones] – every app, every network – tells us we’re the most important person in the world. And it becomes the standard. When you go to traditional marketing it is nothing like that. And that’s the problem. And so I was trying to get to the core of what that was.”
Going on the hunt for good customer experience design, Solis found that it’s not a marketing tactic, rather a full business philosophy. And marketers are still pretty inefficient at creating interactive experiences. To illustrate that, Brian talked about Disney Land:
“From the rides to the placement of trash cans to how the buildings are designed – everything was designed for a very specific experience. And they’re all not just designed as one thing, they are designed as a complete, what I call, experience map. Everything is designed to the tiniest details.
But when you try to shop on Disney online, it’s an outmoded experience. It’s very very traditional. What’s the difference? What’s the disconnect between the people who work at the park and the people who work on the online property? Why aren’t they bringing that same thinking to this?”
The reason would be digital marketers think only about conversions rather than what customers value, want, or need. They haven’t unlearned the old marketing rules.
Learning to unlearn
During his keynote at DigitalK Brian Solis touched upon learning versus unlearning. As digital specialists, we need to not only learn new things. We need to unlearn the old comfortable solutions we know. To break the rules and be innovative, you need to unlearn the tactics you automatically default to.
Brian practices what he preaches, as he’s unlearning things on a regular basis. When writing X, he designed a completely new reading experience. Recently he collaborated with LinkedIn on a storytelling ebook, and heworked with a storyboard artist to teach him the art and science of telling a story. He has done his fair share of unlearning and admits it’s not an easy thing to do.
“Unlearning is hard because it goes against every convention that makes you who you are today. We’re human beings and we all have experiences and skills and things that we’ve learned throughout our whole life. And if there were somebody to tell you, “All of that is part of the problem,” that’s hard to hear. Very hard to process. Because it is that experience and that expertise that has made us successful in where we are today.”
I almost felt like our conversation was following a steady wave pattern. We were swinging between the bad news of how the world changes, making us inept to deal with it, and the good news that there is still something we can do about it. So I was almost holding my breath to hear about the flip side of unlearning. It didn’t take long:
“The question I had to ask was why do I have to do a book the way that every book is done? If I had to invent the book what would it be? Once you start asking these questions you start getting different answers. Once you start getting different answers and you start experimenting you get better at unlearning and you get better at having ideas you never would have had before.”
Unlearning breaks the usual process of iteration that we often mistake for innovation. Unlearning makes us go to places we’ve never been to before and although it’s extremely hard, the return on effort is astronomically high.
Unlearning is hard because it goes against every convention that makes you who you are today.
The motivation of Brian Solis
All the things Solis talked about were inspiring, but also extremely difficult to apply. He’s not the type of speaker who’ll give you hollow inspiration and no clear next steps. He won’t focus on tiny easy iterations that will make you feel better for achieving something.
So I had to ask what was the motivation giving Brian the energy to continue researching, writing, and advocating for the hard way out.
“I’m done with the bull…, I’m done with the hype. The world is changing and the only solution is to figure out how the world is changing and how to be more relevant as the world changes. No amount of cheerleading, no amount of motivation is going to solve that problem. The only way to solve that problem is to understand how to reverse engineer how people are changing, what’s important to them, how they make decisions. And then build the bridge between today and them. What I know, what I don’t know, and them. What I need to learn, what I need to unlearn, and them. That’s your purpose, that’s your inspiration, that’s your motivation. The only way to do that is through hard work. And I understand that hard work is not a sexy message to send out. It’s not a best selling message. But it is the solution. It is the answer and that’s why I determined that that’s going to be my role in life.”
The world is changing and the only solution is to figure out how to be more relevant as it evolves.
I drank the rest of my cappuccino and left the rooftop bar feeling like I was at the base camp of a high mountaintop. The clouds cover the peak and you’re not fully sure what the end goal looks like. But you know the road to it will be hard.
It feels like challenges arise all the time and the life of a digital change agent is to always focus on the next one. But consistency in taking on the hard challenge is what distinguishes the no-BS marketer from the pat-on-the-back snake oil salesman. There’s no easy way forward, so get to know your customers, start unlearning, and drive meaningful change.
_____
Brian Solis
Brian Solis is principal analyst and futurist at Altimeter, the digital analyst group at Prophet, Brian is world renowned keynote speaker and 7x best-selling author. His latest book, X: Where Business Meets Design, explores the future of brand and customer engagement through experience design.
Please, invite him to speak at your event or bring him in to inspire colleagues and fellow executives/boards.
When you’re looking for ways to get something done, facts and data will serve you better than following a hunch. The marketers who (without much thought) say, “Oooh, I like that idea, let’s try it,” are bound to have more missteps than those who research, use proven strategies, and test everything before rolling anything out.
Those who follow the tips we’re about to share get more shares compared to others, and the reasons are clear.
The typical advice you hear when it comes to increasing content engagement:
Ask visitors to share
Make content valuable and unique
Reach out to influencers
These strategies are effective and you should implement them, but they’re nothing new. Even worse, they may not work — especially if you don’t have a deep understanding of exactly what is working right now.
Let’s dive into what these marketing strategies really mean.
Pound the Pavement for Shares
No, this isn’t a section about creating a great call-to-action at the end of your article. It’s about doing the hard work and getting one share at a time.
Think about authors. When an author gets a book deal and their novel is published, that’s only the beginning of their work. Depending on the publisher, some promotional work may be handled in-house, but the success of the book is often largely on the shoulders of the person who wrote it. In some cases, publishers promote books to retailers and distributors, but the author is on the hook for things like audience engagement and other direct-to-readers promotion.
As of writing this article, there have been more than 5.2 million blog posts published, according to WorldoMeters.
Google, WordPress, and Facebook don’t really care that you wrote an awesome blog. Even the people who would like, share, and use your content aren’t going to come without a fight. And fight you must.
Reach Out to Related Businesses
Email Related Businesses: Businesses that go after a similar buyer, but aren’t competitors, can be a great partner to rack up shares. Email them saying:
Hi [Name],
Really enjoyed (and shared) your blog: [title of their post w/link].
I recently wrote, [Title of your post w/link,] and think it could benefit your audience. If you think so, would you consider sharing it via social media?
If not, thanks for your content, [Name]. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you promote [Business/Product].
Best,
[Your Name]
Eccentric, Not Just Unique
Even if you’re filling your site with countless blog posts jam packed with stellar written content, you may still be disappointed.. The content getting the most engagement is focused not just on value, but also visuals.
It’s visual, interactive, and includes multiple types of content — all in one cerebral package.
You may be saying, “The content doesn’t seem in-depth enough.” Sure, you can deny its thoroughness, but it is undeniably shareable.. Take a look at this screenshot from Buzzsumo showing the top-shared articles for the term “marketing automation.”
(The gist: MailChimp is number one with 3x the shares of number two on the list.)
You may not be able to get to this level overnight, but the more visually appealing, the better. A few things to consider:
Add graphic elements to support points
Create short videos and place them into your posts
Influencers are always on the lookout for compelling content to share with their Facebook audiences. Some look for solutions that do it automatically – these influencers get curated content sent directly to their social profiles.
That means that the networks that provide this solution are now the ones looking out for quality content. Using something like Quuu Promote or Zest Content Boost often means hundreds of shares per promoted post.
As with any strategy, there are pros and cons. The big plus is, of course, the shares, but the drawbacks are the requirements. For instance, Zest only promotes a very limited number of blogs/posts at one time. While they guarantee hundreds of visits and increased shares, there’s a waiting list you’ll have to sign up for to even get a shot.
A Final Word
Asking to share works, but it may take an email to potential sharers.
Making valuable and unique content is a good start. Just make sure that when someone looks at it, they can’t help but want to tell someone about it — even if it’s as much to do with novelty as value.
Figuring out the best influencer outreach strategy is important. But if the budget and timing are right, you could run a promotion on your best content and have influencers lining up to share it.
The proven strategies for increased shares boil down to the same methods for everyone – you just have to take it to another level.
Great deal! Buy now!! But why should people buy from your brand over the competition? That's where your value proposition comes in. Here are five steps to test whether your value prop is helping you succeed--or fail. Read the full article at MarketingProfs
Thursday’s explosive story by Bloomberg reveals detailed allegations that the Chinese military embedded tiny chips into servers, which made their way into data centers operated by dozens of major U.S. companies.
We covered the story earlier, including denials by Apple, Amazon and Supermicro — the server maker that was reportedly targeted by the Chinese government. Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment. Amazon said in a blog post that it “employs stringent security standards across our supply chain.” The FBI did not return a request for comment but declined to Bloomberg, and the Office for the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment. This is a complex story that rests on more than a dozen anonymous sources — many of which are sharing classified or highly sensitive information, making on-the-record comments impossible without repercussions. Despite the companies’ denials, Bloomberg is putting its faith in that the reader will trust the reporting.
Much of the story can be summed up with this one line from a former U.S. official: “Attacking Supermicro motherboards is like attacking Windows. It’s like attacking the whole world.”
It’s a fair point. Supermicro is one of the biggest tech companies you’ve probably never heard of. It’s a computing supergiant based in San Jose, Calif., with global manufacturing operations across the world — including China, where it builds most of its motherboards. Those motherboards trickle throughout the rest of the world’s tech — and were used in Amazon’s data center servers that power its Amazon Web Services cloud and Apple’s iCloud.
One government official speaking to Bloomberg said China’s goal was “long-term access to high-value corporate secrets and sensitive government networks,” which fits into the playbook of China’s long-running effort to steal intellectual property.
“No consumer data is known to have been stolen,” said Bloomberg.
Infiltrating Supermicro, if true, will have a long-lasting ripple effect on the wider tech industry and how they approach their own supply chains. Make no mistake — introducing any kind of external tech in your data center isn’t taken lightly by any tech company. Fear of corporate and state-sponsored espionage has been rife for years. It’s chief among the reasons why the U.S. and Australia have effectively banned some Chinese telecom giants — like ZTE — from operating on its networks.
Having a key part of your manufacturing process infiltrated — effectively hacked — puts every believed-to-be-secure supply chain into question.
With nearly every consumer electronics or automobile, manufacturers have to procure different parts and components from various sources across the globe. Ensuring the integrity of each component is near impossible. But because so many components are sourced from or assembled in China, it’s far easier for Beijing than any other country to infiltrate without anyone noticing.
The big question now is how to secure the supply chain?
Companies have long seen supply chain threats as a major risk factor. Apple and Amazon are down more than 1 percent in early Thursday trading and Supermicro is down more than 35 percent (at the time of writing) following the news. But companies are acutely aware that pulling out of China will cost them more. Labor and assembly are far cheaper in China, and specialist parts and specific components often can’t be found elsewhere.
Instead, locking down the existing supply chain is the only viable option.
Security giant CrowdStrike recently found that the vast majority — nine out of 10 companies — have suffered a software supply chain attack, where a supplier or part manufacturer was hit by ransomware, resulting in a shutdown of operations.
But protecting the hardware supply chain is a different task altogether — not least for the logistical challenge.
Several companies have already identified the risk of manufacturing attacks and taken steps to mitigate. BlackBerry was one of the first companies to introduce root of trust in its phones — a security feature that cryptographically signs the components in each device, effectively preventing the device’s hardware from tampering. Google’s new Titan security key tries to prevent manufacturing-level attacks by baking in the encryption in the hardware chips before the key is assembled.
Albeit at start, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. Former NSA hacker Jake Williams, founder of Rendition Infosec, said that even those hardware security mitigations may not have been enough to protect against the Chinese if the implanted chips had direct memory access.
“They can modify memory directly after the secure boot process is finished,” he told TechCrunch.
Some have even pointed to blockchain as a possible solution. By cryptographically signing — like in root of trust — each step of the manufacturing process, blockchain can be used to track goods, chips and components throughout the chain.
Instead, manufacturers often have to act reactively and deal with threats as they emerge.
According to Bloomberg, “since the implanted chips were designed to ping anonymous computers on the internet for further instructions, operatives could hack those computers to identify others who’d been affected.”
Williams said that the report highlights the need for network security monitoring. “While your average organization lacks the resources to discover a hardware implant (such as those discovered to be used by the [Chinese government]), they can see evidence of attackers on the network,” he said.
“It’s important to remember that the malicious chip isn’t magic — to be useful, it must still communicate with a remote server to receive commands and exfiltrate data,” he said. “This is where investigators will be able to discover a compromise.”
The intelligence community is said to be still investigating after it first detected the Chinese spying effort, some three years after it first opened a probe. The investigation is believed to be classified — and no U.S. intelligence officials have yet to talk on the record — even to assuage fears.
For business owners and entrepreneurs, every day presents a myriad of new business challenges. Chief among them is the constant and relentless pressure to grow your business in an increasingly competitive and noisy marketplace.
As most businesses and consumers are risk-averse, avoiding an expensive mistake is the top priority in their purchase decision process. Having a solid brand strategy will allow your company to be perceived as less risky and as a more reliable choice. Here are the top eight reasons to manage your brand as a key business growth strategy.
Customer acquisition. Building a brand that consistently (and without exception) places customers first and ensures a first-class experience with your company is the most critical reason to manage your brand. Delivering an exceptional customer experience when things are going well is usually easy. The more important customer experience is when there is a real or perceived complaint that requires delicate negotiation to successfully resolve the concern. Here’s where your brand must excel by living up to your customer promise of quality and service.
Innovation or reinvention. All businesses—small or large—must continually innovate or reinvent themselves to remain relevant and to consistently meet evolving customers’ needs and marketplace trends. For businesses, this is especially true, and it requires a commitment to forward-thinking and a willingness to adopt strategic and early adjustments to marketplace trends and changes. In this case, a company’s brand must be strong enough to build upon and to evolve with the changing marketplace dynamics without sacrificing brand equity.
Reputation. Managing your brand can significantly influence your reputation and enable your company to break through the marketplace noise to attain top-of-mind industry positioning. Additionally, creating a solid and positive reputation can be helpful when addressing a negative or crisis situation and can create opportunities to promote the company.
Profitability. A strong, positive and resonant brand will command premium pricing, as the customer value is clearly and consistently articulated through actions and communications. According to McKinsey and Company, business-to-business companies with brands that are perceived as strong generate a higher EBIT margin than others. In 2012, strong brands outperformed weak brands by 20 percent, up from 13 percent in 2011.
Talent acquisition. Want to successfully compete for the best talent? With a strong employer brand, business owners can and do recruit high demand talent. This is an area often overlooked, and even ignored, by many business owners. An Employer Brand International study indicated only 41 percent of companies have an employer brand strategy.
Disruption. Stagnation is a common challenge for many businesses. While disrupting an industry may be a long shot, becoming a disruptor within an industry niche is often doable for small business owners. Having a brand that enables the company to quickly build credibility in the new marketplace or to launch new offerings is imperative for success.
Resilience. Economic downturns happen, and most brands stumble from time to time. During these challenging times, it is important to expand your knowledge, capabilities and opportunities. Another imperative to remain relevant is to continually refresh your products to meet consumer desires and to stay steadfast to your brand values. Consumer responsiveness is a hallmark of great brands and should be a goal for business owners.
Engagement. Highly successful companies cultivate innovation and creativity and empower their employees to create a high performing culture. These companies embody their brand promise throughout their touch points and have no fear of failure as they celebrate, embrace and respect calculated risks with both good or bad outcomes.
Whatever your business status, managing your company brand should be strategic, purposeful and consistent to yield endless opportunities and unlimited success. A proactive and well-thought-out brand strategy is the secret to the long-term viability, growth and success of your business.
There’s a famous quote from Lao Tzu: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
It makes me think of when Rob and I launched SalesLoft Cadence back in 2014, and how far we’ve come today. We were the first software company to deliver a cadence solution that met the needs of sales teams worldwide. Today, we’ve built the leading sales engagement platform, helping to increase the productivity and scalability of sales organizations.
We’re proud that the concept of cadences has caught on in sales. When a CRM industry giant like Salesforce enters the market, it further validates the sales engagement category. This is what SalesLoft has known all along – that sales engagement platforms drive efficiency, from lead generation to renewal.
Recent TOPO research revealed that salespeople still spend 47% of their time on non-selling activities. The automation of sales tasks enables sales professionals to work faster and more efficiently. However, we must be careful not to sacrifice authenticity.
Today’s buyers expect salespeople to interact with them in a personalized, consultative manner. The real differentiator is in using automation as a tool to help salespeople make real, human connections. That is what delivers significant results that are sustainable over the long term. Artificial intelligence will not be the demise of the sales profession. Instead, it will elevate and improve the buying experience.
What is next for sales engagement?
As we look to the future, sales engagement will encompass the automation of repetitive tasks, improved coaching, and a more personalized buying experience.
Here are a few specific areas we see technology shaping the future of sales engagement:
Better Meetings: Tools like Meeting Intelligence will automatically transcribe conversations and document the key takeaways. This “virtual assistant” allows salespeople to focus on the discussion. It enhances the dialogue by enabling recordings and clips to be shared directly with customers.
Personalized Communication: Cadences will become more and more customized to make prospects feel more understood and important. The question is not whether or not to personalize, but how, where, and when to personalize. Data can begin to answer these questions for us, removing the guesswork and improving the effectiveness of cadences.
Data-Driven Playbooks: Data rather than gut will identify prospects that are the best fit for your solution and prioritize leads. Messaging and content can more easily be aligned with a customer based on their persona before a rep ever picks up the phone.
Smart Sales Interactions: Machine learning will predict the effectiveness of any series of sales interactions. By cracking the code on cadences, we can improve sales performance and figure out what approach works best. With enough data, AI can discern patterns and domain-specific data in an instant.
On-Time Sales Coaching: Features like Live Call Studio enable live-call monitoring, letting managers coach sales teams in real-time. Managers can also use technology to skip directly to critical points in recorded sales calls. More efficiently discovering improvement opportunities saves managers valuable time. Focused, on-time coaching benefits both the buyer and the organization.
The smart features and functionality of a sales engagement platform are essential to making sales strategies work. The best salespeople are using technology and smart data to learn from their customers, to understand their business and their challenges, and to improve overall sales engagement. With the help of a sales engagement platform, sales organizations can deliver a better, more efficient sales experience for both buyers and sellers.
We’re excited to see that sales engagement continues to expand beyond the foundational Cadence product. To better serve you, we are already testing the edge cases of critical components like dialer technology, mail server integrations, automation rules for use cases, open APIs, and deep bi-directional CRM syncing.
Today’s sales professionals are able to give a higher level of attention to prospects because they will have more time to proactively and consultatively engage with warm, relevant leads. As sales engagement technology continues to evolve, at SalesLoft, we look forward to continuing to help you deliver a better sales experience.
If your content doesn’t include data, it is less likely to be trusted, persuasive, or even read. That’s based on the findings from an August survey of 1,054 U.S. adults released this week by SurveyMonkey Audience:
Three-fourths of adults say content with data is more trustworthy than content without. (Interestingly, 5% say data-backed content is less trustworthy.)
Three-fourths of adults say #content with data is more trustworthy @SurveyMonkey #research. Click To Tweet
Almost three-fourths (73%) say content with data is more persuasive (6% say it’s less persuasive).
Persuasive #content? It’s better with data, says 73% of adults in @SurveyMonkey #research. Click To Tweet
And four out of five U.S. adults (82%) prefer to read an article based on data than one based on the writer’s opinion.
82% prefer to read article based on data than on writer’s opinion, @SurveyMonkey #research. Click To Tweet
Too often marketers think of data only in the terms of analytics – prescriptive and descriptive data to understand how well content is performing or to inform their content planning. But this research reminds marketers that using data in their content is an audience must-have (or at least a preferred-have).
“When you bring research and data into your content, you’re instantly incorporating voices and perspectives outside your own,” says Morgan Molnar, senior product marketing manager at SurveyMonkey Audience.
When you bring #research into #content, you’re instantly incorporating voices outside your own. @MorganMLehmann Click To Tweet
Data is great, but it should be a component of the bigger picture. “The goal of your research is to be able to tell a compelling story validated with data,” writes Michele Linn, chief strategy officer of Mantis Research. “Constantly ask yourself: Why will someone care?”
Data is great, but it should be a component of the bigger pictures, says @michelelinn. Click To Tweet
Let’s look at a couple brands using data in effective ways that Morgan shares then delve into how you can use data to create better content for your brand.
Do you cheat? That’s the question Netflix posed in 29 countries. The media streaming company asked its audience if they watched new episodes of a series before their partner did.
Instead of creating a static research report from the results, the company created an interactive web experience.
Instead of a static #research report, @Netflix created #interactive web experience on cheating. @anngynn Click To Tweet
In another data-driven project, Netflix surveyed people about their viewing behavior with their pets, turning the results into an infographic:
As an entertainment brand, Netflix naturally lends itself to entertaining survey topics. But even B2B companies can think creatively. Wrike, a B2B project management software company, found a compelling and relatable idea for its research – workers disconnecting during vacation. It pulled together the research into a gated report to generate sales leads.
Lisa Murton Beets, research director of the Content Marketing Institute, says research-backed content requires a commitment. As she writes, “Even though many types of research and survey software are readily available, not just anyone can ‘do research’ successfully.”
Research-backed #content requires a commitment. Not anyone can do #research successfully, says @LisaBeets. Click To Tweet
The first step, both Lisa and Morgan say, is to identify your purpose for the research. You need to have a goal.
Then, do your research to see if the data is already available. As Lisa explains, you may find sufficient existing data to inform your content or you may identify a gap that needs to be filled.
If you proceed with your survey, you should identify the questions to be asked. As Morgan advises in SurveyMonkey’s guide, follow up on key questions about “what is happening” with “why” questions. Understanding the sentiment behind “what” responses is important in capturing (and telling) the full and accurate story.
Follow up “what” questions with “why” to learn the sentiments behind the what. @MorganMLehmann @SurveyMonkey Click To Tweet
Then identify to whom the questions will be posed. Will it be an audience you already have access to or will you need to identify third-party resources?
TIP: Ensure your sample size is at least 1,000. Over half of adults (58%) in the SurveyMonkey Audience survey say they pay close attention to the data collection method or source. And two-thirds (66%) say the smallest sample size they trust is 1,000 respondents (and that’s also a standard expectation because it means a low margin of error [plus or minus 3%] and confident conclusions.) Only 15% would trust data coming from 100 responses or fewer.
Once you’ve collected the data, you can use it in your content. The options are seemingly limitless, though it makes sense to marry the content with the best format (for the reader and for your brand’s objectives.) Options include:
Depending on the amount and level of data, you should know how your audience prefers to consume data. In the SurveyMonkey research, four in 10 respondents (42%) prefer data visualization – charts, graphs, or infographics, while one-fourth prefer it in tables or grids. Almost one-third (32%) prefer data as part of the text.
Depending on amount & level of data, you should know how your audience prefers to consume data. @anngynn Click To Tweet
BONUS FINDING: Men prefer table visualizations more than (30% vs. 20%), while women preferred data in text more than men (35% vs. 27%).
If your research is multi-faceted and detailed, consider creating a home base – a landing page or central repository of your data, as Michele Linn advises. She shares this example from Orbit Media’s 2017 Blogger Survey:
Orbit’s co-founder Andy Crestodina believes so strongly in research that he’s said original research is “possibly the most effective marketing tactic.”
Given the effort that often goes into data-informed content, brands often ask themselves if the content should be gated (to capture leads) or not (to maximize the number of readers.)
SurveyMonkey found 87% of adults have provided their email address to access content or join a newsletter/blog mailing list. But only one-third (33%) of those who provided an email address report the content as being valuable.
“This is an opportunity for marketers to provide more value to their readers,” Morgan says.
SurveyMonkey analyzed what type of content worked better in securing email addresses. Here are the top findings by type:
Newsletters and blogs (46%)
Research reports (28%)
E-guides (28%)
Webinars (24%)
BONUS FINDING: Women are more likely than men to provide an email to join a newsletter or blog (51% vs. 40%), while men are more likely than women to provide an email for research reports (32% vs. 25%).
Men are more likely than women to provide an #email address for research reports (32% vs. 25%). @SurveyMonkey Click To Tweet
Almost half (49%) of people ages 18 to 34 say content with data is more fun to read. And more than one-third of adults age 55 and older and 43% of adults 35 to 54 say the same.
“Data doesn’t have to be about boring number crunching and large data tables that make your eyes bleed,” Morgan says. “Data can be confirmatory or it can be surprising and challenge stereotypes.”
Don’t ignore what motivates your audience
It may be easier to write an article sharing your (or your subject matter expert’s) opinion. But recognize, if you publish content without data, you’re missing an opportunity to build trust and/or persuade your audience. And in some cases, you may be missing out on readers altogether.
Having a strong relationship with your partners is an influential part of positioning your business as a leader amongst your competition. Building these successful partner relationships should rely on a key element, a beneficial Partner Relationship Management (PRM) software.
To develop a successful PRM portal, we’ve outlined 5 key components that every portal should have. Through the use of easy accessibility, focusing on channel partner needs, collaboration, the necessary resources, and measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) your partner portal will unify channel managers and channel partners, and lead them to a successful channel partner relationship.
Partner Portals Need to be Easy to Access
A self-service partner portal should be convenient for your channel partners to use. With the use of a single sign-on (SSO), channel partners will have access to a unique set of login credentials that will grant them access to multiple platforms. For further convenience, partners will also have the option to access the portal using their social media credentials, i.e. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Google.
Additionally, the portal should offer partners real-time access to relevant content such as documents, files, articles and data records. For further success, a partner portal should be mobile-optimized. This will ensure that channel partners will have the ability to close deals when they want, wherever they are.
Partner Portals Need to be Partner Focused
A self-service partner portal should be focused on creating the best experience for channel partners. A PRM portal that is personalized for your partners will provide content that is tailored to the channel partner’s usage, engagement, and activity level.
Ensure your partner portal is suitable for your partners, by keeping your portal relevant and up to date, in order to close deals faster. To do so, a PRM portal should give users access to newsfeeds, real-time collaboration, articles, custom dashboards for analytics, etc.
Partner Portals Need to Encourage Collaboration
Providing channel partners with a partner portal is the base of a successful channel partner program. Without this tool, it would be difficult to achieve real time communication and collaboration.
A PRM portal provides businesses with a central system where channel managers can communicate with channel partners on specific accounts, such as leads, opportunities, sales forecasts, resources, and other shared information. By moving discussions on to specific accounts located on the portal, rather than using email, communication will be made easier and conversation will be easily tracked.
Having a strong way to collaborate with channel partners this will lead to an increase in partner productivity, loyalty, profitability, and consistency.
Partner Portals Need to Provide the Necessary Resources to Sell
In order for partners to effectively sell your products or services, it is important that they have up to date knowledge of your business.
A PRM Portal provides the perfect solution. With the platform’s engaged environment, channel partners will be able to learn and enhance their knowledge.
For instance, the Learning Management Solution (LMS) module on the portal provides channel partners with custom time-based training. By providing channel partners with ongoing access to training and certifications, it will help them be more efficient and effective during the onboarding and sales process.
Additionally, a documents library should be used to share important files and resources. This library can also be used to create playbooks. A Playbook is a feature that allows channel partners to easily create a collection of marketing and sales materials. These assets can be easily accessed and utilized during the sales cycle to close deals.
LMS and Playbooks aren’t the only tools that provide channel partners with the necessary resources to sell.
Partner Portals Need to Provide Easy to Measure Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Through the use of a centralized partner portal, you’ll be able to use KPIs to determine the positive results of your channel partners and the partner relationships itself.
KPIs will give you ability to identify areas of success and areas that need improvement. KPI measurements may include performance, partner engagement, leads and opportunities, sales and etc. Tracking these metrics can help you improve the partner program and help determine what areas need further investment.
Is it time to make a change to your partner program?
Establish and support your relationship with channel partners by implementing the use of a partner portal. Your PRM portal should be contributing to the success of your relationship, and help partners meet their goals. Provide your partners with the best portal by doing your research on the best PRM portals available.
The owner of a small business must successfully manage a lot of tasks simultaneously. As an entrepreneur, you must overcome resource restraints and at the same time focus on growth.
Statistics indicate that growing your business at the initial stage is not easy. Nearly 20% of businesses do not last for a year and 50% of them don’t make it to the fifth year.
It is a bit tricky to fight a battle on every front at the same time. You need help to boost sales and grow your business. That’s where growth-hacking comes in.
In the piece, we will see what growth hacking actually is and how it is useful for small businesses.
What is growth hacking?
Growth hacking involves quick experimentation across various areas of your business to identify the most efficient methods for achieving growth. The term was coined by the CEO of GrowthHackers.com, Sean Ellis after he found the absence of focus on growth in traditional marketers. In Ellis’s own words, “A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth.”
The use of word “hacking” in the term suggests that it’s a clever way of producing higher growth results through a few shortcuts. The main aim of an ideal growth hacking strategy is to increase your customer base by keeping investment to a minimum.
Now, let’s take a look at some of the proven growth hacking tactics that every small business owner should know to grow their business.
Best and proven techniques to growth hack your small business
Prioritizing content marketing
Content marketing is one of the most valuable marketing strategies for businesses. Statistics cite that it’s 62% cheaper than traditional marketing and generates three times more leads.
Create a blog with content that is properly optimized with trending, high-volume, and low-competition keywords to present your business as an expert in the industry. These blogs generate heavy traffic on your website and produce more conversions.
Blog posts and other informative content is meant to educate readers with high-quality information. Users visit your website to gain important, helpful knowledge, which helps in building credibility and enhances brand awareness.
Online reviews matter
Online reviews are essential when it comes to building brand credibility. According to a survey, 84% of users trust online reviews and testimonials when considering purchasing a product or service.
Make it easy for users to view and react to all the praise you have received online. Present the top quotes and testimonials on your homepage as comments from satisfied customers. It is helpful in encouraging your prospects to make the purchase.
Integrating calls-to-action with your social media platforms
In order to boost growth, you need to encourage your prospects to take a specified action. Integrating your calls-to-action across various social media platforms is the best way to motivate your customers to take action.
Ask users to sign up for your product or share or like your posts. Ensure that your call-to-action is precise, clear and easy for customers to understand and take action.
Requesting feedback
Listening to your customers is the best way for any brand to grow further. Ask users for their feedback on their experience your product or service. Improve your business accordingly to present a best-in-class user experience, which ultimately is helpful in boosting sales.
For better interactivity, use popups to ask for users’ comments after making a purchase. The aim is to capture insight and feedback from customers so you can improve the customer experience.
Offer freebies
Offering free downloadable or viewable assets is one of the most effective ways of growing your email list quickly. You may try offering a free ebook in exchange for the user’s email address.
Ensure the freebies you are offering are aligned with your marketing strategy and the theme of the product.
Use customer retargeting
Retargeting simply means bringing your customers back to your website in an attempt to sell to them again. The best way to do it is by showing targeted ads to customers who have been to your website previously.
Google and Facebook retargeting contains optimizations, which show targeted ads to your previous customers and encourage them to make the purchase.
Offer discount coupons
Another effective way to build your email list is distributing discount coupons, which also encourages users to make the purchase. Adding the feeling of urgency in your deal also helps boost conversions as users don’t want to miss interesting deals.
You can use exit intent pop-ups containing information about your coupons. The system detects a visitor, who is about to leave your website.
Use pop-up creator tools to create best-in-class customized pop-ups, which instantly catches customers’ attention.
Implement organic SEO strategies
Using organic SEO techniques is an effective strategy for engaging prospects. Data suggest that 70-80% of users ignore paid ads altogether. Moreover, organic traffic is the most effective way to drive traffic to your website.
Upgrade your SEO strategies and go organic as much as you can. Pure SEO techniques help you bring more traffic than social media outreach and helps in increasing conversions.
Build an app with advanced capabilities with the help of a popular app building service in order to bring more visitors to your site.
Take mobile optimization seriously
As 48% of users use mobiles to search on the internet, it’s extremely important that you optimize your website for mobile devices. 61% of mobile users won’t be visiting your website again if they have trouble accessing it. Considering its importance, Google also emphasizes making your website mobile friendly.
Ensure that your website and marketing emails are fully compatible with mobile screens to get the most out of mobile traffic.
Gamify the onboarding experience
Gamification is used by various businesses as it makes the whole customer journey interesting. Gamifying the onboarding experience involves rewarding new users for using the product and referring it to friends and colleagues.
Incentivise users as they refer your brand to their friends and colleagues in order to increase your user base. Offer various milestones as the customers use your product.
Gamification helps to make the whole customer experience interactive and encourages to the customers to use and recommend your service or product.
Use deep analytics for decision making
Data and analytics are at the heart of every business. Measured data helps in maintaining complete insight into the results of your business.
You can use data to trim all your unnecessary expenses, identify areas which need improvement and the places where you are committing resources without any results. Measure and use the data for intelligent decision making.
Make freemium products
People like to use free products. Making a freemium product helps you attract a lot of attention from potential reviewers as they don’t need to buy the product to review it.
However, freemium does not mean the product lacks best-in-class features. A freemium product with amazing features is what you are looking for.
You can then encourage the users to go for the paid version of the product for more seamless support, additional features, and unlimited integrations.
Keep experimenting
Experimentation is a scary topic for small businesses. Usually, small businesses don’t have enough room to experiment considering budget limitations.
However, experimenting opens new doors for new growth opportunities so that you can bring in more customers.
Sometimes, your strategies may fail but in the long run, your gains could be much higher and worth the time and amount you are investing into it.
Conclusion
Growth hacking is all about finding new shortcuts to grow your business and bring in more consumers. It is a completely ethical and efficient practice. Small businesses must try innovative ideas to make growth-hacking simple and easy.
Follow the tips above and get the most from your growth-hacking strategy. This will help in taking your business to the next level.
Your brand is important. As marketing guru Seth Godin explains, “a brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”
Given this definition, the consequences of damaging your brand—even when acting with the best of intentions—can be severe. This is especially true when it comes to your email marketing efforts.
After all, a primary point of contact between you and your customers is email. That’s why it’s important to utilize opt-in when building your distribution lists. You need to make sure that those on your email list truly want to hear from you.
So, what exactly is opt-in, and why is it so important to your brand? We’ll go over all the need-to-know information below.
What is email marketing opt-in?
If a subscriber opts in, it means they give you explicit permission to send them an email, newsletter, advertising, or another type of digital communication.
The single opt-in is what most people are familiar with. That’s when a contact fills out and submits an online form which gives you permission to send them messages.
The double opt-in, however, is recommended. After a subscriber requests to be added to your list, you send a confirmation email with a link to verify that it’s okay to contact them. In this fashion, the subscriber opts in twice.
As we’ll discuss below, it’s critical to make sure you receive permission from every single contact and keep it stored in your records.
Why you need an opt-in for your email marketing
There are three basic reasons you need all new subscribers to explicitly choose to receive emails from you. The first has to do with building the most effective lists possible while the second and third are concerned with making sure your lists don’t violate usage standards or laws.
1. Build effective lists
Sure, you want your email lists to be growing on a regular basis. But you also want to avoid alienating potential customers and giving a bad impression of your brand. If you’re not using opt-in to ensure subscribers want to hear from you, then many people on your list won’t engage with what you have to say.
If you want to build a highly engaged list with soaring open rates and healthy click-through rates, then you need to make sure everyone on your list not only wants to be there but chose to be.
2. Avoid blacklisting
The second reason to use opt-ins is to avoid being added to a domain name system blacklist (DNSBL) due to overly aggressive list building. Blacklist databases are queried in real-time by email servers to obtain an evaluation of incoming emails to determine if they’ll be accepted based on their IP addresses.
A high rate of spam complaints from users is the quickest way to find yourself on one of the many existing blacklists. The process to be removed is labor intensive—each DNSBL will have its own procedures to do this—and the best policy is not to be added to begin with.
In addition, if you’re using one of the many email marketing and distribution services, they can’t afford to have their IP addresses blacklisted because of emails you’re sending out. Therefore, they’ll be monitoring if your bounce rates – that is, the number of emails that come back as undeliverable – are too high or if they see too many complaints.
If this happens, they’ll block you from using their services before your emails result in them being blacklisted.
3. Comply with CAN-SPAM and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws
Finally, you should also be aware of existing United States and European Union laws which deal with unsolicited – that is, spam – emails.
In the U.S., the CAN-SPAM Act provides compliance guidelines for businesses who use email and digital marketing. Much of this has to do with avoiding deceptive advertising practices. For example, don’t use misleading subject lines or inaccurate header info.
At the same time, make sure to clearly identify the message as an ad and include your physical address as well as clearly stated opt-out options.
While opt-ins are not required by CAN-SPAM, their use is recommended to avoid any complaints about or investigations of your email marketing practices. The penalties can be severe, up to $41,484 per email not in compliance.
In the E.U., GDPR laws regulate how businesses can interact with individuals online. Regarding email marketing, the guidelines for gaining consent from a new contact are more stringent than in the U.S. and require clear affirmative action from the individual. That is, unlike the U.S., you must use opt-in.
Given how business is more global than ever before, it’s easier to use opt-in for all your list building efforts.
Wrap up
When you’re first building your distribution lists, of course, you want to reach as many people as quickly as possible. After all, how can people buy your products or services if they don’t know about them?
There are, however, no shortcuts worth the damage they can do. Again, as Seth Godin writes, “If the consumer (whether it’s a business, a buyer, a voter or a donor) doesn’t pay a premium, make a selection or spread the word, then no brand value exists for that consumer.”
Build your brand—and your email marketing lists—the right way using opt-in. After all, your brand’s value will increase when you avoid alienating potential customers, stay off blacklists, and follow all anti-spam regulations and laws.
Repurposing content is like restoring a classic car. It depends on your perspective. What to some people is junkyard worthy, others see as the next hottest car on the block. The same can be true with your B2B content marketing and B2B PR strategy.
Many people hesitate to repurpose content, for fear that the topic is out of date or that it will displease their audience. But really, you can view it as a second chance. Take content that may not be performing up to your expectations and transform it into a knockout piece.
You can even take content that has performed very well in the past and give it new life by changing up the format or expanding the content to include more helpful suggestions.
While we will get into specific ways that you can repurpose your content later on in this post, let’s first look at what repurposed content is…
What is repurposing content and why is it important?
Repurposed content is content that is older but has been updated or recycled to be used again, possibly in a different format. This could be a blog post that is out of date and needs freshening, or an eEbook, whose information could be used for a video.
There are several reasons why you want to repurpose rather than delete old content, including:
Its age is valuable to your SEO ranking.
It can be used to attract new audiences.
Repurposing your content is often more affordable than creating new content.
How Should You Get Started Repurposing Content?
Do a Content Audit
Before you can begin deciphering which content to repurpose, you should have a solid idea of what content is in your archive. Depending on how long you’ve been creating content, this could be extensive.
During a content audit, you’ll want to ask yourself:
What content is out of date?
What content could use some additional information?
What content is still relevant but could use a little polish?
What holes are there within your content that you could fill with new content?
Once you’ve determined what content you have at your disposal, you’re ready to craft a plan to repurpose it.
Update Your Information
Does your content contain dates or figures that are out of date? Get the most current information. If your content is based on statistics that are over 5 years old, for example, it’s time for a refresh.
Apart from updating old statistics and data, you can also improve your content with additional advice and insight. Instead of a post on 10 ways to improve small business finances, why not make it 15? This will give your past audience new motivation to reread the content. Not to mention making it more attractive to new readers.
Make It Look New
If you don’t plan to change the content format, then you want to give it a fresh look so that people feel like they’re having a new experience. People don’t want to feel like they’re having leftovers — but the way you present it can make it feel like a gourmet meal.
Change the images including the feature image. Include an editor’s note in the beginning that notes the update.
Now let’s check out 10 powerful ideas to guide you in repurposing content.
10 Awesome Ideas for How to Repurpose Content
1. Craft an Ebook
Ebooks are a great way to get more leads and also build your reputation as a thought leader. Despite what you may think, ebooks aren’t as complicated as they may sound. No doubt, you probably already have a library of content that could seamlessly become a 40- or 50-page eBook.
2. Create a Checklist
Got a blog post that has performed really well? If it’s a numbered (i.e., 10 Awesome Ways to Make Your Servers More Secure) then make it into a handy checklist that your audience can use on the go. Checklists are fairly easy to make — after all, you already have the content, you just need to organize it as a checklist.
3. Make a Video
Video is one of the most popular content formats out there. But video doesn’t have to be drawn-out, complicated affair. There are several services that aim to help you create video from your already existing content, such as Lumen5.
4. Create an Infographic
Do you have content, such as a report, that relies on data, figures, and statistics? This kind of content makes excellent material for an infographic. Break down that heavy data with colorful visuals and bold headlines that will help your audience digest the information easier.
5. Create Social Content
Have a blog that is doing really well, but want to make it more accessible to your social media audience? Take the content and make it more sharable on social media. Create a visual that highlights the basic information or animates certain key points.
6. Turn It Into a Webinar
You may have several posts, or maybe even a long-form post or eBook, that would make a great outline for a webinar. Include additional points that would add value for your audience.
For example, if you notice your readers enjoy your posts on small business tax deductions, you could create a small webinar that covers the nuts and bolts of tax preparation for small businesses, and promote it during tax season.
7. Go Live on Facebook or Instagram
Take content that has done well in the past and use it as talking points for a live video on social media. Both Facebook Live and Instagram Stories are great platforms for this kind of content. Afterwards, transcribe the video to use for your newsletter or Ebook.
8. Update It with New Information
If you find a blog post which has outdated information or is a couple of years old, don’t be too quick to hit delete. You can reinvigorate it, or even completely revamp it, with new information. Update any outdated information, give it a fresh look, and include additional information that will make it more valuable.
9. Create a SlideShare
SlideShare is a great tool, especially for B2B businesses. Take a how-to post, listicle, or eBook and break it into easily-digestible snippets that will go well on slides. Add in a few colorful and relevant images, and you’ve got yourself the makings of a great SlideShare.
10. Record a Podcast
Depending on how much content you’ve created over the years, you might have enough topics and information to do your own podcast.
In review…
You never know what gem you have until you start wiping away the dust and seeing what’s under the surface — you might just have the ’68 Mustang of content hidden away in your archives!
What tactics have you used to repurpose content? Let us know in the comments below.
Are your website visitors not convinced by your pricing page? After you’ve done your competitor research and studied your target audience to come up with the best prices for your products or services, it can be discouraging to see that you’re still not making sales. But don’t go lowering your prices – you’re worth more than that. There are some simple tweaks you can make to your pricing page that will take you from broke to bountiful.
Of course, you’ve got to be mindful of margins but that’s not the only aspect of pricing that you should be considering. In order to get higher conversions, you’ve got to develop a pricing strategy. There are a number of simple strategies you can use on your pricing page that are proven to grab the attention of users and boost conversions.
Get consumers hooked on your pricing, here’s how to develop a pricing strategy for higher conversions.
1. Use common psychological principles.
Go into any store and you’ll see tons of pricing that ends in the number 9. You see it everywhere and so often you might not have realized that there’s a name for it and psychology behind it. It’s commonly referred to as “The magic number 9’; instead of pricing an item at $100 for example, sellers set the price at $99. The idea behind it is that it makes the price seem lower and therefore consumers will be more willing to buy.
The Magic Number 9. https://www.zendesk.com/product/pricing/
You might be skeptical but it actually does work. In his book Priceless, William Poundstone found that these prices increased sales by 24 percent versus slightly higher, ‘rounded’ prices. So when you add your prices to your website, consider rounding to the nearest 9 in order to drastically improve your conversions.
2. Name your pricing plans.
You should never underestimate the power of good pricing plan names. While Option 1, Option 2, and Option 3 might seem simple to you, it doesn’t tell your potential customers what they want and need to know in order to make a purchasing decision. So make it easy for consumers to know which choice is right for them by naming your pricing plans accordingly.
Name Your Pricing Plans. https://www.bluleadz.com/blog/12-outstanding-pricing-page-examples
For instance, Mailchimp did this really well in the example above. By naming their pricing plans ‘New Business’, ‘Growing Business’, and ‘Pro Marketer’, users can see immediately which option will work best for them. This strategy eliminates confusion for the user, which will result in more sales for you.
3. Keep it simple.
Consumers want to know exactly what they’re getting when making a purchase. That’s why it’s so important not to overwhelm them with too many details or make your pricing page more complicated than it needs to be. Consumers should be able to skim your pricing page to quickly get the highlights of the features they’re getting; if the page is too busy or has too many words, you risk the user abandoning your site altogether.
Keep it Simple. https://www.getcloudapp.com/pricing
You can add an FAQ section or a link to a separate FAQ page underneath your pricing plan for the users who want more detailed information about the packages if needed. But for most users, a simple breakdown of your pricing plans will suffice, and it will push them towards the checkout faster.
4. Display monthly pricing.
Most consumers, when given the option of paying $50 per month or paying $600 upfront, would choose the $50 per month, even though both options end up costing the exact same. Monthly pricing seems much more reasonable to users and makes them less weary about purchasing.
Even if you plan on billing annually, it’s a great tactic to put the monthly price on display as well. For instance, showing the monthly price like in the example below to show how affordable the product is per month, but let customers know they’ll be billed annually.
Now that you have some great options to develop a pricing strategy for higher conversions, start A/B testing to see what tactics will work best for your website visitors. Once you start implementing a few of these tips, shoppers will find your prices irresistible and your sales will soar to new heights.
Are you looking for ways to get more out of the budget you have?
I guess that second one goes without saying. We’re all looking to maximize the return we get from what we spend (or just spend a little bit less).
And, time being money, let’s see if we can’t save a bit of that along the way.
This article will break down the 5 top marketing tricks I use to save Wishpond time and money on a daily basis.
Let’s get into it!
1. Steal. Originality is for chumps.
Seriously, steal.
No, but seriously. Steal.
Can’t think of an idea for your next post?
Add your competitor’s blogs to Scoop.it and Feedly to find what they’re writing on, then do it better.
Looking for statistics for a given subject?
Go to your competitor’s article then look for the original source of the statistics they give. This way you’ll get statistics, but won’t have to link out to a competitor.
All out of ideas for your next A/B test?
Check what your competitors are doing with their homepages, pricing structures, onboarding, etc. Then put your own spin on it and test.
The fact is, marketing is hard. Not to begin with, necessarily. If you know what you’re doing then the “getting set up” is just about checking things off. Once you have your baseline, though, iterating and optimizing is challenging.
Where do you get your new ideas when your brain is fried, you’ve already had 7 cups of coffee, and it’s only 2pm?
You steal them. And, so long as you put your spin on it, I won’t tell anyone.
Why do you think every website looks the same?
I love this graphic from novolume showing every single startup, consulting or agency website in the world:
Don’t believe me?
As I said: Steal. All the cool kids are doing it.
2. Use Google Drawing and Presentation instead of expensive design software
For me, the idea that only trained graphic designers with expensive design software can create awesome graphics, gated content or social media visuals is one of the most costly misconceptions about digital marketing.
Now, before my design team jumps down my throat, I do want to assure them that what they put together is better, don’t get me wrong.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t put together some professional designs yourself.
And Google Drawing and Presentation are the two most useful tools in our repertoire.
For instance, let’s say I wanted to take four screenshots from SaaS homepages to show readers how similar they all are (see above…):
Google Drawing makes it super simple to combine the images into one, add drop shadows and borders, resize, and export as a JPG, PNG or PDF. Plus, it’s super easy to ask my team for their thoughts, edits or whatever. Sharing and co-creating is super simple.
It even works with copied images from the web, so when creating social media graphics I can just copy from my favorite stock image site (Pexels) and drop them in.
For instance, this is the graphic which Social Media Examiner created for my most recent contribution (yes I’ve recommended this little marketing trick before):
And here’s what I can create with Google Drawing:
And the exact same tools which enable me to do that enable me to duplicate an ebook from your top competitor and create it in Google Presentation.
3. Automate your email campaigns
…Without sacrificing results – that’s an essential caveat for this time/cost-saving marketing tip.
Automation is all well and good (and it is all good) so long as it doesn’t hurt your end results.
Let’s break it down. There are two things we need to remember here:
Automation makes delivery of targeted, segmented email campaigns quick and easy. This increases your ability to reach out to large numbers of prospective customers at the right time.
Personalization increases open rates, click-through rates and replies.
In short, automation without personalization just spams people with irrelevant offers. Personalization without automation takes forever and means you won’t be able to contact everyone you need to.
Here’s an example of a personalized, yet automated, welcome email from content analysis tool BuzzSumo:
Coming from the Co-Founder, this email has been personalized using merge tags. It’s short, with no styling and it prompts a reply with a specific question: “what are you looking to get out of our tool?” – all this is best practice for an automated welcome email.
Here’s another example of a great, automated abandoned cart email from Ralph Lauren:
This email has been personalized, automatically, by including the item I abandoned. Abandoned cart emails are the biggest selling point for automating emails, by the way.
Out of all cart-retention intended emails that were sent, 45% of them were opened.
Out of the opened emails, 21% of them received click-throughs.
50% of the users who clicked purchased.
If you have 100 people abandon their cart, a good automated email campaign will send 5 of them to complete their purchase. That might not sound like much, but that’s 5 customers you wouldn’t have had otherwise!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a huge fan of landing pages, particularly for online courses, webinars, industry reports, etc – gated content which needs some explaining.
Plus, they’re significantly quicker and easier to create, and that’s what this article is all about.
Something like this combination from Hootsuite:
When a reader or visitor clicks the green button on that slide-in popup, this click popup shows:
Or, if you want a live example, just click the bottom button on the sidebar of this blog for the guide to email marketing. You’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.
5. Use hotkeys and learn to type
I’m consistently amazed by how many digital marketers don’t navigate their browsers as efficiently as they could.
Those little things which save you a second here and a second there add up. For me, the two biggest ones are using hotkeys and typing quickly.
Use Hotkeys:
Hotkeys enable marketers to do things faster. That’s kind of the point.
Instead of having to reach over and grab your mouse, double click on text and click a button on your keyboard, you can keep your fingers on the home-row and do the exact same thing, more quickly.
Sure, it only saves you a second, but those seconds add up to days over the course of a year of digital marketing.
Plus, you can impress your friends.
Hotkeys my team and I love for Chrome:
Hotkey Combination: What it Does:
⌘ + Shift + N
Open a new incognito window (great for viewing web pages without cookies)
⌘ + T
Open new tab
⌘ + W
Close current tab
⌘ + Shift + T
Recover a tab you just closed
⌘+ (Number 1-8)
Move to the tab in position (number)
⌘+ Enter
Select URL bar in a new tab
⌘+ L
Select the URL bar in current tab
Hotkeys my team and I love for Google Docs (content marketers, pay attention):
Hotkey Combination What it Does
⌘ + C
Copy
⌘ + V
Paste
⌘ + Z
Undo
⌘ + Y
Redo
⌘ + Up/down arrow
Send cursor to top or bottom of document
⌘ + Shift + Arrow Left/Right
Select everything on a line
⌘ + Shift + Arrow Up/Down
Select the line above or below the cursor
⌘ + Arrow left/right
Go to far left or far right of a line
Option + Arrow left/right
Send the cursor one word to the left or right
Option + Shift + Arrow left/right
Select one word to the left or right of the cursor
⌘ + K
Hyperlink selected text
Shift + 8 + space
Create bullet point
⌘ + X
Copy and delete highlighted text
Learn to Type
I type about 100 words a minute. This saves me a huge amount of time over the course of a week or year of writing.
Most people my age, who grew up with a computer keyboard at their fingertips, are typing at similar speeds. For those readers who aren’t, though, I’d urge you to get rolling.
Invest a few weeks in improving your typing speed and it’ll pay off more than anything else in this article, honestly. As digital marketers, we’re constantly typing: emails, blog content, social media posts, web copy… The list goes on and on.
If every sentence you write takes a second less time to put down, you save hours.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully one (or all five) of these marketing tricks resonates with you and your marketing team. Some of them are big savers, and some smaller, but with a larger application. I hope they can all work to make you a more efficient marketer.
If you have any questions about any of the marketing tricks in this article, don’t hesitate to reach out in the comment section! I’d be happy to help.
There’s a lot of talk in the B2B world about what we can learn from consumer marketers. We need to treat business buyers as individuals, with their own personas, analyze their digital buyer journeys, and use social media to communicate with them. And how to speak to buyers like humans, with messages that both inform and entertain. These are useful lessons. But did you ever think about what the B2C world of consumer marketers can learn from us? I have a couple of ideas.
The first is about prospecting strategies, and the second is about building relationships.
Offer problem-solving as a way to attract prospects.
Much of B2C prospecting is about deals and discounts. In business markets, on the other hand, the proven prospecting model involves offering a solution to a business problem.
In practical terms, this means content marketing. Preparing educational, objective, non-sales-y material that addresses a customer problem. In business markets, this might be a white paper, research report, infographic or case study. In consumer markets, it might be a recipe book, a blog or a how-to video.
It can be used as a motivational offer to generate a lead, or it can be used to establish thought leadership, or to stimulate viral sharing.
This way you can establish yourself as a helpful resource, expert in your field, and trustworthy enough for a business relationship.
You also tend to attract more qualified customers than you do with a deal. A buyer who really needs the solution will appreciate it, and will appreciate you. They can become not just a loyal buyer, but also an advocate.
This is an approach that consumer marketers can use successfully. Look at YouTube, which is filled with how-to videos for consumer products.
Nurture your customers (and prospects) until they’re ready to buy.
B2B marketers are really good at this. We recognize the power of the Rule of 45, which says that 45% of business inquirers in a category will eventually buy in that category. And when they become ready, we need to be there. Otherwise, we may just as likely lose the deal to our competition.
So, B2B marketers have elaborate systems of outbound contacts designed to stay in touch until they’re ready. Known as lead nurturing, it’s a key component of the B2B demand generation process. With a nurturing program, we can expect to triple, possibly quadruple, the productivity of our campaigns.
Consumer marketers already understand this principle. Look at the retargeting banner ads that follow us all around, weeks and months after we’ve stopped by a website.
But I think there’s additional opportunity here for consumer marketers. Nurturing needs to be personalized, acknowledging the relationship, and building it over time through two-way communications. It’s one-to-one, not mass advertising.
Perhaps it’s about developing a different attitude. Consumer marketers enjoy prospect universes that are something like 10x those of B2B marketers. Maybe they have the sense that there are plenty of fish in the sea, and instead of nurturing, they are tempted to move onto the next prospect. But maybe it’s time to treat every inquirer as your last.
Ratings play an enormous role in our lives. Ratings made by critics, judges, and evaluators determine a range of outcomes, from the seemingly trivial (which wine you pick for dinner or which products you buy from Amazon) to the more consequential (which athletes win Olympic gold or which students get into top universities).
But how reliable are these ratings? How well do they hold up over time?
We thought about this when we learned about the speculation over wine rating inflation. When Robert Parker introduced his 100-point rating system for wine decades ago, the highest score he gave that year was 91 points. Now many wines each year receive perfect scores from his publication, the Wine Advocate. Similarly, in 2000 just 15% of wines rated by Wine Spectator received a score above 90. By 2015 the frequency of those scores had more than doubled: Nearly a third of all wines reviewed now receive a score above 90.
We wanted to know what was going on here, and whether people have a bias toward giving higher ratings over time.
Ratings Rise with Experience
In eight studies, recently published in Psychological Science, we captured more than 12,000 sequential evaluations to see whether ratings changed as the rater gained more experience. The evaluations covered much territory: judges’ scores on the TV show Dancing with the Stars, student grades from university professors, and ratings for short stories and photographs by college students. We also analyzed thousands of Amazon product reviews by devoted reviewers.
In one study, we analyzed 5,511 scores from the same panel of judges on Dancing with the Stars. As 20 seasons passed, we found that the more evaluations judges made, the higher ratings they gave. This was true even if we controlled for other factors, such as whether professional partners were actually improving or whether more-skilled dancers appeared in later seasons.
We followed that with a different study that examined student grades over a 10-year period in 991 courses that were taught several times by the same professors. As with the dance competition judges, the more times an instructor taught a course, the higher grades they gave. Again, we wondered if other factors could account for these results, including whether, over time, students were getting better, all course grades were increasing, courses that awarded higher grades were more likely to be offered again, and professors were improving their teaching. Despite controlling for these possibilities, we found the same results: When professors taught the same course many times, they tended to give higher grades.
To rule out alternative explanations, we also tested for this pattern in a controlled experiment in which people evaluated short stories. We asked 168 college undergraduates to rate one short story per day for 10 days. By the end of the study, all participants had rated the same 10 stories, but they each saw them in a different randomized order. Randomizing allowed us to isolate the influence of order (day 1, day 2, and so on) on evaluations. In other words, does making more evaluations, regardless of what people are evaluating, make ratings go up? As before, we found that the more stories a person rated, the higher ratings they gave. Consequently, the 10th story was rated higher, on average, than the first.
Across the board, we found the same result.
More Evaluating Makes Evaluation Feel Easier
Why might ratings rise over time?
We wondered if the process of evaluating might feel easier the more you do it, which may influence how positively you rate something. In a follow-up study, we asked 362 people in an online panel to rate one randomly selected story per day over 10 days. We also asked them such daily questions as, How easy was it to evaluate each story? As the days progressed, participants said that they found it easier and more enjoyable to rate each story. These feelings, in turn, led to improved evaluations for stories over time.
The findings suggest that biased evaluations are the result of a misattribution process: If something feels easier to evaluate, people believe that it must actually be better. In other words, they misattribute their own feelings about evaluation (it feels easier to make an evaluation) onto their assessment of the actual merits (this thing must deserve a higher rating). This was true even though each person’s sequence of stories was randomized.
When we asked if they thought their ratings were getting any higher over time, however, participants disagreed that they were. The outcome suggested that most people are unaware such bias might influence their judgments.
Product Ratings, Promotions, and Performance Feedback: How Trustworthy Are They?
Why do our findings matter for managers and organizations? One practical implication speaks to organizations that seek customer reviews. In a supplementary study, we found that reviewers on Amazon give higher product ratings the more reviews they give. For example, if someone makes an evaluation for the first or second time, she might give a lower star rating — regardless of the product — than if this is her 20th evaluation. If crowdsourced information is a key feature of an organization’s business model and a driver of consumer choice, biases like this would be important for business leaders to consider and for consumers to be aware of.
Our recent findings also raise an exciting, open question for managers: How might this bias in evaluations affect hiring, promotion, and performance reviews? Despite attempts to make accurate and fair assessments, our findings suggest that evaluation processes will benefit candidates interviewed by a recruiter who has been making evaluations for longer time periods. We are studying this next and seeking organizations to partner with.
We are also interested to see whether similar results would play out in promotion decisions and sequential annual 360-degree feedback processes. If true, the impact of these biases could be widespread and affect much of the current and prospective labor force.
Finding ways to mitigate this bias, such as making hiring assessments, performance reviews, and promotions more accurate, is something we are also eager to look at. We noted in our studies that most people seemed unaware that, over time, bias influenced decisions. One possible remedy is simply to make people aware of this potential influence on their decisions. There are other situational variables that we are also trying to better understand.
There are limitations to our studies worth noting. Despite the bias we found in all of the contexts we studied, many other factors contribute to evaluation decisions. Positive bias over time is just one. Second, there is some evidence that, under certain conditions, evaluations may also become more negative over time. The factors and conditions under which evaluations get more positive or more negative, however, is still an unanswered question.
Perhaps the next time you post on Yelp or spend time interviewing candidates, you’ll consider how many evaluations you have already completed and how your current assessment might drift more positively. Doing so could help you assess more accurately.
Conversely, when you depend on others’ numerical evaluations, keep in mind that the rating not only reflects the inherent product quality but may also be higher due to more-experienced raters. Indeed, it may be worthwhile to buy that older, lower-scored bottle of wine.
Content marketing has become a critical strategy for online businesses. They use it to achieve many important goals, such as presenting themselves to potential customers, becoming an authoritative source of information, and building positive relationships with Internet audiences.
In fact, content marketing generates 3X times more leads than outbound marketing and costs 62% less. 86% of marketers use this strategy, according to the 2017 Content Marketing Institute’s report on the state of B2C content marketing.
If you’ve been using content marketing for some time but failing to produce positive results, perhaps you’re making mistakes that hold you back.
Here are 8 common content marketing mistakes that can keep your conversion rate low.
1. Including Obvious and Immediate Sales Pitches
Of course, we all want to market our amazing products and services. However, you won’t reach your marketing goals by ignoring what the visitor is seeking and shoving a conversion call to action in front of them prematurely.
Google has been working on reducing “salesy” content that has a little value for users for quite a while. In fact, they have recently made available their own content creation guidelines.
According to these guidelines, the search giant recommends writing high-quality content that has substantial value for customers. Most of us are so fed up with “in-your-face” advertising that we don’t appreciate obvious sales pitches (the same applies to Google, too).
2. Focusing Too Much on Text
Text is the most popular type of content. Because of this fact, some businesses overly focus on keeping their own content text-only.
You would be making a mistake by producing content without visuals. Many of your readers are visual learners. More visual people tend to appreciate visual illustration of the points described in the text.
Hubspot’s compilation of statistics on visual content marketing supports the importance of creating visuals in your content. Here are some of the most relevant stats from that publication:
People following directions that include both text and illustrations do 323% better than people following directions with text only
Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images
32% of marketers say visuals / images are the most important format for their business
3. Overlooking Personas
A reader persona, often referred to as a content persona, is a representation of your target reader based on research data. It contains information about their characteristics, needs, and preferences. In other words, it fuels your content marketing strategy by helping you create content based on these needs.
If your business doesn’t have detailed reader personas to inform your content creation effort, then you aren’t putting your readers first. In this case, the content you produce won’t be interesting or relevant to your audience, which is bad news for your reputation.
People who review your business at company review websites, for example, won’t give you positive reviews. Even worse, those who read it will choose to buy from your competitors.
4. Offering no Clear Benefit
Content marketing’s main purpose is to persuade potential customers to purchase your product or service. You’ll find it far easier to reach this goal if your prospects have a clear understanding of how that product or service can benefit them. That’s where the content comes in.
You have to describe a clear benefit. Focus on convincing the readers that you understand their problems and can address them. In fact, every content piece needs to convey a clear benefit to the target audience.
For example, let’s say you are writing an article about time management targeted at college students. You’ll want to focus on helping prioritize and use time efficiently, which should allow them free time to have fun or provide assignment help to their friends.
5. No Call to Action
Even the best content in the world won’t help you to generate sales without a clear and compelling call-to-action (CTA). For example, you can include CTAs at the end of articles or blog posts related to your products or services.
The calls, of course, can vary. Anything from “buy now” or “download here” can help you engage prospects more deeply in the sales and marketing funnel (see this list with CTA examples for inspiration).
To maximize the chance that the reader will click on your CTA, address their needs and thoroughly explain how your product or service can meet them. Then make your move.
6. Not Creating a Content Calendar
There are four main reasons why you need a content calendar:
Organizes your content marketing strategy: By outlining your future actions (publishing etc.)
Saves your time: By planning ahead and automating tasks, you will eliminate the need to create content on the fly.
Maximizes the time for content production: With sufficient planning, you can avoid rushing out content under tight deadlines.
Helps you be more strategic: A complete content calendar allows to visualize the strategy and plan content, instead of just posting random content.
7. Not Producing Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is critical for getting to the first page of Google search results. It’s also useful for generating traffic for years to come.
Why? Because evergreen content stays relevant for a long time.
Essentially, it’s content that tackles one issue that the readers face and is not based around news or trends (“how to dribble a basketball,” “a guide to losing weight” etc.).
Content like this can generate leads over time. Don’t make the mistake of overlooking evergreen content that will have a longer shelf life to benefit your business.
8. Opting Out of Sharing Content on Social Media
Social media is one of the most popular and easiest ways to obtain information. Failing to take advantage of this amazing source of information means that you’re limiting your marketing outreach.
So, share your content on your official social media pages. Then, promote it to increase the chances it will be shared by others.
A recent Forrester report, commissioned by Mediafly, revealed B2B enterprises overwhelmingly provide tools and training to their direct sellers over their indirect or partner channels. The problem? By neglecting these sellers, companies are unintentionally impeding their own sales performance and overall business success.
To overcome this challenge, I’m sharing five ways treating distribution channels like second-class citizens can hurt B2B companies -- and what you can do about it.
5 Reasons to Stop Ignoring Distribution Channels
1. It creates a disconnected brand experience
Today’s buyers are different. They conduct more research before connecting with a sales rep, and when they do agree to a meeting, they expect salespeople to provide a customized and consistent experience through every interaction.
However, Forrester’s research showed only 45% of sales and marketing leaders are confident in the current level of brand consistency buyers experience during the sales process.
When sales reps have access to an intuitive sales application, they minimize the risks of saving outdated and inaccurate content to their personal devices. By implementing sales enablement technologies, companies can ensure both direct and indirect sellers are equipped with the most up-to-date content at any time, on any device.
Having an easy-to-use, mobile-ready sales enablement platform encourages maximum usage across all sales channels and leads to increased business results. According to Forrester, organizations that empower their partners with sales enablement technologies are 2.1x more likely to see an increase in customer references and 1.5x more likely to see an increase in customer lifetime value.
2. It allows for visibility loss into the sales process
Organizations that neglect the needs of their indirect sellers lack visibility into the sales process.
By making sales enablement tools and technologies available to direct and indirect sellers, management and marketers gain insight into which reps are using the assets provided, what content is being used during each interaction, and what content is driving revenue.
Forrester revealed when an organization deploys sales enablement technologies for their partners, they’re 2.3x more likely to achieve sales goals and see 1.4x higher revenue growth.
With built-in machine learning capabilities, a sales enablement platform can automate the process of recording meeting notes, customer data, and content presented in the sales application and CRM.
Through the use of machine learning, management can forecast more accurately and marketers can focus on producing content that helps close deals and drive sales.
3. It poses a challenge for partners to do business
When 68% of organizations provide direct sellers with sales presentation templates but only 48% supply the same assets to partners, it isn’t surprising channel partners have a significantly harder time getting buyers to take a follow-up meeting than their direct selling counterparts.
Direct sellers have access to sales enablement tools at rates 1.4x to 1.7x higher than indirect sellers, and when the gap in resources is so significant, it’s impossible to expect these indirect sellers to perform at the same level as direct sellers.
To close this gap and increase selling success, many organizations are investing in sales enablement technologies for their partner channels.
Forrester’s report shows indirect selling channels equipped with sales enablement tools experience 1.4x higher average revenue growth and are 2.1x more likely to achieve double-digit revenue growth. Capitalizing on these technologies is a huge advantage.
4. It affects the business’s competitive advantage
Investing in a robust sales enablement technology for all selling channels pays off. In their research, Forrester uncovered a direct correlation between sales enablement technology adoption and business success.
When businesses enable indirect sellers with sales enablement technology, they’re 2.3x more likely to accelerate deal closure, meaning these sellers are now better able to differentiate themselves from competitors, secure more future meetings, and find it twice as easy to accelerate deal closure.
Sales enablement platforms help sellers cultivate a more customized and insights-based buyer experience. Sellers can ditch their static deck and create a personalized sales interaction that addresses how to solve each buyer’s unique business challenges.
5. It hinders business success
Although partner sales contribute to roughly half of annual revenue for B2B enterprises, more than half of firms say they’re not confident in their partners’ ability to deliver compelling sales interactions. Maximizing indirect selling channels will result in stronger sales outcomes, but channel sellers can’t sell what they don’t know.
When partners are responsible for half an organization’s success, they need to be equipped with the same training and knowledge to sell like direct sellers. A new sales rep wouldn’t enter the field without proper onboarding, and a partner seller should be no different.
An alarming number of B2B firms are at a huge disadvantage when they opt not to provide their entire sales force with the right assets to sell successfully.
A sales enablement platform for sellers is a critical part of any modern sales strategy -- and is the best way to guarantee both direct and indirect sellers generate a more engaging and consistent buying experience.
The big reason salespeople are not successful is their inability to prospect. When you prospect effectively, it’s amazing how smoothly your entire sales process goes.
Prospect right and you’ll close right. It’s really quite simple.
Each week I field inquires from companies and salespeople on this issue, and almost universally the missing link is a process they can implement day in and day out. The excuses I hear are all over the place, from the story that would fit well in a Steven King novel to the more routine excuse of simply not doing it.
Regardless of the excuse, it’s just that an excuse, and you can’t eat excuses or feed your children with them. Excuses are what people create as a way to escape reality.
For the next several weeks, I’m gong to be digging into this issue of prospecting, and along the way, I will be providing you with some great tools. If you’ve been following me for a long time, you may recognize some of them, but many of them are brand new and you’ll be the first to take advantage of them.
My assurance to you is if you stick with me on this journey and follow what I share, you will be successful. This isn’t hype. It isn’t smoke. It’s fire and it will work.
First off to help us understand prospecting and what it takes to be successful, I do need to spend time here being negative and point out what I see are the 10 big mistakes people make when it comes to prospecting.
These 10 are from an ebook I put together and I encourage you to download it. The ebook goes into a lot more depth with each one of the ten. You can get it at this link.
Below are the 10 Reasons Most Prospecting Plans Fail:
1. Using the same prospecting process for all your prospects.
2. Having too many prospects in your pipeline.
3. Not following up.
4. Not segmenting your prospects based on who they are and their needs.
5. Relying on email as your primary prospecting tool.
6. Thinking social media is your answer.
7. Not allocating the proper commitment of your time. Prospecting happens when you engage!
8. Failing to realize your prospects don’t care about you and your company.
9. Not making your messages about the prospect’s needs.
10. Failing to realize the telephone is still a great prospecting tool!
Be sure to grab the ebook, as I go much deeper into each one of the 10 reasons.
Your ability to close deals is a direct reflection of your ability to prospect. Join me back here next week and I will share with you more insights. In the meantime, read the ebook and stop making prospecting excuses.
What makes a good question? In sales, some would say a good question is one that is prepared in advance. Some would say a good question is one that swiftly leads the buyer toward the close. Still others would say a good question is one that forces the buyer to agree with the seller, even if on a small point.
To improve performance, optimize spend, and enhance the consumer experience, marketers must inject data and analytics into every phase of their marketing and advertising process. And thanks to ever-evolving digital device types, platforms, and technologies, marketers now have access to more audience and performance data than ever before, so they can make smarter decisions that drive meaningful business results.
Although more data is certainly a “check” in the plus column, it can pose challenges for optimizing marketing and advertising performance: To guide decision-making, the data must be consolidated, processed, and interpreted correctly; in that process, mistakes are common.
The good news is that those mistakes can be avoided.
Here are five common pitfalls when measuring marketing and media performance, along with best-practices for how to avoid those pitfalls.
Pitfall 1: Not Defining Clear Business Goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Before launching a marketing or advertising campaign, it’s essential to define what success will look like. For some brands, that goal may be to increase sales or improve media efficiency. For others, it may be to increase engagement among new or existing customers.
Once the overarching goals have been set, the right KPIs must be identified so that progress can be measured and quantified. It can be helpful to define macro and micro KPIs, depending on the size of your marketing budget and sophistication of your media. For instance, a macro KPI may focus on the combined performance of your marketing and advertising ecosystem overall, whereas a micro KPI may focus on the tactical performance of a particular channel or tactic.
Having a structured framework, with clearly defined goals and corresponding KPIs, is a vital first step. It will set the tone for subsequent measurement efforts, and enable you to hone what’s truly important to the business.
Pitfall 2: Establishing Benchmarks Without Considering Internal and External Factors
A key component of setting KPIs has to do with existing benchmarks. Whether those benchmarks are derived from your own data, competitor data, or vendor data, they must be contextualized if they are to produce the most informed benchmarks for KPI measurement.
For instance, analyzing internal historical data to establish benchmarks is a common practice, but organizations are constantly changing and often have cyclical fluctuations. Marketing performance will shift regularly based on internal factors, such as short-term promotions and media blitzes, as well as outside factors, such as seasonality, competitive activities, economic factors, and more. To ensure an apples-to-apples comparison of performance results, all of those variables must be taken into account when determining benchmarks.
Pitfall 3: Expecting Perfection
Marketers are challenged with trying to predict human emotional responses to marketing and advertising stimuli, and then accurately measuring which channels and tactics were most effective in driving each desired outcome.
Although those challenges can be dissected in a variety of ways, each minute that goes by without optimizing is a lost opportunity.
Marketers all dream of having perfect data sets so that they can accurately quantify performance by audience segment, and quickly optimize from there. But, in reality, perfect data sets are rare. Velocity of measurement and decision-making are critical for delivering the right message to the right person at the right place and time, and the risk of waiting too long to optimize often outweighs acting on the data that’s available.
Although mitigating risk is important, it comes with an understanding that there is no exact predictive science of human behavior, and you may be forced to optimize quickly, even if the data is only directional.
Pitfall 4: Believing Correlation Implies Causation
All too often, marketers use correlation to understand how their marketing and advertising efforts contribute to leads, conversions, sales, or other specific business outcomes. However, correlation does not mean causation, and so it can lead marketers astray when they’re determining what’s actually driving results.
For example, a retailer may see an uptick in sales of a product that is seemingly the result of a recently launched remarketing campaign. It may be human nature to want to draw a connection, but doesn’t mean that another, unrelated external factor didn’t also influence product sales.
Marketers can avoid confusing correlation and causation by considering all touchpoints customers were exposed to on their journey to conversion. Only such a holistic view can isolate causation from correlation and uncover the true drivers of conversions and other desired business outcomes.
Critical thinking and robust marketing measurement solutions can account for the subtle, yet important, distinction between correlation and causation.
Pitfall 5: Thinking That Multi-Touch Attribution Is Only a Direct Response (DR) Tool
Until recently, multi-touch attribution has been perceived as strictly a direct response exercise, enabling marketers to tie their digital efforts directly to leads, conversions, revenue, ROI, and other DR metrics. Yet marketers in sectors such as pharmaceuticals and consumer packaged goods, who may not have “hard” direct response conversions, still need a holistic view of their ecosystem performance in reaching and engaging target audiences.
Today, sophisticated media and marketing attribution and modeling technologies are available that incorporate multiple brand engagement activities into a single KPI metric for streamlined measurement and optimization by audience segment.
Brand marketers benefit from a holistic view of their marketing and media’s true impact on brand engagement, as well as the ability to effectively optimize budgets across touchpoints and deliver coordinated consumer experiences that drive incremental brand lift. For companies that dedicate big budgets to branding efforts, this means entirely new levels of accountability in how their budget is spent—and the business results they deliver.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator has long been an effective tool to help salespeople get closer to their prospects and customers.
Sales Navigator still helps salespeople get closer to the right people. And now with the new Deals feature in Sales Navigator, this indispensable tool also helps sales managers get closer to their sales teams.
Introducing “Get Closer to Your Sales Team,” a new guide that shows how Sales Navigator and the new Deals feature can help sales managers:
Get more visibility into pipeline
Hold more productive 1:1 deal review sessions with their salespeople
Gain more insight into the complete buying team at prospects and customers
Generate more accurate sales forecasts
Based on extensive conversations with top sales managers at LinkedIn, this new guide reveals the insider’s view on how LinkedIn sales teams are getting the most out of Sales Navigator and the new Deals feature. Here’s what LinkedIn sales managers are saying about Sales Navigator:
Kate O’Leary, Senior Sales Manager, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, on how she and her reps get a real-time view of the Buyer Circle with Sales Navigator:
It’s completely changed my approach to how we manage the buying committee.
Jack McKeon, Regional Manager, LinkedIn EMEA, on how Deals provides a clearer, more efficient view of pipeline:
I used to explore our pipeline in a spreadsheet, adding endless columns and using color coding to try to make sense of it all. Not only was this inefficient, it’s a static view of a dynamic pipeline. With Deals, I can quickly and easily get the focused view that I want—no more wrestling with our CRM system.
Joan Doyle Foley, Head of Enterprise Sales at LinkedIn, explains how the Buyer Circle feature in Sales Navigator can link salespeople to more connections at their prospects and customers:
When I see through the Buyer Circle that we are single threaded, it’s a red flag to dig deeper and figure out who else we should be talking to. I use the Buyer Circle to look at other functions that might touch the larger deal.
Dan Stanton, Regional Sales Manager, LinkedIn Sales Solutions, on the value of Buyer Circle feature in Sales Navigator:
Seeing an empty space in a rep’s deals is a trigger for me to poke and figure out whether it’s a matter of doing standard account cleanup or it signals a true risk.
Andrew McCarthy, Regional Manager, LinkedIn Sales Solutions, on how he uses Deals for forecasting control:
After each meeting, I open the Deals, update the next steps, and change the close dates and forecast category if necessary. All the information Deals is automatically fed into our CRM system, saving me hours per week keeping that up to date while also making sure I can forecast more accurately.
McKeon on using Sales Navigator to deliver more accurate forecasts:
Sales Navigator Deals has made it so much easier to aggregate all the information I use to build my forecast. Plus, it’s better quality information, so I’m delivering a more accurate forecast—and in less time.
Lisa Killeen, Regional Sales Leader, LinkedIn Sales Solutions, on how the Buyer Circle element of Deals enable more efficient one-to-one meetings:
The Buyer Circle provides a snapshot that allows me to maximize my time in one-on-one meetings. I can pull Deals up and very quickly see the status and where I can help.
Isabel Delgado, Manager, LinkedIn Sales Solutions, on how Sales Navigator makes her team more efficient:
The efficiency play is reason enough to start using Sales Navigator Deals. After just a dozen one-on-ones with your reps, you’ll realize how much better prepared you are and how much more you can accomplish.
Doyle Foley on the simplicity and efficiency of the Deals feature:
What I love about Sales Navigator Deals is the ability to do all the things I need to get done from one spot, without toggling between Salesforce and other apps.
Killeen on the overall impact of Sales Navigator:
The power of Sales Navigator is incredible. I can’t think of any other tool that better enables sellers to quickly find the right people, understand what matters to them, and engage them with relevance.
In a business world where 20% of decision makers change roles annually, where 25% of sales professionals also take new jobs, and 24% of forecasted deals go dark, Sales Navigator can help sales managers gain more control of an always uncertain future.
Amazon’s 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods was met with a lot of fanfare. The deal would allow Amazon to grow beyond e-commerce and sell groceries in hundreds of stores while collecting significant shopper data. Meanwhile, Whole Foods could lower its prices (organic avocados for just $1.69!) and scale up after its recent declines in sales and market share. In the words of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, the partnership was “love at first sight.”
A year later, such optimism seems hard to find at Whole Foods. Stories of employees literally crying on the job over Amazon’s changes have begun circulating. Scorecards measuring compliance with a new inventory system are used to punish and sometimes terminate workers. A group of Whole Foods employees have recently taken steps to explore unionizing. Even customers — the stakeholders that Amazon values the most — have been angry over poorly stocked stores.
So where did the love go?
Amazon and Whole Foods’ relationship problems were completely predictable. The two companies may have seen value in capitalizing on each other’s strengths, but they failed to investigate their cultural compatibility beforehand. They now stand on a fault line where tensions often erupt in mergers. This fault line is what we call tightness versus looseness. When tight and loose cultures merge, there is a good chance that they will clash.
Tight company cultures value consistency and routine. They have little tolerance for rebellious behavior, and use strict rules and processes to uphold cultural traditions. Loose cultures are much more fluid. They generally eschew rules, encourage new ideas, and value discretion. Tight cultures have an efficient orderliness and reassuring predictability, but are less adaptable. Loose cultures tend to be open and creative, but are more disorganized. People in loose cultures prefer visionary, collaborative leaders: those who advocate for change and empower their workers, like Whole Foods’ Mackey. People in tight cultures desire leaders who embody independence, extreme confidence, and top-down decision making. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is known to expect unwavering discipline from his workers, personifies this leadership style.
Amazon’s culture is a tight one, characterized by structure and precision. Rooted firmly in the manufacturing industry, Amazon has defined processes to maximize its efficiency. Employees operate within a hierarchy and are well aware of the guidelines that dictate their behavior. According to Amazon’s leadership principles, leaders are instructed to “hire and develop the best” and “insist on the highest standards.” Performance is subject to constant measurement and review — employees can anonymously report each other to higher-ups through an internal phone system. Behavior is even more tightly regulated at Amazon’s warehouses, where target goals and surveillance keep production on schedule. This rule-bound culture ensures that all employees understand the company’s objectives and are consistently working to achieve them.
Whole Foods, on the other hand, has a much looser culture. The unique blend of idealism, high profit margins, and rapid growth that came with operating the first certified organic national supermarket in the U.S. provided the founders with considerable latitude in introducing innovative and unorthodox management methods. Prior to the Amazon merger, the company had an egalitarian structure organized around self-managed teams. This structure granted individual employees significant decision-making power. Face-to-face interactions between workers, vendors, and customers were the norm. Managers could operate their stores with autonomy and tailor products to customer preferences. “Empowerment must be much, much more than a mere slogan,” Mackey wrote in a 2010 blog post. “It should be within the very DNA of the organization.” Such decentralization and lack of structure, however, might have ultimately contributed to company-wide inefficiencies that drove up prices.
To understand more about how mergers between tight and loose cultures work, we collected data on over 4,500 international mergers from 32 different countries between 1989 and 2013. The study took into consideration factors such as deal size, monetary stakes, industry, geographic distance, and cultural compatibility. We found that mergers with more-pronounced tight-loose divides performed worse overall. On average, the acquiring companies in mergers with tight-loose differences saw their return on assets decrease by 0.6 percentage points three years after the merger, or $200 million in net income per year. Those with especially large cultural mismatches saw their yearly net income drop by over $600 million.
Fortunately, when diagnosed early, the tight-loose clashes that crop up in mergers can be handled productively. To increase their chances of achieving cultural harmony, companies should do a few things.
Prepare to negotiate culture. In addition to negotiating price and other financial terms, organizations discussing a merger need to negotiate culture. Leaders should start by conducting a cultural assessment to understand how people, practices, and management reflect tightness or looseness in both companies. They should determine the pros and cons of their current levels of tight-loose, as well as the opportunities and threats posed by merging cultures. How might sacrificing some discretion for structure, or vice versa, enhance or harm each organization? Above all, they should identify areas for compromise: Tighter organizations need to identify domains where they can embrace greater looseness, and looser organizations need to think about how they can welcome some tight features. We call these flexible tightness and structured looseness, respectively.
Construct a prenup. Once merging organizations better understand the strengths and weaknesses of their company cultures, they should develop a cultural integration plan that articulates which domains will be loose and which will be tight. Mutual input about how each company will change — and a formal contract documenting those changes — can help ensure long-term success. When Disney bought Pixar in 2006, Disney CEO Robert Iger agreed to a set of ground rules for safeguarding Pixar’s looser culture. For example, Pixar employees weren’t required to sign employment contracts with Disney, were free to choose the titles on their business cards, could decorate their cubicles and offices as they wished, and could continue their annual paper airplane contest.
Get buy-in. Everyone across both organizations needs to be informed about the integration plan. Simply explaining what the changes will be is not enough; people need to know why they will be implemented. Communicating openly and gaining broad acceptance for changes will help minimize the threat people feel from new ways of doing business. People in tight organizations might feel their control is being threatened. People in loose organizations might feel their autonomy is being threatened. Leaders need to be culturally ambidextrous — or demonstrate the value of being both tight and loose, and work to address employees’ underlying fear of change.
Embrace trial and error. Finally, organizations need to be prepared to reevaluate their original integration strategy. No matter how foolproof the plan may seem, issues are bound to arise. Amazon’s increased standardization and employee surveillance at Whole Foods had positive business outcomes — prices dropped as much as 40% on certain items — but it was also hard on the company culture. Amazon now has an opportunity to learn from these results, and possibly incorporate some of the looser cultural elements that Whole Foods employees value. For example, Amazon could create a better balance between the time people spend on logging inventory and organizing store shelves and the time they spend interacting with customers. Likewise, there may be more domains where Whole Foods can relinquish some of its unstructured business practices. For example, using Amazon’s expertise in data science and logistics, Whole Foods has an opportunity to gain better customer insights and provide its clientele with services that are not only personal but also customized and consistent.
Negotiating tight and loose in organizations takes work, but patience and a willingness to make sacrifices can help merging organizations overcome some of the most difficult challenges. How will the Amazon–Whole Foods partnership pan out? It’s too soon to say, but spending more time on integrating their cultures could help.
I’ve been a negotiator all my life. From persuading my parents to let me have ice cream as a bed-time snack to landing my first job at age 12 – coordinating golf carts at a New Jersey course – it’s in my DNA. This critical skill has served me well in my professional life, first as an executive contract negotiator for a major corporation and, for the past 20 years, in my role as CEO of Minneapolis-based wealth management firm JNBA Financial Advisors, where I have been involved in negotiating business dealings both big and small on behalf of my clients daily.
In fact, we’re negotiating right now. How about you promise to read the rest of this article, and in return I’ll give you three tips to negotiate nearly anything.
Oh, you’ll agree to it if I offer four tips?
It’s a deal.
Here are four tips to improve your negotiating skills:
Go into a negotiation armed with accurate information and data. Take the time to prepare. Do your homework. Read everything, and read it again. And don’t hesitate to bring in trusted colleagues to go over contracts, supporting data, projections – everything – with a fine-tooth comb. The old construction adage “measure twice, cut once” applies to negotiation prep as well. If you go to the table with faulty data, or if you missed an “I” that isn’t dotted or a “T” that isn’t crossed, you’re at a significant disadvantage, and could pay a significant price.
Don’t fall in love with a deal. I will walk away from an opportunity in a heartbeat. That can be extremely difficult if you’re emotionally invested, and another good reason to seek counsel from a trusted advisor. When a client brings us an opportunity they’re interested in, we always listen to them to truly understand what’s appealing about it. Then we do the technical assessment where we really scrutinize it and look at the hard data – the P&L, budget, projections and much more. Often we find it’s not as good an opportunity as the client initially thought, and when we present the information to them in an objective manner, they understand that it doesn’t make sense to move forward. Your gut can only get you so far – data doesn’t lie.
Know when to bring in a professional. You may be the best company owner or most talented sales person, but that doesn’t mean you’re an expert negotiator. It often makes sense to bring in a trusted advisor to handle negotiations, especially when it’s about something that’s very near and dear to your heart like your family or your business. An objective third party acts as your advocate and removes the emotion from the situation, sidestepping the things that go bump in the night for most of us – fear, uncertainty, lack of confidence, greed. Top advisors enter negotiations by asking themselves one – and only one – question: What is right for my client?
Define what a win-win situation actually looks like. I always go into a negotiation with the idea that it has to be a win-win. What’s interesting is the definition of a win-win. Each party needs to get something of value out of the transaction and “win” somehow, that’s a given. But where you really provide value for your client is in helping them determine what provides the greatest worth for them, and what they’re willing to give up in pursuit of the win. Is it price, speed, quality, comfort? “Winning” isn’t necessarily beating the other person; it’s getting what’s most important to you, in a way that’s acceptable to both parties.
One example? My main objective in the deal between you and me was to get you to read this whole article, and if it meant all I had to do was write one more tip than I had originally planned, then so be it.
And it looks like you made it to the end. I call that a win-win.
A few years ago, I implemented an email unsubscribe massacre in my inbox. I realized I was tired of deleting multiple emails from the same brands every single day — emails that I never even considered opening. I decided that instead of simply deleting these emails as they came in, I would unsubscribe every time I received an email that didn’t provide value. I was ruthless about it. After a few days, I was able to breathe a sigh of relief. But now, a few years later, my inbox is overrun with unhelpful emails again. How annoying.
As a marketer, I understand why companies send so many emails. Email remains a critical marketing channel for most industries, and it is incredibly affordable compared to other channels. As a consumer, I often learn about a sale or a new product from an email. Sometimes I go on to purchase that product — resulting in a sale that wouldn’t have been made if the email was never sent. So for the marketer, those emails are worth sending because they can produce positive results. But I know I’m not alone in these feelings of frustration with my inbox.
So what’s a marketer to do to avoid annoying email recipients? The answer, of course, is greater relevance. How can you be more relevant to everyone? Well, you can’t! But you can be individually relevant to your audiences by employing better personalization and targeting techniques. Marketers know this. Adjusting the subject line or including a person’s name or company name in an email, however, isn’t enough to cut down on email clutter and ensure a person finds value in your content. So in this blog post, I’ll explain three different email personalization principles that you can leverage to improve the relevancy of your emails.
Open-Time Personalization
First and foremost, every email you send to a customer or prospect should be as personalized as possible, leveraging all you know about the person. Including their first names is, of course, a great start. But when I say leverage all you know about a person, I mean more than just her name. I mean the behaviors she has demonstrated, her location, the length of time she has been a customer, her loyalty program status, and more — in addition to what all of this information says about her interests and intent.
For example, the shoes I decide to wear each day are heavily dependent on the weather at that specific moment. Is it cold? Hot? Raining? Snowing? The answer to that question helps me decide what to wear. With that in mind, DSW used the weather in my location to send me appropriate product recommendations in this recent email:
So this email has been personalized to me based on my location and, more specifically, the weather in that location.
Of course, between when an email is sent and when that email is opened, circumstances can change. A recipient could have already responded to an offer sent by email, or she could have shown interest in something completely different. The key is to be relevant at open time, rather than at send time. By personalizing your emails at open time, you have the opportunity to display the latest or most accurate information (like availability, pricing, inventory levels, etc.), show the most appropriate content by factoring in completely up-to-date information about a person’s preferences, and avoid suggesting an action that someone has already taken or dismissed.
So returning to the DSW example, the weather in my location can vary dramatically between when the email is sent and when I actually see it. It’s the perfect occasion for open-time personalization. When I opened the email again, I saw this image instead:
The weather and the products displayed in the email changed each time I opened it to ensure the email never seems outdated.
Here’s another example. If a financial services firm sends out an email promoting an upcoming webinar to prospective clients, it may look like this:
But if a recipient learned about the webinar elsewhere and has already signed up, this email will seem behind-the-times (or worse, it could confuse the recipient into thinking her original sign-up didn’t go through). At open time, the content of her email could be updated to acknowledge her registration and suggest a few relevant resources to check out in advance of the webinar.
The right solution can help you collect all of this data, interpret it, and pick the most relevant content to display in your emails and update that content at open time.
Triggered Emails
The previous section covered what to include in your emails to ensure they’re more relevant. Next, let’s discuss triggered emails. Triggering emails based on certain criteria — such as a person’s behaviors (like cart abandonment), catalog updates (such as a product of interest coming back in stock or its price being reduced), or external conditions (like the weather) — can allow you to send fewer, more relevant/timely emails.
Triggered emails are generally based on “IF/THEN” rules. For example, IF a visitor leaves an item in her shopping cart, THEN trigger an email reminding her to complete her purchase. IF a customer hasn’t logged in to your SaaS application in the last month, trigger an email asking him if his needs have changed.
This image below shows an example of a triggered email from a home improvement retailer. If a shopper has demonstrated specific behaviors that indicate that he may be looking to remodel his kitchen (such as viewing three or more categories of kitchen appliances), then the retailer can trigger an email to help him in his research.
This email wouldn’t have been sent to this person if he hadn’t demonstrated intent to remodel his kitchen while on the site, so it is particularly relevant to him at this moment.
As another example, a SaaS company can trigger emails to inform users of the status of their accounts or remind them of actions they need to take. Once a user has completed all the required onboarding steps, for example, it can trigger an email to her to thank her for completing the steps and suggest content she may find valuable as she begins using the solution.
The right solution will give you the control necessary to define the situations where an email should trigger, so that they always make sense to the recipient.
Bulk Personalized Emails
Triggered emails are useful, but they aren’t always what you’re looking for. Sometimes, you have a specific message or promotion that you want to communicate to your whole email list — or a portion of your list. In those instances, you can send bulk personalized emails.
With this type of personalization, you can send regular emails to your list (e.g., a weekly promotion email or a monthly newsletter), but only to those who will be most receptive to the message. For example, your personalization platform can determine who your frequent purchasers or regular shoppers are, and send the majority of your bulk emails to them. Meanwhile, it can reduce the email frequency for those recipients who don’t always engage with your emails, and further reduce the frequency for those who have never opened an email.
Of course, each bulk email should contain content that is personalized at open time, as described earlier.
So for instance, if you want to send out a newsletter-type email to highlight relevant, recent blog posts to each person on your list, you can do so with bulk email personalization. The email would feature different blog posts for each recipient, depending on the interests they have each demonstrated in their past interactions with you.
Whether or not a person receives this particular blast will depend on how he has engaged with your emails in the past. A person who has never opened this newsletter may not receive it, while someone who always opens them certainly will.
Final Thoughts
Email marketing continues to be a successful tactic for marketers, so it’s no surprise that email volumes continue to rise. But as with most things in life, it’s important to focus on quality, not quantity. Leveraging email personalization, you can deliver more relevant content in your emails to each individual recipient.
I’ve written a lot about reader profiles for your own work, I even have a free worksheet you can download, but it’s been a while since I’ve addressed reader demographics as they pertain to media, blogs, and other reader-centric platforms where your potential buyers are hanging out.
Book discovery depends on not just getting your book out there, but getting it in front of the right people.
So reader demographics for magazines, newsletters and book review blogs are critical details to have on hand and should be referenced on a regular basis when mapping out your ongoing book marketing efforts.
Why Reader Demographics Are Important
I’m sure I haven’t informed you of anything groundbreaking yet, so let’s move on to the real point of this post – reader demographics change, and our assumptions can definitely work against us.
There are a lot of us who feel relatively media savvy, we read magazines, watch the news, click through to relevant blog posts we see shared on social.
So it makes sense for us to have assumptions about reader demographics and who reads what.
But we can be so wrong!
I was even caught off guard recently, and to be honest it changed how I promote my books and how I promote my clients’ books.
So if this can happen to me, I would guess you’re not immune to it either.
Important Insights from Bookbub’s Reader Demographics
The biggest example I have of this in recent memory is for Bookbub.
Because Bookbub is a discount eBook promotion newsletter and platform, I just made some general assumptions about who the subscribers were. Granted I didn’t have these written down in stone, but my general perception was that, sure, mostly women, predominantly in their 30s, so skewing younger, on their devices all the time, big time readers of mass market genre fiction.
But I learned so much by doing some updated reader demographics research lately!
And to be honest, that’s what it takes. It takes consistent research to stay on top of your book marketing to truly understand how to spend your time and investment in book discovery.
Check it out, I give Bookbub a lot of credit for representing fiction readers in today’s market because they’ve amassed such a fantastic following. Sure, they don’t represent all readers, but it’s still great insight.
The Numbers Can Change Our Approach
Here are some exciting reader demographics from Bookbub that may have you changing some of your book discovery strategies!
Over 60% read a book per week.
Over 75% are women. But that’s down from 85% women in 2014, so their male reader demographics are growing a lot.
38% read mysteries and thrillers, only 9% read non-fiction.
36% are retired. This shocked me! I had no clue there were so many tech savvy, book loving retirees on board with this platform and I love it.
Over 70% are empty-nesters, so people who have children, but they don’t live at home. Another shocker for me!
Over 75% are married or living with a partner.
Over 75% are 45+.
Over 75% purchase full price and discount books, so book discovery is not ruled predominantly by discounts, which is fantastic news for most authors still struggling to make enough money to warrant continuing this often crazy way of life!
Over 30% read both eBook and print books regularly.
Over 60% bought additional books by an author they discovered on Bookbub.
These reader demographics are really eye opening in general, but especially for what I thought Bookbub was all about, and it’s likely a decent glimpse at other online book discovery platforms.
As a book marketer, staying on top of these reader demographics means I’m opening doors to other authors and books that may not have realized these opportunities were out there, not just on Bookbub, but for online book discovery as a whole.
Even Women’s Magazines Change
Another recent example of surprising reader demographics research involved women’s magazines geared toward women with families. I wasn’t quite as surprised as my client, but it was an eye opening call, and she learned a lot about her own book discovery and expanding her potential buyer market.
There are assumptions about a lot of women’s magazines skewing younger, so women in their 30s and 40s, either without kids yet or with younger children still in grade school.
It’s kind of ironic because the women I know personally in the broad group have very little free time at all, let alone to read magazines, but I digress…
FIRST for Women’s media age is 54. Family Circle’s biggest group is 25-54. Parents biggest group is 25 to 54.
Basically these all skew a bit older than most would assume, which again, I love. It confirms the diversity we know exists for mothers in today’s society.
It’s About Who’s Buying and Who’s Reading
Some of you may wonder why I’m focusing so much on reader demographics for women, and the reality is, women are the buyers in general, and that includes books, even titles that skew more masculine are often bought by women, even if men are the primary target readers.
That’s a discussion I have with a lot of my clients that write in genres traditionally read by more men, they’re often caught off guard when I include media that’s generally followed by women – and it’s because women are the buyers.
Book discovery requires both research and creativity.
You really need to understand not just who reads your books, but the avenues you have to reach readers, and how those resources are connected to your potential readers.
Reader demographics help you fill in those holes, they’re the clues and insight you need for getting your foot in the door with media and bloggers, and how to use reader-centric platforms like Bookbub and Goodreads to your benefit, to really connect with the people most likely to buy your books.
What You Can Do Right Now
So my homework for you is this, add reader demographics research into your next round of book discovery planning.
This isn’t something you have to do every month, that’s silly, but a couple times a year be sure you’re staying on top of who’s reading and using the media you’re pitching, the bloggers you’re pitching, the reader-centric platforms you participate on.
This definitely includes social media! The reader demographics (user demographics) on social media are constantly evolving and changing, Instagram is a great example because it’s seeing a surge in users due to all the issues Facebook has been having lately, and new users mean updated demographics.
Don’t get stuck wasting your time using angles, pitching media, or posting on sites that don’t get you results. Do research on your reader demographics so you can feel confident in the choices you’re making to expand on your book discovery.
What are some surprising reader demographics you’ve learned about recently? Please share in the comments.
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Maybe you’ve already adopted a sales engagement platform. Perhaps you’ve heard about it in a presentation from a software vendor. The odds are that if you lead a sales team, you’re somewhat familiar with the concept of a sales engagement platform. But how would you comprehensively define the function? What is a successful sales engagement platform? How do you use it effectively?
Sales engagement “consists of the various interactions that sellers have with prospects and customers. Sales engagement technology enables sales departments to efficiently deliver high-quality interactions with prospects and customers at scale.” (TOPO)
A sales engagement platform enables the consistent and systematic execution of an organization’s living sales playbook. It increases productivity and scalability within a sales organization.
The desire to build and execute on a sales playbook is not new. However, thanks to today’s software and computer-savvy salespeople, it’s now possible to codify an entire sales organization’s processes and rulesets and deploy them across your go-to-market team efficiently and effectively.
Formalizing a sales engagement process requires a systematic approach to converting your target accounts into customer accounts. If you aim to transform your team into a high-performing sales organization, aligning the sales process with the customer journey is imperative.
Just seven years ago, less than 20% of organizations invested in sales enablement. According to CSO Insights, in 2017 more than 50% have a dedicated sales enablement person, program, or function. However, organizations reporting achievement of their sales enablement goals has only increased slightly, from 31% to 34%.
For clarity, here’s what sales engagement does not involve:
It isn’t spamming emails.
It isn’t cold-calling lists (it’s not executing lists at all, in fact).
It’s not selfish, sloppy, dishonest, insincere or robotic.
It’s definitely not turning your sales team into the wild west, where everyone goes their own way, hoping that the brightest and best rising to the top.
Above all, sales engagement is customer-centric. CSO Insights found that when sales enablement efforts are aligned with how customers make decisions, quota attainment rates are “up to 14% greater than the average.”
Sales engagement delivers a higher quantity and quality of selling time. The good news is that it’s not difficult to build an organization around it.
The structure of a successful sales engagement function encompasses seven pillars:
Pillar 1: Primary and Secondary Data
Target contacts, accounts, opportunities, funding, competitors, news, growth rates, etc.
The most overlooked element of the sales and business development process is data. You want accurate data, drawn from multiple sources, validated routinely to keep it fresh. This data must be relevant to your workflow; it needs to provide insights that are valuable to the organization. Used properly, data empowers sales reps to improve communication with customers and have more relevant and meaningful interactions.
The data component of sales engagement is valuable when it converts and humanizes data into qualified opportunities and new accounts.
Pillar 2: Orchestrated Workflow & Playbooks
Coordinated actions and plans of high-performing sales organizations.
A high-performing sales organization is one that has an orchestrated sales process. Meaning, your SDRs, AEs, AMs, marketers, and executives all know the status of an account. Primary reps know which communication steps to take and when, and each buyer persona receives the right level of messaging.
An orchestrated workflow is a combined series of plays. For example, a play might be a “triple-touch” of phone, email, and LinkedIn. The workflow injects this sequence alongside the other channels in your playbook. For most systems, this process is prescribed. In the future, the orchestration engine of sales engagement will use machine learning and artificial intelligence to recommend the most effective course of action.
The workflow component of sales engagement links communication channels to form one cohesive rhythm or cadence.
Pillar 3: Your Communication Channels
Email, phone, direct mail, SMS, social, in-app messages, video, and more.
You’ve built a playbook. Next, the sales team must understand how to execute the plays, the cadence of communication through specific channels. Organizations should measure prospecting efforts by the success of the overall campaign, not merely by individual channels. For example, if you only look at phone connect and call back rates, you might conclude that “cold calling is dead.” The reality is that calls often drive email replies and vice versa.
It seems like every day on LinkedIn there is a comment-filled post discussing how some prospecting methodology is “dead” – cold-calling, social-selling. It’s either dead, dying, or suddenly en vogue once more. The only thing that is “dead” is single channel prospecting. Consider the triple-touch play of phone, email, and social media. TOPO reports that 81% of the surveyed fastest growing SaaS companies are using all three (if not more) in their sales communications.
The communication channels you use for sales engagement form one cohesive rhythm or cadence.
Pillar 4: Messaging and Content
Emails, voicemails, case studies, landing pages, templates, snippets… anything going to a customer.
We have our target account data, we’ve codified our plan of account correspondence, and we know our channels. The next step is architecting the message. Messaging includes email subject lines and bodies, but it’s also voicemails, call opening tactics, objection handling, discovery navigation, custom landing page copy… anything to support sales engagement. Innovations like text snippets and slash commands are making templates easier to access and inject into customer communications than ever before.
Your message should be unique and consistent across the organization. Copying another company’s cadence or asking reps to write their own copy risks causing your customers confusion and/or detracts from valuable selling time.
There are three primary elements of exceptionally written cadences:
The message is customer-centric, meaning it demonstrates an understanding of the customer’s needs and wants, and that you are there to add value.
The copy is prescriptive, introducing a way you can satisfy the customers need or want based on what you know today.
The communication is coordinated, meaning the message from your AE is in line with what your SDRs, executives, and marketing folks are saying.
A sales engagement platform allows messages to be easily accessed and edited centrally across the whole organization, eliminating sourcing and quality concerns.
Pillar 5: APIs & Integrations
Apps, integrations, overlays, and other additions to the sales stack.
I’m sure you’re aware of the mind-numbing amount of sales and marketing tools that exist in the marketplace. Once you wade through the choices, you will likely find that many can offer value to your revenue mission.
Streamlining your sales stack and integrating specific tools can be life-changing (only a slight exaggeration) for your sales organization. Whether it’s connecting your apps (CRM, email, phone system, calendar, etc.), migrating data (importing, exporting, or enrichment), or enlisting webhooks for other app endpoints, connecting the whole stack will save everyone time (and a few headaches).
Sales engagement bring all of these tools together into one cohesive platform, integrating everything your sales stack.
Pillar 6: Reports & Analytics
Metrics, data, stats, snapshots, winners and losers, undeniable facts.
The next piece of this puzzle is turning data into actionable insights. It’s hyper-critical to know what works and what can be improved in your sales process. This can have the most direct impact on revenue.
However, all of the data in the world won’t benefit an organization unless it can be understood and applied. Sales organizations must determine the metrics that impact the business. Limits reports to a few analytics. Analysis paralysis handicaps everyone! Use a sales engagement platform to provide sales leaders with the actionable insights they need to optimize performance, improve effectiveness, and scale success.
A successful sales engagement process is scientific, analytical, and data-centric.
Pillar 7: Artificial Intelligence
Behavioral, sales, and profile data to deliver a better sales experience.
According to Forrester Research, marketing and sales organizations are leading the charge when it comes to adopting artificial intelligence (AI) systems. According to recent TOPO research, salespeople spend 47% of their time on non-selling activities. Using AI, reps have access to insights that can provide more targeted communications, leading to a better buying experience. Moreover, today’s buyers expect more personalized communication.
Tools like Meeting Intelligence enable sales teams to improve their engagement with buyers during and after sales meetings. The best salespeople are using smart data to learn from their customers, to understand their business and their challenges, and to improve overall sales engagement.
With AI comes a new sales engagement channel that allows sales professionals to be more human in their interactions with prospects.
Where do I start with a sales engagement platform?
Investing in a sales engagement platform designed to meet the needs of your sales team is a critical step toward a better sales experience. Such a solution can help your sales team continuously improve and more effectively engage with buyers. By implementing a sales engagement platform like SalesLoft, sales leaders can transform their sales teams into high-performing sales organizations.
Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on the Intercom blog here.
One of the lures when I joined Intercom in 2014 was that it sold itself as a product-first company. We continue to repeat that mantra to ourselves today, and we say it to anyone who’ll listen.
We thump our chests when we say that. It’s a badge of honor – a badge of legitimacy – a badge of a new, better way of building a company. But, there’s a hidden arrogance inside that product-first mindset, and traps that await those who adopt it.
What are these traps, and how can you avoid them? This was the basis for my talk on the 2017 Inside Intercom world tour. Below you can watch me deliver that talk in London’s Roundhouse, or read on for a written account.
If you prefer audio, we’ve also released my talk as a special episode on our podcast. You can subscribe on iTunes, stream on Spotify or grab the RSS feed in your player of choice.
The term “product-first” is implicitly set up in contrast to what came before, which were mostly sales-driven companies. Their approach: “First we sell it, then the product team has to quickly build it.” At a glimpse, this actually makes sense – if customers are willing to shell out cash, surely that’s a great way to ensure you build only valuable stuff. However, we all know how that story ends. Big clients end up dictating the roadmap, there’s no product vision, and your product quickly turns into incoherent bloatware.
This led to an era of marketing-driven companies. They were slick, polished, and most of all, promised the moon. These companies are comfortable selling an idea that has, at best, a tangential connection to what’s actually been built. Often they try to pitch a product that hasn’t been built yet. This still happens all the time.
In the world of subscription-based business models, your product better deliver
Dan Kaplan framed marketing’s tarnished legacy this way: “Many of history’s most brilliant marketing strategies were crafted to persuade consumers to believe things that were lies, buy things they didn’t need, and do things that were actually bad for them.” Case in point: the cigarette industry.
There’s also VC blogger Fred Wilson’s pithy statement: “Marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks.” No wonder marketing has a bad name in the tech industry.
Product-first contrasts this. It’s about building a product so great that it sells itself. All you need to worry about is building something customers love. And in the world of subscription-based business models, where switching software is a whole lot easier and cheaper, your product better deliver.
In this scenario, the R&D team are viewed as the heart of the company. The success of everyone else is predicated on the success of this team.
The idea of a product-first company isn’t exactly new. As Procter & Gamble CEO Bob McDonald once said, “We know from our history that while promotions may win quarters, innovation wins decades.” Similarly, James Dyson, of vacuum cleaner fame, would tell employees, “Focus on the product. Everything else will follow.”
The four traps facing product teams
New idea or not, we at Intercom are still big believers in the product-first philosophy, so this post isn’t written to tell you that product-first is a mistake. It is, however, a philosophy that comes with hidden traps. Here’s how our product team at Intercom has pulled ourselves out of them – hopefully with only a few minor flesh wounds to show for it.
Implicit in a product-first mindset is the belief that the best product always wins. On many product teams, this is what drives us. This optimistic view of the product world is relatively new, and I think it’s directly attributable to the ascent of Apple. Fifteen years ago Apple had laptops and a desktop OS that was miles ahead of its competition, Windows. It also had measly market share, and few of us early Apple fans thought we’d ever see the day when Apple products would be the incumbent. Back then, the better product was almost always the underdog product. Fast forward through the iPod and then the iPhone, and seemingly overnight your CEO and non-techy friends and family suddenly had good product taste.
Google’s search engine is a similar story. At first it was just in-the-know techies who used it; now virtually everyone does. But these examples are exception, not the rule.
In technology, fast followers are really fast. Just ask Snapchat.
Let’s look at another absolutely dominant product: Salesforce. I genuinely haven’t talked to a single person who really likes using their product or speaks enthusiastically about it, yet it’s viewed as absolutely essential to sales teams. Salesforce is like the modern day equivalent of Microsoft Office in the ’90s: Everyone uses it. Few people like it.
If you want to continue living in an optimistic world where the best product always wins, remember this: even if you do genuinely have a superior product, and your customers know it, your competition will quickly follow. In technology, fast followers are really fast. Just ask Snapchat. In their IPO filing they explained that their competitive advantage was a “consistent velocity of product innovation.” They planned to innovate so fast and so successfully that no one would catch them. Sounds easy enough, right? That is high risk. Facebook may be huge, but they are damn nimble when they’re copying you.
Believing the best product always wins leads us directly to the second trap: being willfully naive about marketing. We fell headfirst into this trap at Intercom. Matt Hodges, originally our Director of Product Marketing, was the first Intercom hire with the actual word “marketing” in his title. In his LinkedIn message trying to recruit Matt, our CEO, Eoghan, gushed, “The product almost completely sells itself. We’ve spent nothing on sales and marketing.” Product-first was held up as a badge of honor. But Eoghan also said, “The next step in growth for the company will come from explaining to the world what we’re building and why.” This approach makes sense – establish product-market fit first, then start to push the pedal on sales and marketing.
Delivery dates do matter
The problem was that this willful ignorance of marketing had already seeped into us on the product team. Though Matt had a very influential voice, the marketing function itself didn’t. Moreover, our product team was slow to adapt to working with a marketing team. We were guilty of giving late handovers to the marketing team, and I use “handovers” to really mean there was almost no collaboration. Sometimes we were setting a feature live with no heads up at all to marketing. It was an afterthought.
For a while we didn’t give marketing any delivery dates. “We’ll ship it when it’s ready!” we’d say. Then marketing said they basically couldn’t function without real delivery dates, so we gave dates a try.
We consistently, and often wildly, missed those dates. For example, when we launched our help center, we initially promised it in April 2016, then July, then September. It wasn’t released until December. Imagine that, a product team who sucks at delivering on a date they promised! We were that team.
As a result, Matt gave an internal talk to the R&D team in hopes of addressing the product team’s naiveté about marketing. Matt explained that there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of marketing’s role. Marketing isn’t a single team. In fact, it’s an umbrella term for a bunch of teams, each with different set of core skills: demand gen, comms, content, events, product marketing, product education and brand design.
Our naiveté about marketing meant that we didn’t think dates really mattered. We had zero credibility when we promised anything, and this created a one-way tension between product and marketing.
For far too long, the product team wasn’t even aware of this tension; meanwhile, marketing was fighting an uphill battle. Our product team’s willful naiveté had a real cost – we were making it difficult for other folks in the company to do their job.
Marketing has a way with words
Our marketing naiveté, however, went much deeper than deadlines. Back in 2015 we made Intercom real time, which meant messages were sent instantly, and we now could compete against “live chat” products. I wrote a big, long blog post for the launch, very modestly titled “Live chat was great but now it’s history.”
You can’t introduce something new without framing it in today’s terms
Live chat is broken, I said. It’s based on an antiquated phone-call model. You have to wait around for someone to answer. Hang up and it’s gone forever. It’s only synchronous and it’s fleeting.
Our version was modeled on modern messaging, It could be real time, but it could seamlessly move to asynchronous, and back again, just like WhatsApp or iMessage. The live chat model is dead, the messaging model is the future. It was a solid product proposition, or so I thought.
What did we see when we looked at our marketing page on launch day? Live chat was mentioned everywhere. It was in the heading, the navigation, even the URL. It’s like the marketing team was completely contradicting the product team.
Matt gently pointed out that there were more than 100,000 global monthly searches for “live chat software,” and basically nothing for “asynchronous messaging.”
If people are looking for live chat software, that’s what we need to tell them we have. You can’t introduce something new without framing it in today’s terms. So while the product team focuses on the future, and builds bridges to that future, the marketing team needs to get potential customers to the bridge. Sometimes that means using the exact phrase you’re trying to kill.
This discrepancy isn’t a good thing in itself, but at least now we have a proper two-way tension. And that is a good thing, because now we can start asking much better questions of both our product and marketing approach.
Product-first folks have a tendency to become product-purists, and with that comes a belief that anything done for marketing purposes is sullied and tarnished. Product purists view marketing as separate and independent from their precious product creation. They think, “build it, and they will come.” Implicit here is that the product team builds things from a pure motivation, whereas marketing wants things built for the wrong reason. In reality both are working to the same end – building something useful for people, and explaining and convincing them that it is useful, so that they actually use it.
The product-purist mindset ignores that a story needs to guide your product decisions. As Simon Sinek says, “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.” This might sound obvious, but it isn’t. Product people, by default, don’t think this way – particularly not after we’ve sweated and stressed through bringing a feature to life.
If you haven’t already, read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman’s work proves that the human need for narrative is overpowering. It’s how we convince ourselves of what we do and what we buy. It’s not rational. Ignore this truth at your own peril. On the product team, particularly in our early days, we did just that. We had a product-purist mindset.
Most good companies impose real pressure to keep shipping, and in that environment it’s easy to ship just half of a story. That’s a shame. It’s amazing how easy it is to lose sight of the story that should be driving what you’re building.
This became apparent when redesigning our Messenger in 2016. We designed new expanded profiles for teammates in the Messenger, which had a deceptively complex interaction. These profiles really seemed like a ‘nice to have,’ so we scoped them out.
It was ¾ of the way through project before I started thinking about the story. Our mission statement is “make business personal,” so it was a no brainer that part of the story of our new Messenger needs to be that it’s the most personal.
Suddenly, it was blindingly obvious: of course we have to scope in those expanded profiles. They embody the mission. Knowing the story made the decision an easy one. It was just a very late decision.
In 2017, we created an explicit place in our process for the story: the external pitch for the project, which needs to be drafted right after the problem statement. Even more importantly, alongside an effort to get better at scoping smaller, we’ve actually said that you can scope features in if they’re required for the story. We’re simultaneously trying to scope down to bare essentials when it comes to that first beta, while leaving in what’s required for the story.
Forgetting the importance of the story is yet another trap. In our experience, you have to forcefully inject the story into your process; otherwise, it will dwindle down to afterthought.
When we think about this chasm between product and marketing, it’s easy to forget that great product people are often natural marketers, and vice versa.
Although we had no formal marketing team in Intercom’s early days, marketing was actually alive and well. We were punching way above our weight from very early on with our blog, thanks to regular contributions from our co-founder Des Traynor. He knew how important the blog was in helping get initial traction. Meanwhile, our CEO, Eoghan, drove the content and design of the marketing site. Marketing was happening; it just wasn’t acknowledged.
A great example of this is what surely became the most copied part of Intercom. Not something from inside our product, but something straight off the homepage. This illustration…
This “old-way vs the new-way” concept – a messy bunch of applications tangled together on the left – spread like wildfire among SaaS company homepages. It seemed like every week we were seeing new copycat examples of this illustration.
As your company grows, think about optimizing for the right tensions
Why did this illustration resonate so much? Because in just a couple seconds customers could create a mental model of the value of Intercom. This concept of bundling and simplifying simultaneously captured a current frustration and a hope for a better place. It told a story, a story that’s actually hard to tell in words, and it told it visually in a way that sticks in your head. That is skillful marketing. And where did it come from? Eoghan sketched the initial concept. He was really our marketer-in-chief too.
The story that Des and Eoghan helped shape – this narrative around our product – gave us a ton of breathing room. People became customers, because they believed in our long-term vision, and that is immensely valuable in a product’s early days.
Mind the traps
The best founders naturally blend product and marketing, but in a product-first company, once you have different product and marketing teams, that natural blending gets ripped apart. It becomes monochromatic, and you’re left with an unhealthy rift between product and marketing.
As your company grows, think about optimizing for the right tensions. If everyone always agrees, then you’ll likely be blind to your weaknesses, and if everyone always disagrees, it’s really hard to make progress.
Don’t hire marketing people who just try to tell a story around whatever product decided to build. Marketing should be fighting for a better story, which often means more scope. Meanwhile, product should be fighting to get a smaller product to customers faster, to make sure what they’re building actually solves the problem.
Both sides are fighting to build a product that has real value and actually gets used.
Where does this leave us? Product-first isn’t itself misguided. But, if you are adopting it as a philosophy, remember to watch out for the traps sitting in front of you:
The belief that the best product always wins
A willful naiveté to the value of marketing
A product-purist mindset
Forgetting that the story drives human decisions. Good product is compelling product, and to be compelling, you need a story.
Hire people who will expose this tension – people who will lean into the tension and embrace the dissent. The world doesn’t need product purists. The world needs great products that actually get used and can make their little dent in the universe.
Word of mouth is the original marketing. It was, for a LOOOOONG time, all we had.
Even today, 50-91% of all purchases are influenced by word of mouth. Yet, NOBODY has an actual strategy for it. You have a digital strategy, and a content strategy, and a social strategy, and a bunch more strategies. Yet we all just take word of mouth for granted.
I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever made, in any format. I know it will help people. After all, the best way to grow any business is for the customers to do the growing. Turning customers into volunteer marketers is possible—and necessary—and Talk Triggers provides the reliable system for doing just that.
I’ve spent the past 18 months working on this book, although I started writing about Talk Triggers here at Convince & Convert way back in 2011. Since we started on this project, I have had a total of two days off; two days where I didn’t open my laptop over the past 550 days.
Is it worth it? Is it worth it to sequester yourself to do research? To lock yourself away to write? To give up nights and weekends to promote the book? I guess it depends on who you ask. I certainly know that the sacrifices made for a project like this are predominantly made by my wife, my kids, and my team. Not by me.
And that’s not to say I’ve been ENTIRELY neglectful during the creation and promotion of Talk Triggers. But there’s no question that when I go into “book mode”… priorities shift.
I don’t love that. It’s not for everyone, and I’m not proud of it. But rightly or wrongly, I don’t know any other way.
As my Dad told me when I was just a tyke, “if you’re going to do something, you might as well do it all the way.” That’s how I feel about writing books, and especially about this one.
I’m driven by the need to teach, and I very much hope that this book teaches you – and many more people – how to systematically grow your business with word of mouth.
I’m blown away (as is Daniel) by the early reactions to the book. And now, with the official launch happening tomorrow (October 2) I’m excited to see what everyone else thinks.
A quick reminder that the book itself includes the greatest guarantee in the history of business books. If you buy Talk Triggers (please do) and you don’t like it, let us know and we’ll buy you any other book of your choosing. No risk, no reward.
Here’s the complete first chapter of Talk Triggers. I hope it will whet your appetite enough to go to TalkTriggers.com, see the amazing bonus materials we’ve made available to you, and order your own copy – or copies for your team, or book club.
To my family and my team at Convince & Convert, I can only say this, on the precipice of my sixth book launch: “Thank you. And I’m sorry.”
All my best,
~ jay
Talk Triggers: Chapter One
Do you like chicken? Do you really, really, really like chicken? Do you like chicken as much as Jimmy Buffett likes the beach? If so, The Cheesecake Factory is your perfect restaurant.
Each of the chain’s 200 locations offers eighty-five different chicken dishes. Unsurprisingly, given how many chicken dishes alone it includes, the menu itself runs 5,940 words long. That is more than twelve percent of the book you are about to read.
You might think that’s too long, but for The Cheesecake Factory, it’s just right. Why? Because the vastness of the restaurant’s menu is so unusual that it compels conversation among its patrons. Menu breadth is their secret customer acquisition weapon—it hides in plain sight, in the hands of each and every diner.
The menu at The Cheesecake Factory is a talk trigger: a built-in differentiator that creates customer conversations.
Every day, consumers comment on the remarkable menu variety with a combination of bewilderment, awe, and frustration. Twitter alone produced this cross-section of commentaries (and dozens more) about The Cheesecake Factory menu in early November 2017, riding along the digital winds like a smartphone-enabled messenger pigeon, spreading the word about the brand’s core differentiator to thousands and thousands and thousands of potential new customers.
Like extravagant sunglasses at an Elton John concert, the menu is such an iconic part of The Cheesecake Factory experience that some customers refer to it that way.
The menu’s benefit to The Cheesecake Factory’s business is massive. Financial filings for the public company show that The Cheesecake Factory spends just 0.2% of total sales on advertising.
Darden Restaurants, a major competitor, operates Olive Garden, The Capital Grille, Yard House, and several other dining brands. Darden is roughly three times larger, but spends 1,799 percent more on advertising (as a percentage of sales). In real dollars, Darden spends $268 million per year more in advertising than does The Cheesecake Factory.
The Cheesecake Factory doesn’t have to buy awareness because its menu is remarkable enough to compel patrons to tell their friends, which in turn creates new customers. When you commit to a talk trigger like The Cheesecake Factory menu, that difference creates conversation that clones your customers, bringing you new revenue for free.
Researchers David Godes and Dina Mayzlin found that a single word of mouth conversation by a new customer leads to an almost $200 increase in restaurant sales. When that occurs over and over and over again, you end up with The Cheesecake Factory, a multi-billion dollar company that barely pays to promote itself despite operating in a category that typically requires heavy advertising.
Researchers David Godes and Dina Mayzlin found that a single word of mouth conversation by a new customer leads to an almost $200 increase in restaurant sales. #TalkTriggers Click To Tweet
The Right Kind of Talk
You might be wondering, “how often do customers really notice talk triggers?” And more importantly, how much do those differentiators actually get discussed? After all, an operational strength that doesn’t encourage conversation may grow repeat business from the original customer, but it does not create new customers at little to no cost. This pass-along effect, where customers tell your story almost involuntarily, turning themselves into volunteer marketers, is what makes word of mouth so delightfully impactful for companies that possess a talk trigger.
To better understand the impact of The Cheesecake Factory’s talk triggers, we partnered with Audience Audit, a respected provider of consumer panels to identify hundreds of adults who had dined at a Cheesecake Factory location within the prior thirty days.
Respondents were asked, “Have you ever recommended The Cheesecake Factory to someone who was not specifically asking for recommendations, just because you were particularly pleased with your experience?” Among them, sixty-six percent had.
Perhaps even more impressive is our research finding that more than nine in ten customers discuss The Cheesecake Factory when directly asked for restaurant recommendations. Respondents were asked, “Have you ever suggested The Cheesecake Factory to someone who was specifically asking for a restaurant recommendation?” Nearly every patron of The Cheesecake Factory becomes an advocate when the opportunity arises.
It was immediately clear that diners at The Cheesecake Factory talk about the experience. But when these customers converse, do they discuss generalities (e.g. “The Cheesecake Factory has good food”), or do they discuss specifics?
The difference is important. Word of mouth impact is higher when the information exchanged is specific.
A consulting client of ours asked us an interesting question that you might also be wondering. She said, “What’s the difference between a talk trigger and a unique selling proposition (USP)?” A USP is well-worn marketing shorthand defined as “a factor that differentiates a product from its competitors, such as the lowest cost, the highest quality or the first-ever product of its kind.
Here’s how we answered the client: “A USP is a feature, articulated with a bullet point, that is discussed in a conference room. A talk trigger is a benefit, articulated with a story, that is discussed at a cocktail party.” A USP is important, but the problem is that almost every one of them has plenty of SP, and very little U. Sure, “quality food” or “good service” are selling propositions. But they aren’t unique, and that atrophies word of mouth.
In our survey of The Cheesecake Factory customers, we asked this question two ways. First, we asked, “What do you typically mention about The Cheesecake Factory when you recommend it to someone?”
Sixty percent of customers said “food quality” which we classify as general information—it’s a USP. It’s also not a particularly compelling or memorable story, since food quality is not—in and of itself—a differentiator in the category. Many restaurants offer food quality, so it doesn’t have a tremendous amount of story power.
But the second-most mentioned aspect of the brand is the breadth of the menu. Nearly four in ten customers said they’ve talked about this differentiator. It’s a talk trigger!
The effectiveness of the menu breadth is even more pronounced when customers are given a list of attributes about which to talk. Options included menu breadth, their favorite menu item, portion size, the number of cheesecake flavors, friendliness of staff, and other features and benefits.”
When presented with this list, more than half of all surveyed customers said they have mentioned the number of menu items to someone else, the second-most common attribute discussed.
Customers of The Cheesecake Factory notice the size of the menu, and discuss the size of the menu, propelling awareness and encouraging new patrons to visit the restaurant for the first time. They have successfully turned their customers into volunteer marketers. And you can do the same.
You Can’t Afford to Ignore Word of Mouth
Word of mouth is perhaps the most effective—and most cost-effective–way to grow any company. Yet, we often take it for granted, like free coffee refills or another U2 album.
One of the reasons we wrote this book is to solve this mystery: As consumers, we all know how impactful word of mouth recommendations are, and we have first-hand experiences with them consistently. But in our jobs, we give very little thought to making sure our products activate word of mouth recommendations. Why and how is this the case?
Perhaps businesspeople don’t actually believe in the power of word of mouth? That hardly seems possible, given the available evidence.
A very detailed examination of the impact of word of mouth by Engagement Labs in 2017 found that nineteen percent of all consumer purchases in the United States are directly caused by offline or online word of mouth activity. That’s approximately ten trillion dollars of economic impact. And a lot more than nineteen percent of purchases are influenced by word of mouth, even if consumers don’t fully realize or recognize it (the same way that people unwittingly hum Katy Perry songs in the shower).
19% of all consumer purchases in the United States are directly caused by offline or online word of mouth activity. #TalkTriggers Click To Tweet
Word of mouth isn’t only applicable to consumer spending, either. In fact, a study by Blanc & Otus and G2Crowd discovered that the impact of recommendations and referrals in business-to-business (B2B) scenarios is actually far greater, due to the considered nature of most purchases, the high average prices, and the limited number of total customers.
And right now, word of mouth is more effective and important than ever for these three reasons:
First, it is hyper-relevant. The recommender customizes the recommendation to fit the receiver’s perceived needs. No other form of marketing is as personalized, and consumers increasingly desire personalization.
Second, positive word of mouth saves the recipient time by giving them a referral and recommendation, eliminating some or all of the research needed to make a sound decision.
Third, when offered by consumers to one another, word of mouth is independent, as the talker has no financial interest in the sale of the service. This adds credibility and persuasiveness to the recommendation. This trust advantage is the key to why word of mouth is so crucial today. Fundamentally, we trust businesses and organizations less than ever, and we trust people more than ever.
According to the research firm Nielsen, eighty-three percent of Americans trust recommendations from friends and family, and sixty percent trust online reviews—an important form of asynchronous word of mouth. In comparison, just fifty-two percent of citizens trust businesses globally, and in 16 of the 28 countries surveyed, fewer than half of respondents say they trust companies.
83% of Americans trust recommendations from friends and family. #WordofMouth #TalkTriggers Click To Tweet
Regardless of the size, shape, category, and history of your business, the reality is that half of your customers do not believe you. The author and keynote speaker David Horsager says “trust is a company’s most important asset.” He’s right, but the best distribution vehicle for that trust is not the company itself, but rather its customers. We’re in an era where trust matters more than truth, and the truth is your customers simply don’t trust you as much as they trust each other.
Trust is a company’s most important asset. #TalkTriggers Click To Tweet
People have the power now in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. This is why the time for talk triggers has never been better—or more necessary. Businesses’ ability to unilaterally dictate consumer attitudes and subsequent purchases and loyalties is fraying like the hem of a cheap dress.
The best organizations are running ahead of this shift, purposefully crafting differentiators that get customers to tell authentic, visceral, trusted stories about the business and its products or services; stories that create new customers through referrals and recommendations.
In his book The Referral Engine, John Jantsch, founder of Duct Tape Marketing, researched 1,200 small and medium-sized businesses and discovered that sixty-three percent felt that more than half of their overall revenue comes from referrals. Yet, 80 percent of those respondents had no defined system for generating those referrals. As Jantsch told us in an interview, “today, most referrals happen by accident.”
Jantsch figures that one percent or fewer of all businesses have a written plan for creating chatter. One hundred percent of businesses care about word of mouth, but less than one percent have a plan for achieving it. That’s why we wrote Talk Triggers.
There are many terrific books about word of mouth and its value. Commentary from the authors of many of them is included here, and we cite their research and conclusions throughout. But what we set out to do with Talk Triggers is to provide more structure and scaffolding to give you a clear, linear, understandable, and achievable system for harnessing the extraordinary power of word of mouth. We’ve tried to create a book that doesn’t just tell you why talk triggers are so vital, but how to actually make them work, starting the day you finish reading.
Based on our research and the findings of dozens of other authors and academics, mixed with our 45 years of combined experience as marketing consultants to hundreds of organizations, and dozens of Fortune 500 brands, we have developed the Talk Triggers framework for how to create word of mouth in any business.
We unveil this framework here, in four sections.
This first discusses the importance and economic impact of word of mouth, and examines why the overwhelming majority of organizations take a laissez faire approach to it.
The second section demonstrates the four criteria that must be present for an operational differentiator to function as a consistent conversation catalyst.
This is followed by the third section, which unveils the five different types of talk triggers that can be developed and optimized to turn customers into volunteer marketers.
The final section includes a comprehensive, six-step process for identifying, analyzing, testing, measuring, and operationalizing talk triggers in any organization.
We’ve also included a handy quick reference guide at the end of the book that summarizes key research, themes, and lessons. This reference guide was very popular with readers of our best-selling books Youtility, Hug Your Haters, and Manipurated. We hope you like it too, and find it to be a time-saver when you want to refer back to Talk Triggers after your first reading.
For retail shoppers, the customer journey often begins with a local mobile search. In fact, 80% of retail shoppers have searched the terms “near me” on their smartphones. After performing local mobile searches, 61% of shoppers go on to call a business, while 59% visit the location. Their calls are often inquiries about inventory and pricing. The higher the price, the more likely retail customers are to call, since expensive purchases are more considered.
In addition, online retail shoppers often call an agent to learn additional product specs, clear up billing issues, and finalize purchases. For retail marketers, these calls to brick-and-mortar locations and contact centers are one of the richest sources of customer insights available.
In order to boost website and marketing ROI, retail marketers and their agency partners should harness the voice of the customer from inbound calls to locations and contact centers to inform their strategy.
Collect Conversation Analytics from Inbound Calls
To keep a finger on the pulse of customer sentiment, you should attribute calls to their brick-and-mortar locations and contact centers and analyze call recordings and transcriptions for insights to understand your consumers and make smarter optimizations. AI-powered conversation analytics solutions can help automate this process for you. Conversation analytics can tell you:
Who the caller is
The geographic location of the caller
What stage of the customer journey the caller is in
Whether or not the call was answered
If the caller is a valid sales lead
What questions the caller asked
What your sales agent said on the call
Whether or not the caller converted
You can use that data to make some truly powerful marketing optimizations. First, you can optimize ad spend, audience targeting, and messaging for what drives the most calls that convert. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Use Conversation Analytics to Improve Website Content and Layout
The average website conversion rate is just 2.35%. In order to drive more online sales, it’s important to ensure your online experience is as smooth and intuitive as possible. One of the most effective ways to do this is to analyze inbound calls for the most common and important questions consumers ask when making purchasing decisions and add them and the answers to your website. This can be a mixture of top of the funnel content, like blogs, as well as bottom of the funnel content, like product page copy.
For example, Galeton.com — a work clothing and safety gear retailer — tested 78 website elements in an effort to boost conversions. One of the biggest wins occurred on the product detail page. A slew of customers were calling Galeton’s agents to ask which size they should purchase, despite the fact that there was a sizing chart at the bottom of the page. Galeton recognized this trend and moved the sizing chart above the fold. This boosted their conversion rate by 13%.
Updating your website content to answer FAQs doesn’t just increase online conversions — it can also drive more in-store purchases. In fact, three out of four customers are more likely to visit your store if your online content is useful.
Use Conversation Analytics to Address CX Issues
Marketers can also use conversation analytics to detect frustrated customers at risk of churning. It’s important to understand these customers’ concerns, as they’re most likely not alone. Are they experiencing website usability issues? Poor customer service? A frustrating call experience? Billing issues? Shipping problems?
A survey of more than 75,000 consumers found the most important factor for securing a customer’s loyalty is reducing their effort. So, it’s crucial to correct these common inconveniences that are leading your customers to churn. For instance, let’s say your conversation analytics flag several customers who complained they couldn’t find the button to apply a discount code to their order. You could then run A/B tests to find a more intuitive placement, ensuring future customers don’t churn over this issue. For the customers already affected, you could increase their discount or provide them with another special offer.
Use Conversation Analytics to Correct Issues Negatively Affecting Marketing ROI
It’s easy to evaluate marketing campaign metrics when customers convert online, however phone call conversions are often a black hole for marketers. It’s important to use call tracking and analytics to understand how many calls your campaigns are driving, as well as what happens on those calls.
For example, conversation analytics can track how many of the calls driven by your marketing campaigns go to voicemail or are abandoned due to lengthy on-hold times. These metrics will allow you to more effectively train and staff your locations and contact centers so that agents can speak to leads while they’re hot. Additionally, you can analyze voice interactions between consumers and your agents to see what time the best leads come in, if agents are following the right scripts, and which locations and agents are performing the highest (and lowest). You can then make the appropriate adjustments to maximize your ROI.
Customer Success Story: B2B Retailer Mines Calls for Insights to Improve the Online Experience
Central Restaurant Products, the leading wholesale distributor of foodservice equipment, mines their calls for marketing insights. With inbound calls making up 56% of orders and 81% of their total revenue, they have a wealth of conversations to pull from. “We can analyze calls from a specific product’s webpage to see what questions callers are asking, then have our content team update the details on that page to answer them,” said Nathan Smith, Marketing Database Analyst at Central.
By understanding the common questions customers ask about this products, Central is:
Optimizing their content for SEO so that users can discover their product more easily from search engine queries
Increasing conversion rates by answering important consumer questions right on the product page.
By using insights from calls to optimize their ad spend, SEO, and website conversion rates, Central is able to create a seamless end-to-end customer experience that significantly boosts sales. “We’ve increased calls by 23% and new customers by 13% year over year,” said Smith.
Having a strong relationship with your partners is an influential part of positioning your business as a leader amongst your competition. Building these successful partner relationships should rely on a key element, a beneficial Partner Relationship Management (PRM) software.
Before you can begin deciphering which content to repurpose, you should have a solid idea of what content is in your archive. Depending on how long you’ve been creating content, this could be extensive.
I’m blown away (as is Daniel) by the early reactions to the book. And now, with the official launch happening tomorrow (October 2) I’m excited to see what everyone else thinks.
