My last post kicked off a six-part series entitled, “Your Sales Culture Is Killing You.” For example, in every conversation, when managers become too attached to the result or their own agenda, it erodes trust and sabotages people’s potential. That’s why it’s so critical to become a Process Driven Thinker.
The Inner Game Of Coaching Salespeople
What does the word ‘process’ mean to you? When you think about processes, what comes to mind? Your HR process, interviewing process, sales process, procurement process or maybe your onboarding process?
When I refer to becoming a process driven thinker, this transcends your strategy. Now, we’re focusing on who the person is, not just what they do. We shift our attention to examine each individual’s internal wiring; their personal operating system, and how they think.
Beliefs precede experiences. Ask practically any manager who struggles to come up with the ‘perfect’ coaching question; the one they hope causes a breakthrough. In order to more intuitively craft better questions, it begins with how you think.
Coach The How, Not The What
When you coach, you don’t coach the result. You coach the person, you coach the process and you coach the how. Unfortunately, because most managers are conditioned to generate results, hit their numbers and achieve business objectives, it’s this line of thinking that, in turn, kicks out result driven questions.
When you change your thinking to be more process focused, it changes the questions you ask.
Are you a result driven thinker? Let’s check. If you are, these are the questions that managers would typically ask their sales team.
What are your numbers?
How many calls did you make today?
How many appointments do you have this week?
What’s currently in your pipeline?
Is your forecast accurate?
What’s the current status on the big deal you were working on?
Are you going to make your quota?
Did you try…… (calling the decision maker, dropping price, qualifying better, delivering your value proposition, calling the help desk, and so on.)
Now, are the answers to these questions important? Of course they are! However, if you’re only focused on asking result driven questions, then you’re only having half of a conversation. Managers continually miss the area where their coaching can have the greatest impact on changing behavior and creating better solutions. That is, focusing on the how, the process and most important, the message your salespeople deliver to your prospects and customers.
What’s The How?
So, what could it sound like if you were to become more of a process driven thinker compared to someone who is strictly a result driven thinker? If you are someone who is more of a process driven thinker, you would ask the following types of questions.
Walk me through the conversation you recently had with that customer?
How did you respond when the customer said that pricing was an issue?
How have you handled a similar situation before?
What steps can you take to resolve this?
What will your message sound like the next time you run into a situation like this?
What do you need to know about every prospect and customer you work with?
What questions do you typically ask that give you the information you need when qualifying an opportunity?
If I wasn’t here, in your opinion, how would you move forward here?
Listen For The How
Think about these two sets of questions. Are you focused solely on the result or are you also mindful of the process? And you don’t coach the result,you coach the process, remember?
Before you start freaking out, I didn’t say that you have to abandon your result driven mindset. I’m suggesting how essential it is to balance this out and become more of a process or “How” driven thinker. That’s the internal shift. Once you shift your thinking around this, you’ll notice how much easier it is to focus on the conversation and what you’re hearing, rather than pushing for your desired outcome, trying to solve the problem or offer a solution you feel would work best. You’ll also find that the right questions to ask will show up naturally, rather than pushing to find them.
Consider your A, B and C players. It’s not what they do that places them in a certain rank but how they go about doing it.
This applies to every sales leader as well as every world class athlete. Whether you’re playing a sport or running a race; you are mindful of winning but it’s your form that gets you there.
According to Wikipedia, a business case captures the reasoning for initiating a project or task. It is often presented in a well-structured written document, but may also sometimes come in the form of a short verbal argument or presentation. The logic of the business case is that, whenever resources such as money or effort are consumed, they should be in support of a specific business need. An example could be that a software upgrade might improve system performance, but the “business case” is that better performance would improve customer satisfaction, require less task processing time, or reduce system maintenance costs. A compelling business case adequately captures both the quantifiable and unquantifiable characteristics of a proposed project.
Business cases can range from comprehensive and highly structured, as required by formal project management methodologies, to informal and brief. Information included in a formal business case could be the background of the project, the expected business benefits, the options considered, the expected costs of the project, a gap analysis and the expected risks. Consideration should also be given to the option of doing nothing including the costs and risks of inactivity. From this information, the justification for the project is derived.
There are several key areas you should include in a Business Case including, but not limited to the following:
Executive Overview
Summary of results
Table of Contents
Introduction
Business drivers
Scope of project
Economic impact expected
Analysis Summary
Current cost, revised cost, value delivered
Economic metrics
Cost of status quo, decision delay
Cash flow analysis
Futures analysis
Project conclusions, recommendations and next steps
Creating a Business Case is the next natural step in most B2B sales processes. Too often we get asked what should a Business Case look like? Below are some screen prints from some of the Business Case documents we worked on for our customers.
The two sections above are part of the economic metrics used to evaluate the value you are capable of delivering. The right side indicates labor cost impacts where the buyer has the option to reallocate resources. The message it is delivering is that you can do more with less staff. A 2.1% labor cost impact is equal to over 30 Full Time Equivalent personnel (FTE).
On the left side the economic impact we used here is based on ROI, NPV, IRR, and Payback period. These are the most common calculations used in a Business Case. Here is another example of data that belongs in a Business Case:
The above graphic is used to display the impact your solution will have on various parts of their operations. We display the impact in the form of a percentage as another way of measuring success. In other words if you captured current cost, then later on you are able to measure your success by calculating the actual impact of your solution. The up arrow indicates improvement, you could of course turn the arrow down and label it that percentage reduction in those particular areas. Here is another example from a Business Case.
This simple cash flow diagram spells out the cost and value delivered over a five year period. You can easily see the Return on Investment occurs in year two. I am partial to including with a graphic the chart above. It lays out the amount you need to invest each year and the expected return or goal year by year, along with an accumulation of value returned.
Here is an additional set of calculations you can consider. It is the cost of status quo, cost of decision delay and cost of no decision. Below the graphic is the explanation of each of the entries and where to get them.
The two charts above related to cost of decision delay and revenue losses due to decision delay is very useful for moving a sale forward when it is stalled. The premise behind these two charts is the fact you went through the discovery process and identified issues, captured current cost, and extrapolated the cost over a period of time. If your prospect agreed to the cost figures, and established reachable goals (i.e. your value proposition) then all of the calculations that follow are valid and difficult to refute.
Begin with the (on-going three year or more) cost of status quo for the issues you identified in your discovery process. Divide that figure by the number of years you extrapolated, and then divide it again by 280 (the number of working days in a year). The result will be the current daily cost of status-quo. Next apply the goal or your value by using the same calculation. Finally calculate the daily investment, again using the same calculation.
These three figures are the key to the cost of decision delay.
Current daily cost
Value delivered daily (cost and revenue value separately calculated)
Investment per day
Here is the math:
Current daily cost per day: $3,489
Estimated cost reductions: ($2,919)
Revised daily cost of status-quo: $570
Daily investment: $193
Daily cost of status-quo: ($2919 – $193) = $2726
Cost for 30-day decision delay: $2726 * 30 = $81,787
The $81,787 cost of decision delay is the result of costs that will continue unless the prospect implements a system to reduce those on-going expenses.
When you look at the lost revenue from a decision delay aspect, it takes into account each day you are not recovering revenue that was lost like customer attrition revenue, or discounts given away. Other revenue loss examples include an increase in the average sale, interest income from reduced DSO’s (Days Sales Outstanding), or increases in sales from more efficiency. Regardless of where the revenue comes from, if you are not capturing it now it is slipping away never to be recovered. Here is the math for our Revenue lost from decision delay.
This time we really only need two figures to calculate the revenue lost from decision delay.
Value (revenue) captured or recaptured daily
Investment per day
Here is the math:
Revenue recaptured or recaptured: $4,582,225
Daily revenue recaptured: $16,365
Daily investment: $193
Daily loss of revenue: ($16,365 – $193) = $16,172
Revenue loss for 30-day decision delay: $16,172 * 30 = $485,167
This simple calculation is extremely powerful when discussing with a prospect the amount of time they are going take to make a buying decision. Be sure to do the math with your prospect present, they will appreciate the unique approach to calculating additional value they can take advantage of, aside from ROI.
A picture is worth a thousand words is never more true than in a Business Case. Here are a few graphical depictions you may consider using in your model.
A simple waterfall chart where you can add Opex (Operating expenses) and CapEx (Capital Expenses)
This graphic displays revenue lost and recaptured over a five year period. This analysis is very effective with the cost of status quo calculations.
This particular graphic is a great depiction of how the value of your solution will continue even after the debt is serviced. This company sells a very large (and expensive) piece of equipment that helps reduce energy costs. You can see the debt continues for eight years, and yet the value continues and even grows from years 8 – 20. This is an additional value you may consider showing. Ask yourself, how long will the value of your solution realistically last?
A Business Case is a key part of your sales process. You must take the time to ensure the data in it is engaging, informative, educational, and tells your story in the best light. Be sure to use graphics when possible, and make sure they are perfect.
Michael Nick is the author of ROI Selling, Why Johnny Can’t Sell and Amazon number 10, The Key to the C-Suite. Michael is available for speeches, workshops, and web based training. Contact us at info@roi4sales.com, or visit www.roi4sales.com. Michael is available to talk at 262.338.1851.
Conversion is a key element in your paid search strategy; after all, if you’re not actually turning lookers into buyers at a high rate, what are you advertising for? Conversion rate optimization enables you to maximize every cent of your PPC spend by finding that sweet spot that convinces the maximum percentage of your prospects to take action.
But what is a good conversion rate? If you’re already achieving 3%, 5% or even 10% conversion rates, is that as high as you’re going to go?
We recently analyzed thousands of AdWords accounts with a combined $3 billion in annual spend and discovered that some advertisers are converting at rates two or three times the average. Do you want to be average, or do you want your account to perform exponentially better than others in your industry?
Through our analysis of this massive amount of data on landing pages and conversion rates, we were able to identify some common traits of the top converting landing pages. What do they have that you don’t? Believe it or not, there isn’t much standing between you and conversion rates double or triple what you’re seeing today. But the way you’re going to get there is totally counter to typical conversion rate optimization wisdom.
In this post, you’ll learn a step-by-step, replicable process for boosting your conversion rates, all backed by data insights from the best (and worst) performing advertisers in the market. Our recent conversion rates webinar is available in full at the end of this post. Today, we’ll cover:
Why Conventional Wisdom Around Conversion Rate Optimization is Silly
What Is a Good Conversion Rate?
How You Can Replicate the Success of Top Landing Pages
Are you ready to find out why everything you thought you know about CRO is wrong? Here we go…
Why Conventional Wisdom Around Conversion Rates is Silly
Learning that the experts you’ve been listening to all along are wrong is a bit like learning for the first time as a kid that mascots aren’t real. Underneath that fluffy suit there was just a sweaty unshaven guy. Everything you’ve learned about conversion rate optimization is a bit like that: shiny and pretty on the surface, but seriously lacking in substance.
How is everyone getting it so wrong? Primarily, if you’re singing the same song as everyone else, you can really never be anything more than average. When all of the gurus are all preaching the same optimizations, and all of your competitors are listening to them, how are you supposed to stand out?
The Classic Conversion Rate Optimization Test is Silly
Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Great Conversion Rate Optimization Fairy Tale. Once upon a time, a self-professed marketing guru told you it’s really important that you optimize your site. They shared one example where the author changed the button color, or the font spacing, or the image. Lo and behold, the advertiser’s conversion rate jumped by 2-7%.
Amazing, right?! Um, no, not really. These are really basic, run-of-the-mill A/B testing best practices. Yes, you should be doing these optimizations on an ongoing basis, and you’re probably going to see small, single-digit increases in your conversion rate – but it’s not likely to shoot you into the 10% or greater conversion bucket.
Let me show you what happens with those gains generated by these small tweaks on your page. Here’s an example of a landing page split test; the gray line on the bottom is the first page version we were running. The blue line is the second version we ran against it. In the beginning, the new page far outperformed the old. Awesome, right?
Except as you can see, the gains were not long lasting. In fact, the “better” page would eventually plateau. We began running 20 to 30 tests at a time and saw this pattern across our tests. We call this a premature testing dilemma. You see an early lead but shortly down the line, the early lead disappears.
This isn’t true all of the time, of course. However, we found that in the majority of cases, small changes like line spacing, font colors, etc. = small gains. If you want big, serious, long-lasting conversion gains, you need to move past these spikes that last only a couple of days or weeks.
Why does this happen? Often, it’s because the total volume of conversions you’re measuring against are low to start with. If you’re looking at 50, 100 or even 200 conversions across your entire test, small changes can seem more impactful than they really are. A couple of conversions might mean a 4% conversion increase if there are only 50 conversions total, because your sample size really isn’t big enough to start with.
It’s Time to Stop Moving the Chairs Around
When it comes to landing page optimization, you can stay really busy doing small things that have little impact. It’s like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We need to move past this mentality to the big tactics and optimizations that will dramatically change your performance and fortune.
First, we need to know:
What is a Good Conversion Rate?
Hint: it’s a lot higher than you may think.
Conventional wisdom says that a good conversion rate is somewhere around 2% to 5%. If you’re sitting at 2%, an improvement to 4% seems like a massive jump. You doubled your conversion rate! Well, congratulations, but you’re still stuck in the average performance bucket.
In this analysis, we started with all accounts we can analyze and went back a period of 3 months. We removed those that didn’t have conversion tracking set up properly, those with low conversion volumes (<100 clicks/month), leaving thousands of accounts for our analysis. We then plotted where the accounts fit in terms of conversion rate.
So what is a good conversion rate? About 1/4 of all accounts have less than 1% conversion rates. The median was 2.35%, but the top 25% of accounts have twice that – 5.31% – or greater. Check out the far right red bar – the top 10% of AdWords advertisers have account conversion rates of 11.45%.
Remember, this isn’t for individual landing pages – these advertisers are accomplishing 11.45% conversion and higher across their entire account.
Clearly, this isn’t some anomaly; this is perfectly attainable. If you’re currently getting 5% conversion rates, you’re outperforming 75% of advertisers … but you still have a ton of room to grow!
You should be shooting for 10%, 20%, or even higher, putting your conversion rates 3x to 5x higher than the average conversion rate. Aspire to have these landing page conversion rate unicorns in your account.
But Conversion Rates Are Lower in My Industry…
That’s entirely possible. We segmented conversion rate data by industry to see whether these insights held true for all marketers. Here’s what we found in an analysis of four major industries:
There’s a lot of flux there; e-commerce has a far lower average conversion rate, especially compared to finance. However, check out the Top 10% Conversion Rates. They’re 3 to 5 times higher than the average for each industry, so we can see that the rule holds across the board, regardless of industry.
The flip side, of course, is that if you’re in a high-performer industry like finance, 5% really isn’t a fantastic conversion rate. If you’re comparing yourself to the average across all industries, you’re really deluding yourself into thinking you’re doing better than you are. In truth, the top 10% are doing almost five times better.
Even if the average conversion rates are lower in your industry, the top advertisers are outperforming you by 3-5x or more.
The Top 10% Of Landing Pages: What Makes Them Tick?
What do these top 10% of landing page unicorns look like and how are they killing the competition the way they are? We went through 1,000 landing pages and performed a qualitative analysis, in order to find the common traits among the best performing advertiser landing pages in the market.
Here are my top five tips to help you reach landing page unicorn status:
1. Change the Offer
Across all of the high-performing landing pages, we saw massively creative and differentiated offers. Companies often have a default offer, their go-to, which may be the same or very similar to what all of their competitors are doing. Lawyers, for example, will offer a free consultation. Software companies will offer a free trial. They’re unimaginative and not very creative.
How can you get creative with your offer? In our case, we realized that offering prospects a free trial of WordStream software really wasn’t very imaginative or compelling. We had to think outside the box (don’t you love that phrase?) and come up with something different and unique; something more tangible and compelling than just sending them to a software trial to find their way around.
What we came up with was our free AdWords Grader, which actually gives people an account evaluation report, with recommendations to help them improve their AdWords strategy. This was a HUGE turning point for us. Prospects loved it and conversions went through the roof.
So how do you know if your offer stinks? If your conversion rate is stuck at 2% or lower, you’re not there yet. But the real way we figured out how our offer stunk was by asking our customers. We added one form field on our landing page form to ask people what they wanted our help with – and it wasn’t a free software trial.
Brainstorm, ask your customers, and come up with more unique offers to test. You’ll never know which one is the winner until you try some new offers out.
2. Change the Flow
Sometimes, you’re putting up barriers to conversion without even realizing it.
In the above example, you can see the first landing page version and just how much information people had to provide before they could download the software trial. Clearly, this was too much for many prospects. It was daunting and discouraging – not the kind of user experience you want on your landing page.
Here you can see their new landing page iteration, which turned out to be an exponentially better performer. They’ve changed the flow so that anyone can download and install the file. At the last step, the user is asked to register the software. At this point, they’ve already spent 10 or 15 minutes with the software and are far more likely to invest the time in completing the information form.
This was actually so effective that they were overwhelmed with conversions. They ended up backing off slightly and using the registration to find more qualified leads, by asking for the information one week after the download, once their prospects had time to sit and get to know their software. Changing the flow helped them boost conversions, but also manage lead quality in a far more effective way.
Here’s another great example, where the advertiser realized their landing page offer didn’t necessarily speak to the person who would be performing a search. In their case, a loved one or friend might be seeking help.
This advertiser decided they would let the visitor choose their own flow. This was incredibly effective not only for conversion, but also in segmentation for their remarketing and lead nurturing efforts.
So what’s the takeaway here? Find the flow that works best for your prospects and use it to boost conversion rate and qualify your leads.
3. Use Remarketing as a CRO Tool
On average, 96% of the people who visit a website will leave without ever converting to a lead or sale. Remarketing helps you get in front of these people with targeted, relevant messaging as they take part in other activities around the web, like email, watching YouTube videos, using social networks or searching for information.
Check out my post at Moz for a deep dive into this incredibly effective tactic.
4. Try Out 10 Landing Pages to Find 1 Unicorn
Let’s talk about effort for a minute. What do you need to put into CRO to find your own unicorn landing pages? To understand this, let’s look at the relative abundance of these top performers:
Sometimes you get lucky, but if you want to achieve these top 10% landing pages across your account, you need to replicate the above steps multiple times and perform testing on an ongoing basis.
On average, you should be testing four unique landing pages – with varying offers, flow and messaging – to find that one awesome landing page. If you want to find a unicorn landing page – that top 10% page that sees your conversions reaching 3-5x the average – you need to test at least ten landing pages.
Here, we’ve analyzed an e-commerce account with 1000 unique landing pages. About a third of traffic goes to the top most-trafficked landing page in their account. When we dig deeper, we see that about 80% of traffic goes to just the top 10% of landing pages.
You don’t need to make thousands and thousands of landing pages. You need to find the top performers you already have and focus your efforts there. How can you improve their performance? Cut the fat, stop wasting time on the low performers – in fact, just get rid of them. If you have just one great landing page, it’s smarter to focus your efforts there.
Here’s more proof that burning the midnight oil creating dozens or hundreds of landing page variations isn’t the best use of your time:
Here, we’ve plotted out tens of thousands of accounts by conversion rate vs unique landing pages. We don’t see a strong correlation between increased number of landing pages and increased conversion.
If you’re after the top performers, quantity does not necessarily equal quality.
5. F%@# Conversion Rates
Wait, what??
Stay with me here. Higher conversion rates, on their face, seem awesome. However, if you’re converting less qualified leads, you’re actually throwing MORE money away, because those leads cost you money.
I want you to focus on landing page optimizations like the above that move you in the direction of higher quality, more qualified lead generation, not just more conversions.
Key Takeaways
So what have you taken away from this? I hope you can get the following to stick and use these tips to guide a more holistic, effective conversion rate optimization strategy – the kind that will boost your conversions, but bring better lead quality, as well.
Most landing page optimizations are like moving around the deck chairs on the Titanic. Small changes = small gains.
Insanely focused and strategic landing page optimization brings 3-5x the conversions AND improves lead quality.
In some industries, even 5% conversion rates aren’t that impressive. If you’re stuck in the 2-5% conversion rate bucket, you have a ton of room to grow.
Get creative with your offers and test multiple different offers to find the one that resonates best with your audience. If you want to get really crazy (you know you do), find different offers that can help you qualify leads in the process.
Identify the obstacles keeping prospects from converting and get those roadblocks out of the way by changing the flow. Test different variations to find out exactly which path to conversion works best for your audience.
Use remarketing to recapture people who showed intent but didn’t convert.
Test smarter, not more often. You need to test 10 unique landing page variations to find 1 top performer, but this goes far beyond changing a font color and calling it a landing page variation.
Trim the fat in your account and ditch your lowest performers. Focus your energies on the top 10% of landing pages that earn 80% of traffic.
Always, always keep your eye on the prize, which is making more sales or generating leads most likely to convert to sales. Don’t let high conversion rates take precedence over lead quality or you’re going to spend more qualifying leads. You need to find the sweet spot where everything works like a well-oiled machine.
You made it! For all the awesome from our recent conversion rate optimization webinar, see the full video below:
If you missed our last webinar, make sure you check out The Secrets Behind Ads with 3x the Average CTR. Our goal is to help you get every aspect of your AdWords account working at peak performance.
Now go forth confidently, young marketer, to slay competitors and wow prospects with your newfound conversion optimization knowledge. Give our free AdWords Grader a spin to see exactly where you’re at with your current landing page strategy, then start making smarter changes that will rocket you past your competition.
And as always, if you have any questions about our data, strategy or the tips outlined above, fire away in the comments!
Understanding your target audience is the first step in any effective marketing or fund-raising campaign. It doesn’t matter if you work for Procter & Gamble, a small start-up, or a charity. If you want to be successful (and who doesn’t?), you need to know who’s buying your product, what goals and challenges they face, and how your service helps them.
P&G brand managers have plenty of resources to help them understand their customers, including focus groups, usage studies, and awareness research.
However, if you work for a smaller business or a non-profit, your research budget is likely non-existent. Yet it’s still possible to create customer or donor personas using a little bit of common sense and quick-and-dirty research that doesn’t cost a lot of money.
Introducing buyer personas
Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers—or your ideal donors if your organization is a non-profit. They are typically based on real data about buyer demographics and behavior, as well as educated speculation about their goals and concerns.
Creating buyer personas is a lot of work. But trust me, it’s worth the effort.
Once you complete the exercise, a good understanding of your customer will guide the development of your overall marketing strategy. Instead of investing money into programs that appeal only to you or other employees, you’ll be creating programs that appeal to actual buyers.
Creating buyer personas
The first step is identifying your ideal customers or donors. Group them into headings such as “moms,” “university students,” or “the local community.” Outline information on each group including demographics, household income, marital status, and where they live.
Now it’s time to book interviews with real customers, both good and bad. This step is one of the most important in creating your buyer personas.
Here are 6 useful tips to help you conduct buyer persona interviews:
Tip #1: How many people should you interview?
It depends. Usually two to three people that represent each buyer or donor persona will be enough. You will know it’s time to quit when you start predicting the answers your interview subjects are about to give.
Tip #2: Who should you interview?
If you can, select people who have either recently made a purchase or decided NOT to purchase from you. The interaction will be fresh in their minds and they are more likely to remember how they made their decision.
If you work with a non-profit the same logic applies. Select people who have recently given a donation or who have declined to give based on a specific request.
Tip #3: How do you get started?
Make a list of people to contact based on your buyer personas. Include a half dozen people in each persona in case some contacts are difficult to reach.
Tip #4: How should you approach your interview subjects?
Get in touch via phone or email. Explain you want to get some insights about your customers or donors. If it’s the latter, reassure them you are not trying to raise money. Make them feel special by letting them know they are a valued member of your community who could really help.
Propose a couple of different times for the call and manage their expectations by letting them know it is likely to last 30 minutes.
Tip #5: What is a typical call agenda?
Start the call by telling them the purpose: We are working on a marketing campaign and I want to get information to better understand the type of people who buy our products or services (or donate to your non-profit organization).
If you work at a for-profit company, your interview prospects may want to know what’s in it for them. Consider giving them a gift card or a free sample to compensate them for their time.
Start the call by telling them a little bit about yourself to make them feel comfortable. Explain your role at the company and provide more information about how the information they provide will be used. Reassure them their responses are completely anonymous.
Here are some questions, but keep in mind they are only suggestions. It’s important to be as conversational as possible and really listen to their answers so you can probe further. Keep asking “why?” as a way to better understand what your customers tell you.
Each question is designed to get more information to help tailor future marketing efforts to fit your target audience’s needs, preferences and behaviours.
Q1. How did you initially find out about [brand/non-profit]?
This question will give you a sense of how people are finding out about your product and potentially indicate some new ways to raise awareness. If your interviewee doesn’t remember, suggest some answers, such as “from a friend or neighbour,” “social media,” or “an article in the newspaper.”
Q2. How would you describe your involvement with [brand/non-profit]?
They may identify as a customer, donor, volunteer or advocate—or something completely different from the roles you already identified. Moving forward, it will be important to use language similar to that used by your personas.
Q3. Why did you decide to buy from/donate to [brand/non-profit]?
You may have trouble getting an answer to this question. People may not really know or they may be unable to talk about their decision process. Suggest some answers such as:
Did you read a favourable review online before deciding to buy?
Do you support our mission?
Are our services superior to the competition?
Q4. What are some of the main differences between us and our competitors?
Before you conduct your buyer persona interviews, you should already have a sense of why people purchase your products (or donate to your organization). Nevertheless, it`s still a good idea to ask the question. You may find new insights or discover additional organizational benefits not yet considered.
Q5. How could we make the purchase/donation process easier?
If your interviewee can`t come up with any suggestions, it’s perfectly acceptable to probe. Inquire about additional customer benefits you could incorporate into your product.
And if you work at a non-profit, ask them if donating online is a good idea—either via your website or through some other method. Inquire if they understand your mandate, including the important projects in which you’re already investing.
Q6. What could we do to reach more people like you?
Suggest some examples such as “be more active on social media platforms including Facebook,” or “make the website easier to find.” You may find there are alternatives to encourage repeat purchases or additional contributions.
Q7. Do you use social media? If yes, what is your favourite platform?
You likely made some assumptions already about where your target audiences are active. Probe to make sure your assumptions are right. Ask them:
What are your favourite websites?
What websites do you have bookmarked that you check daily?
They may regularly visit news sites, social networks, or some other type of site. This information will help you decide where your marketing and fund-raising efforts should focus.
Tip #6: How do you summarize your buyer persona interviews?
Write down the interview responses during each conversation. Once you`ve completed the interviews, look for common themes. For example, did everyone identify Facebook as a favourite social media platform? Are they all using email? Do several of them want the donation process streamlined with an online alternative?
The final step is incorporating the responses into a donor persona summary. At the same time, consider how your persona’s habits will shape your overall marketing strategy.
Good luck! Don`t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or require some help along the way. Be sure to download our convenient template to help you create buyer personas for your company or non-profit group.
If I had a dollar for every time I heard a sales person say “I should have …”, I could start working a three day week. And for all the coulda shmoudas, the risk for not acting was not that much greater than not acting, but the rewards always measurably bigger. I have never understood how some can live better with the regret of not having gotten a sale because they did not act, versus worrying about not getting an account because of a mistake they made attempting.
We worry about making mistakes when it comes to accounts, or meetings, usually unnecessarily so, and usually due to a lack of a proper pursuit plan, or process. Process here refers to a set of necessary and common-sense activities required to move the sale to close, executed in a logical and sequential stages, not something overly complex just for the sake of being complex, or more expensive. But the ‘process’ is not the end all and be all, as many mistakenly believe, it is the jumping point, the platform that allows you to act and measure progress and recalibrate when needed, but none of that matters till you act. It is when you act and make mistakes that you can correct, vary, and act again. Mistakes can be corrected, regrets you just carry around like so much luggage.
This unfolds with meetings as well, I often hear sales people say after the fact “I should have asked…” So why don’t they? One simple reason, they didn’t write their questions down in advance, and simply forgot, they didn’t want to look amateurish, but many buyers tell me they just see that as being prepared. More often sellers tell me they didn’t want to sound foolish asking such a simple question. What’s the old question: “do you want to be rich or look cool?”
Many sales people tell me that they don’t want to act “until they have it right”. They practice and rehearse – a good thing – till they feel they have it “perfect” – not a good thing, because no one is ever perfect. Selling is not like figure skating at the Olympics where you get a score for “artistic merit”, more like speed skating, successive qualifying rounds, semi-finals, and finally the big race. Perfect is not as pretty as success, and success is not always pretty.
While the intent of doing your best is a good one, and I have always said that intents go a long way, buyers are very much in tune with your intent, and are very forgiving when they know your intent was good, despite questionable execution. But without action on your part, there is no way for the buyer to see or gauge your intent. It’s a lot like not leaving a voice mail because “no one ever calls back”, how could they if you don’t leave a message or number?
If you’re going to err, err on the side of acting and dealing with the outcome, not on the side of staying on the sidelines and rationalizing the might-have-beens. In sales, it is about execution – everything else is just talk!
Ten years after the app’s Windows debut, Microsoft is finally launchingOneNote, its note-gathering service, on the Mac. Best of all, the app is now free for all users.
In a move that clearly amps up competition with similar note taking app Evernote, OneNote’s expansion also marks the debut of a developer API. That API, according to Microsoft’s official announcement, enables “any application to connect to it.” It’s noteworthy that Evernote also offers a developer API and has invested in the development of third-party applications lately.
Microsoft’s move to bring OneNote to the Mac is certainly welcome — OneNote fans, however few and far between, are often die-hard supporters of the app.
Unfortunately, Microsoft’s Mac edition [pictured below] is very…Windows-esque. On first look, the app’s design certainly does not appear very OS X native.
VentureBeat and marketing technology analyst David Raab are working on a new Marketing Automation usage and ROI study. If you currently use a marketing automation system, help us out by answering the survey. If you do, we'll share the resulting data with you.
Today's post is by LaVon Koerner, Chief Revenue Officer of Revenue Storm, which he cofounded in 2000 to offer companies worldwide a suite of comprehensive, proven tools and techniques for profitable revenue growth. Download Revenue Storm’s latest white paper, “How a Successful Coaching Strategy Increases Revenue.” The way we conduct business today is different from how we conducted business in the past. We communicate differently, discover information differently, and share information differently. So while buyers are buying differently, are you selling differently? If your sales organization is functioning as it did a few years ago, chances are you’re having problems...
In case you have been living under a rock, or just too busy to read much of what is going on in the world, we have come to a time where information multiplies quickly and the next trend is already the last trend.
From a thought leadership perspective this means to be ahead of the curve you need to be talking not about what is here, or what is just arriving, but really what is coming in the months or years ahead. This is sometimes referred to as trend spotting, but let’s just agree that seeing the future is valuable.
In the world of business, technology and communication and the various subcategories that lie beneath them, the rapid transformation that stirs the online eco-system and fills it with insight and analysis is also a massive headache for practitioners. (Read: people who are doing things other than reading about the next big gadget or trend) Given that this group of busy individuals aren’t always up to snuff on topics like Big Data, Search Engine Optimization, Context Marketing and all kinds of other “Buzz” concepts, it is time for those of us who guide these businesses to take a step back and recognize that we have to get back to communication basics and start speaking to our audience.
The Conversation That Sparked This Revelation
I suppose we would think that it is mere common sense that we would speak to our audience, but sometimes it isn’t. I think this is partially driven by the fact that many marketers and futurist types spend an inordinate amount of time congregating around the water cooler and this leads to setting unrealistic expectations that everyone we associate understand shifting business and tech trends.
Recently I wrote an article I wrote about how the informed consumer is creating a new buyers journey. To provide an example I described how a modern consumer may purchase a car and how from start to finish there may be very little interaction with the dealer. In short, the consumer controls the information and seeks out validation from their peers.
I sent the article over to a peer and got back a response that more or less said, this is old news, which immediately had me wondering if I had just written another “Me too” article about something everyone knows. Upon further consideration I realized that the problem was this is perhaps old news to the person I shared it with, but to the majority of business owners this is an important shift that needs to be explained and acted on.
This idea about the informed consumer, which is also one of the big premises behind my new book is one that is changing sales in just about every industry. When I talk to many B2B companies this is a fairly new revelation to them. While they have noticed a shift, they hadn’t pinpointed it and certainly hadn’t done anything about it.
Provide Value To Your Audience, Forget Your Peers
Understandably we all have the desire to be liked and further we seek validation from our peers. This was the exact reason that I sent the article for review. I was hoping to hear that I was on to something good. But really I already knew this and asking my peers for their validation is really a mistake because like me, they are following these types of trends in business, tech and marketing.
What really matters is that we are adding value to our audience and that the ideas we share and content we create have a high utility value to those we serve in our businesses.
If by some manner we are able to impress our peers with our vast intellect or forward views than so be it, but that shouldn’t be the goal because being impressive to someone that will never hire you really doesn’t (shouldn’t) matter.
Truth be told, I enjoy nothing more than some water cooler talk about what the future will look like, but for the sake of all of us who work to make our clients more successful, let’s focus our energy on communicating value and teaching them what they need to know to drive better outcomes. And yes, sometimes that may mean we have to tell them something that to us is common sense.
Have your unsubscribe rates been rising…and your open rates dropping?
Possibly there’s no cause for concern. But usually when this happens it means your prospects are growing disinterested – most decidedly not a good thing.
There are lots of ways to structure email programs. If you have a short sales cycle, fast turnover, and lower-priced products, you may be able to do one-off, product-focused messages that work. But most B2B marketers find that only a small percentage of the leads we generate are actually ready for sales. That means most leads need to stay with marketing longer for nurturing as we continue to engage with them, often through email.
Most of us have two key jobs for our email campaigns:
To educate the prospect, who may begin the sales process knowing little about the problem they are facing – and even less about potential solutions – so they become confident enough to choose a solution
These two types of campaigns can overlap a great deal. Here are six strategies to help you get the most from either:
1. Don’t Send the Same Email to Everyone
Sending the same email to everyone is called “batch and blast.” Don’t do it. Your leads come from a variety of backgrounds and have a variety of problems to solve; they want something from you that shows how your company can help, and makes them feel like you actually understand them.
Nobody responds to generic, robotic emails. Here are three ways to make sure yours are not:
Get personal – add the prospect’s name to the subject line. Studies conflict on whether this tactic raises or lowers the open rate, but for some companies it works very well. Test both first-name-only and first-and-last against a control to get the full range of possibilities. And, of course, make sure your sign-up forms ask for this information, so your automated programs can make use of it to place the name in the subject line or in the body text.
Get picky – use list segmentation. Segment by meaningful factors, and if you aren’t sure what those might be, look to your best customers to determine common attributes. This lets you tailor your message to different types of target groups. Sometimes all it takes is one image, or a few different words in the intro paragraph, to tailor an email to a specific department, industry, job title, problem, or business state. (See point 5 for more on segmentation.)
Get responsive – use trigger campaigns to respond automatically whenever a lead takes a certain action, such as downloading an eBook or filling out a survey. Mentioning that action in the email is an effective personalization – and having the response message delivered quickly makes you look attentive.
2. Make the Prospect Smarter
Early in the game, your prospects are working to fully understand the scope of their problem, research solutions, and compare their options. They aren’t going to buy anything without really understanding the landscape; they have to have confidence they’re choosing the right solution and be able to justify it to their superiors. You can help them educate themselves by nurturing them with information that’s appropriate to the stage of their engagements and the size of their decision-making team.
For clues as to what your leads are interested in, take a look at what they’ve already downloaded, what pages they visit on your website, and what they discuss on social media. You may be able to segment them into various tracks by product interest or some other factor that harkens back to the personalization discussed earlier.
Possible steps in an email educational campaign:
Send links to blog articles that prospects may be interested in
Offer a survey; the results will show what your prospect’s peers think
Teach them how to do something with a how-to email, perhaps linked to a video
Send excerpts from white papers, eBooks, and case studies with links to the full versions.
Invite them to a webinar
Show how a high-profile company solved a similar problem
Create an eye-catching infographic with statistics they will find interesting
3. Make an Offer They Don’t Want to Refuse
Along with the content you send – eBooks, videos, white papers, infographics – make special or limited offers:
Free trial periods
Product demos
Discount coupons
4. Don’t Email Leads Every Day
This seems obvious, but it’s surprising how often companies still make this mistake. You might even know firsthand how annoying it is to receive emails from the same company every day. Set up a schedule that keeps your company on the forefront of your leads’ minds – without spamming them.
Decide what’s reasonable for your company and test your presumptions. You want engagement without irritation; even weekly emails may be too frequent. The bottom line: if you over-email your prospects, you’ll see results, quickly, in skyrocketing unsubscribes.
5. Segment Your Database
To drive engagement, you’ll want to cater to your prospects’ needs and wants as effectively as possible. The only way to achieve that is to segment your contact database into different categories.
MarketingSherpa highlights an ecommerce case study in which a company created targeted emails for a re-engagement strategy. The tactics were 1) target one-time, big-ticket purchasers; 2) make it very personal; 3) make an attractive offer; and 4) make it urgent, with only a short window to buy. The results? A 208% higher conversion rate than batch-and-blast.
Failing to segment usually results in sending many leads irrelevant information, which damages your relationship with them. It makes the lead feel as though you really don’t understand their needs and could well push them to unsubscribe.
6. Re-Engage Your Leads
If your leads aren’t opening your emails or responding to sales calls, try re-engaging with them. The worst-case scenario of this tactic is that the lead unsubscribes, however, getting unengaged, disinterested subscribers out of your email lists is a very good thing for your deliverability. In the best case, they reconnect with your company and prove that they’re still a good fit for your product. Either way, you win.
Two tactics to re-engage your leads:
Ask for feedback on email frequency, subject matter, and content quality. If there’s something the lead isn’t satisfied with, hopefully they will share it and help you improve your campaign for future leads.
Offer something valuable. Entice your leads to reconnect with you by giving them access to exclusive content or a discount. Perhaps all the lead is looking for is a chance to try out your product at a lower risk (e.g., a discounted rate) or find out more about your experience and reputation before they do business with you.
Each time you talk to a business owner (if they are honest) they will tell you about how hard it is to keep sales up enough to support their company. Sure, it is easier than ever to get raw sales leads. Digital media offers up a host of ways to find people who are interested in what your company has to offer.
From the company owner’s perspective, it seems that the art of sales is declining. It seems that today’s salespeople simply do not have the right attitude. They accept failure to convert and won’t muster up enough drive to close the sale.
If you see your salespeople like this…you are probably wrong.
New Buyers
Salespeople are eager to close the deals. They will absorb any help you offer them…just like they always have. What is different is the buyer process and the buyers themselves.
In the old days, a buyer had to be interested in anything new. Their best source of information was generally the expert that contacted them in an effort to complete a transaction. The sales department was largely responsible to educate and inform the buyer. All you had to do as a business owner is educate the sales team.
Today’s buyer will not be educated by your sales team. They look for digital forms of information to become educated enough to make a good buying decision.
New Marketing Responsibilities
The shift in buyer attitudes necessarily changes the responsibility of your marketing function. If you want to have long-term success in this marketplace, start focusing on your marketing.
New Sales Training: Contrary to the way you may be currently doing business, you want to train sales staff to qualify prospects quickly and dump almost all of them out of their sales pipeline. Spending any amount of time on the not-ready-yet sales lead is inefficient and will cost you lots in the long run.
Arm your team with 5 critical qualifying questions to sort out those few buyers that are ready for a sales conversation. The majority of your prospects will be dumped into another marketing program.
Email Marketing: Sure, email marketing is not new. In fact, many have predicted that email marketing is dead or dying. The truth – for many companies, this method is the most profitable way to reach out to sales leads and deepen the relationship. In fact, when it is done right, some buyers will come to your company already prepared to purchase what you sell. Buyers like that kind of empowerment to choose.
Responsive Marketing: Not all companies get enormous ROI from email marketing. Most get at least a good response from this sort of consistent communication. The investment returns vary from company to company; industry to industry. The only way you will know if it works for you is to set up metrics in your CRM software.
Dashboards will give you up-to-the-minute measurement of all your marketing initiatives. You will know when email marketing, in general, is working. The dashboard will even let you know when one particular email falls flat. With the data about what works, you can adjust your emails to fit reader preferences.
Super salespeople are no longer capable of converting a large percentage of sales leads. It is not their fault. Arm your marketing efforts with these 3 powerful tools and see your sales soar.
I’ve been employed to do a tough task in a small composite company that doesn’t have the finances to employ specialists. Do you have any advice or books on how to effectively get leads and qualify them and the processes involved in doing so?
Kind regards,
Philip La Trobe, business development analyst
(A young man employed to revamp a business, increase sales and address the communication lines between departments whilst increasing overall company efficiencies.)
I emailed a little more with Philip after this note, and he explained that his background is not in sales, marketing or business development, but rather materials engineering.
That was a wake-up call for me.
The challenge for anyone in B2B content marketing is to not only to create content that would impress the most experienced reader, but also to have some content that appeals to someone new to the industry.
For that reason, here is a beginner’s look at lead generation with links to many additional resources so you can dive deeper where you would like to. I’ll focus on some fundamental questions you should answer as you craft your lead gen program.
Experienced lead gen marketers reading this: What did I overlook? Please add your own advice in the comments section of this blog post.
Question #1. What do your potential customers want?
Getting leads isn’t as easy as it sounds, if it sounds easy at all. No potential customer wants to wake up in the morning and become a lead for your company.
So first, you must understand what your customers want. To figure this out, you have to answer two big questions that result in an infinite amount of more specific questions:
What are their pain points?
What keeps them awake at night?
What could get them fired?
What do they want to avoid so bad that they would dedicate 15 minutes in their busy day to learn how to avoid it? An hour? Pay $100 to know how to avoid out of their own pocket? $10,000 out of their budget?
What is the bad outcome they are trying to avoid?
What are the three questions they’re worried their boss or client will ask them?
And on and on
What are their goals?
What could get them a promotion?
What excites them about their job?
What do they want to brag to colleagues about? Their boss?
And on and on
There are many ways to learn this – surveys, social media monitoring, interviews with current customers, A/B testing, conversations with Sales, Services and Customer Support …
But the reason this is the longest section of the blog post is because the lead gen journey begins (and sometimes ends) here – what do customers want?
Your customers may want unicorns. But unless you run a unicorn factory, that information isn’t going to be very helpful.
What we’re getting to here is this: What promises can you make to potential customers and actually deliver on. What is your company’s value proposition?
Is it an email address that you buy from a list? Probably not. Is it someone who provides a phone number for a white paper download?
Or is it someone who raises their hand and asks for more information about your company and product? Is it someone who has a big enough budget and the proper authority to buy your product?
Before you can really generate a “lead,” you should create a universal lead definition and make sure all the key players in your company (this usually includes Sales) to agree on what you’re actually trying to get.
Keep in mind, there is an implicit trade-off here. If you want to generate higher-quality leads, you will likely get a lower quantity (and vice versa) or have to invest more resources to get the leads.
On the flip side, if you’re generating a lot of low-quality leads, the cost will probably get you when you send them to Sales, in both man hours and the relationship between Sales and Marketing, because Sales tends to involve more human resources.
Marketing, on the other hand, tends to involve less human touch, whether that’s due to marketing automation or the simple fact that a print ad can reach many more people at a much lower cost than a sales person.
Getting this step right can also help your Sales-Marketing alignment. In other words, making sure everyone involved in serving the customer before a purchase agrees on the strategy and processes to do that.
Once prospects start responding to your campaigns, you have to determine if you really have leads. Question #3 will play a big factor in this determination. This is commonly known as lead qualification.
The answer to this question probably seems fairly simple – send it to Sales.
But what you may find through this process (as you can see, one question informs another) is that what you have received through your campaigns aren’t really leads.
In the work you’ve done answering these questions with Sales, you may find that this is what Marketing would determine is a lead (Marketing-Qualified Lead) but not what Sales would consider a lead (a Sales-Qualified lead).
Lead nurturing is the process to move the prospects you’ve gathered through the funnel (or buying process) to the point they are ready to talk to a sales rep. The best definition I’ve ever heard of lead nurturing is from my colleague at MECLABS, Brian Carroll, author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale: Lead nurturing is helping prospects whether they buy from you or not.
One of the areas of content publishing that has become voluminous over the last few years is research studies. Whatever you want to know about what marketers are doing, you can find out. Not that research studies are always representative, but when hundreds, or even thousands, of marketers agree on a certain premise, it’s worth considering.
However, lately I’ve seen research studies that are concerning. When I look at the sentiments these studies reflect, and the questions they raise about our industry, I get a bit queasy thinking about whether our profession is as advanced as it should be. I get a sense of inertia — of doing the same things we’ve always done but expecting different results — that makes me wonder if we’re really making progress now that continuous change has become, well, a constant.
Here are a few examples:
The State of B2B Lead Generation 2013, a study conducted by Buyer Zone, asked marketers what they do once a lead is generated. Fifty percent answered that the next step would be to route the lead directly to sales.
What’s notable about this? Well, 21 percent of marketers in the Buyer Zone study said they think the “key game-changer for the future of lead generation” is increasing the quality of lead generation. But, when asked where they would route money if they had an unlimited budget, 31 percent of these marketers said buying more leads would be their most popular choice.
Mass Relevance and The CMO Club asked Fortune 500 CMOs about their priorities and challenges in 2014 in their At The Speed of Life study:
95 percent said that content marketing is important to their business
95 percent believe creating and finding new, timely, and engaging content is one of their biggest challenges in 2014
The fact that the importance of content marketing is realized at the top level, yet marketers are still struggling with creating and finding content shows that companies haven’t addressed the gap that exists between understanding content’s value proposition and knowing what’s needed to capitalize on it. By leaving it up to marketers to figure it out themselves, how much lost opportunity are companies leaving on the table?
In reviewing the first B2B Trends report conducted by MarketingProfs and Junta42 (now CMI) back in 2010, the challenges marketers face have remained eerily similar. That’s over five years! The top challenge in 2010 for 36 percent of marketers was producing engaging content, followed by producing enough content. In the 2014 report, producing engaging content is a challenge for 47 percent of marketers (preceded by lack of time and producing enough content).
Instead of getting better, it’s gotten worse. More marketers are experiencing the same pressing challenges they did in 2010, in addition to new ones. Why do we think this is a situation that will resolve itself? Our current approaches for becoming more confident and effective at content marketing are obviously not working well enough.
Last fall, Adobe released a report — Digital Distress: What Keeps Marketers Up at Night? — in which 1,000 U.S. marketers were asked about their biggest concerns with digital marketing. What the report found is that things are shifting even more quickly than we thought, and our ability to keep up is declining, rather than improving. Yet, even with mounting pressure for improved performance from marketing teams, dedicated training has not yet become a priority.
Some more of the findings from the Adobe report included:
76 percent of marketers think marketing has changed more in the past two years than the past 50
Only 40 percent think their company’s marketing is effective
68 percent feel more pressure to show ROI on marketing spend
Most marketers don’t have any formal training: 82 percent learn on the job
While there are many areas of shaky confidence in relation to digital marketing, the top two concerns for these marketers were their ability to reach customers and their ability to keep up. And the kicker? Only 9 percent of these marketers agreed with the statement, “I know our digital marketing is working.”
There are also a number of studies being done on the changing nature of buyers (from both B2B and B2C perspectives). The problem I see here is that comparing marketer studies with buyer studies doesn’t show that marketers are listening to — or learning from — buyer feedback. This needs to change. Marketers will need to start directing their efforts toward improving capabilities and attaining the necessary core competencies that will enable their marketing programs to reach full potential.
It’s time to shine a light on learning
After evaluating all of the issues that marketers are facing — along with the increasing urgency of content as a top priority — the statistic that stood out the most for me is that 82 percent of marketers say they’re not receiving training. While I’m a huge proponent of learning on the job, I question whether or not that’s enough to prepare today’s marketers to conquer all the challenges they will encounter — now and in the future.
Let’s face it, there are a lot of new skills to be learned. From buyer personas to content marketing strategy to storytelling to social conversations to multi-channel integration and data analysis — to name just a few — what marketers need to know today is much different than what we needed to apply to be successful just a few years ago. When 760 out of 1,000 marketers can agree that marketing has changed more in the last two years than it did in the previous 50, it suggests that there’s been progress at such an accelerated pace that the need for industry training and ongoing professional development is likely outpacing the ability of an organization’s senior-level marketers to provide it for their team members. The need for rapid evolution is clear and pressing.
The State of Digital Marketing Talent study backs up this assumption, stating, “… the results of the study indicate that there is a substantial gap that exists between the need for strong digital marketing talent and the skills that individuals in the field currently bring to the table.”
The question every content marketer needs to answer is: “What am I going to do about it?”
Pursue your vast potential
As far as I’m concerned, there’s never been a more important or exhilarating time to be a content marketer. We’ve got opportunities to influence our company’s business strategy, provide a flow of qualified buyers to our sales teams, and take our seats at the executive table because we’re able to quantify the contribution we make to company growth, innovation, and viability. But the marketers of tomorrow won’t be able to hold those seats if we, as an industry, can’t close the gap between the skills we have now and our future ability to produce the outcomes that employers value.
Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to get up to speed. From consultants and coaches to online training courses, conferences, and workshops, the opportunities for content marketing training are abundant. Many of these options can be achieved iteratively in small increments of time that are designed to help you learn what you need right now, and then add to your knowledge as you move forward.
Often, what I hear is that marketers already have a bigger slate of tasks than their day will allow them to manage. That’s an excuse. And, trust me, if a marketing program executed next week (instead of today) is better than it would have been originally, based on newly acquired skills, I’m not really sure what’s keeping marketers from upping their game. How much more evidence do we need before we’re motivated to take action?
Want to be better prepared to address tomorrow’s marketing challenges with the latest content marketing tools and techniques? Sign up for access to a free preview course in CMI’s new Online Training and Certificationprogram. Get training from content experts like Ardath Albee, as well as marketers from Google, Mashable, SAP, and more.
A word I have seen pop all over the business blogsphere these days is “gamification.” Gamification in the workplace in the simplest of definitions is making a game out of employees’ day-to-day activities. In the various articles I have read on the topic, the opinions seem to be split on the overall effectiveness of gamification. Farhad Manjoo of The Wall Street Journal feels that it has the “potential for stifling creativity and flexibility in the workplace, and the growing sensation of being watched, and measured, in everything we do.” Others believe that creating a game out of an everyday work task increases competition and therefore productivity. Now I can’t speak for the larger companies (the AMEXes, IBMs and Googles of the world) who leverage a gamification strategy to increase productivity, but I can say that at AG we like to keep it simple and effective. I’ll share with you an example.
When I was a child, getting me to do chores (most often cleaning my room) was a constant struggle for my mother. She would threaten to take things away, ground me from having friends over — anything to compel me to clean my room. This changed, however, when my grandmother came over one night to babysit. She took a rainbow baton (“fairy wand”) and tapped all the items that needed to be put away. In no time at all, my bed was made, toys were put away, and chores were completed. When I was a nanny for a brief time years later, I employed the same strategy and it always worked like a charm.
Now I am not trying to draw a comparison between children and inside sales reps but that idea of taking something mundane and making a game out of it is compelling in increasing productivity. I think the key is to keep it simple. We have been using games/competitions at AG since before my time here, and I am glad to now be a part of the continuation of that part of our culture. Along with the other managers we try to follow a few simple guidelines when applying gamification strategies to AG:
1. Establish which KPIs are most important to track. Then, create different games to address each of these KPIs to mix it up and keep things fresh. For the operations team, we look at 10 or more metrics on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, including but not limited to: leads passed, quality conversations, connect rate, emails and voicemails sent, etc. Changing up which metric we will be focusing on any given week keeps inside sales reps on their toes.
2. Keep the goal attainable for all. One of the realities we face in a client service organization is that each client is different and could be varying in level of difficulty in regards to a specific metric we’re tracking. In these cases, when we run a contest over a course of a week, we’ll often have qualifying rounds so we measure a number of different metrics to accommodate for inside sales reps’ client-specific challenges.
3. Vary how the winner is selected and keep it fun. Sometimes we like to give a reward based purely on performance. For example, “the inside sales rep that has the most leads this week wins xyz prize.” Given the diversity of clients, we prefer contests in which people have the ability to qualify based on a variety of factors and 5-10 reps can compete. When it comes to the actual game, we have one rule and that is to keep it fun. “Minute to win it” type games on a Friday at lunch are a big hit amongst inside sales reps. We’ve done “AG Trivia,” Jeopardy, Jenga, and last week we had reps throw darts at balloons containing dollar amounts.
We understand at AG that cold calling is difficult and eventual burn out is inevitable without a change of pace. What the management team strives to do is to create an atmosphere where not only the contestants are excited to compete but fellow employees are excited to watch and become more productive next week.
Market research can be an expensive practice that takes quite a bit of time.
Well what if I told you that there’s a new method of building marketing knowledge that doesn’t involve expensive measures.
A new study published at Texas Tech University by researchers Dennis B. Arnett and C. Michael Wittman (2014) discusses how an organizations sales team may be the best way of attaining marketing information.
Think of it this way. A sales professional develops a massive outbound network using Social Media, Cold-calling, and etc.
These “boundary spanners” as Arnett & Wittman (2014) discuss, are actively involved in learning about client issues and possible client leads. This is highly valuable information for the Sales team because it develops their competitive advantage.
A central problem with many organizations however is that this valuable information is not shared among the rest of the organization. If organizations were to spread information from their sales team towards their marketing team, their marketing team will have a much higher chance of developing highly successful and innovative marketing tactics.
According to the researchers Arnett & Wittman (2014), these are the best 4 practices you should use to turn your sales knowledge into marketing innovation:
Improve communication between Sales and Marketing departments. The first thing all organizations should consider doing is improving the communication lines between their departments. Some ways of developing communication can be either through increased socializing opportunities, use of communication technology, and using inter-departmental memo boards. However just talking more won’t cut it, organizations should encourage Sales and Marketing to transfer higher quality information between each other (Arnett & Wittman, 2014).
Develop practices in trust building activities. “Second, when coworker trust is higher, tacit knowledge exchange tends to be higher,” (Arnett & Wittman, 2014). Trust is a significant aspect within inter-departmental communication. When organizations encourage competition amongst employees, those employees are less likely to cooperate. Cooperation cannot truly foster when work environments are fashioned to award competitive behavior. Furthermore employees will be more likely to retain information from each other because it increases their importance at the workplace.
Increase interaction between Sales and Marketing. This means that organizations should be creating events and projects that involve high interaction between different departments. This can be a primary way of improving communications and developing trust between departments.
Upper management should constantly be involved in interactions between Sales and Marketing. Upper management must remain the flag bearers in developing inter-departmental interactions. If upper management chooses to be uninvolved, the likelihood of inter-departmental communication is less likely.
If you follow these four steps, you very well might turn your Sales team into Marketing innovation. And with increased interaction between Sales and Marketing, your organization is much more likely to build their competitive advantage.
Bibliography:
Arnett, Dennis B., and C. Michael Wittmann. “Improving marketing success: The role of tacit knowledge exchange between sales and marketing.” Journal of Business Research 67.3 (2014): 324-331. Print.
Relationship selling and social marketing are becoming one and the same, and this presents numerous advantages for any business that understands how the two work together.
If you hate cold calling and the feeling of interrupting your best clients, then stop selling as you know it and get focused on helping. That’s the heart of relationship selling.
To be clear, helping can come in the form of sharing valuable information or introducing new product innovations.
Helping is the New Cold Calling
When I started selling for a large corporation immediately after graduating from college, I did not initially understand my role. I was on the road 3 full weeks out of every month. To be honest, it seemed like I was a professional visitor.
The truth is I was practicing relationship selling without even knowing it. One of my goals for the first year was simply not to lose any business, something that can happen when there is a change in the sales team. To make that happen, I did everything I could to help my customers and earn their trust.
Is that selling? Traditional selling tends to focus on transactions – moving products and services. Whereas relationship selling assumes that if you continuously earn the trust of the customer they will buy when the time is right.
This is the role of your blogging and social media. It informs and educates potential buyers, thereby gradually earning their trust. It’s a new way to sell that happens to work exceptionally well in our digital world.
One of the reasons cold calling seldom works is that it is interruptive. Whereas, digital, social marketing is willingly consumed by buyers that want the help. This is one reason why social marketing is the new relationship selling.
Relationships are Sustainable: Transactions are Not
You can build a relationship selling process that predictably leads to desired outcomes. The idea is to view every customer interaction as an opportunity to move them from interest to outcome, with that outcome being determined by the buyer – not the seller.
Smart companies continuously move their potential buyers and customers to a better place. This used to be the role of the salesperson. Now that it can be accomplished digitally, it can be automated with customer relationship managers (CRM’s) just like the one that delivers this newsletter to thousands of subscribers.
The outcome of a relationship selling process is ideally a stronger relationship or a sales transaction. Both are good, but only one is sustainable. Therefore, focus on the continuity of the relationship and let buying become a by-product of that sustained relationship.
Investing in Relationships Builds Your Business
Sales transactions are often viewed as the conclusion of the sales cycle, which effectively makes them an ending. Nobody likes endings. A healthier approach is to treat them as events within a continuous process that never ends.
When a customer buys they are invested in your company. What is their return on that investment above and beyond the product or service? Many businesses will have to answer zero, because that has traditionally been the standard practice.
What happens next is typically a waiting period until the customer buys again. Marketing is designed to make that happen; and so is selling. The business often asks the customer if there is anything they can do to help them.
Asking to help is not helping.
Helping is proactively giving the customer what they need to be happier, regardless of whether it relates to the business or not. This is relationship selling in this trust economy.
Relationship selling is an investment in the people and communities the business serves.
It’s an investment in the collective future of everyone concerned.
It’s proactive, continuous, and unlike a transactional approach – it never ends.
It’s been five years since we started moving our marketing, and our customers’ marketing, toward more of an inbound approach. Most of our customers are B2B marketers, so we strive to find the best channels and content to meet their goals for lead generation and conversion to customers. We usually include social media in the mix, some customers more than others, depending on where their buyers are most likely to be found online. The question remains—is social media an effective channel for B2B lead generation, or should we focus on other channels?
What Channels Do Most B2B Marketers Use for Lead Generation?
A 2013 Business.com survey of 500 pay-per-lead advertisers found that a majority of B2B marketers were skeptical about the value of using social media tools for lead generation. Instead, more than 66 percent favored outbound marketing (inside sales, telemarketing, live events and tradeshows). While content marketing and social media sharing were in use by 71 percent of B2B marketers, only about 22 percent rated these methods as “effective,” with customer testimonials and case studies rated as the highest performing types of lead generation. The infographic below summarizes this data.
What Happened to the Top of the Sales Funnel?
If you believe that the above data accurately represents CMO sentiments these days, there are some pretty surprising implications.
Direct marketing tactics are considered to be more effective than inbound
Marketers are trying content marketing, but doubt its effectiveness as a means of attracting qualified leads
Social media has only a minor role to play in B2B lead generation
We’re effectively back where we were 10 years ago in marketing, or maybe we never left!
I think the Business.com survey overlooks other surveys and reports showing the relative effectiveness of content marketing, social media and SEO in building sales pipelines. For example, the Content Marketing Institute reported widespread (and increasing) use of social media in content distribution in 2013, but, at the same time, respondents considered LinkedIn to be the only highly effective social media channel. CRM Daily reported inbound channels deliver up to 30X the conversion rate of outbound campaigns. According to HubSpot, inbound strategies double website conversion rates from 6 percent to 12 percent, and inbound marketing delivers 54 percent more leads into the marketing funnel than outbound marketing.
So, Where’s the Disconnect?
I think the frustration shown by CMOs with inbound tactics, especially social media, stems from the relative difficulty in deploying effective teams to support them. Let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to pull the trigger on an email blast, ad campaign or telemarketing campaign than it is to build an effective content marketing team that’s well versed in social media engagement and promotion. Then there’s the challenge of standing out in the crowd with content. As Jessica Meher so eloquently put it, “…the great thing about content marketing is that it works. The bad thing about content marketing is that almost everyone else has figured that out, and now, there is a deluge of crappy content on the internet.”
On the other hand, while conversion rates for outbound marketing may be relatively low, time-to-campaign can be fast, with results starting to show up within a few days. CMOs love the immediacy of outbound, even if it can be difficult to measure results without driving leads to landing pages tied to marketing automation systems. Social media is particularly vexing for B2B because buyers don’t generally like to use social channels to research and evaluate products and services. Most use Google for that. B2B executives use LinkedIn for networking, problem solving and job promotion (or search). Twitter is basically a news channel, while Facebook is for connecting with family and friends. And Pinterest? Pinterest is a big question mark for B2B.
So Who’s Right?
You’re both right! I think social media is getting a bad rap because it’s been badly misused by marketers in recent years. While advertising sometimes works and works well for B2B, that’s usually not the case. Social media is best used for relationship building, thought leadership and customer service. LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter are still go-to channels for content search and curation. Your content marketers, thought leaders and support people need to be there to get the word out about your brand and answer questions. Really, the marketing channel debate boils down to short-term vs long-term goals.
Short-Term Goals—High Cost Per Lead, Rapid Return
Use targeted outbound campaigns in channels where your buyers are likely to be found
PPC and retargeting ad campaigns designed to convert more visitors to leads
Leverage top-funnel, educational, original content to attract buyers and generate leads
Local or national events for targeted buyers and communities
Capture lead information via landing pages and enter leads into nurturing campaigns and personalized content opportunities
Use lead scoring and marketing automation to shorten the sales cycle and alert inside sales
Arm inside sales teams with lead intelligence to increase close rates
Long-Term Goals—Low Cost Per Lead, Sustained Pipeline Growth
Buyer persona discovery—interviews, surveys and sales team feedback
Content marketing—blogs, social media promotion, SEO, blog syndication
Social media engagement—brand awareness, thought leadership and customer support
Inbound marketing campaigns—gradually move leads forward in the pipeline with supporting content and online events
Website content personalization and SEO to improve organic visits and lead conversions
B2B Lead Generation is Both a Marathon and a Sprint
Depending upon your business goals, you will want to put more eggs in one basket than another, but that may change next quarter. Your team should be building both inbound and outbound strategies and fueling them with great ideas and content. Each initiative should be carefully planned and measured. Tacitly ignoring one channel, such as social media, can be a reckless strategy based on confusion and urban legend. Successful companies will find the right mix of all tactics that fit their goals and talent profiles.
You’ve created a masterpiece! A magical collection of words and images that captures the essence of what you offer to your customers. It is clear, highlights the advantages of selecting you over your competition and positions you as the go-to solution in your market. It has influenced prospects to choose to do business with you. It resides in different formats ranging from a yellow note pad, to a slide deck, to sticky notes and many times to a whiteboard or flipchart from a very productive session with employees or customers.
Sadly, it is frequently found sitting idly on the sidelines of your sales and marketing efforts while your potential customers are searching high and low for what you provide.
7 ways to re-purpose your most effective customer messages.
Website – clearly this should be at the top of the list. Compare your current website to your masterpiece. Are they in sync? Are you conveying the same message on the front page of your site with the same power and persuasion? Does the impression from your website match the influential power of your best work? If not, now is a great time to get your website upgraded. There have been significant changes in the tech and the visual capabilities of websites. If it has not been upgraded in the last two years, you are overdue. While you are at it, look at your website on your smartphone. If almost one-half of all your website views are coming from a smartphone or tablet, you need to ensure that they experience your magnificence as easily from their phone as you do from their dual 27 inch LCD’s on their desk.
PowerPoint – You probably have a deck that contains much of this message. You probably also have a batch of other slides that show your building and a two page history of your company. Is it time to update your deck with a current version of your software (PowerPoint, Keynote, Haiku Deck, etc.) incorporating the current best practices from presentation thought leaders like Roger Courville and Nancy Duarte? Don’t forget to make sure that it displays effectively on a tablet or smartphone as well.
YouTube – Now that you have your key message in an updated format, convert it into a video format and share it on YouTube and other video platforms including Wistia and Vimeo. If you are new to this and are using at least PowerPoint 2010, you can save your presentation, animations and all, as a video with just two clicks right from the PowerPoint Menu. You can even record audio of someone talking to the content contained on the slides. Once you have this converted to video, upload it to your company YouTube channel that has been customized to reflect the message you want to convey and compliment your website and other online presence. Here is a Jump-Start Guide to creating your YouTube Channel if you need some help.
Slideshare – One of the most over-looked yet productive places to share your most powerful customer-facing information is on Slideshare. It is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. It also supports videos; PDF’s and even recorded webinars. Do not underestimate the potential of having your information published for all to see on Slideshare. With an upgrade to a paid account, you can even collect leads and other information from those that view your information. It is money well spent in my experience, and you will seldom find your competitors in this space.
SoundCloud – Sometimes the power of the spoken word is more effective than a bunch of pretty pictures or video. This service will store and make available for search and replay any of your audio content. I have coaching clients that get more leads from SoundCloud than any other social media sites. Your experience will vary based on your industry and prospect pool, but the ability to listen to your message from their computer, smartphone or iPod, or even from iTunes can get your message delivered in completely new ways.
Webinars – If you have a presentation deck that is powerful, then get it online in the form of a webinar. Old stand-by’s like WebEx and GoToWebinar are still around, and new tech like UStream, LiveStream and Google Hangouts on Air are very effective at delivering your message and interacting with the viewers at the same time. If done correctly, you will be able to gain valuable information from each attendee to follow-up with and continue to develop a relationship long after the webinar event is complete. Don’t forget that a webinar is an efficient way to record your visual and audio presentation in a video format, for distribution on all the other platforms that are being shared here.
Social Media platforms – They all have a place in your distribution plans. Your LinkedIn Company page is an effective location to share one of more of these newly re-purposed messages. Include a link in your Twitter main page, and embed video, audio or slide presentations on our company Facebook Page.
It takes hard work to create that masterpiece we talked about at the beginning. Sometimes it can take years to get it just right. It will change as your company grows. Whatever form or format your current “masterpiece” is in, get it out there, convert it into all the other formats and spread the information to the world. That is what our new social-enabled world is all about. Jump in with both feet and share your results with the rest of us in the comments below.
Here are examples of using the information in this post and re-purposing key points for SlideShare and for YouTube
Avoid the Content Marketing Scrap Heap through Personalizing Insights for Prospects
The business world is being over-run by content marketing. Prospects are being overloaded with information, and e-mail response rates are in the tank. If you succeed in getting the attention of your prospect, your next challenge is to grab them with something that will keep them on the phone and engaged long enough to warrant a deeper conversation. Upon picking up the phone, inevitably, your contact’s guard is up while giving you only a portion of their attention as they wait for you to give them an opening to say, “No thanks, I’m not interested.”
Thinking from your prospect’s perspective requires you to consider why they would ever want to invest their precious time to meet with you. You need to offer them something of value that makes it worthwhile. Providing an “insight” is one of the best ways you can add value. This is especially true if you work across a number of organizations and can bring some outside perspective to an issue that is a priority for your target. Or, maybe you can enlighten your prospect on a growing trend that will impact them and provide more depth based on your experience.
Adding value through your ideas and experiences is sharing insight. While delivering insights has grown as a sales and marketing buzzword, few really grasp the concept. Make no mistake — an insight is only an insight if it is insightful to your prospect. This is similar to when salespeople or consultants refer to themselves as “trusted advisors.” I’m sorry, but that title must be earned. You’ll know that you’ve earned their trust when your client starts behaving differently. Their defenses will start to lower, they’ll reveal more about their business and situation more freely, and they’ll probe not just with challenging questions, but in a more collaborative tone that hints that they could envision working with you.
Research reports and pitch books are not insights. Nor are product dumps of marketing materials and internally focused sell sheets. These can substantiate your claims to helping to solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity, but you cannot lead with them with preparing an insight.
Provocative content and ideas typically break down into one of the following categories:
Research reports, white papers, or articles licensed from a research company
Research reports, white papers, blog articles, surveys, ebooks, or infographics published by other credible sources that you find online
Marketing content, blog articles, surveys, white papers, ebooks, infographics, or research reports from your company
Wisdom, experience, and stories — either your own or others’ in your organization
Diagnostics or benchmarking studies customized for your prospect
You’ll know when you’ve delivered insight when your prospect reaches an enlightened state, opens up to your new way of thinking, and begins to seek you out. Getting them there is not easy!
While these are good starting points, the challenge lies in really understanding your prospect, forming a hypothesis of need, identifying the best points from your content or ideas, tailoring the content or ideas to the prospect, and engaging in dialog that leads to enlightenment. The graphic below helps to illustrate this process.
The Insight Blueprint
An insight bridges a prospect’s needs with your ability to help them. Creating insight requires you to determine the challenges or opportunities your prospects face related to what you sell and then identify your unique differentiators. Then, find marketing content, surveys, research, articles, studies, wisdom, experiences, and stories or diagnostics that will pique your prospect’s interest, which ultimately leads to the “aha moment.” The ensuing discussion should help them to better understand and heighten the sense of urgency around an issue or get them to think differently about an issue and the best solution for it (yours).
This process will help you to create a series of “generalized” insights that you will personalize to the specific needs of your prospect. This generalization will help you scale your efforts more effectively because they cover most current issues that many of your prospects will likely face.
However, I cannot stress enough the importance of preparing and delivering a personalized insight. You cannot expect to further a relationship through impersonalized, bland content and messages that indicate they’re just one of many fish in the sea to you. We all want to feel special, like we’re being spoken to directly, even if we intuitively know that you are casting out several lines hoping that someone will bite.
At work and at home, we’re being content-marketed to death. Information overload is ever-present, which has dulled our senses and raised our defenses against any and all unwanted solicitations. How can you break through? You need to literally personalize it by first understanding their unique situation and positioning the relevance of the insight for each prospect. Otherwise, you’ll end up in the growing scrap heap of content marketing and sales pitches that fail to land.
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Learn more About Richardson’s Selling with Insights® Sales Training Solutions
Richardson’s Selling with Insights® sales training program teaches your sales reps advanced preparation techniques and dialogue skills to effectively present insights, challenge the customer’s thinking, add more value, differentiate your solution, and build credibility as a trusted business partner. If you would like to learn more about Richardson’s Selling with Insights workshops and full seminars, please email Jim Brodo at jim.brodo@richardson.com or click here to read more.
Today we are using minions to illustrate our points regarding content marketing images!
Unless you are an avid photographer who has a fathomless capacity for creativity and plenty of volunteers to pose in your photo’s, you aren’t going to be able to create all the images on your website yourself (Unless perhaps you really ARE a photographer).
Some bloggers are tempted to skip the images, but we strongly advise against this. Sites with images (good images) look better. People enjoy eye-candy, as we all can attest, and are more likely to browse around a site with good images, rather than hitting the back button.
Showing off hip and modern images communicate that you and your business are hip and modern too. People trust up-to-date businesses, so the chances of developing more leads from your blog increases.
This means more sales.
So, rest assured that as you pile image after image into your blog that you’re doing something wonderful for your company! As long as it’s in focus, it’ll work. Right?
Wrong!
So wrong. While images do indeed have that hidden hook that pulls people in, this all depends on the images you’ve chosen.
David Ogilvy remains a powerful influence in the world of advertising.
Years ago, long before the internet prevailed as king of communication and advertising, David Ogilvy commissioned research into the use of images in advertising.
He was an advertising legend, and he decided that he wanted to be sure that when he brought forth his brilliant pithy ads, the images being paired with the words were actually increasing response rates. The lie then, and now, was that any old image would attract attention and increase sales.
Ogilvy’s researchers debunked this theory. They discovered that images may snag attention, but unless the image itself was well-designed and clearly indicative of the following article or ad, it had no higher translation into sales.
On the other hand, images that excited a response in consumers, such as curiosity, laughter, or interest, translated into the consumer continuing to read the following text, and increased sales. Despite his groundbreaking discoveries in the world of images and marketing, his principles are less used today than one might expect.
Some will argue that the advertising guru lived in a different generation and old fashioned ads are nothing like our modern-day internet marketing. However, Ogilvy’s principles address the psychology behind readership which remains as yet, unchanged. In addition, the style of his ads are remarkably similar to the newspaper layout still used by both online and offline marketers.
At this point, you ought to be wondering what images are the ‘golden egg’ of image advertising and how you get your hands on them. Good— we were hoping that you would be. Let’s talk about that.
1. Never use poor quality images.
You’d think that this is self explanatory. However, the internet is well speckled and splattered over with pixelated, over-compressed, low resolution photos that someone failed to resize correctly.
These photos practically shout ‘Don’t read this article!’ If all you have is a poor quality image, it is actually better for your sales to skip the image entirely and focus on creating stellar content.
Stock photo’s must be chosen judiciously.
2. Never use stock photos that are obviously stock photos.
There are some stock photo companies that have beautiful images that don’t look like stock photos (read about these here). However, in every single page of 50 stock photos’, 47 of them are going to be the sort of images that are blatantly a part of an image package.
In some cases, these are still ok—a glass of orange juice with a white background, or a dog running through a field with a perfectly blue sky behind it are going to be stock photos.
The problem arises when images that are not personal to the company, or the article, are used. The most criminal of these involve overly posed people smiling in a contrived setting. These have a lackluster look about them that says, ‘no imagination.’
They may be beautiful, but if they aren’t captivating and centered around your actual content, Oglivy’s research shows that they aren’t going to be as effective for pulling in your readers. This is, after all, the entire point.
Group photo’s often lack a central focal point for the eyes to focus upon, disrupting the concentration of the consumer.
3.Never use group photos.
This can apply to any photo that doesn’t have a clear focal point. Human brains have short attention spans. If there isn’t something to snag our thoughts, a place to center our attention, we often click the backspace button in less time than we took to look at the confusing crowd photo. The only time a group photo is a good photo is if there is a very clear focal point or focal person.
The boredom inspired by a boring image reflected on the face of a minion from Despicable Me.
4. Never use boring images.
The best images are those that inspire the reader with a sense of what the article will be about. You need images that showcase your content, that mirror the thoughts that went into the text beneath.
Businesses that do boring things, such as accounting or manufacturing air purification products, may especially be culprits of this. They find an image of, say, a graphic ballooned dollar sign and put it up with a caption of ‘Save money on your taxes this year!’ Not exactly effective.
When images are placed on the left, they break the natural pattern of Western reading—left to right.
5. Keep it to the right!
Americans (and the Western world) read left to right. When you break up your text with images on the left, it breaks the focus of the reader, briefly jumbling their thoughts for a nanosecond. This can sometimes be enough to trigger them to click out of the page. Keep your images to the right whenever possible. Exceptions to this rule are CTA (call to action) buttons or other ‘click-me’ buttons that you want your reader to pause and focus on.
Keeping your image high above the title ensures that when the readers eyes drop down, the first thing they see is your snazzy title.
6. Float above the title.
It is often the natural reaction of a blogger to place title, image, text. However, according to Ogilvy’s research, images are better placed above the title. The psychology behind this is that our eyes hit the image and naturally drop down. Placing the title below the image will instantly inform the reader what the following text is about.
Captions can make the difference between bouncing and a conversion as people are 4 times more likely to read a caption than the text that follows.
7. Captivate with captions:
Always add captions to your images. Captions are sometimes the only portion of a page that people will actually read. Some people suggest that captions are 300% more likely to be read than the bulk text. By including attention grabbing captions, you increase the chances of a click through and a lead.
Images can be a powerful way to invite readers into your content, when used correctly. Of course, there are differing views on the psychology behind images and image placement. What are you opinions on the correct images to use and where to place them?
Put your B2B data lists to better use and rejuvenate your telemarketing department with our 10 hot tips.
Let’s be honest, when most of us think of telemarketing we think of those annoying phone calls made to someone who hasn’t lived at your house for 15 years or by someone who appears to be trying to sell you pet insurance for a dog which you don’t own and have absolutely no intention of owning either now or in the future.
Effective B2B telemarketing couldn’t be more different. If you want to improve your results, a top priority is to ensure that your telemarketing team do not view themselves in the same industry as the unsolicited B2C callers mentioned above.
Ensure your team understand their value.
Well-researched and well-planned B2B telemarketing is one of the most effective marketing assets a company can employ, and is widely welcomed by other businesses.
In a recent UK study of 200 business managers, telesales calls at work were voted one of the least annoying forms of advertising (polling just 4%), whilst 90% of marketing managers said that B2B telemarketing was either effective, or very effective, for their business.
Ensure your B2B data lists are spotlessly clean
Never underestimate the value of clean, up-to-date, targeted B2B marketing data, tailored not just to your business, but to the specific campaign (if you’ve just sold a software upgrade to a client, he’s going to be a bit peeved if you try and sell the same product at 25% off).
Develop realistic goals and a clear pipeline
Develop a clear structure for your campaign, and set goals for each call in the sequence, culminating in the ultimate outcome (appointment / sale / renewal etc.).
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither should your telemarketers be expected to broker a killer deal in a single cold-call.
Understand that good B2B telemarketing takes time
An analysis of 29,000 UK B2B telemarketing calls, showed that it took an average of 80 calls to develop a new opportunity. Success rates vary hugely by sector, so it pays to analyse your own team’s call conversion rates to set future goals and manage expectations.
Integrate your telemarketing strategy
Don’t view your telemarketing campaign in isolation, but rather integrate it as part of a multi-channel approach to achieving your end goal.
Outsource
A 2013 presentation by SiriusDecisions, claimed nearly two thirds of a B2B buyer’s journey occurred independently from sales interaction, whilst in-house sales teams only follow up on 20% of leads. Outsourcing your telemarketing requirements can free up valuable time for your sales team, and help to ensure that no leads slip through the net.
Allow your team to innovate and improvise
It’s often more valuable to give your team a set of key points to cover in each conversation (thus allowing them to adapt the pitch as they see fit), than insisting on scripted conversations.
Micro-managing your team’s conversations can limit the rapport they develop with prospects, and can lead to the perception that your company lacks personal touch.
Knowledge is king
Arm your team with clear, concise information about the product or campaign they are promoting.
Just as you would read up on your client before heading into a face-to-face meeting, so your telemarketing team should be briefed on each new prospect they approach.
Make sure your B2B marketing data is detailed enough to give you this information.
Vary call times
Key decision makers often operate outside the normal 9-5 working hours of a company’s ‘gatekeeper’. Early morning and evening calls can result in easier access to those with whom you wish to speak.
Finally, don’t let your team think or act like B2C telemarketers
Most B2B buyers are receptive to telemarketing calls – it’s their job to procure products for their business. A structured, personalised and professional approach to each call is most likely to have a positive outcome.
In a recent B2B lead generation survey, 31% cited telemarketing as their most effective lead generation channel, falling behind only email (42%) and live events (35%).
In summary:
Plan meticulously.
Clean up your B2B data lists.
Set realistic targets.
Encourage your team to build rapport with new prospects.
Ensure your team understand the professional value of their role.
Email as a marketing channel isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. According to Nielsen, email is one of the most effective methods for mobilizing contacts. This suggests that if you hope to improve your clickthrough rates or increase your conversion rates, using a personalized email message could be one of the best avenues to explore.
But it's also important to note that email marketing is not a successful marketing strategy on its own. Rather than using it as an isolated tool, your marketing efforts will be far more successful if you properly integrate email marketing into as many inbound campaign channels as you can.
This post will focus specifically on how and why you should focus on integrating email into your inbound campaigns. If you're looking for a more complete guide to email marketing, download The Complete Guide to Optimizing Email Marketing for Conversions. It'll cover everything from building and growing your email list to how to improve your deliverability and segment your marketing emails.
Email & Social Media Integration
Study after study shows that email strategies that integrate social media into their sends lead to better results. In fact, 65% of the top 20% of B2B marketers in social media lead generation integrate email with social media, compared to the industry average of 51% (Aberdeen Research).
Fortunately, integrating social media into your email strategy is easier than you might think. Here are some tactics to help you get started:
Add social sharing buttons to your emails.
Adding social media sharing and follow buttons to your emails will extend the reach of your email sends beyond the recipients in your database, expanding the visibility of your content and your brand -- and increasing the opportunity that you generate some net new leads.
Send emails based on social media insights.
Send targeted emails to subscribers who have mentioned you on social media. Using integrated marketing analytics, you should be able to see a list of email subscribers and leads who have mentioned your company on Twitter. In addition to responding to those highly engaged social leads, you might also send them a follow-up email with targeted information.
Grow your email list through social media.
Leverage your social media presence to give followers a reason to subscribe to your email list and advance their relationship with your brand. For example, consider placing a call-to-action on your Facebook page. Make sure you determine clear benefits to email subscription so that you can turn your social media followers into subscribers.
Email & Blog Integration
If you want people to subscribe to your blog, you need to encourage blog subscriptions! One of the best ways to do this is to clearly emphasize email subscriptions. Remember, there are two ways your visitors can subscribe to your blog -- via RSS and via email. While both are valuable, email subscriptions can often have a much bigger impact than RSS subscriptions. Since subscribers get emailed whenever new content gets published (compared to RSS, which subscribers have to manually check on their own), email has the potential to seriously boost your blog traffic.
Once you successfully attract new subscribers to your blog, emails can also help you maintain those subscriptions and nurture them into leads. Welcome emails are one great way to do that -- they show your new subscribers you appreciate having them as part of your subscriber community. Plus, those people just opted in to get even more email delivered to their already cluttered inboxes. That's a pretty good audience to have.
Building up your blog email subscription is also critical for nurturing. A blog subscriber may not be considered a sales-ready lead quite yet, but the more free blog content they receive, the more likely it is they'll convert into a lead later down the road in one of the posts you send them. The best news? That lead is already educated because of all the great blog content they've been reading, thus more likely to advance through the sales process quickly.
Email & Mobile Integration
Creating a strategy that reflects the changing way recipients open and read email is going to be increasingly important in the coming years. According to Litmus, 48% of all emails are already opened on mobile devices and 69% of mobile users delete emails that aren’t optimized for mobile devices. Remarkably, despite these telling statistics, only 11% of emails are optimized for mobile (Equinox).
So what does it take to make your email strategy mobile?
Give your calls-to-action (CTAs) wiggle room -- make sure buttons and links are easy to click for readers using touch screens.
Offer both plain text and HTML versions of your email.
Use descriptive alt text under your images in case they don’t display.
Optimize the landing pages and forms your email links to so mobile users can easily fill out their information.
Email & Analytics Integration
Today’s marketing goes well beyond the boundaries of your website. As a result, individual analytics for your website, social media, email, and other channels just aren’t enough anymore.
A multi-channel view, however, lets you to see how email contacts are navigating their experience with you. Marketing analytics data can answer cross-channel questions, such as:
How many people clicked through on your email but didn’t convert?
Are there email contacts that would be better nurtured through social nurturing, as opposed to email nurturing?
Which email contacts convert into customers at a faster rate -- those who subscribe to the blog first, or those who enter the database through another channel?
Not only do integrated, closed-loop analytics show you the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, but they also provide you the data you need to improve your email targeting. 37% of B2B marketers say lack of user data is the major obstacle to effective segment targeting (B2B Magazine). Despite this desire for user data, 17% of marketers still don't track or analyze email metrics for their organization at all (MEC Labs).
By exchanging single-channel analytics for integrated, closed-loop marketing analytics, you can begin to segment your emails and getting deeper insights into what your contacts actually want from your business.
How else do you use email marketing to improve the performance of other channels?
When it comes to hiring employees in the digital sector, more often than not, you’ll already have a good idea of the kind of candidate you’re looking for – and, as such, the skills and experience you’d like them to have.
That said; no matter which role you’re recruiting for in digital, there are a number of additional skills that candidates can have on their CV which are always going to come in handy – even if they’re not necessarily essential for the role’s main responsibilities and day-to-day tasks.
The skills I’m talking about might not strike you as relevant for the particular role in question but they’re ones which might just help them to solve a problem on their own and find a solution independently, rather than adding it the to-do list of other members of your team. The result? Increased productivity – and a saving in time, budget and resources. And really – who doesn’t like the sound of that?!
Without further ado then, let’s take a look at the five key skills that you need to keep an eye out for in any digital CV you receive.
1. HTML Coding:
While a knowledge of HTML coding is essential for web development and digital design roles, it can also come in handy in roles like content, copywriting (if the employee needs to create something directly for the web and no CMS is available), social media and even eCommerce too. In fact, I’d say any digital role which deals directly with producing and publishing content on the web would definitely benefit from a candidate who has a basic knowledge of HTML coding and CSS.
2. Photoshop/Paint Knowledge:
Just like HTML coding, it’s amazing how many roles actually involve producing some kind of imagery in the digital industry at one point or another. Yes, there’s the obvious ones like graphic design – but again, it’s things like social media and content where this crops up often, along with things like digital advertising and even eCRM too – so it’s definitely one to keep an eye out for! Although a knowledge of Photoshop would be amazing, a knowledge of basic Paint can also come in handy – so don’t rule it out!
3. Knowledge Of SEO:
Think a knowledge of SEO is only relevant to SEO, PPC and SEM jobs? Think again. Online marketing, content, copywriting, web development and even user experience – you name it, they’re all linked in to SEO one way or another – so candidates for these vacancies who already have an existing knowledge of SEO should definitely be considered.
4. Knowledge of Social Media:
Just like SEO, social media is linked to lots of roles in the digital sector like content, SEO, copywriting, content marketing and web development – so a knowledge of the different platforms, how they all work and how best to use them could come in handy in the long run when recruiting for digital candidates.
5. Strong Communication Skills:
When it comes to any job in the digital industry, strong communication skills are pretty essential. Think about it; you might be looking to recruit a technical SEO or web developer but you’re still going to need them to communicate with other members of the team and create reports and presentations effectively – so I’d really advise you to consider the candidate’s communication skills when recruiting for a digital candidate (hint; their CV and cover letter should act as a big hint!)
So there you go; the top five skills I think you should be on the look-out for when recruiting for a digital vacancy. Just to clarify; I’m not saying these are all essential skills – but I’m saying that they could come in handy and act as an added bonus when it comes to a candidate’s day-to-day tasks.
Do you agree? Or think I’ve missed anything off? Leave me a comment below.
Content, for the sake of this article, is copy written for websites, social media posts, blogs, press releases, and anything else your business may publish online. Put simply, content is how people learn about who you are, what you do, and whether or not they should become customers. Is it easy? No. Is writing good, high-quality content worthwhile? Yes.
1. Call-to-Action
Content written for businesses has intent: To turn the average Web user into a conversion. You don’t want to write an incredible article, have visitors skim through it, and call it a day. Instead, businesses need to implement a “call-to-action” into their content that convinces readers to click to learn more, check out products on a webpage, or follow the writer on social media.
The key to quality calls to action is that they avoid being overly promotional. Consequently, they should be the most self-involved words in a piece of content. It’s a difficult balance. Sometimes, just having a website, phone number, and a Twitter handle is enough.
2. Meaningful
Does your content have a purpose? Or is it just out there…taking up space? The key to writing meaningful content is three-fold:
Copy must inform.
Copy must deliver a takeaway.
Copy must entertain.
The easiest way to meet and exceed these requirements is to find topics that are worth writing about. Do you plan on writing a 1,000-word post on a new part your manufacturing company uses? We hope not. Instead, find a way to work that information into the larger scope of things (comparing processes of competitors, exploring how this actually affects customers, etc.).
3. The Formality Issue
A press release, for example, is by nature more formal than an everyday Facebook post. The tone in a piece of content is extremely powerful and can make the difference between good and bad writing.
The challenge for businesses is de-formalizing social media and blogs. You don’t want your customers coming to your Facebook page or blog to think they’re reading ad copy. Get rid of the strict, jargon-heavy writing and replace it with something more conversational and friendly. Customers prefer connecting to people, not brands.
Alternatively, it’s important for business writers to avoid sounding immature and unprofessional. Content on the Web defines what a business is.
4. Rushed
As a reader, there’s nothing worse than opening a page and reading rushed, choppy copy chock-full of spelling and grammar errors. Everything you publish needs to be polished, revised, reread, and read again, no matter how tedious the process seems.
Rushed content is also flaky content, usually written on topics that don’t mean anything to readers. Blogs, for instance, need to be informative, to the point, and offer a takeaway to readers. Can you do this by writing a post five minutes before your boss’ deadline? Probably not. Take the time to deliver what your online followers deserve.
5. Formatting
Even the best content becomes terrible when it isn’t formatted well. This usually isn’t a problem for social media, but long-form posts and Web copy need to look good. It’s not 1997 anymore and there are plenty of tools out there that can help you present well-formatted copy in a highly readable way.
6. Plain
Words are just words. Want to make them more engaging? Add in multimedia, graphs, charts, infographics, pictures, links, pull-quotes, and other visuals to give your readers a break. This secondary content is often what people remember most about posts. The challenge, of course, is formatting content around this supplemental material.
When we started talking to business groups about Twitter in 2009, the most common response was, “I don’t get it.” Almost five years later, the response from many business owners: “I still don’t get it.” Most business owners seem to comprehend that Facebook and even Google+ are important to their businesses (though many still haven’t figured out how to effectively use those platforms either.) Twitter seems a little silly. Even the name belies its usefulness as a professional marketing tool.
Although the statistics tell us that 70% of small businesses are on Twitter, the reality is that many of these businesses are not actually using the platform. They put the cute little “T” on their websites and forget it.
What these business owners are missing is that 42% of Twitter users learn about products and services via Twitter, and are 67% more likely to buy from the brands they follow there. There is also a direct correlation between the number of tweets a company posts and the number of followers they have. And since 90% of Twitter users say they follow a business to get discounts and special offers, it might be time for business owners to adjust their advertising strategy.
The worst parts of any job interview are exacerbated by conducting it remotely. Besides the obvious tech glitches, simply sitting in different spaces creates a completely different experience on both ends. Conferring a sense of your company’s and your own identity becomes a struggle when you’ve never seen or met the candidate face-to-face.
Why do video interviews in the first place?
Job interviews over Skype are more complicated than a video team meeting, since you don’t know the person on the other end very well, and are probably digging around for conversation topics with which to engage them. The logistics of a video conference and bandwidth issues can make them even more off-putting than your typical client conference call.
Still, job interviews conducted over video give you a very important advantage over the phone: body language. Among other things, you can literally see
how the other person says what they think is important;
how they engage the listener; and
how professionally they present themselves.
Tips for helping the conversation flow
So if you have play interviewer via Skype, here are a few things you can do to make the discussion easier for all parties involved.
1. Get your calendar invitation right. Make sure to include your Skype username and contact information, as well as specifics on who is calling who in the calendar invite itself. Being clear on these instructions will help avoid a lot of the upfront confusion and awkwardness that goes into a video interview.
2. Set expectations upfront. Take the time to set out the structure of the call as soon as you get on the line. Handing the interview an agenda is the first part of most effective interviews, but even more important in a video interview because of the potential for dropped connections.
3. Give yourself something to talk about. Supplementing your video conversation with a test or exercise of some sort will give you a sense of the candidate’s skills and something in common. Consider assigning the exercise in advance of the interview, so that the interviewee can follow up with questions about it during the interview.
4. Stop yourself. Consciously resolve not to the cut the other person off. At the same time, regularly interrupt the conversation to ask if the other person has any questions. This is more important on a video call with delays and crossed wires than during in-person interviews.
5. Show off. When possible, it’s helpful to turn the camera around and show the interviewee your office. It’ll give them a sense of where/how the team works, and can cut through the formality a bit.
6. Chat. Make wide use of the chat panel to send links or files that you might want to discuss with the interviewee in real time. It will allow you to share relevant examples of the work and make the conversation a bit more seamless.
7. Better yet, Share. Use screen-sharing apps like Join.me or Skype’s inbuilt functionality to show the other person what you’re seeing during the interview. This is also a great way to test their collaboration skills.
8. Help with Prep. Walking into an interview with minimal information about what the company does or how they want you to help do it generally renders it pretty ineffective. Consider sending the interviewee an “interview guide” beforehand so that you have something to talk about. It can include case studies about your clients, videos by your employees about their work or even just a few recruiting pamphlets.
9. Take a Different Approach. Fill the latency gaps in the phone line with “let me dial you back” instead of “can you hear me.” If all else fails, move your conversation over to the phone line, but leave the video screen on (and muted) so that you can still see each other.
10. Direct the Questions. At the end of the interview, instead of asking if they have any questions, ask something more pointed that might solicit questions. For example, ask what their top 3 questions for the outgoing person in the position would be. This could help in any interview, regardless of where it’s conducted. But it’s especially well-suited to remote interviews because it makes up for the lack of chit-chat that usually occurs while bidding farewell to someone in your office.
There is no question that e-newsletters continue to be extremely effective marketing tools. However, just like with any marketing tactic, the tool is only as good as what the user allows it to be. In the case of email marketing, what should be a very powerful outreach tactic can backfire spectacularly without proper caution. To avoid that kind of scenario, we are offering you five tips to make sure your e-newsletters are as effective as possible.
1. Do not send to recipients who have not opted in to your e-communications
The temptation is strong to simply send your email to anyone with an email address, which is a lot of people. At the worst, some companies figure, the email may be ignored. Maybe someone who was not familiar with your company gets a quick glance at it and it piques their interest. In fact, however, sending emails to people who do not want them can actually have very negative ramifications for your entire email marketing program. If your email is marked as spam, your company may be flagged as a spammer account. This can impact your ability to get other emails out in the future. The gamble is unnecessary. Simply make sure that anyone who receives your email has opted in, and always make sure there is a way for them to opt out.
2. Do not use your e-newsletter as an over-the-top sales tool
While some product or service promotion can be included in your e-newsletter, this is not a good environment for “buy now” starbursts. In order to entice people to sign in to your e-newsletter and in order to prevent anyone from opting out, you need to develop content that your audience will find interesting. An occasional note about a sale may be interesting, but more likely your readers will want to know how their jobs can be made easier, how certain problems can be tackled, and perhaps how you can help them reach their objectives.
3. Legibility is what matters
I encountered an e-newsletter not long ago that was absolutely gorgeous. The font was beautiful, the pictures were amazing, but I can’t really tell you what the message was because while it looked pretty, it was hard to read and I rather quickly lost interest. You have approximately five seconds, maybe less, to attract someone’s attention. If they have to struggle for an instant to read what you are trying to get across, they will bounce away. Even though you may love a certain font or image, make sure legibility is your first priority.
4. Incorporate HTML links and monitor who clicks them
Often times you will not receive feedback regarding your e-newsletter. Apart from some statistics about how many people actually opened your e-newsletter, you may not have a good idea about how your e-newsletter is performing. One way to measure how much people are truly engaging with your content is to incorporate HTML links into your message. Most email programs will report after the email is sent how many people actually clicked those links. This is important for several reasons. First, many email programs have begun to prioritize emails just like Facebook prioritizes certain people in your feed. If a person never interacts with your email they may no longer see it in programs like Gmail. Seeing clicks means that you are still likely really reaching that recipient. Noting how many people are interacting with your content can also give you a better idea regarding what kind of content tends to perform better or generate more interest.
5. Speaking of monitoring…
Just like everything we talk about here, we have to mention how important it is to monitor your email campaigns. If you simply keep sending out emails assuming that it’s doing *something* you are investing a lot of your time for no known reason. Apart from the reporting that most email programs will give you, make sure you invite your recipients to interact with you. Ask questions. Ask them to weigh in on certain issues. If you don’t get any responses, the chances are fairly good that your content is not attracting enough attention. As you monitor in various ways, be willing to change up your topics, your style of writing, the time at which you send your emails, and more. See what works best.
Email marketing looks deceptively easy. The truth is, however, there is a lot of tweaking, testing, and monitoring that needs to occur in order to find success. Are you on the right track?
Email marketing = SPAM. That’s the perception of email marketing nowadays. More and more business owners are led to believe that email marketing delivers little or no ROI. But is this really true? Does email marketing really not produce ROI?
Over the past few years, email marketing’s reputation has deteriorated. From being one of the top lead generation tactics, email is increasingly seen as a negative tactic and earned the label SPAM.
According to The Marketing Tech Blog, 45% of all email messages worldwide is SPAM. That’s $14.5 billion SPAM emails. It’s no wonder businesses are shying away from email marketing and leaning towards social media. This blog dives into some misconceptions surrounding email marketing and discusses whether it can still produce a worthy ROI for B2B businesses.
Does email marketing = SPAM?
I cannot stress this point enough – email marketing does not equal to SPAM. In Australia, the Spam Act 2003 considers SPAM as unsolicited commercial electronic messages, which have the following characteristics:
Offers, advertises or promotes the supply of goods, services, land or business or investment opportunities
Advertises or promotes a supplier of goods, services, land or a provider of business or investment opportunities
Helps a person dishonestly obtain property, commercial advantage or other gain from another person
Includes links, phone numbers or contact information that leads to content with a commercial purpose
Essentially, an email is classified as SPAM if it contains commercial messages and is sent to a list without explicit permission from the people on that list. Therefore, your business is not violating SPAM laws when you send emails to your contacts, i.e., people who have explicitly opted-in or subscribed to your emails.
Does email marketing produce ROI?
The simple answer: Yes and No.
Email marketing will absolutely not produce a ROI, if it is used to send promotional content to a list of unknown contacts. This is a mistake quite a few organisations make. They see email marketing as a tactic that can boost their awareness, buy a list from a broker and do an email blast without getting explicit opt-in. What makes it worse is that they send promotional content that provides no value to the reader, and therefore gets deleted almost immediately. In this case, email marketing will never be able to deliver a healthy return.
However, if executed properly, email marketing will undoubtedly produce a positive ROI. Build an email program that is centred around delivering engaging, valuable content to contacts that have opted-in to receive your emails, and you will have better lead generation results and ultimately, higher ROI.
A survey by Marketing Sherpa finds that businesses with email marketing programs on average enjoy an ROI of 119%. In fact. one marketer responded, “Email marketing, even as basic as we did it in 2012, outperformed all other forms of online marketing combined for us. We are investing much more in email. It works better than PPC, better than online display ads and provides a channel for content marketing”.
Additionally, email marketing has been proven most effective when used for lead nurturing. When coupled with an automation tool, emails can be the channel by which you regularly share valuable information with your leads to progress them further along their buying journey. Additionally, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads, according to The Annuitas Group.
So when it comes down to it, email marketing can produce a high ROI when executed well and particularly when used for lead nurturing. To maximise ROI, don’t forget to:
Understand your target audience’s buying behaviour and determine whether email marketing is a suitable tactic to engage them
Incorporate email marketing as one tactic in your end-to-end campaign to truly see how it contributes to your lead and revenue generation efforts
Ensure your database contains only contacts who have explicitly shown interest in receiving your communication by subscribing to your emails
Create a stream of content that is centered around your buyers’ problems and needs, and gives them valuable, engaging information
Leverage a marketing automation tool that enables automated lead nurturing
Measure your results periodically to know how email marketing has performed to have a clearer idea of the returns generated
To learn more, refer to our eBook on measuring ROI.
The single most important objective behind any online marketing campaign is to drive traffic to your site. However, it is important for companies to know which of their marketing efforts are yielding the most positive results and which campaigns are not working at all.
Without information on the latter, they would keep making efforts towards campaigns that are useless for their business.
Best Analytics Tool
The best tool companies can use to track the performance of different marketing campaigns is Google Analytics. Besides the fact that Google Analytics is just simply amazing, it is also free!
Using top-notch analytical tools like, Google Analytics allows you to see which of your marketing campaigns are driving the most individuals to your site.
If you are running Marketing Campaigns like:
Facebook PPC Ads
Email Marketing
Twitter to Generate Leads
Search Engine Optimization
Every marketing campaign you do, needs to be tracked. Otherwise you have no clue what is working or not.
By default, Google Analytics tracks visitors from three channels [Organic Traffic, Referral Traffic and Direct Traffic]. However, if you are looking for more detailed information, you can add custom tags to classify different campaigns.
How to Track Different Marketing Campaign Successes
In order to track the performance of each of your marketing campaigns, you can use the URL Builder tool offered by Google.
The tool will create a custom URL for each campaign, allowing you to include it to the campaign assets. Now using this tool is extremely simple if you understand the perimeters mentioned.
Google URL Builder
First, you have to add the URL of the website that you want to promote in the campaign or a landing page to the URL you want to promote. After that, you have to fill out certain perimeters which are:
Campaign Source – This identifies the source from which the traffic is coming to your site, i.e. newsletters, Google or Facebook.
Campaign Medium – This identifies the medium used for advertising, such as email, display ad or content.
Campaign Term – This defines the paid search keywords used in a campaign. It should be used to specify keywords if you are manually tagging them in the campaign.
Campaign Content – Campaign content is used to differentiate two links within one campaign so that you can know which link is used more by the visitors.
Campaign Name – This is the name you give to the specific campaign that you are tracking.
Source, medium and name are mandatory while others are optional and can be used in case of specific campaigns.
Once you have filled out these parameters, simply click on the “Submit” button to get a custom URL for that particular campaign. The URL will look like:
Using a service like bit.ly, you can shorten this URL to look like:
http://bit.ly/1fX9zVn
Ultimately include it in your online marketing campaigns.
Once the link is included, you will start getting results you can effectively track. You will be able to track how many visitors on your specified webpage are coming in from a particular source.
When inside Google Analytics click on “Acquisition” and then click on “Campaign“. Below is a screenshot of what you’ll see on yours, our sources are blurred (don’t want to give away any top secret tactics! :) )
This will tell you which of your campaigns are faring better than others and point out which campaigns you need to improve or cut off completely.
Many sales organizations often struggle with how to predict which sales will close. Their sales forecasts are weak, or non-existent, and that fact affects their bottom line.
Your sales forecast influences numerous decisions in your company’s sales process. A weak sales forecast not only affects commission checks, but also the success of your entire organization. It’s tricky to predict which sales will close or which prospects will be qualified. However, when it’s done right, an accurate forecast will keep a business on course, using past figures to predict short- or long-term performance.
To improve the quality and accuracy of your sales forecasts, here are 7 steps to follow to ensure your sales forecast accuracy:
1. Use consistent definitions
If your entire inside sales team is working from a consistent set of definitions (i.e. what is a good lead, what is a qualified opportunity, etc.), then it’s easier to trust the data you have. If you look historically at your conversion rates – overall, by industry, by geography, by rep – it’s easier to predict conversion rates and new sales from a future pipeline of opportunities. The entire sales & marketing team needs to understand these definitions, and sales management needs to enforce their usage on a regular basis.
2. Know your sales cycle length
If you get a good lead today, when will it likely close? This week? This quarter? This year? Many inaccurate sales forecasts get this one piece of data wrong, meaning your conversion rates are accurate but don’t take place in the window of time you assumed. You eventually get the revenue, but not at the time your organization was expecting it. By building in a typical (or even conservative) sales cycle length into your model, you’re making it easier to map expected sales to the week, month, quarter or year in which they’re likely to land.
3. Read market changes (and their impact on closing behavior)
The model you built last year might not work this year. If market conditions are weak, sales cycle length may have spread out. If budgets are tighter, an earlier decision maker may need permission from the CFO to take action now. These changes can wreak havoc on your sales forecast if you don’t anticipate, identify and adjust both behavior and expectations as a result.
4. Require a “compelling event” to become an opportunity
The right contact at the right company in an ideal market can surely benefit from your product or service. But do they want it? Is it a priority? Is there something internally that is driving urgency and prioritization of what you’re selling? Requiring a defined “compelling event” for new opportunities may reduce the volume of opportunities created, but it also increases the likelihood that those deals will close, which in turn makes your forecast far more accurate.
5. Conduct regular deal reviews
Sit down with your sales reps and walk through their pipelines. Not just names and numbers, but context. Ask for the back story, why they’re qualified, what the compelling event internally is that’s driving action. This isn’t about not trusting your reps. It’s about establishing a culture of accountability, learning and collaboration.
Make these deal reviews about helping your reps brainstorm new ways of accelerating deals, establishing greater urgency with latent opportunities, and creating greater income opportunities for them personally. In the process, you’ll have a more intimate idea of the quality and accuracy of the pipeline.
6. Make updating the forecast fast, easy & mandatory for your reps
Opportunities change after they’ve entered the pipeline. Close dates move out. Or up. Deals that were on a fast track suddenly slow down, and perhaps should be moved back to an earlier stage. Most reps don’t want to make these changes to opportunities in their CRM system, as that may imply weakness in their own pipelines and selling skills.
Instead, make it easy and mandatory to make these changes in real-time. Make it clear to the sales organization that these changes will help management improve selling conditions, and address real-time changes with the resources needed to close more business.
7. Reward accuracy and honesty
Very few sales organizations reward pipeline performance & behavior. They compensate based on closed business, but not based on how close reps come to their forecasts. Create incentives for your reps to accurately forecast their expected sales. Foster an environment where honest changes to forecasts, even if the news isn’t good, is encouraged and rewarded.
Would you now reward a rep for reducing their sales forecast? I hope so. Imagine the alternative, that they led you to believe their output would be much higher when they knew they couldn’t deliver.
What strategies and tactics have you used in your sales organization to improve sales forecast accuracy? What would you add to this list?
The email ecosystem is constantly updating, changing the way we strategize email marketing initiatives. Tactics that worked three to five years ago don’t necessarily work today. Today, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) look at many different variables when determining whether to deliver one of our marketing emails to one of their customers.
Every ISP does its utmost to protect its customers from spam and unwanted email. In parallel, one of the highest priorities for all marketers is to ensure that our marketing emails are not mistaken for spam.
This makes it critically important to continuously monitor and update the hygiene of your lists. Establishing and maintaining good email hygiene practices is absolutely imperative to the long-term success of your marketing campaigns as well as overall deliverability.
One way to keep your hygiene up to par within the ever-changing email ecosystem is to regularly clean your lists. List cleaning has become a standard practice today for marketers and is a reflection of how our industry has evolved over the last decade.
5 Reasons Why Email List Hygiene Is a Serious Marketing Priority
Enhance your deliverability: While list hygiene doesn’t guarantee 100 percent deliverability of your emails, it can make a huge improvement. Email list cleaning helps you identify bad records you should eliminate from your list prior to sending.
Avoid negative effects on your sending efforts: Failure to manage your email lists makes you vulnerable to spam traps, invalid email addresses, leads that sign up with non-deliverable domains or simple typos, and more. Email list cleaning helps you avoid all of these potential pitfalls.
Speed up delivery: A bad list can slow your delivery rate to the end recipient, as receivers can throttle your mail or completely block you.
Enhance your online reputation: If you start a campaign with a list of old, stale, duplicate, or unverified email addresses, you could produce high spam complaints, reach invalid emails, and/or hit spam traps. Each of these hurts your reputation and negates your efforts. On the other hand, sending emails to a clean list of genuinely interested prospects enhances your brand and boosts your return.
Increased ROI: There’s no chance of a sale if you send emails to bad addresses. Your campaign could even backfire if you send to invalid email addresses or spam traps. Increase ROI by performing data hygiene first.
What Does Email List Cleaning Entail?
Keeping a clean and healthy email marketing list is a staple of any email marketing program and requires you to proactively manage the following:
Subscriber information: Anyone who has signed up for an email campaign is a “subscriber.” Their contact information is incredibly valuable to your business because it could result in a converted lead or sale. However, this information is useless, even detrimental, if it’s not accurate. The trick is to have the right, correct subscriber information at your fingertips so you have better success during the lifecycle of engagement with the recipient.
Bounce data: It’s a waste to send to emails that simply bounce right back. Stay on top of bounce data and remove bad emails from your list.
Unsubscribes: If a prospect unsubscribes from an email campaign and you continue to send emails anyway, you put your reputation at risk. Responding to opt-out requests immediately is an essential part of cleaning your email lists (and a legal requirement under CAN-SPAM). Many email service providers (ESPs) do this for your accounts automatically.Watch out for the people who unsubscribe by sending you an email instead of clicking the opt-out link. It is a best practice to monitor accounts for people who do this.
5 Tips for Keeping Your Email Lists Clean
Data hygiene should be an ongoing task for your business. Try these tips to keep your lists squeaky clean:
Be strategic about the leads you acquire: Check each lead and assess its fit for your business before you add it to a list. Then, make sure the lead is added to the correct list and entered correctly for best results. There are real-time validation companies that can verify the emails at time of addition.
Allow recipients to opt-in to your emails: Obtaining prospects’ permission first ensures your list is filled with recipients who are eager to receive your content. This is becoming a necessity in optimal deliverability.
Use data checkers: You can avoid getting bad email addresses by using data checkers at the point of data collection. That way, only properly formatted email addresses are accepted into your contact database.
Clean out spam email addresses: Any email address that hasn’t seen any engagement – opens and or clicks – in the last 180 days should probably be removed from your list or targeted for a reengagement campaign. Blacklist operators create spam traps with email addresses that have gone dormant. While this helps catch spammers, it can also result in you becoming blacklisted if you continue to bombard such an inbox with messages. Monitor your email lists and recipient engagement to avoid this.
Use an online tool: List cleaning and validation is a tedious task. With the help of an email list cleaning service, you can quickly tune up your lists.
Want to learn how to avoid the ominous and ever-infamous blacklist, get smart about spam traps, and learn how to protect your email performance? Register for the free webinar:
Join David Fowler, Chief Privacy Officer at Act-On Software, and Craig Swerdloff, Co-Founder & CEO of LeadSpend, to discuss the different types of traps, how to avoid them, and what to do if you get blacklisted.
The two sections above are part of the economic metrics used to evaluate the value you are capable of delivering. The right side indicates labor cost impacts where the buyer has the option to reallocate resources. The message it is delivering is that you can do more with less staff. A 2.1% labor cost impact is equal to over 30 Full Time Equivalent personnel (FTE).
Each time you talk to a business owner (if they are honest) they will tell you about how hard it is to keep sales up enough to support their company. Sure, it is easier than ever to get raw sales leads. Digital media offers up a host of ways to find people who are interested in what your company has to offer.
One of the areas of 
It’s been five years since we started moving our marketing, and our customers’ marketing, toward more of an inbound approach. Most of our customers are B2B marketers, so we strive to find the best channels and content to meet their goals for lead generation and conversion to customers. We usually include social media in the mix, some customers more than others, depending on where their buyers are most likely to be found online. The question remains—is social media an effective channel for B2B lead generation, or should we focus on other channels?
Email as a marketing channel isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. According to 
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There is no question that e-newsletters continue to be extremely effective marketing tools. However, just like with any marketing tactic, the tool is only as good as what the user allows it to be. In the case of email marketing, what should be a very powerful outreach tactic can backfire spectacularly without proper caution. To avoid that kind of scenario, we are offering you five tips to make sure your e-newsletters are as effective as possible.
The email ecosystem is constantly updating, changing the way we strategize email marketing initiatives. Tactics that worked three to five years ago don’t necessarily work today. Today, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) look at many different variables when determining whether to deliver one of our marketing emails to one of their customers.
Data hygiene should be an ongoing task for your business. Try these tips to keep your lists squeaky clean: