Despite the best intentions of hiring managers, bad salespeople still slip through the cracks and get hired. It happens every day in every industry. As we say in our seminars, sometimes the best sale you ever see out of a … Continue reading →
The post How Bad Salespeople Get Hired appeared first on SalesDrive.
Here's how to drive target audience members to your website using marketing automation.
Building on the concepts delivered in last week's post Marketing Automation Isn't as Easy as It Sounds, I will continue the discussion of the pre-requisites to success in marketing automation. Last week, we explored the tasks necessary to develop a relevant platform of branded content that will 'set the table' for your online visitors.
Below are the tasks necessary to drive guests to your dinner table to generate online leads and sales.
Never stop developing engaging content
Developing a solid marketing automation system with tons of content is setting the table, but you can't let your dinner get stale. The most successful marketing automation teams use trending topics as leverage to attract target audience members to the brand. Trending topics regularly change, so content must stay fresh and change with the trends.
Developing content such as blog articles, guides, eBooks, videos and other multimedia on a regular basis is essential to staying relevant in your marketplace and attracting target audience members to your website. Helpful resources that address the needs of your target personae is essential to attracting new contacts to your marketing automation system.
Distribute your content outside of owned properties
Developing expert content on your website is great, but you also need third-party references to gain genuine buy-in from your marketplace. Focus on reaching out to relevant industry publications that are trusted by your target audience to get your content mentioned in editorials. Anyone can buy an ad, but only those who create truly great content that deserves a mention can get space in the story (the part people actually spend their time reading!).
Relevant branded content mentioned in trusted third-party publishers will not only get your brand attention and drive users to your website, but it will also allow your brand to shape the conversation around topics in your industry and be a recognized thought leader. This thought leadership and brand mentions has a big impact on organic search, since authoritative citations are the most important factor in organic search results.
The biggest challenge with content marketing is getting people to read the content. Earned media is the most effective content marketing distribution channel that will get your content in front of the users that want it.
Embrace the processes of your chosen marketing automation platform
Your brand must be willing to subscribe completely to the processes and strategy that powers your chosen marketing automation platform. There are many great options out there, and each one has a different take on marketing automation. Choose a platform that most closely aligns with the current or preferred strategy of your organization, rather than cost or shiny features that you may never use.
Develop your strategy for success
Overall, it is important to understand the amount of work and research that goes into developing a successful marketing automation system at your organization. When done correctly, this process will generate a reliable sales/lead flow of people that are genuinely interested in what your company offers and allow your brand to un-couple itself from advertising campaigns or list buying practices that are annoying for everyone involved. After all, the future is to Always Be Helping rather than Always Be Closing.
    
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NEW YORK — When deep learning startup AlchemyAPI exposed its natural language processing system to the Internet, because of the way folks talked about their pets, it determined that dogs are people.
That might ring true to some dog owners, but it’s not accurate in a broader context. That hilarious determination reflects the challenges — and opportunities — inherent to machine learning.
“The whole idea of a ground truth, which used to be a big thing in computing, is really starting to go away,” said AlchemyAPI CEO Elliot Turner in conversation with GigaOM writer Stacey Higginbotham at the Structure Data conference on Thursday. “Vampires are real in a certain context, but not in others.”
IBM’s artificially intelligent computer Watson also grapples with contextual scenarios, said IBM’s Stephen Gold on-stage at Structure Data. We think of computer logic in absolute terms, he said; in our minds, it should figure out that two plus two is four. But to Watson, that could also represent a car configuration — two front seats and two back seats — or a familial unit with two parents and two children.
“There is no absolute outcome,” said Gold, who serves as the vice president of sales and marketing for the Watson Group. ”These systems grow in confidence as information is presented — and they learn.”
Many of these artificial intelligence frameworks date back to the early ’90s, but organizations shelved a lot of neural network techniques because computers were just too slow. But they’re progressing rapidly: Watson is 90 percent smaller and 24 times faster than its initial form factor in 2006.
That leads Gold to believe that we’ll see freemium models for cognitive computing emerge in the near future.
“Although the issue of cost is very real,” he said, “there will be people who step up and say, ‘I will pay for it because of the value it brings.’”
But these technologies still need humans to direct them, said Turner; they will augment human capabilities, not replace them. Just because Watson can now understand X-rays doesn’t mean that doctors will become obsolete.
“I believe in the strength of the human spirit, he said. “While the systems that are coming online are amazing… you can still have a person read a document better than a machine can today. Same thing for vision. We just have to focus on the things that make us special, and move away from the historical view of rote memorization.”
“I think the challenge and the skills is how we educate,” added Gold. “Understanding natural language and machine learning, understanding analytics and big data — we need to modify our educational system to get people who can truly build these new systems.”
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Most companies will reply in the affirmative if asked whether they employ common marketing practices like SEO, social media, PPC and offline methods. However, for some reason and despite living in an increasingly mobile oriented world, most businesses have yet to embrace mobile marketing. This is especially true of SMS, even though 100% of cellphone owners have access to text messaging.
SMS marketing came into prominence in 2009, so it’s not like text advertising is anything new that requires businesses to learn something absolutely alien to them. It’s also worth noting that consumers have to voluntarily opt in to receive your messages, so it’s less likely that your text will be perceived as spam. In fact, 95% of mobile users open and read received messages within three minutes of the mail being sent.
Most businesses never realize the potential of SMS marketing because they never bother to implement it into their campaign or gave it an honest try. The benefits of text messaging can be profound if applied in a strategic manner, some of which benefits include the following:
Regardless of the marketing method, it is always valuable to have some kind of metric tool. With an SMS tracking service, you have a clear report in front of you that outlines all the information you need at your fingertips. This includes a full analysis of each text message sent, such as the percentage of the mail that was read, the average time it took for the mail to be opened, and the number of times any embedded links were been clicked.
When it comes to marketing, you definitely want to jump on the bandwagon of whatever is trending and working well at the moment. In a day and age where roughly 90% of the population owns a cellphone, it is almost unfathomable that more businesses aren’t incorporating SMS into their promotion. Whatever the reason, a businesses’ full earning potential cannot come to fruition unless the most lucrative marketing approaches are explored and exhausted.
SMS, while not exactly a new concept, is still a formidable way of getting your consumers engaged. If you still haven’t explored SMS marketing, then there’s a huge revenue source that you are not tapping into.
Don’t Lose Good Workers
Employee turnover is more costly than you think. Every businessman knows at some level that it’s easier for them if they can manage to keep their current employees than to need to find replacements. However, the cost of staff turnover is surprisingly high, and many small business owners don’t fully realize just how expensive it is to replace an employee.
When you’re negotiating with an employee, you need to keep this cost of employee turnover in mind so that you can accurately assess how much your employees are worth. The value of an employee goes beyond the value to the company to also include this high cost of finding a replacement.
Expenses to Consider
The factors that go into determining the cost of employee turnover are diverse and reach into many areas of your business that you might not immediately think about. Some expenses are obvious, while others are more indirect but real nonetheless. Here are a few examples:
The Total Cost
So how much do all these various factors cost you when you face employee turnover? Some of them are hard to quantify, and calculating opportunity cost is much more difficult than, for instance, determining the cost of job postings and hiring recruiters. There are many estimates people have come up with, formulas that they use to budget the cost of replacing employees in their own businesses. Aetna, for instance, estimates the cost at 93 percent of the annual salary of the position, factoring in all the elements of time, productivity, and other hiring costs. Others, however, estimate the cost of hiring a new employee to be as high as 200 percent of the position’s salary, depending on the field and kind of position.
No matter which figure you find to be most accurate for your business, employee turnover is costly. The best thing you can do as a businessman is to find ways to keep good people, rather than constantly churning through replacement after replacement.
This article originally appeared at GoSmallBiz.com and is reprinted with permission.
By Tim Riesterer
According to IDC, 80 percent of all purchasing budgets will soon be controlled — and decisions justified — by companies’ senior-most decision makers, including the proverbial C-level executives.1 This means more deals at lower dollar amounts will receive higher-level scrutiny. How has this impacted your marketing messages, product positioning and sales training? Have you changed anything to make sure your sales teams are ready to talk the new talk with these executive buyers?
If you believe a Forrester study2 that revealed business buyers felt 88 percent of salespeople who call on them are knowledgeable about their products and services, but only 24 percent understand their business issues, the answer is probably “no.”
Combine that with some SiriusDecisions research that says executive buyers value business and industry insight up to four times more than traditional relationship and product knowledge from their salespeople,3 and you have a real challenge. Essentially, you have customer conversations that are four times less likely to focus on the content that is four times more desirable.
Business Acumen Gap
If you look at Figure 1, this research from Forrester and SiriusDecisions are paired together to reveal something I’m calling the “Business Acumen Gap” or BAG, if you will. Salespeople are literally “bagging” it when it comes to executive conversations. In one example, a prospective client of ours, a multibillion-dollar professional services company, recently examined its CRM system and discovered that less than 10 percent of the opportunities listed in the system had executive-level contacts attached.
One of the big barriers to salespeople being more effective with executives is them being aware of what they need to know to be relevant to this audience. After significant buyer-side research, we’ve identified five related but distinct core competencies that executives say are critical to getting value out of any sales conversation. They are:
• Business knowledge
• Customer insight
• Financial consideration
• Return on investment
• Executive engagement
Over the last few years, we have assessed more than 35,000 sellers at Fortune 1000 companies to determine how competent they actually are in each of these five areas. What we’ve found is, on average, salespeople exhibit only 50 percent of the acumen desired by executive-level buyers.
Business-change messaging
So what does this mean for your messages and tools, and how you train for sales conversations?
Starting immediately, you must connect your story to the business issues that matter most to executives. At the risk of over-simplifying, I’d like to provide you with a basic template for re-configuring your messaging to sell a business change.
Current Situation: In the opening minutes of an executive conversation, decision-makers expect you to clearly identify a business issue at risk and describe the current situation that needs to change.
Business Change: Then, you must pivot quickly to describe how your company’s offering will change the way your prospects operate, enable them to do things differently and how that difference will be measured for business impact.
Best-in-class companies do it two times different
TrainingIndustry.com recently compared the sales training emphasis between high-performing companies and average-performing companies. What it found is that average-performing companies are more likely to focus on traditional training, such as products and services training, significantly more than the high-performing companies.
Meanwhile, the high-performing companies focused on “executive selling skills” training, along with “business and financial acumen” training two times more than the average-performing companies.4
Best-in-class firms make twice the effort and investment in equipping salespeople for calling high and standing toe-to-toe with the CXO, while the average companies continue to push the status quo.
1. IDC, Top 10 Predictions (2013)
2. Forrester Research, Technology Buyer Insight Study: Are Salespeople Prepared for Executive Conversations (2010)
3. SiriusDecisions, Changes in Buyer Behavior. Summit Keynote Presentation, John Neeson (2012)
4. TrainingIndustry, Inc., Developing Exceptional Sales Professionals (2013)
As originally seen in the February 12, 2014 issue of Sales & Marketing Management.
Content marketing is all about exchanging value: you have to give your buyers something good to get information in return.
When you give something away, it fosters positive feelings, and the recipient will be more inclined to return the favor. However, many content marketers ignore this basic principle. We want to grow our email lists, so we ask for contact information without first proving that we deserve it, without fostering trust. With this mentality, we ultimately miss out on fantastic opportunities.
Here are three simple methods for giving first, and leveraging the power of reciprocity to generate new leads.
“Content marketing is all about exchanging value.” @jhaynam
There was a marketer who started out small. In order to get new leads in the door, he would offer a free 15-minute phone call to anyone interested. No obligations. The strategy worked, and his practice grew rapidly. Even as time got tighter, this marketer never stopped offering free consultations, and continued to give away his time doing assessments even as his business generated millions in revenue. Nearly every person he assessed became a customer, and they told their friends about the amazing experience they had.
These potential customers received the most valuable asset anyone can give—time. And the marketer didn’t devalue that time by pushing a purchase. In return for that act, they felt not only obligated to return the favor, but that they had developed a connection with the marketer that other companies had not fostered.
You’ve spent thousands of hours becoming an expert in your field, so offer a bit of your time for free and watch the connections (and new customers) grow.
Skilledup has an amazing guide on using Microsoft Excel that may just be the most exhaustive resource on the subject that exists today. It’s so good that the page receives more than 40,000 visits a month. Even more impressive, this page generates more than 600 new email subscribers for Skilledup every single month by using a quiz to test browsers’ knowledge of Excel.
A quiz uses the same principle of an assessment to get new email leads. By providing personalized, expert information for free, Skilledup is giving their time to help out the visitor, without asking for anything up front. Then, in return for information about how to improve at excel, they simply ask for an email address.
“Give away your expertise first, and ask for an email address second.” @jhaynam.
You can do the same thing in any niche. Think about the questions you would ask in a phone assessment and turn them into a quiz. Give away your expertise first, and ask for an email address second.
Buffer is famed for the method they used to get 100,000 users on board in less than a year. Co-Founder Leo Widrich wrote more than 60 articles on using social media effectively and distributed them to publications whose visitors could benefit from the information. By giving away his knowledge for free, without asking for anything first, Leo was able to drive an amazing number of people to explore his service and sign up.
Add value first, ask for a sign-up second. By providing strong writing pieces around the web, Buffer was able to grow their brand exposure and drive signups. They didn’t ask for signups directly, but rather provided thought leadership on relevant, compelling topics.
Reciprocity is powerful. We love it when someone else takes the first step and provides value before asking for anything in return. Whether you use your own knowledge to provide assessments, either in-person or through a quiz, or provide value by partnering up with other websites and giving away your writing, always be the first to provide value, and then ask for a lead in return.
After lunch at our favor Chinese restaurant yesterday, my fortune cookie reminded that continued success would be ours if we remembered that – “practice makes perfect.” We chuckled – since “practice makes perfect” is really only a partial truth.
Practice alone doesn’t make perfect. Feedback is missing. If feedback is lacking or poor in quality, performance is unlikely to improve. The more complete proposition is “Practice + Feedback Makes Perfect.”
Applying this proposition to sales training, let’s use role-plays as an example, recognizing that the points apply to other types of exercises, too.
Practice. There’s a difference between simply doing a series of activities and practice. If practice is going to work it needs to be well designed and structured. For example, a well-designed role-play must meet the following design criteria:
Feedback. When it comes to getting feedback right for role-plays a few fundamentals deserve note. First, ample time must be set-aside for the feedback session. Second, it should be done in small groups of 4-6 with everyone participating. But let’s examine an all to frequent and significant problem that tends to degrade the effectiveness of feedback in role-plays.
Sure this is feedback – but will it lead to performance improvement? The first problem is salespeople often cannot realistically play the customer. They often lack the knowledge and demeanor needed to play a senior person in an organization. Second, frequently no one at the table has mastered the best practices for handling the opportunities and challenges in the role-play. The result? Due to lack of expertise, or in some cases willingness, the feedback is often useless from a performance change perspective. Add in a third factor – those sitting at the table start thinking that their chance to “do” the role-play and hear feedback is coming up shortly, so saying positive things works. Combine these reasons and that’s why you hear, “Good job, Lee” so often!
First, can you justify taking a group of front-line sales managers out of the field to spend time in the classroom playing the customer roles and providing feedback to a group of sales reps during training? Absolutely – and under most circumstances it’s a bargain. In complex sales that generate substantial revenue, like high tech, medtech, or global supply chain, it’s easy to make the business case for front-line sales manager participation.
Front-line sales managers can incorporate the complexity of the sale, as well as, the nuances customers present during the buying cycle. It’s certainly not justifiable to have sales managers participate in just any type of sales training program. However, imagine a sales simulation where the entire program is devoted to participants crafting sales strategy, planning sales calls, conducting sales calls, and getting feedback on customized scenarios representing strategic challenges faced by the sales force. After all, if every sales rep was able to sell even one or two solutions they might not have closed, then the increased sales easily can justify the sales managers’ commitment.
Are there benefits to front-line sales managers? In most cases, the front-line managers will do more coaching during the two days than in six months in the field. Plus, the program can be structured so the front-line sales managers get feedback on their coaching. Sales gains occur because when front-line sales managers engage in the training, because best practices and institutional knowledge are shared – providing sales reps with feedback that can immediately be applied in the field.
Leading-edge companies have made this commitment to improve the results of their investment. The model has been tested – it works to change behavior – it’s worth trying. As the program progresses, you can actually see the performance change happen!
Summary. To bring the point about practice + feedback home, last year we were doing a simulation for a company in the oil and gas industry. The VP of Sales had assigned his top managers to attend the program to play the buyers and he sat in at various tables to help in the feedback. The VP was able to create a safe environment and the level of feedback he and the managers provided increased the performance change by an order of magnitude.
If you found this post helpful, you might want to join the conversation and subscribe to the Sales Training Connection.
One of the most challenging steps in the sales and marketing process is the final conversion into a desirable outcome for the buyer and the seller.
One reason for this is the terminology. The word conversion has a connotation bordering on manipulation. At the very least it suggests the transition is mechanical, like flipping a switch.
Trust is earned gradually, over time, and on its own time. It takes a skilled and experienced human being to know when a sufficient level of trust has been achieved. Of course, this is much easier in face-to-face selling situations than with online marketing.
Nevertheless, these principles apply in both situations, which means successful web marketing is simply a matter of adapting your traditional practices to a digital format. Here are three steps for converting trust into profitable outcomes.
In the earlier days of selling we often had to rely on the spoken word to communicate. You could also illustrative brochures to demonstrate what a product looks and feels like. Actual samples were effective too.
Part of the genius of the Apple retail stores is they provide an opportunity for test driving the machines. A business has to manage expectations, and this includes whether or not the product or service will get the job done, and how well.
In addition to these traditional methods, online content works nicely to earn the trust and confidence of buyers . Content is usually thought of as text, yet, it also includes image, visual tutorials, videos, and audio that educate buyers about how your product or service performs.
Consider creating using a combination of these methods to convert trust into desired outcomes.
Video – Demos of how things work. Live performances. Interactions with real customers. Testimonials. Unusual or interesting applications.
Images – Products or services in use. Step-by-step, how-to tutorials. Happy customers. Comparisons, such as before and after. Diagrams and charts.
Audio and Written Copy – Engaging stories. Lists. Ask and answer questions. Persuasive or personalized content.
How and when trust is earned varies from one person to the next. Therefore, it is best to take your time, because moving too quickly to covert interest into a sale or agreement of any kind will likely stop or even end the process.
When a business moves too quickly the buyer has a sense that something has been skipped, or will be. This is why it is essential to have a written sales process that communicates to the buyer in advance where you are taking them, and how you will get there.
Think of your content in as earning the attention of the buyer. What should then follow is a process of interaction that is ideally collaborative. Buyers readily engage when they understand you have a defined plan for taking care of them. This is why it is smart to sell the process that sells your products.
So, to be clear. Show your buyers why and how your product or service is the solution to their problem. Engage them with a collaborative process that delivers on that promise. Then be alert to their readiness for moving forward with your company.
I often say that conversion is a by-product of a well-designed sales process. However, there is one thing that will significantly improve your rate of conversion, and that is letting your buyer know in advance that you will be doing so.
The process we created for my landscape business required four meetings to achieve a final landscape design and a signed agreement or contract for building it. Each meeting had a name that informed prospective buyers of the purpose of that meeting in advance.
The fourth meeting was named the commitment meeting. That is what we expected after a series of meetings that often spanned a month of more. Thus, there were no surprises or uncomfortable situations. If a buyer decided not to engage with our process they simply backed out after the first meeting.
My friend Chris Brogan has a creative way of adapting this to his digital marketing. He announces at the beginning of his content that he will be making an offer with the term “selly sell.” Knowing that in advance, one can easily skip over that content, and most important, trust with the community is preserved.
FA Insights is a daily newsletter from Business Insider that delivers the top news and commentary for financial advisors.
We're Far From Euphoria (MarketMinder)
Stocks had a record year in 2013, with the S&P 500 returning 30%. Now many wonder if the market looks frothy and if we're overdue for a correction. "It’s been a long time since investors witnessed euphoric equity markets firsthand," write the staff of Fisher Investments. The 2000-2007 bull market didn't reach the euphoric stage either. What's more, concerns over Crimea and profit margins means there are few "similarities to the prevailing sentiment in 2000," when the tech bubble burst.
"Two words you didn’t hear much in 2000? Bubble and euphoria. They are easy to find today—evidence of lingering skepticism, not euphoria. (Bubble fears, in this way, are somewhat self-deflating!) We’re only starting to see sentiment tiptoe toward optimism—investors could warm to stocks significantly before reaching euphoria. And as they do, stocks should rise with sentiment until you reach an eventual bubble likely few will be discussing."
What Advisors Need To Do In A Scarce Yield Environment (The Wall Street Journal)
It's getting harder to find yield, and for advisors it "might mean adopting an investment approach that's more opportunistic and active than you're accustomed to," writes Mike Sorrentino of Global Financial Private Capital in a new WSJ column. Advisors can do this by looking for income-generating stocks. "At our firm, the kind of event we're keeping an eye out for is a market correction that affects stocks that look like bonds--telecom stocks for example, that have high dividend yields and relatively low volatility," he writes. But advisors also need to be mindful of the emotional toll this can take on their clients.
Bonds Are Not In A Bubble (Business Insider)
Some argue that low rates mean bonds are in a bubble, but Steve Feiss, an interest rate strategist at Government Perspectives, told Business Insider's Matthew Boesler that this is one of the most misunderstood thing in markets today. "I'm biased as a bond guy but offended almost daily at the flagrant misunderstanding that is "sold" to/through mainstream media regarding the association of low rates with an asset class that is in a bubble."
"U.S. Treasury rates are as much a "future" discounting mechanism as are the equity markets. What were stock prices thinking back in 1999? Exactly WHAT multiple were they OK with, again? How’d that work out? While I get that low rates hurt savers and retirees, simply selling low rates as a bubble like tech stocks were in 1999 seems to leave out the discussion/distinction between components OF the fixed income markets as well as the fact that as a country, we generally speaking like buying cheap stuff at Target and Wal-Mart. And as long as that continues, China will continue to have an abundance of U.S. dollars, and so will continue to be natural buyers OF our U.S. Treasuries. Low rates are likely here to stay for quite a while. Still. Like it or not…"
UBS Is Considering Expanding Into The Independent Advisor Space (Investment News)
UBS is considering expanding into the independent advisory channel as competition from registered investment advisors (RIAs) grows, reports Mason Braswell at Investment News. UBS has considered having an independent arm but John Mathews, head of UBS's Private Wealth Management group thinks this could be distracting for employees. "Culturally, we're at a pretty good place right now, and if we introduce a new channel, it could be viewed as, 'Why are those people getting paid more,' or something like that,” Mathews told Braswell. "But we're pragmatic, too, so if the market turned that direction years from now, we'd have to consider it."
The Impact Of The 'Millionaire's Tax' On New Jersey's Wealthy Is Unclear (CNBC)
A report from New Jersey wealth-management firm Regent Atlantic Capital, that says the wealthy are leaving the garden state for lower-tax states like Florida and Pennsylvania, is getting a lot of attention. The report says this follows the implementation of New Jersey's "millionaire's tax" in 2004 which raised taxes on those making $500,000 or more.
But Robert Frank at CNBC tells us we should take the report with a grain of salt because it relies on "anecdotal evidence" and because the report itself says it has no "proof or hard evidence" that the reason they're leaving is because of high taxes. He also points out that New Jersey is also creating new millionaires. "The report points out that the high costs and restrictions to doing business in the state have been costly. But it remains unclear whether the millionaire's tax is the sole reason some of New Jersey's rich are moving to Florida," Frank writes.
Whether you sell products, services, information — even hope — you can use email autoresponders to connect better with your audience.
An autoresponder is an email that gets sent automatically based on specific criteria. Autoresponders are often used in a series — also called a drip campaign — to engage people over time.
How are autoresponders different from email newsletters? When someone subscribes to your newsletter, they only receive future editions. If you have autoresponders set up, you can control exactly when people receive which content — regardless of when they sign up.
Here are 22 great autoresponder strategies to help grow your business!
Consider setting up a single autoresponder email to welcome new subscribers. It’s an awesome opportunity to link to relevant information, tell subscribers more about your business, or just show them you appreciate their interest.
Whenever customers purchase something — whether it’s a product or an hour of your time — shoot them an email a day (or a week) later with an autoresponder. Use some basic personalization and ask them how they liked their purchase (you’ll gain some great insights!).
Use those insights to make small improvements, and don’t forget to say thanks for the feedback.
Add customers to lists based on their purchases or — using a tool like “Link To List” — based on links they click. Based on customers’ actions, send follow-up autoresponders with related products.
This may sound complex, but if you keep things simple, it can be set up in minutes!
Autoresponders are the perfect way to deliver e-courses. Send a daily or weekly course module without even having to think about it! Set it, forget it, and when someone subscribes to your course, they’ll receive the modules automatically. Winner!
Whenever people sign up for our service, we kick off a three-day tutorial where they can learn a little more about our tools each day.
Setting up a “new customer tutorial” is a great way to avoid overloading newbies with a ton of information at once.
This is a fun one. A year’s worth of lovely thoughts — sent daily (or weekly, or whenever) — is a fantastic way to inspire people and remain top-of-mind.
After an appointment, add your client to your “post-appointment” list and send them a follow-up autoresponder. It could be a thank-you note or a reminder to schedule their next appointment. Whatever works for your business!
With some basic personalization to take care of specifics, you can simply add the customer to the appropriate list and send off an invoice.
Serializing your ebook via email is a great way to turn readers into subscribers (and subscribers into buyers). Send them a chapter a week with autoresponders!
Need to confirm that someone registered? When people register for our Mad Mimi webinars, we use autoresponders to confirm the details. You can do this for live or web-based events.
Autoresponders are also great for thanking people who RSVP to your event.
Encourage subscriptions to your email list by offering a downloadable reward like a song or a piece of writing. Commonly used by musicians and authors, the offer goes a little something like this: “Sign up for my newsletter and receive a free download!”
Once the subscriber joins your email list, deliver the reward via autoresponder. Easy, right?
Your customers love you, right? But it isn’t always easy to ask for reviews on Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc. A neat way to handle this is to send a sweet thank-you note after they purchase something — and include links to the important review sites. It’s not subtle, but it’s not awkward either!
Customer service can be enhanced with autoresponders, but don’t rely on autoresponders to run the show entirely. After certain interactions, show that you care by sending a follow-up autoresponder.
This works wonderfully for both services and products. Set up a series of autoresponders to remind your customers that their trial period’s clock is ticking away. Educate your customers on the features they might have missed while also creating a sense of urgency.
Allow new subscribers to “self-segment” by creating a web form (also called signup form) that lets them choose which lists they want to be on. Create an autoresponder series (also called a drip campaign) for each list so new subscribers receive highly relevant information.
On a similar note: with the Link To List tool, you can send targeted autoresponders based on which links people click in your newsletters.
Whenever someone books an appointment, send them an autoresponder confirmation right away. Include all the import details like date, time, and place.
It’s also a neat opportunity to add other information about you and what you offer — and anything else people ought to know before an appointment!
If your business or organization works with people who should be taking medications, you can set up reminders to help them adhere to their prescriptions. A simple reminder can feel reassuring and help people stick to the plan. (Just be sure to consider privacy issues around medical information.)
Do your customers need help creating easy meals for their families? Or help sticking to a diet?
You can offer meal-planning subscriptions as a service to your customers! Using autoresponders, you can send out weekly menus and recipes, and you can even create content for specific needs (e.g., a gluten-free subscription and a vegan subscription).
This is similar to the meal-planning service. Fitness professionals: give your clients a daily dose of motivation using autoresponders! Send daily workout plans, along with additional information like tips on improving form and links to demo videos.
This one’s pretty obvious. Set an autoresponder to send a thank-you note just to remind your customers that you appreciate them!
With the increasing complexity in marketing, marketers are less able to prove the ROI and are not able to be 100% accountable, despite the promise that digital channels allow better tracking and provide more transparency.
The issue is not that technology does not allow it, but that there are too many tools available for marketers.
This is indicated in the graphic below, showing 947 different companies providing marketing technology software.
With such a proliferation of tools, marketers find it difficult to be organized, to streamline their operations and to track marketing performance consistently and seamlessly, cross-channel and across markets.
This is aggravated by marketing operations technology vendors claiming that their technology will solve all the problems that marketers are facing.
Based on such promises, marketers adopt workflow and resource management systems and expect that their operations will all of a sudden become more efficient and that they will be able to report accurately on the performance of marketing activities.
Unfortunately, these benefits don’t always materialize.
In reality, marketing operations is not just about implementing workflow and resource management tools. It’s about organizing the end-to-end marketing ecosystem, mainly the good old cliché of people, process and technology.
Rolling out a marketing operations platform without changing anything around it, will not produce the expected results.
To be successful, marketers have to invest time and resources (people and financial) to define a solid and integrated marketing operations strategy, then they have to invest even more time and resources to roll it out across their organization and ensure all parties adopt it.
So what does a marketing operations strategy look like?
Going back to the good old cliché, it’s about identifying who are the people involved in the marketing delivery, what standard toolset they will use and how they will go about delivering marketing programs through these tools.
There are so many touchpoints to reach the consumer, across multiple channels, that the marketing team has expanded to include more people hired directly by the brand, as well as more agency staff assigned to service the account, and account and technical support staff on the technology vendor side.
The issue is that with the rise of so many digital channels, where marketing campaigns are executed by specialist agencies and technology providers, the number of stakeholders in the marketing delivery process has increased exponentially.
So the first step in defining the Marketing Operations strategy is to get a very clear view of who are these team members and to understand the type of work they are doing.
This will provide an understanding of how many internal and external stakeholders are involved in the marketing delivery process, what type of access they need to marketing tools, and who needs to be on-boarded onto the new system to ensure it delivers on the expected benefits.
The common mistake many brands make is that they define processes based on the workflow in the platform being used.
However, marketing technology platforms are designed to fit the needs of many organizations, and, even though a certain level of customization is possible, the platform-driven workflow might not necessarily meet the organization’s requirements.
Depending on the number of internal and external stakeholders, and policies in place (corporate, brand and legal at a minimum), the process might need to be more sophisticated and may require steps to be done outside the tool, or in other systems.
Process definition therefore relies on a clear understanding of the brand’s requirements, the stakeholders and the policies governing how marketing activity is delivered, and should not be mainly driven by the workflow in the tool.
If we look at people and process requirements together, we can start to see what changes are required for a successful implementation of a marketing operations strategy.
By identifying all stakeholders in the marketing delivery chain, and by designing processes that meet the brand’s requirements and policies, marketing leaders can set roles and responsibilities for specific individuals.
This creates an environment of transparency and accountability, where mistakes can no longer be hidden.
Technology is not limited to implementing a marketing operations platform. It actually extends to all the platforms needed to deliver the campaign across channels.
Take for example the launch of a microsite for a new product, in multiple markets. There are several platforms that have to be taken into account, including, at a minimum:
While Marketing Automation tools come with the promise of full integration of the campaign execution, they do not allow tight controls for delivery within a particular area.
In our example here, human intervention and manual steps are still required to create the content and to build the tracking. In parallel to that, implementing a standard Marketing Operations tool across the various markets cannot alone ensure consistency in delivery.
The brand will need to adopt a global standard toolset, such as a content management system and a tracking system, and enable its local markets to access and use these tools, within the boundaries of pre-defined processes and policies.
Let’s simply go back to the People and Process components.
Implementing a standard toolset for content management and tracking requires the same effort of identifying the stakeholders and defining the processes and policies as was done for the marketing operations platform.
And this effort has to be repeated for every channel used to reach the customer, whereby each of these channels may have its own specialized team of internal and external stakeholders.
Building a marketing operations strategy and having to define the people-process-technology ecosystem for each channel may sound daunting.
However, brands that invest the time and effort to create an integrated marketing operations strategy across all channels and markets create an environment of transparency and accountability where campaign performance is measured more accurately and the cost of delivery is substantially reduced.
This is not a one-time effort though. The marketing landscape is evolving rapidly and constantly, new channels keep popping up and along with that, the number of stakeholders, platforms and policies.
As a result, the marketing operations strategy has to evolve along with all these changes, and the focus is always three-fold: people, process and technology. Marketing organizations that rely on such a strongly integrated foundation are able to reap the benefits and achieve marketing excellence.
In today’s Web-driven world, very few salespeople spend the bulk of their time actually in front customers anymore. Instead, they generally engage with buyers through virtual mediums — conference calls, email, social media, blogs, webinars, and myriad other online channels.
Sure, some sales folks still play the occasional round of golf with a prospective client, or meet with them in-person during the latter stages of the sales process. But in most cases, virtual is the new sales reality.
Yet, interestingly, many businesses haven’t proactively adapted their strategy to this evolution.
In fact, one recent study revealed that many sales teams remain ill prepared to sell in Web-driven environments — either because they haven’t been trained to do so, or they lack the tools (see: content and technology) to deliver the right messaging to the right audience through the right online channel.
That’s a problem, of course, because unpreparedness or tactical confusion often translates to poor execution. In other words, rather than delivering the right messaging to the right audience through the right online channel, untrained salespeople often resort to the offline sales tactics they know best. And as we all know by now, those tactics rarely yield positive results in the virtual world.
The post 3 Tips to Keep Your Sales Team on Message appeared first on KnowledgeTree.
Outside of marketing and customer service, one of the fastest growing areas in the social media world is social selling. With billions of people connected to social networks for personal and business reasons, time and attention of prospects is both valuable and highly competitive.
Connections between people supported by social technologies have become more valuable than ever as trusted sources of information. Interactions with brands don’t have to happen on the corporate website anymore. From customer service to sales – social networks are powering important buyer and brand discussions from awareness to purchase to advocacy.
Companies of all sizes are empowering their sales teams to leverage the technology of the social web with the human connections between sales people and their customers to scale reach, engagement and new business. Demand for social selling experts is rising too, as companies look for outside perspective on how to create the culture shift, processes and skills training necessary to make social selling real and valuable.
Along with considering an outside expert to help scale your social selling capabilities, here are a few tactical considerations:
Whether it’s a blog, tumblr site, or Facebook Fan page, a destination for social participation can serve as the hub for a salesperson’s social media activity. This is where social content is published, aggregated and curated. It’s also where calls to action, offers and invitations to engage on a more business level can be posted. The social hub scan serve as a destination for other publishers and bloggers to link to and appear within search results.
The preference for a hub is a domain and site you own, like a WordPress blog. Companies could create a multi-blog platform to support blogging efforts across hundreds or thousands of salespeople of the brand domain. company.com/blogs/sheilasales/ or sheilasalesblog.company.com.
As more consumer and B2B buyers participate on the social web during the discovery and consideration phases of the buying cycle, sales people can monitor for comments and conversations that indicate engagement opportunities. Monitoring social media sites for keywords that indicate prospects with questions or in the search phase can shortcut time to sales discussions drammatically.
Simple tools like search.twitter.com, board reader or a variety of free social search engines and discovery tools like socialmention.com, buzzsumo or topsy can also be used along with Google Alerts to surface interaction opportunities. Ideally, a robust social media monitoring tool could be used that includes advanced filtering options. It takes some refinement of search queries to make this kind of monitoring work, but can be very effective at identifying prospect conversation opportunities at their greatest moment of need.
Most Sales Reps, Account Executives and Business Development people are pretty busy, so efficiency with social media and content is essential. With an understanding of relevant search keywords and social topics that matter to prospective customers, salespeople can create a content plan as a guide.
However, creating new content on a regular basis while maintaining high quality can become a challenge, so it’s important to think about where content can be repurposed.
For example, salespeople might each maintain their own blogs that they publish to once a week. But they might also share portions or customized versions of their blog posts with other industry blogs, online publications and industry newsletters. They could compile blog posts into ebooks or could be used within corporate content marketing materials.
An effective way to become a “go to destination” for information on a particular topic is to aggregate or curate news from different sources on the web to the salesperson’s hub. Subscribe to other industry news sites, newsletter and setup Google Alerts for topics of interest to collect news. Collect the most interesting and/or themed news of the week and add short comments. The same curation tactic can be used to create a newsletter. With some practice, the process of scanning headlines and putting together a weekly news roundup can be done in only a few minutes a day, resulting in one beefy blog post per week.
In the course of researching useful industry news to aggregate or to cite in original blog posts, salespeople will undoubtedly find other blogs and online publications that allow commenting. They’ll also find others discussing topics of interest on sites like LinkedIn, Groups & Forums, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and others. Searching or monitoring for prospects also reveals these kinds of interaction opportunities.
Answering questions, sharing useful resources and asking questions on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ helps communicate personal characteristics and thought leadership for the salesperson. Corporate marketing might be able to use their resources with social media monitoring tools to identify social channels, groups or individuals that are most influential and relevant. Salespeople could also use tools like Klout to find others with influence to engage with.
This can seem like a very time consuming task, but many salespeople who are the most productive with lead generation through social media make a consistent effort to participate on a frequent basis. Setup a recurring reminder in Outlook to spend 15 minutes each morning to ask/answer questions, collect, aggregate and share useful links. Spreading this activity over several days using a consistent amount of time is very productive. Schedule Tweets and Facebook updates during the day in advance using a tool like Hootsuite.
Corporate sales and marketing leadership can keep tabs on the most effective uses of social media and networking sites by their sales teams and create best practices for the benefit of all. Continuously improved processes, new social tool evaluations and tactics evolution can improve salesforce social media effectiveness and overall ability to create value and engage prospects.
Companies can provide sales teams with templates, process and training plus regular internal networking opportunities to share best practices in order to help salesforce social media efforts succeed. It’s also important to provide ongoing education so salespeople know what it looks like to be overzealous and forward with their social participation efforts.
As with all social media marketing efforts, mileage varies according to the target audience, industry, resources and sales teams capabilities. There’s no doubt that strategy alone doesn’t sustain long term social media marketing success. Ongoing training and feedback mechanisms are essential to improve skills and identify both productive and non-productive behaviors.
Has your company implemented formal social selling training or best practices? Does your company support social sales with a blogging platform for sales teams or are they left to create their own using WordPress or Tumblr?
Photo: Shutterstock
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Maybe you’ve been creating content for years and your biggest worry now is gearing up for and surviving content shock. Perhaps you are on the opposite side of the spectrum, having only dabbled in content marketing but intend to make a real go at it. Either way, there are a few things your company needs to have a firm grip on before it can develop and execute a truly successful content marketing strategy.
We’re not talking about the steps for creating a content strategy here—if you need help with that check out this post by Jennifer King. Today, we are taking an even bigger step back toward the basics of marketing. These three things may seem obvious as you read through them, but too often they are overlooked when it comes to getting eBooks and blogs out the door.
And it is totally understandable…I know I was guilty of this back when it was all about creating content for the sake of having content. But as the battle for buyers’ attention grows increasingly more difficult, I find it nearly impossible to move forward with content in any capacity if a part of the puzzle is missing.
What are these puzzle pieces? Branding, Goals and Audience.
First things first: You need branding guidelines before you can even think about producing content. Start-ups aren’t the only companies that charge forward hoping to generate brand awareness with the help of content and social channels without giving much thought to the initial steps of branding. It happens more often than anyone would like to admit—even at well established companies.
But there are necessary elements of any business that need to be agreed upon by all stakeholders before a writer can contribute a word or a designer can turn those words into a palatable piece of information. Get team members to sign off on:
Ensure all parties can talk about your brand, your products and your services in a clear, concise and consistent manner. Agree on how you will not only talk about your product, but how you will portray it to the world. Without this piece of the puzzle, your content will be confusing and your buyers will be uninterested.
There are so many reasons a company may want to create content. Perhaps you need more traffic or leads. Maybe the need stems from low brand awareness or engagement. Entering a new market could be a reason, or, many times, it is just about closing those sales.
As you identify goals, your tactics may change. If you are looking for brand awareness, you may want to concentrate on getting your CEO’s name out there using tactics like guest blogging and traditional public relation maneuvers. If you are looking for leads, it is likely you will want to focus on an extremely captivating piece of content you can distribute via owned and paid channels.
No matter the reason, it is imperative you know the goal behind creating every piece of content. Without a clear goal in mind, your content will suffer from lack of direction and generic undertones.
Creating buyer personas has been a hot topic lately. Seems like everyone, from HubSpot to Eloqua and even Kuno is talking about them. And for good reason. You need to understand how your audience members think and talk—and especially what they care about—before you can create content they will consume. (Hint: It’s all about pain points, people!)
Even President Barack Obama knows how important understanding the audience is to the message (something he and his team have always been pretty good at). He knew he needed to get young people on his side to make his healthcare plan work. So he enlisted the help of Zach Galifianakis and appeared on Funny or Die’s Between Two Ferns. Why? Because after research and analysis, he knew this is where he could efficiently deliver his message in a manner his target audience would embrace. And it worked! Healthcare.gov received a 40 percent increase in traffic 24 hours after the skit aired.
The lesson here? Understanding how your audience wants to receive its content and from where can result in major increases in KPIs.
If you are just beginning to explore the possibilities of content marketing, or you consider yourself a pro, it never hurts to go back and explore the basics. You may discover tiny pinhole problems or gaping holes in your strategy. Either way, getting these puzzle pieces in place will only contribute to a successful and rewarding endeavor.
What puzzle pieces did I miss? Share in the comment section below!
photo credit: Alfonsina Blyde »; Funny or Die 
As annoying as haters are, they're a leading indicator of success, as I've written before. So for the market leader, a gaggle of noisy haters should actually be more comforting than disturbing.
But what about for prospective buyers? Is there a reason to tune into a hater's advertising and buy from the runner-up, rather than the market leader? Is it ever prudent to buy the market leader's exhaust?
What do Apple, Microsoft, Google and Salesforce have in common? Each, at different times and in different markets, has shaped an industry in its image.
Intriguingly, however, none of these companies was first to their respective markets. Each was a follower first.
Followers are tempted to try to get ahead of the market leader by denigrating them through negative advertising. But this is the sign of a loser, not a winner, and markets don't buy from losers. Ultimately, great brands inspire their customers. It's hard to inspire if most of one's marketing is directed at shouting down the market leader. Such 'hating' is a sign of weakness, not strength.
Hating also leaves the losers with little pricing power. As some academic studies suggest, there's only one clear reason for buying from a losing brand: Price. As the researchers found, "Marketers of leading brands should not concern themselves about price but merely stress the benefits, whereas marketers of follower brands should make much of the price differential."
Microsoft ruled the desktop, but it was not first to market with Office (WordPerfect beat it in both time-to-market and product maturity) or with Windows. Instead, Microsoft sold a big vision to consumers and businesses: A computer on every desktop and in every home. This meant Microsoft had to significantly lower the bar to computing, making the experience simpler and more powerful. Microsoft then did the same thing for the enterprise by making exceptional development tools, thereby lowering the bar to IT productivity.
But that was the old Microsoft. Fast forward to 2007 when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer ridiculed Apple and the iPhone:
This was the same Ballmer who said there was "no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share." The same company went on to attack open source, calling it a "cancer."
During this negative campaigning against competitors, Microsoft was rapidly losing the battles that mattered the most. The company had become a spiteful follower of the market leader, rather than being the market leader.
It's not over for Microsoft, of course. Its story on cloud (Windows Azure) is much more positive and thoughtful than its broadsides against open source and Apple, so there is a chance to lead the market once again. But that's because people want to buy from the leader, not the loudmouthed, hateful follower.
There is far more value in following leaders than in subsisting on the leftovers of their competitors. For one thing, there are significant network effects that derive from joining the dominant ecosystem. Even though plenty of users seem to prefer Macs, for decades virtually all of the best third-party software was written for Windows. The same holds true today for Salesforce: It has a massive, growing ecosystem built up around it, something that its competitors simply can't match.
This same effect spills over into talent. One of the hardest things in business is to hire exceptional people. This is made dramatically harder if the talent pool is smaller. Is it worth buying into an obscure but noisy losing company if their talent pool is also anemic? No way.
Followers are forced to be parasites on the market leader's direction. That's what happens when one company has a dominant vision.
In open source, the leaders are those that contribute most to a project, and can therefore influence projects to go in directions favorable to them or their communities. This is something we're seeing in the Hadoop community right now: The market leaders are those that are also the code leaders. Those who buy from losers never get to benefit from the market leader's innovation.
It's far better to buy into Apple's "insanely great" products and vision than a cheaper facsimile—same goes for buying into Salesforce's vision of a world without (installed, cumbersome) software, or Google's mind-bendingly cool data-driven universe. These are leaders. They're worth buying from. Their haters? Not so much.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
List segmentation remains one of the most effective methods to boost the performance of your email marketing campaigns. In fact, according to the Lyris Annual Email Optimizer Report, 71percent of email marketers say list segmentation has significantly improved their results.
Though segmentation based on data points like age, gender and zip codes is a proven way to see results, few marketers take their segmentation beyond the basics. Next time you’re organizing your list, try segmenting with these creative, data-driven categories.
All businesses are not created equal. Solopreneurs have very different needs than small businesses, which in turn have very different needs than medium-sized companies and enterprise-level organizations. Additionally, if you segment by industry, you can change your messaging as market conditions change—and in doing so, you’ll show your subscribers you really understand them.
This is a critical segmentation if you have a long sales cycle with multiple stakeholders. Managers and C-suite executives have very different perspectives and each will have distinct concerns you need to address. Segmenting by job title or job function allows you to hone in on these differences and answer each type of stakeholder directly.
Creating email content that helps move buyers through the sales cycle is always a good idea. Consider high-level information for buyers at the top of the funnel to educate them on the overall topic. Then, create more detailed comparisons of your solution versus the competitor’s solution to help move buyers to the middle of the funnel. Finally, build case studies to highlight the unique appeal and strength of your solution to help close the sale at the bottom of the funnel.
According to MarketingProfs, as many as 83 percent of marketers segment their lists by past activity like opens and clicks. Creating a segment for this sort of activity allows you to provide special loyalty incentives to encourage even more of this desirable behavior. On the flip side, it allows you to retarget those subscribers who don’t engage with your communications. Perhaps a special offer will entice them to come back to you, or perhaps it’s time to ask them if they still want to remain on your list.
Over time, you’ll notice some subscribers are more interested in certain topics than others. Therefore, wouldn’t it make sense that these subscribers would want to see more information on the topics they enjoy? Segmenting your list by topic allows you to send subscribers more of the content they want and less of the content that could care less about.
Whatever criteria you use for your segmentation, you’ll need the right data to make it work. If you’re wondering whether you have the right data to segment your list properly, sign up for a free Email Intelligence Test to get a glimpse at what you might be missing.
Earlier this week, I published a post over on The Sales Thought Leader’s Blog – “5 Generations of Selling – Are You Still Stuck in the Past?” My objective was to illustrate how selling has evolved since WW2, moving first through what I call “Cronyism” where there was a huge reliance on relationships, and needing to be liked – popping in for a cup of tea, to see if there was “anything going”
In those days the sales world was heavily populated by Willy Lomans. Interestingly, it was actually a time of “me first” as in, “I need to place an order, but I’ll wait until that nice Willy pops in on Friday, he always drops by on Fridays” Discounts were only negotiated for volume or regular orders, but typically, most scenarios ended up a “win-lose” for the salesman – note I use the masculine, because there were few saleswomen, if any.
After I wrote that post, I looked at “cronyism” and I realised that quite a high % of today’s sales population is still selling in this way.There are huge numbers of sales “reps” still making what I term “courtesy calls” on a regular basis, within a clearly defined territory, in the hope that there might be an order for them. But more often than not, these calls are being handled by an internal sales team these days, although the “hit and miss” principles remain.
From the 1950′s to the 60′s, things became a lot more competitive as there was little – if any – product differentiation. The playing field was very flat, and the pressure on salesmen (yes, still few women) to cut margins was considerable. I call this period “Commodity Selling” I know that many of you are recognising similarities to the way you sell today?
We then moved on to “Content Selling” and terms like “features and benefits” were regularly used by salespeople (hooray, women had arrived) who were keen to establish some differentiation. This period ran from the 1960′s to the 1980′s – and this is the time when we first witnessed the emergence of professional marketers, creating “brand awareness” The big problem with this sales approach is, as I suggested in that post “Although this era marks the start of “professional selling” the flaw with a features and benefits approach is that it did not take into account the unique and differing needs of customers. In effect, this approach was product-centric versus customer-centric. Although content selling raised the likelihood of increased sales with some customers, it did not maximize success with all customers. Hence the evolution to the fourth era of selling…”
Then of course, about 30 years ago, we moved on to “Consultative Selling” – well at least some of us did. In fact, around 20% of the selling population graduated beyond consultative selling, to “collaborative selling” – and you can read a full description of my take on what that means precisely, but popping over and reading that original post
However, the critical point I want to make today is that in my view, in many sales scenarios, the buyer has wrestled back complete control. We know for instance that they are coming into the “cycle” 70% up the line, more educated, more knowledgeable, and more independent . They are needing a seller’s input less and less, and as more and more products/solutions/services become commoditized, their control will only increase.
We cannot attempt to sell collaboratively, or even consultatively, if the buyers won’t let us! This selling method or style only works in high value, big-ticket sales, currently being handled – and will always be handled – by the top 20% players within the sales space. Here face-face selling will not only survive, but it will thrive.
The reality is that inside salespeople will rarely, if ever, sell consultatively/collaboratively – they are going to be increasingly forced back into “commodity selling” at best, or worse, “content selling”
On Monday I intend to extend this theme, and I ask ”Are Buyers Forcing Sellers to Become Less Sophisticated?”
In the meantime, wherever you are, have a wonderful weekend – JF
Though content marketing strategies should be created to meet the needs of buyers throughout the entire funnel, the three “E’s” (engage, educate and entertain) can serve as a primer for an overall strategy. This approach can help marketers develop a healthy mix of content for the top of the funnel, which is where conversions are born. And, since we all know time is money—for everyone—we could all use quick and exciting content ideas. So, how do marketers create the mix of the content I speak of?
For starters, creating content that engages an audience at the top of the funnel is a non-invasive way to invite prospects to interact with your content. People appreciate when their opinions and feedback are considered. In return, the interaction gives marketers more insight into how others perceive their content and brand. To take it a step further, the feedback can be repurposed into content that “spotlights” the engagement (i.e., putting your potential customers front and center), and it garners even more awareness for your brand.
Beyond interaction, engaging content can easily segue into educational and entertaining content. Buyers search for content because they are in need of something, and if yours is relevant, informative and represents thought leadership, potential prospects are likely to engage (interact and/or share) and come back for more. Providing content with utility shows potential customers that you’re capable of solving their problems, leading to a foundation of brand trust.
Beyond engaging and educating an audience, content marketers always have the opportunity to create entertaining content, because let’s face it, people seek entertainment on a daily basis, even during the busiest of days. Luckily for marketers, there are countless ways to create content that entertains. Visuals such as infographics and videos are great ways to quickly capture the attention of your audience. Our friends at Marketo presented a webinar about content marketing and the need for more visuals, which are often entertaining. Not only can visuals grab attention, they can also be repurposed into whitepapers or case studies further down the funnel. But, more importantly, if you entertain your audience, they will remember your content.
Though this approach is just one of many that can fuel content marketing strategy, developing content that engages, educates and entertains potential prospects can help marketers generate demand and capture leads early on. If you’re still not sold on this primer, take a minute to think about the content you read. My guess is you only read and/or watch something in its entirety if it’s useful to you and/or entertaining. Am I wrong?
If you have been around the sales and business owner block for a while, you understand the mental strength necessary to cope with rejection. Sometimes becoming numb to the rejection can be both a blessing and a curse. How many times have you submitted a proposal, giving free consults and went through presentations where the person didn’t end up doing any business with you?
The first few times your company gets rejected for a gig, you probably take it to heart and then put some thought into why the prospect declined the opportunity to work with you. But then after a while you probably become a bit immune to the rejection, and that is when you don’t even bother going back to watch the game tape.
The four reasons why people don’t buy or want your help comes down to ; No Need, No Money, No Time/Urgency, No Trust. We have already visited No Need and No Money, Today let’s look at No Time/Urgency.
No time is only one of the four reasons why people do not buy but it is probably the verbal objection that is used most frequently. I am really busy or too busy to do this right now is the most common mask to “I have no money,” “I don’t really see the need” or “I don’t trust you.”
If a prospect is balking at signing the deal because they have no time all of a sudden, then do not jump down their throat with a slick line to combat their excuse. Simply try to find the real issue if you think the timing isn’t the real issue. Use language like: “In addition to being very busy, is there any other reason?” If they give a different reply that still seems like it still isn’t the root cause of deferment, then ask again, “in addition to being very busy and ____________, are there any other reasons why this deal isn’t being acted upon?”
This well help you identify the true cause and also find out in a non-threatening way versus responding to every objection they have.
Grated time is everyone’s greatest asset, especially business owners, we need to figure out what no time is a mask for. Many times, no time just means that this issue isn’t a top priority in the prospects business or life at this point. They may have a big need but they do not have a burning desire to fix the problem. This can occur due to two reasons.
The first reason why it isn’t a priority could be because your sales cycle was too long and desire waned in between interactions. To prevent this in the future, get in the habit of sending follow up e-mails that outline the need, why it is important to that person based on your initial conversation and when the next meeting will be. Keep the problem and their desire to fix the problem in front of them if you will not see them in between your initial engagement.
If time lag isn’t the issue, then re-evaluate your initial interactions with the prospective client. You probably were very efficient of discovering the need but never asked the level of importance this issue was in the prospect’s life. In initial conversations, make sure there is ample time talking about the importance or desire they have in fixing the problem in addition to the actual landscape of the problem. This can prevent frustrating experiences for both you and the client.
If it truly is a timing issue then your balance of empathetic persistence needs to play out. If you are not listening to the prospect when they tell you that they have no time, and you still try to get back in front of them, you will probably botch any potential sale. Listen and gently follow up. Follow up language simply can sound like, “John, I know a few months back this was important to you so I wanted to make sure I did my job and reconnect. How do you feel about getting back together next week to see if anything has changed and I can give you some updates on my end ?”
People will tend to procrastinate when it comes to making final decisions and this also leads to a lack of waning urgency and desire between the interactions. If you need to set up a time to ink a deal, and you are aiming for “next Thursday at Noon” and the prospect says that day doesn’t work for them… we tend to default to saying, “how about the Thursday after that?” and push it out a week. Instead, why not say, “I will work hard on this and can get it to you by next Monday since you are busy next Thursday.” Bring the meeting closer to the present not further away from the wanted time.
Sometimes we communicators are sticklers for grammar and usage. When someone says he just published a new blog, for example, we really hope he doesn’t mean a new “blog post.”
Don’t even get me started on “lie” and “lay.”
But there’s an even bigger transgression I’m seeing more and more these days: an apparent confusion between the terms “content marketing” and “any old content related to marketing.”
For the record, here’s the definition I like to use for content marketing:
Content marketing is the consistent creation, curation and publication of relevant, valuable material that attracts and engages a clearly defined audience.
It must have an objective.
It is not sales-y.
Why do people lump all the content they’ve ever written about their product, including brochures and sales sheets, into the bucket known as “content marketing”? This just confuses the issue. I have to believe they truly don’t know what content marketing is, and they’ve just latched on to what they believe is a “trend.”
For the sake of clarity, perhaps some examples will help.
If you’re a lumber company, your video about how to build a birdhouse is content marketing. On the other hand, your video about how your pressure-treated wood is better than Company X’s wood is content, not content marketing, because it’s about you.
If you are a professional podcast producer, your blog post about how to choose a microphone is an example of content marketing. A post about your own podcasting production services is content, not content marketing.
If you’re a writing coach, your workshop about how to write a best-selling book is content marketing. A workshop about your coaching services for writers is not content marketing. (Yes, I’ve been invited to many “workshops” that are merely vehicles for a sales pitch; spare me.)
Some people seem to object to the very idea of content marketing. “Why should I publish anything that won’t immediately lead to sales?” they ask.
Well, I believe content marketing can be an important part of your communications because it can:
Overall, content marketing is like a magnet drawing prospects to you.
Do you agree with my assessment of content marketing?
For more on this topic, check out my free report on content marketing. (Yep, that’s content marketing.)
Tomorrow is officially the first day of spring, even though it doesn’t feel like it for us at Grass Roots Marketing! We’ve experienced one of the worst winters we’ve had in a long time and it seems like warm weather is still miles away. This past winter has actually been so bad that I’m considering trading my newly purchased car for one equipped with 4WD so I’ll be able to battle upcoming snow and ice storms like a champ. Needless to say, we’re all over it… and we’re more than ready for April showers and May flowers.
The return of spring also means that it’s just about the beginning of the second quarter. How do you think your 2014 marketing efforts are going so far? Have you incorporated content marketing into your overall marketing strategy? If you haven’t yet, then now is the time!
According to Demand Metric, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads. As we all know, more leads = more sales. The importance of content marketing is clear, but it’s still a fairly new concept, so many business owners are still unsure of how they can use it to grow their sales. If you’re one of those businesses, check out these helpful tips to get on board:
1. Create downloadable content
Content marketing allows you to demonstrate your expertise to generate leads. You must identify what’s important to your audience, create content that will address their needs and then turn it into whitepapers, eBooks and checklists that they can download for free in exchange for their contact information (use a short form that will require their email address). This way, you are able to identify warmed-up leads that your sales team can nurture while your prospects can easily receive the content they want.
2. Update your blog on a consistent basis
Did you know that 33% of traffic from Google’s organic search results go to the 1st item listed? Of course, your website should have a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy, but consistent website content creation is also important for improving search engine rankings. In addition to increasing your chances that your audience will find your website before a competitor’s, blogging helps position your company as an industry expert.
3. Show off your case studies and testimonials
Your prospects are not going to buy anything from you if they don’t trust you. Showcasing positive reviews and results helps prove that your product/service works. Add a case studies page to your website, update it as much as possible and then connect your product and services pages with results. Then, share your testimonials through social media, email, your blog… and everywhere else you can!
4. Use email marketing to identify warmed-up leads
Email marketing is a great way to identify who’s interested in your message. The ability to view who’s opened your email, how many times they’ve viewed it and what they’ve clicked on is extremely helpful for future content creation and determining what stage of the sales cycle each prospect is in.
5. Use social media to maximize your audience
Once you have all of this remarkable content for your target audience, use the power of social media to create buzz about it. First locate your audience and then as long as you believe that your content is relevant and will be useful to them… share away! Be sure to check different relevant LinkedIn and Google+ groups and also research popular hash tags that could be associated with your content (as long as it’s relevant!). Never try to trick your audience!
Content marketing is the latest craze and it doesn’t seem like it’s going away any time soon. As long as we have the internet, we will continue to crave more information and as long as we crave information, the need for content will exist. If you’re ready to dive into content marketing or kick up your efforts a notch, Grass Roots Marketing can help. Check out some of our own content to get a feel for what we can do to help you!
It’s said an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In the case of your AdWords efforts, it’s a bit more like: a few hours of research is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Negative keywords are easy to overlook, but can be critical to finding your target market with PPC.
You spend time carefully crafting your keyword list. You write compelling ads that are sure to drive clicks. Your bids and your budgets are spot on.
Yet your efforts suffer from low CTR, and the traffic you’re driving just doesn’t seem to convert.
Enter the negative. In this article I’ll refresh you on the basics, and take a look at two cases for negative keyword use you may have overlooked, and discuss how to research for keywords during Ad Group or Campaign setup.
Negative keywords are keywords that tell AdWords not to show your ads for any searches containing that keyword.
Match type options for negative keywords are: Broad, Phrase, and Exact.
Modified Broad negative keywords do not exist, because Broad negative terms work very similarly to Modified Broad match terms. Erin over at PPC Hero wrote a really great piece demonstrating how negative keyword match types work, including a really helpful chart.
The negative keywords menu lives at the bottom of the keywords tab at all levels of the AdWords interface.
Negatives can be set at either the Campaign level, or the Ad Group level.
Also, if you’re signed in, and you’ve never worked with negative keywords before, Google will walk you through how to find keywords from your search term reports to add as negatives by clicking on the links labeled “Find negative keywords now” as you see in the screenshot above.
In the Shared Library, you can create lists of keywords to use as negatives on multiple Campaigns.
Campaign negatives and Campaign negative lists are incredibly useful if you want to segregate your efforts by a particular brand, product, or intent.
For example, if you were a sporting goods retailer that has a Campaign aimed at Adidas shoes, and a separate Campaign for Adidas apparel.
Notice that our budget for Apparel is much smaller than our budget for shoes. This could be for a number of reasons, like maybe the customer lifetime value for Apparel customers isn’t as high, so we can’t afford to waste money on clicks that don’t count.
One of the challenges we face here lies in the fact that Adidas provides gear for a number of sports, such as running, that has both shoes and apparel.
Image Source
If we have groups both dedicated to “Adidas running” we might see some conflicts between our apparel keywords and our shoes keywords. Especially in cases where products share familiar names, such as these Supernova shoes…
And these Supernova jackets…
We can of course manage this by restricting our keyword sets in our apparel Campaign to only include product-specific keywords such as supernova smt jacket in our apparel, but we could miss out on some valuable matches for searches that aren’t intent specific for either shoes or jackets, such as this…
…or this
We can help keep these two buckets of keywords separate by adding -shoes & -”running shoes” to our negative keyword list at the Campaign level of our Adidas apparel Campaign.
And adding apparel-specific negative terms to our shoes Campaign.
Adding these negatives to each of our Campaigns serves two purposes:
Use Exact match terms you’re bidding on from the shoes Campaign and add them to the Exact match negatives to your apparel Campaign at the Campaign level.
You may be able to do this with focused Phrase match terms also, e.g. “adidas running shoes”.
This will help keep your apparel Campaign much more focused on appearing for searches directly related to the product you’re trying to sell. Better focus leads to higher relevancy ads, which leads to more motivated clicks, and ultimately more leads or sales.
It will also stop almost all shoe-related searches from matching to your apparel Campaign keywords, which can prevent budget-burning mismatches.
A word of caution about this method, though. Don’t simply pull your Exact and Phrase match keywords and dump them in at the Campaign level.
For example, if you had “supernova running gear” in your shoes Campaign originally, you wouldn’t want to place that as a negative in your apparel Campaign. Why?
Let’s review the keyword results before we make a decision:
If we excluded that phrase term, ads from our apparel Campaign wouldn’t appear in searches for our example query of sale on supernova running gear. The results here clearly skew towards apparel rather than shoes, which means it would be a mistake to set “supernova running gear” as a negative keyword in our apparel Campaign.
We should consider moving this keyword out of shoes completely. This review has showed us three important things:
This type of reviewing prevents you from cutting off potential important matches, and can help you discover how to better categorize your bidding terms in the process.
If you have massive amounts of keywords and this seems too daunting, try to pick one brand, product, or service to review in this way.
This particular use case for negatives is aimed at making sure that your Broad and Modified Broad terms aren’t stealing the thunder from your Exact and Phrase terms.
It’s not easy to see, but your match types can conflict with one another, even when they aren’t exact duplicate terms with different matching. Jessica Niver over at PPC Hero does a good job of explaining match type conflicts and provides some guidelines a few ways to approach the issue.
Luckily for us, this method employing negative keywords lets your Exact match pull its weight without competition from your other match types, and lets your Broad and Modified Broad match terms keep your reach wide open for those long tail and unusual queries you need to keep growing.
Specifically, it prevents the issue of duplication across match types up front by stopping Broad, Modified Broad, and in some cases Phrase match from competing for attention with your Exact match terms by disallowing matches for your Exact match terms.
There are pros and cons to this approach.
Pros Cons
Basically, the pros have to do with gaining focus and control over your keywords and bids.
You can more confidently target ads for Exact match ads, knowing that a generic ad you set for your Broad match efforts won’t show up. You can be sure that your Exact & Phrase match terms are capturing all the traffic for that keyword, rather than most of it with the occasional Broad match term getting the traffic instead. It all works to make your bidding and performance tracking much more accurate along match type lines.
The cons to this approach are… it’s simply more work. Extra work may not be your cup of tea if you’re already feeling overwhelmed by your workload, but setting this up is a simple routine that will save you money in better bid control and time in reporting in the long run.
The method for setting this up is simple: split your keywords into groups by match types, then set your Exact and Phrase terms as Exact match and Phrase match negatives in your Broad or Modified Broad match Campaigns.
Clear as mud, right? Let’s walk through the steps.
When you have a set of keywords that share a central theme, such as “buy Nike shoes” and have Modified Broad, Phrase, and Exact match keywords, split them out into separate groups by their match types.
Keep Broad and Modified Broad match terms together, with Phrase and Exact each in their own groups. Be sure to name your Ad Groups with their match types. This will become an important filtering key in the future.
Since all three groups share targeting goals, they can also share ads. This will allow you to use the copy and paste function found in either AdWords Editor or AdWords to rapidly duplicate new ads as you create them or test them.
Create a filter within the Keywords tab to show only the Phrase and Exact match keywords.
If you have many different Ad Groups covering many different topics, expand your filter to include the term your Ad Groups all share.
Once you’ve got your keyword set filtered down to just your Phrase and Exact, download them.
This step is needed because we can’t use the Copy and Paste functions of the main AdWords interface with the negatives section.
Instead, we’ll use the CSV we downloaded and copy our keywords from a spreadsheet editor such as Excel.
Once we’ve copied our Phrase and Exact keywords, it’s time to go back to our Broad match Ad Group and add them as negatives.
You can also take your Exact match terms and set them as negatives in your Phrase match Ad Group in the same way, for even greater granularity of control.
This step is the maintenance required to keep things running tightly.
As you add additional Exact and Phrase match keywords to your Groups, go back and add them to your Broad match negative list as well.
This is as simple as copying your Phrase or Exact match keywords after you’re done adding them and pasting them into your Broad match Ad Groups as negatives using the method detailed above.
Likewise, if you delete or pause Exact or Phrase terms from your Ad Groups, you have to take them out of your negative list in your Broad match Group if you want to continue to get traffic for those terms. Obviously, if you discover an Exact or Phrase match term is a money sink, you can leave the negative in place.
This part can be tedious, because there aren’t filters in the main AdWords interface that can help you search for specific negative keywords.
AdWords Editor can help with this issue, however.
AdWords Editor will allow you to search for specific terms within negative keywords. Editor also allows for some faster copy and paste operations between Groups and positive/negative keyword lists.
Editor also provides warnings that show you potential conflicts or issues.
Some warnings may be unnecessary, such as the one shown above.
In this case, we wanted to exclude both the Exact term [cheap nike shoes] and the Phrase match “cheap nike shoes” so that neither match type was captured by our Broad match keywords.
Review your warnings and alerts before making changes, to make sure you aren’t missing any real critical issues.
Darian Schouten wrote a great post over at TechWyse called 75 Negative Keywords Every AdWords Campaign Should Include. Read it.
This is a great jumping point, providing direct lists of keywords that are highly unlikely to be relevant to many advertisers.
However, no list can trump business-focused research when it comes to keywords, positive or negative. In this case, the research we should be doing is looking up common terms in our keyword set to see if there are any negative terms we can put in place before we start up a new Ad Group or Campaign.
A great example of a common word that deserves proper negative research is the word diamond. Many different online businesses might use the term “diamond” in their keyword lists.
In fact, according to DuckDuckGo, there are at least 86 different uses of the word diamond, and that is only counting disambiguation results.
Even if you think your keyword list is rock solid (get it?) in terms of relevancy, you should make it a point to search common terms. There are at least three methods for discovering negatives through searching common terms…
DuckDuckGo is a great search engine in general, and one of the things it does very well is provide definition and disambiguation for as many terms as possible. It also provides direct links to search for your term in other places, which are also context dependent.
Example: sock
The area highlighted in yellow is the disambiguation you can use to cherry pick obvious terms to use as negatives, such as names of famous people irrelevant to your product, or highly specific uses of your general term that don’t fit your business model.
If your business was selling novelty women’s knee high socks, you might discover through this search that you need to set sock novel, compression socks, and sockpuppet all as negative keywords.
Use the “try this search” resources highlighted in green above also. You may discover synonyms that may lead you to more keywords both positive and negative. You might also discover keywords in news stories that you want to set as negatives or positives. Sock full of quarters or a similar term would not be something you’d want your ads running alongside, since it’s likely to have very negative connotations you don’t want to appear alongside.
This should be a no-brainer, but searching common terms in Google itself will provide you a wealth of suggestions and possible negatives.
The two main ways to get basic ideas for negatives comes from the very bottom…
…and the very top…
…of a Google search results page.
Not to mention all the search results in between.
Skimming the search results for cheese, we see:
If you made goat cheese outside of the US, most of these results would give you direct terms to add as negatives to your efforts. Anyone making or selling cheese could easily add “cheese drug” and any related drug terms to their negative lists immediately.
The other benefit to this research is it gives you an idea of which properties Google values for that very generic, top level term.
You can also use the Search Tools button above the search results to change your location, the type of results served, or the freshness of the content.
This is especially important if you’re already advertising with the Bing and/or Yahoo network. Understanding how a search engine you’re advertising with prioritizes results for common terms can give you a better understanding of how to tailor your efforts for that engine.
Bing provides related searches below the search box, and to the right.
Much like Google, through the results you can see what Bing values most for the core term “paint”.
Bing also has auto-suggest for search, and a few searches indicate that the auto-suggest results from the home page and the search results page may differ. So it could be worth your time to check both.
Out of the three methods for searching for alternative meanings and potential mismatches, using DuckDuckGo is probably my favorite. They’re detailed, no-nonsense, and prioritize results as non-commercially as possible, which in turn provides the greatest possible range of potential negative keywords I could ask for as fast as possible.
However, you may find that you get the kind of information that’s most relevant to your business’s needs through Google, or Bing. All three have merit, and the end goal of the entire exercise is to find the terms that don’t fit your business goals.
Negative terms can improve your signal-to-noise ratio immensely. I’d love to hear more about your experience with negative match.
Are you using negative keywords?
If so, what kinds of negative keyword research do you do?
Is there anything related to negative match keywords you’d like to understand better?
Thanks for reading and I look forward to helping you out.
Social media is remaking the marketplace, and few of us really understand its implications—much less how to adapt to it.
The days in which businesses could afford to ignore social networks are long gone, with no sign of returning. However, the ways in which both small businesses and big brands use social media are constantly changing, mainly because many companies using social media have yet to fully understand it. Social media can be used to fulfill many company objectives—including sales, leads, branding, retention, and customer service—and those companies that are not using it effectively risk getting left in the dust.
If your business is looking to better reach customers—and what business isn’t?—now is the time to step it up with a Facebook page, Twitter account, and possibly activity on other social networks. But having active accounts is not enough; success on social media depends on a strategy designed with the characteristics of each social network in mind.
Whatever your business needs may be, here are a few pointers to help you build a better social media presence in 2014:
Social media’s sheer size may be overwhelming, but when done right, it can be a powerful tool to reach customers and grow your business. The most important tip for you is to be dedicated, patient, and consistent. Investing 10 to 15 minutes a day in social media probably won’t cut it, but one to two hours a day may be enough to give your business a serious boost.
This post was contributed to The Conduit Mobile Blog by guest blogger Jonathan Raveh. Jonathan is the Director of Publishers at Appnext, a growing monetization and discovery network for mobile and social media. He also writes for TheMarker (online edition) and is the publisher of Mobilize, a mobile-oriented news and business blog.
One of the major penalty issues we work with is Panda and duplicate content. Duplicate content generally presents itself in two ways:
When the Panda penalty was first released in February of 2011 there was a bit of a misconception regarding the type of duplicate content Google would penalize. First, duplicate content is not the only area that Panda targets. Panda targets content that’s “thin” and provides very little value to humans. The big grey area here is “valuable.”
Just because Panda targets thin and duplicate content does not mean really long articles that pass a copy-scape check (plagiarism check) are going to win the optimization game every time. If that were the case, we could use tools that just scraped the internet for content to create articles that would allow us to rank for everything. No, the key here is value! Value is the essential item that differentiates “thin” content from great content.
You will find examples of short articles that provide good value in press release or news sites. Generally, there are a lot of articles that are small in nature in news spaces that receive excellent rankings because they get a lot of human interactions via social space, comments, and back-links. This is a perfect example of how Google’s algorithm is at work.
So, understanding some of the basics of how Panda penalizes on-site content helps us understand when, and how we should use the rel=”canonical” tag on our website.
We should not be using rel=”canonical” on pages with duplicate content that seek to merely “game” the search engines. The rel=”canonical” is to be used in situations where duplicate content is necessary to better explain a product on a website.
For example, let’s say I have a website that sells basketballs. Generally, these basketballs differentiate in size, Children’s, Womans, and Men’s basketballs. Going a step further, there are different brands of basketballs for each size that have to be organized. Going a step further, there are different colors of these basketballs… uh oh… now we are going to have some serious issues with duplicate content.
Here’s the problem, writing content for thousands of pages that deal with very similar content is not only difficult but it can incur a Panda Penalty for having very “similar duplicate spun content” that describes each type of basketball. The more logical way to deal with ranking is to think of ranking Category landing pages for “theme keywords”.
Let’s Skitch a visual of what I’m talking about:
In the example above there’s a general category page that is about basketballs. This is the page we want to rank for our key-terms. We will use a rel=”canonical” tag to tell Google that we know the content on the sub-pages is generally thin and duplicate, and that the main page we want to rank which provides the most value is the category page.
Here’s another Skitch:
We will place on each page in the header to show Google, Bing, and Yahoo that ‘basketballs’ is the page we want to rank.
This is a classic example of a category URL creating multiple versions of the same page
Not using the canonical tag can cause a significant loss of rankings for site owners. If your product website is experiencing a penalty in rankings it could be from a lack of proper site structure and use of proper canonicals.
http://moz.com/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html
Want to learn more? Download our free guide on 25 website “must haves” for driving traffic, leads, and sales!
As a content marketer, when I complete a project, I sometimes get this feeling like I’m handing over the keys to a Ferrari, only to watch it crash before getting out of the car park.
Looking at the data revealed in Content Marketing in Australia 2014: Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends, I’d say clients are also experiencing a state of frustration:
So what’s going on?
Of those same marketers, only 52 percent reported having a documented content marketing strategy. (And, while these numbers are reflective of content marketing in Australia, the same trends appear across all geographies and verticals.)
Without the strategy in place (the targeted purpose coupled with streamlined processes), there will be no business goal blueprint to guide the provision of the right content in the right format, to the right audience, at the optimal time — or to measure the results. In the absence of content strategy, I often see content being produced for content’s sake. The rationale for formats, audiences, distribution, and timing is usually: “Because we’ve always done it that way.”
While lack of a documented content marketing strategy is an issue, other factors could be responsible as well. For example, when I looked at the type of content being produced by the marketers surveyed, I began to see some clues around format that may help us get to the root of this problem:
Out of the top 10, only two were visual content formats!
Just how much reading do we expect time-poor customers to do? After a while, having to read everything gets kind of boring. And if marketers are trying to convey complex stories, it’s a big ask to expect prospective customers to engage quickly through written formats: In 2013, a person’s average attention span dropped to eights seconds — that’s even less than a goldfish (which came in at nine seconds).
Now, apply that thinking to the most popular forms of written content used by Australian marketers surveyed:
Then, factor in that the average person only reads 20 percent of the words on a standard web page and you may begin to see some possible reasons for that effectiveness rating of 33 percent. Two of the most engaging forms of visual content didn’t even make the Top 10: Infographics came in 12th, and one of the fastest growing content formats — motion graphics (animation videos that combine moving images, text, animation and music to explain a message, promote a service or to tell a story) — didn’t even rate a mention.
The metrics marketers are using to measure success are the third reason why marketers may not be feeling effective in their efforts. Fifty-eight percent of Australian marketers surveyed cited web traffic as the key metric for their content marketing efforts, with social media sharing coming in second (51 percent), and SEO ranking third at 45 percent.
In contrast, the metrics I would rate most important — sales lead quality (44 percent) and sales lead quantity (43 percent) (especially if the content is appearing on a website) — came in fourth and fifth, respectively. Direct sales were rated only sixth as an important metric (with only 40 percent of survey respondents rating it as important). Interestingly, a benchmark lift for product/service awareness was rated 12th (26 percent) among important metrics, yet content marketers surveyed rated “brand awareness” as the most important goal of their content marketing efforts.
What is the CEO or the CMO going to do with website traffic as the lead metric? That’s an activity, not a results measurement. Crowd-pleasing metrics like activity at the expense of results or quantity at the expense of quality are really just comb-overs. Even if marketers accept these as the standard measurement currency, there are still important questions that aren’t getting asked, such as:
Another clue in solving the “33 percent effectiveness” problem can be found in the data rating marketing goals.
There are certain outcomes that content marketing delivers on very, very well. I’d suggest the top three goals for content marketing should be lead generation, customer acquisition, and sales. Findings in a recent survey of 815 LinkedIn groups supports this view, with lead generation being the most common content marketing goal for B2B tech marketers, cited by 71 percent of respondents (followed by thought leadership and marketing education at 50 percent and customer acquisition at 45 percent). However, Australian marketers surveyed rated these goals much less important: Lead generation came in third, customer acquisition fourth, and sales eighth.
If marketers realigned their goals to play to the strengths of content marketing — like lead generation and sales — perhaps that effectiveness metric would shift north of 33 percent. Again, a disconnect among these goals emerged within the data — only 45 percent of Australian marketers surveyed tailored their content marketing efforts to stages in the buying cycle — typically awareness, interest, consideration, purchase, support, loyalty, and advocacy. Content should be created to address a customer problem and then guide them from that point.
Australian marketers surveyed are producing more content on a lower budget than their U.S. and UK counterparts. This can be a smart play — depending on the recommendations derived from the content marketing strategy. However, based on the fact that only 52 percent of marketers actually have a documented content marketing strategy, I think this falls in the “not smart” category.
Think about it in terms of effective content optimization (i.e., creating multiple content formats from a single format): Infographics can easily be converted into motion graphics with little effort; nuggets from thought leadership videos/interviews can serve as the basis for articles; articles can be further dissected for use as social media content; PowerPoint presentations can be reformatted for sharing on SlideShare. It’s hard to tell if that kind of optimization is going on. But based on that gloomy 33 percent effectiveness metric, I suspect that, for most marketers surveyed, the answer is no.
There are some quick wins to be had and some long-term thinking to be applied. There’s also a need to understand the general shift in marketing that’s occurring. Digital marketing efforts are becoming a lot more transparent (thanks to the growing number of online metrics available), nimble (data analysis enables quick tweaks of marketing efforts), and considerate of audience fragmentation — and marketers’ efforts need to recognize this.
Yes. Marketing is becoming more data-driven than ever before. I’m not suggesting that advertising creatives will cease working on the brilliant Big Idea, but what I am saying, is a lot of the heavy lifting is going to be done through content marketing efforts — put some thinking behind the effort, and you’ll be happily cruising north of 33 percent in that Ferrari, instead of straight into the wall.
I’ve also captured the ideas presented in this blog in an infographic: Content Marketing in Australia: Are We Doing it Right?
Looking for more insight on how to improve the effectiveness of your content marketing? Register to attend Content Marketing World Sydney, March 31 – April 2, 2014.
You know when you get excited about new inbound leads. Then when you call them, all you hear is "not interested", "just researching", "not involved", "not a decision maker" etc. And you soon realize you are completely wasting your time.
Well, I called 185 inbound leads like that, in one week.
Not only was it a waste of my time, but the repeated failure really started to get inside my head. After making that many calls, you start to recognize behavioral patterns in the leads. You start to see unique trends based on the specific source of the leads. Both good and bad trends. In my case, it was a bad trend.
My objective was to book a 15 minute call with them (not a tough sell with a warm inbound lead). So, when marketing sent me the new inbound leads, I naturally got excited.
My excitement quickly subsided after the first few frigid responses on the phone. After 185 calls, I took a moment to analyze the lead source more closely.
(I'm changing the facts of the story slightly to avoid scapegoating the responsible marketing team)
The leads came from a webinar. The webinar was called, "The Future of Social Media." Which is relevant when you're selling social media management software.
However. Think about who uses social media management software? Marketing employees and entrepreneurs mostly. Right?
But, who wants to watch a webinar on the "Future of Social Media"? Just about anybody curious in the social media industry. Right?
My grandmother might even sign up to learn about the future of inmails, likes, and tweets.
My point is, the topic is too broad. The content does not speak to any pain point or need the customer is facing. Therefore, even though the quantity of leads was good, the quality was very poor.
I wrote an article for my sales club about the "Best Answer to Sell Me This Pen I Have Ever Seen." It quickly became the most popular content on my site. Why? Because it's hyper specific content. Let's say you have a sales interview coming up. And you know they may ask you to "sell me this pen." That's an article you need to read.
If you want to attract better inbound leads you need to make your content more targeted and specific. More specific to the needs and pains of your target audience.
Here's a better webinar title to attract higher quality inbound leads, "How to Get 3X More Social Reach with Your Brand."
Then, every registered lead has a specific problem they're looking to solve by watching your webinar. So after, when you make your sales calls. And ask a lead, "what was your specific interest in the webinar?"
Their response will explain the specific problem they are facing. And it will be a problem that your product perfectly solves. Make your content more targeted and specific to address your customers problems.
So tell me, what was the source of a recent inbound lead campaign that completely wasted your time?
| Today's guest blog is by Ian Adams. Ian is the founder of the Senator Club, a social club for entrepreneurs and sales professionals to get good at sales. Founded in 2013, the Senator Club is designed to educate members on modern day sales strategies and technologies. Get to know Ian via Twitterand Facebook. |
I’ve come to the conclusion that evolution is lopsided. Especially when it comes to B2B marketing vs. sales. It seems to me that either one or the other is evolving, but much of the time it doesn’t seem to be both. At least not within the same organization.
The best marketers are on a quest to get to know their buyers. They’re doing the hard work to create personas, develop content strategy and execute content marketing in a way that moves the needle by building relationships.
On the other side, salespeople who are in tune with their markets are spending the time to do research on prospects, learning how to apply the content that marketing is developing to supporting relevant dialogues with customers. And with all of this in hand, they’re adding value to keep the progression established earlier in the buying process moving toward the decision to buy.
Then there’s everyone else. What the heck happened?
Why is it that in so many companies these two ends of the buying process never join in the middle? It’s like buyers need to cross the chasm on their own to get from one side to the other.
What makes you think they have the motivation?
I’m hearing a lot lately that marketing is doing great getting leads into the early stages of the buying process, but that there’s a bottleneck in the middle that is somehow keeping them from moving farther.
Take a look and see if any of the below sound familiar:
There are a ton of things that could be represented in those bullets above. But each of them has one characteristic – the focus is on the company, not the customer.
When are we going to learn that it’s not about what we want, but what our customers must have?
Our customers do not want:
What they do want is:
Relationships are the highest currency we can build in today’s “social” business environment. I spend a lot of time failitating introductions for my clients to vendors who can bring expertise to the table that’s not in my wheelhouse. They like this. It makes them feel important and they get darn good treatment from those I recommend.
Why is it that marketers don’t facilitate introductions of highly qualified prospects to salespeople? Why is it that we don’t help our sales team see the value in pursuing the leads we’ve worked hard to nurture to a readiness for conversation?
Why is it that marketers don’t share the background of prospects with salespeople? Sure, marketing automation can help improve visibility to what they’ve seen or clicked on up to now, but do your salespeople know what other content you have that would enhance that prospect’s experience moving forward?
There’s a wide gap in B2B companies between the marketing and sales organizations. What are you going to do to close it?
Or are you relying on your prospects making the leap across the chasm on their own?
Feeling confident about that?
