Rnordman

Gone are the days of “Let’s not get personal; this is business”, or “My personal preferences have nothing to do with my business decisions”. All this has changed. Marketers are seeing now how crafting a satisfying customer experience has everything to do with knowing and understanding personal choices, behaviour and mindset. Clearly, business is now personal. And without personalization, there is no business.

Take a look at this study an what it tells us about the benefits and challenges of personalized media programs, which is only one tool in the whole spectrum of personalized marketing.

The biggest benefit, as is apparent from this study is that not only does personalization drive increased sales but it also becomes the catalyst for repeat purchases. Given the long-standing challenge for B2B marketers, i.e., how to reduce cost per lead, this phenomenon is possibly the most worthy outcome of personalized marketing.

Traditional media can very quickly and exponentially drive up marketing costs if personalization becomes a top priority for your organization. Is there a better, more cost-effective way to approach personalization? In my opinion, social media has the answer. When integrated seamlessly into your overall B2B marketing efforts, the cost related challenges of personalized marketing can be overcome to a huge extent with the effective use of social media. It is hard to get our heads wrapped around this realization of “it’s not business if it’s not personal”, but it is definitely the way things are for now and will continue to be for a long time.

Although it is not a new one, I still think many of the ideas in this resource are useful—take a look at 10 ways to implement personalized marketing.

The Key to Personalized Marketing: Big Data and Predictive Analytics

You want to get personal with your prospective customers? Get to know their personalities. That’s the undeniable first step to personalized marketing. The essential tools you need to get to that first step are Big Data and Predictive Analytics. Basic data analytics is no longer sufficient because it can only tell you how your buyer is behaving right now. You want to get to the point where you can glean insights into future behaviour and trends. You need that marketing prediction based on hard data in order to personalize your social media programs, direct marketing, email marketing and all forms of online and offline marketing methodologies you are using. By layering in additional data and using predictive modeling, you can discover valuable information about when your offer has the strongest potential to deliver conversion with a particular buyer and what type of promotion they are most likely to respond to favourably.

Remember that you can never find out everything you want to know about your customers, but you can use what you do know. Prioritize the facts and figures you have in hand and craft your marketing campaigns around that knowledge. For instance, if geography plays an important role in the purchase decision for your product or service, use that as the key idea in your personalized campaign. On the other hand, if a particular social channel sees highly engaged activity by your ideal customer, then that’s definitely where you want to be—interacting, listening, educating and feeding social conversations that will build engagement in your brand.

A word of caution here—social can be interesting and uniquely personal but it can also become dangerously intrusive, obtrusive and distasteful. There is a fine line between trying to engage buyers through social media and turning them off with your “24/7, in-my-face” social chatter.

Finally, let’s always remember as B2B marketers, that lead generation cannot be cost and time effective unless you have a holistic solution that offers a 360° view and a defined process to deliver true, qualified leads.

Have you experienced a personalized approach to marketing and lead generation? If so, was it a significant factor in your buying decision? Share in the comments below.

Image credit: Shutterstock

As executive-in-residence at Scale Venture Partners, I’ve worked with a number of SaaS startups to help them refine the efficiency of their operations. One of the things that is often neglected is customer churn. Early focus on churn helps build discipline that becomes even more important as a company grows to $100 million or more in revenues.

In the bad old days of on-premise Enterprise software, a startup was considered to have traction when it got its first dozen paying customers. These were typically six-figure deals and required a lot of heavy lifting to get the customers into production. While the old-school field sales model was not particularly efficient, it had the virtue of driving an organization toward making early customers successful.

When you have hundreds or thousands of customers, though, things can become rather anonymous and it’s harder to make sure customers are using your product correctly. If customers aren’t successful in using your product, they churn.

Having churn is like rowing a leaky boat. After a while, you spend more time bailing water than moving forward. By contrast, organizations that focus on reducing churn will find that their revenue grows every quarter.

Break it down

To accurately measure what’s going on, you should begin by breaking out churn (customer cancellation) from contraction (a downgrade in spending). Measure downgrade and churn separately from upgrades and expansion; otherwise, your net growth numbers will mask problems that are bubbling below the surface. If your SaaS product has different editions (e.g. Basic, Pro, Enterprise) you should watch for downgrades that suggest customers are not seeing the value in the higher-end features.

It’s also worth paying attention to churn and contraction by customer segment. In most SaaS businesses, churn is highest in low-end customers — some of whom will inevitably be acquired or go out of business. Over time, if you move upmarket to larger SMB or Enterprise customers, low-end churn becomes less significant. Customers who spend a lot of money usually have greater commitment and resources for working through any speed bumps during implementation. They’re also far less likely to switch to another vendor with newer features.

Understand the reasons

The most important thing is to understand why customers are downgrading or churning. While it’s easy to speculate, the best approach is simply to ask your customers. Remember, your purpose in doing this is to understand the customer’s experience, not to second-guess them.While founders sometimes get defensive, recognize the value of the feedback you’re getting, even if it’s negative. And make sure that this information is shared within the company.

Classify your findings to determine whether it was a customer issue, a sales issue, a product issue or some external factor. Did the customer not understand what they were buying? Did they lack the skills to implement your product? Was it missing key features? Were there quality or reliability issues?

Your first line of defense in reducing churn is to make sure your product lives up to its marketing claims and that it quickly delivers value to the customers. Depending on your product, it may be worth adding some introspection to help you determine usage patterns — less-frequent log-ins, for instance — that suggest a customer is at risk of churning.

Try a human touch

At Zendesk and MySQL, we implemented several customer programs to reduce churn and benefited from below-industry churn rates. I wanted to avoid being the kind of company that only calls up customers when seeking a renewal. Instead, we built a Customer Account Management team that worked with customers over the entire lifecycle.

We defined a twelve-month program with regular check-ins, emails and phone calls to make sure customers were successful in using the product. The Customer Account Managers also kept their eyes peeled for issues that might suggest the account was at risk of churn, such as if a new manager was hired, or if certain features weren’t being used. They kept accounts up to date with information about best-practices for customizing their setup, implementing new features and so on. When necessary, the Customer Account Manager could call on resources in engineering or elsewhere to solve a customer’s issues.

Occasionally, fast-growing customers would outgrow their initial setup. We worked proactively to help them through these situations. While this meant undertaking some modest amount of services for free, the alternative was far worse: an unhappy customer who would inevitably blame our software. In general, by being proactive, we could turn these situations around and win the ongoing loyalty of what would otherwise have become a problem customer.

Move toward negative churn

In a rapidly growing business, you may experience “negative churn,” meaning that your upgrades and expansion more than make up for contraction and churn. But even in this kind of scenario, it’s vital to pay attention to churn. To fail to do so leaves you blind to trends of customer dissatisfaction that may indicate fundamental problems with your product or your business model.

While some modest amount of churn is inevitable, you should strive to get your churn rate as low as possible and then continue to monitor any changes. If your churn rate is more than 10 percent annually, you have work to do.

Zack Urlocker is Executive-in-Residence at Scale Venture Partners. He was previously the Chief Operating Officer at Zendesk and the VP Products at MySQL. Reach him @ZUrlocker

Feature image from Thinkstock/AleksandarVrazlski

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This is the second in a five part series discussing the 5 most common complaints I hear from business owners and sales team leaders. Read the first installment here. If you have been in business for more than five or six years then you may remember a time when the phone rang and you had enough or more business than your salespeople could handle. Since the economic downturn began several years ago, that dynamic has shifted to the point where most salespeople need to actually proactively generate some of their own business. They cannot just rely on the leads to find them anymore.

If you have witnessed this change in your company but your salespeople have not adapted to this new environment then you must share some of the blame. What are your clearly communicated expectations of them? If you are like many, you have communicated a sales revenue expectation but that is the extent. Too many managers only evaluate salespeople based on closed sales. You do need to start with a sales goal but then you need to go deeper.

Once the sales goal has been established (and it actually would be more beneficial to hear from the salesperson the amount they need to earn to achieve their goals), then you and each individual salesperson need to break down that goal into a quarterly, monthly or even weekly goal. Help the salesperson calculate, based on his or her closing ratios, how many deals need to be in the various stages of the pipeline to close enough business to meet his or her goals. Then, the salesperson needs to create their plan. What are the activities that they will execute every day, week or month that will generate enough opportunities? Remember that activities are leading indicators and closed sales are lagging indicators.

You may have done all this, many sales managers do. But the disconnect comes from actually holding them accountable to those agreed upon activities. What are the consequences if they fail to do what they agreed they were going to do? If you have not established agreed upon consequences then you can blame yourself for your salespeople’s behavior. Start with the plan, and be sure to establish consequences of failing to execute the appropriate activities. Then follow through with those consequences. Here’s an example: If it is a requirement that the salesperson generates a certain number of their own leads to be successful, but they fail to do it, you may be able to easily withhold company generated leads as a consequence.

If, however, you are doing all these things and the salespeople are still underperforming in their proactivity, then it may be that you have salespeople who may not be able to do what is necessary. You may have hired based on a different environment when these proactive activities were not as critical. Or maybe you thought they would do it when you hired them, but you are now disappointed. Or, maybe they don’t have the financial motivation to generate more business on their own. Do you even know if they can prospect and successfully get their own leads? If they aren’t doing it now, can they be taught? This is where utilizing an objective analytical assessment of their collection of strengths, skills and weaknesses comes in handy. We use the #1 rated Objective Management Group battery of assessments. Here’s a sample if you want to see the information provided.

As a recap, there are two simple solutions when faced with salespeople who wait for the phone to ring:

1. Set activity goals with consequences for failing to execute
2. Objectively assess your sales team members to determine if they can actually do the proactive prospecting activity

Sales leaders believe marketing has some work to do when it comes to driving the right leads. In the latest CSO Insights Sales Performance Optimization Report, only 33.4% of sales leaders gave marketing a passing grade when it came to lead quality. That number dropped 6 percentage points when it came to quantity.

Poor alignment in sales and marketing is nothing new. If you asked marketing leaders the same types of question, the results would probably be very different. Almost every sales organization has been challenged at one time or another with “out-of-sync” sales and marketing departments.

The Root of Disjointed Departments

Often, the problem is not the content. It’s very likely your marketing team is publishing great content that effectively demonstrates the value your organization provides. The challenge is in the usability. Your sales organization either (1) doesn’t know how to correctly leverage that content or (2) marketing hasn’t made it sales consumable, so your sales force can easily use it with customers.

Marketing and sales speak very different languages. They have different DNA. If both of them are going to improve sales and drive revenue effectively, they need to understand each other’s goals and motivations. Participate in your own rescue.

Sellers, don’t just sit there and complain that they’ve never sold and have no idea what you deal with on a day-to-day basis. Those are tired excuses, (P.S. they’re likely saying something similar about you.) Help your marketing team first, understand the language of salespeople. Then, help them speak it.

Here are five things your sales team can do right now to improve your sales and marketing alignment and help marketing understand your point-of-view:

1. Proof Points

The best proof points come from the sales team. Best-in-class salespeople know the success in their accounts. They have the client relationships and the trusted advisor status to gather the measurable results. Sellers can quickly enable marketing to demonstrate the value of your solutions by taking charge of gathering the proof as soon as possible after a successful engagement. Help marketing determine the gaps. Share with them our Proof Point White Space Template or do your own analysis.

Which of your value drivers need stronger proof behind them?

Develop a process to fill white space for future prospects. When that next opportunity comes up, you’ll be glad you did the work to fill in these gaps.

2. Sales Calls

One of the most powerful components of an effective sales messaging platform is that it arms the salesperson with what is needed at the “moment of truth,” when you’re in the middle of the conversation with your prospect. Help marketing understand your world. Invite them to sales conversations as silent observers. They’ll welcome the opportunity to better understand the questions you answer in your sales process and as a result, will be able to better produce content you can easily apply to your sales conversations. (Where do you think we get our blog ideas from?!)

3. Pipeline Planning

Involve marketing in the pipeline planning reviews. What activities are your reps planning to drive pipeline next quarter? How can marketing help in specific territories? Include them in the meetings and invite them to share ideas on how they can add value to your sales planning process.

4. Get Social

Studies show sellers who engage socially drive more revenue. It’s likely your marketing department is spending a lot of time and effort sharing information socially. They’re trying to drive leads and nurture clients, on your behalf. Help them spread the word. Share their content on your own social networks. Promote them on Twitter, like their posts on Instagram, engage with their LinkedIn posts.

Social media shouldn’t be something they just do. By engaging on social media, you build an unfair advantage over your competitors. Your social contacts will attach your subject matter expertise with the valuable information you provide. You’ll build contacts and enhance your professional brand.

5. Check-In Calls

Don’t underestimate the power of communication. Schedule a regular check in call between a member of the sales team and marketing to determine areas of opportunity. These calls don’t have to be long. Limit the discussion to three action steps each side can take in the next 1-3 months. For example, marketing can commit to participating in 2 sales calls. Sales will commit to gathering one marketable proof point in that time period. Sometimes, the simplest of efforts can make the biggest impact.

Clarity.fm is a great site allowing prospective customers to ask quesitons and find advisers based on their answers. This question got an answer from me

I’ve seen a few different approaches.

Some companies simply have their blog buried somewhere on their website.

Some start an industry-wide standalone publication that’s more like a magazine/newspaper.

Some build a standalone blog just for their company

Some build some kind of a content hub, kind of like Hubspot that seems to mix a bit of everything.

How should I choose where and how to structure my content? Where should I be directing my energy to efficiently generate leads? Does separating your blog/publication from your company website reduce the visitor’s exposure to your brand too much? Does the increase in visibility of the blog/publication as well as amount of outside content offset the reduced exposure to your brand thanks to greater quantity of visitors?

And my reply

The most leads come where marketing promotion and content are set up so the visitor flows naturally from one to the other.

They start investigating or discovering free content, then from links in the content or below/around the sidebars or a popup lightbox they click through to other material. And then an explicit sales message is put in front of them that they activate.

The way to plan and structure your content is to first plan your product sales hierarchy (what they buy first, second etc) and then align the content which will persuade a visitor to buy each to work in concert stepping them up naturally from a browse to a first purchase, return for a second purchase etc.

I suggest you start with a planning session to map out your business products and the content you’ve already got. Then put these into a process so new content, new social sites and new products can be added over time using the same structure.

If this sounds a bit confusing, give us a call and let’s help you out.

I always knew I wanted to be a Sales Manager, (after my tuba career didn’t work out). Seriously though, I’ve had some terrific sales managers in my career. No strike that, they were sales leaders who left a lasting impression. The difference between the two is critical to a sales person’s development and success.

Managers spend their time focusing on the tasks. Leaders execute the vision. People become sales managers thinking they’re going to change the world, but all too often what they end up doing is reacting to constantly changing direction from above.

I learned early on that the front-line sales manager has the toughest job in the company. Front-line managers are trying to motivate, coach, develop, reinforce and inspect their own teams, but they’re dealing with constant pressure from top leadership. I’ve seen both sides of this coin and you have as well.

On one side you have the leadership who is in lock step with growing revenue through highly skilled, well thought out and executed sales campaigns. On the other, you have the leadership that leads by the kneejerk reaction to the latest report on this month’s sales or activities. Front-line managers who work under the latter end up spending too much of their time running interference. They end up trying to create a shield between upper management and the sales rep, instead of being able to align their efforts with the true company objectives.

Top sales leadership often has clear goals on where they want the organization to go, but, somewhere down the line, those goals often turn into misguided directives. You’ve seen them yourself. Pipeline is low so leadership sends down a new mandate to make 20 calls a day. What happens? Reps spend their days making sure they hit their call numbers, not paying attention to what they’re saying in those calls or if they’re even calling on qualified pipeline. What results is a sales team that is really good at “gaming” the system.

Sure, you may have some success, but you won’t drive real change in your company. Remember, people are going to do what you pay them to do and what you talk to them about doing. Accordingly, Sales Managers will act the way upper management wants them to act. You have to ask yourself one question every day as a sales leader; “What value will my leadership and direction deliver to the sales organization?”

Help your managers succeed. They’re your boots on the ground. Expect them to lead and give them the direction and tools they need. Focus on these four areas:

1.  Drive the Right Accountability

What do you want your reps to be accountable for? Consider my “number of calls” example above. As a sales leader, I’d rather my sales people make four calls a day that have great outcomes rather than make ten calls that lead to nothing. Drive the accountability that ensures your front-line sales managers focus on the activities necessary for repeatable success and that they do them well.

• What’s the best way for the sales manager to be accountable for driving qualified pipeline on their team?
• How can you help your sales managers ensure their teams are following client focused, value-based selling principles on every sales call?
• How are your managers responsible for reaching higher-level executives in their prospects’ organizations?

Don’t get caught up in benchmarks that won’t create lasting success. Make sure your front-line managers are accountable for the right actions.

2. Build Customer Alignment

The focus of any sales organization should be on what provides value for the customer. Are your front- line managers reacting to what’s urgent, rather than what’s most important? I’ve seen, and even participated in, sales managers allowing the sales person to become not only the account manager, but the product specialist, the customer service rep, even the chauffeur, especially when it’s a big account.

More times than not, that is a disservice to the customer and often creates a debilitating ripple effect. Your customer doesn’t get the company’s best. The salesperson bends over backwards, trying to be all things to all people because he/she doesn’t have the resources to pull in the right expertise when it’s necessary. The salespeople don’t have time to sell. The front-line managers are buried in trying to make the salespeople sell. No one is effective because they’re submerged in fire drills.

Alleviate the piling-on effect for your sales teams and front-line managers. Build alignment between your sales, services, and product teams to ensure not only a buyer-centric sales process, but also a customer-first service structure.

3. Involve Them In Initiatives

Give your front-line managers the power and influence they need to succeed. People are effective leaders when they are emotionally connected to their initiatives. Enable them to lead their teams, by helping them to be effective change agents. Don’t force new programs on them. Instead involve them in the creation of any initiatives that are directly related to their team’s success. They’ll be more willing to drive it on their own teams if they had a say in its development.

4. Develop an Repeatable Rhythm

Provide your front-line sales managers with a repeatable rhythm that supports consistency throughout your sales organization.

Do your front-line managers have a cadence that helps them coach reps to success?

The amount of time your front-line managers waste just trying to keep up with the forecast is valuable time not helping their team sell.

Ensure consistency and improve efficiency by giving them tools that make their jobs easier.

Develop a sales operating rhythm that provides a consistent language and process around:

• Territory Reviews
• Account Reviews
• Opportunity Reviews
• Forecast Reviews
• Active Sales Call Participation and Feedback

Remember, it doesn’t matter how many reviews you do with someone, if there’s no focus on executable action, there is no value within the sales team. An operating rhythm helps you as a sales leader drive that action. .

When everyone is using the same Management Operating Rhythm®, they’re all speaking the same language and everyone knows the benchmarks they need to create success. As a result, your front-line managers are less burdened and there’s consistency throughout the sales organization. Your sales managers then have the opportunity to become sales leaders because everything they do has value attached to it, instead of being some sort of compliance exercise.

Enable your front-line managers to spend their time creating value for the company. Don’t make them run interference. Don’t pile on. Help them become leaders and focus on the right activities and your sales organization will generate more revenue and more repeat business.

Online advertising trivia 101.

How much does Google make a year?

A lot.

Why? Their stuff is really good, and they have lots of it.

Second question, how about did Facebook make?

So one might conclude, does Google have way more traffic than Facebook’s traffic?

Nope. They have about the same. And it looks like Facebook is going to exceed the amount of traffic that Google gets on its properties.

So what the HECK happened.

Same amount of traffic yet only a fraction of the revenue?

What’s going on here?

Simple: demand GENERATION vs. demand FULFILLMENT.

No TWO traffic source qualities are ever the same.

Que es demand generacion vs. demand fulfillmente?

(Ok, my spanish is rusty.)

What’s the difference, you ask?

Demand generation – People don’t know who you are. They discover who you are (company, product, idea, service, trend, news, organization, etc.).

Demand fulfillment – People know you you are. They are looking for you.

Thus…

Demand fulfillment cannot precede demand generation because people wouldn’t know what to look for or what search terms to use.

Makes sense, right?

How would you know about a product if you’ve never even HEARD of it?

If you’ve never even heard of it.. what would you enter into the input box into a search engine?

Demand generation (s awareness, and demand fulfillment is satisfying the demand (for more knowledge). When people say “lead generation”, they’re actually being vague because they’re not asking which.

And of course, if you are aware, there is a HIGHER chance that the visitor has the desire to purchase (assuming the product/service is commercial in nature).

Certain sites are more on the demand fulfillment side than others..

Here’s an excerpt of an interview with Sheryl Sandberg, the CFO for Facebook (src):

Q: You’ve said Facebook’s sweet spot is the top of the marketing funnel–that is, ads that create awareness and consideration of a brand, rather than direct marketing. Is that turning out to be true?

A: It’s demand generation. We’re not really demand fulfillment, when you’ve already figured it out what you’re going to buy–that’s search. We’re demand generation, before you know you want something, before you know you’re interested in something.

Q: Yet it seems like most of Facebook’s ad business is really not branding yet–it’s more direct-response-oriented by advertisers that are looking for a fairly overt result, like getting an email subscription for a daily deal or trying out a social game.

A: I don’t want to confuse wanting a direct response with demand generation. (She walks up to the whiteboard.) Here’s the marketing funnel. Here’s what advertisers would call intent (in the middle of the funnel). So above this is demand generation. And below this is demand fulfillment. Here (at the top of the funnel) is awareness. And then you go all the way down to purchase. What every advertiser is looking for is this (she circles “purchase” in red). The question is, where do you start?

When you see advertisements on Facebook that want a response, I still think they’re demand generation. But they’re trying to get you here (she points to “awareness” at the top of the funnel). In other words, they’re taking you all the way from here (awareness) to here (purchase) in one ad or one experience. They don’t believe you got on the site looking for what they’re selling. When you go to search, you’re “OK, shower curtain. Looking for shower curtain.” You already have intent, I’m going to take you to purchase.

If I saw a shower curtain on our site, no one thinks I’m searching for shower curtains. It’s more that a friend bought a shower curtain. If I see an ad for Sprinkles cupcakes, I’m not looking for dessert. So there’s still demand generation. Demand generation does not mean you don’t want action. It just means you’re starting here. You’re trying to generate awareness.

Case Study: DropBox

When DropBox came out, no one had any idea what it was.

Especially those in non-tech industries.

So how did the founder of DropBox tackle the problem of distribution when he first made the product?

He tried search engine marketing… and failed miserably

So how did the DropBox team solve this problem?

Simple: a really easy to use product and growth hacking.

Why Demand Fulfillment = $$$

Where does the demand fulfillment (i.e. search) actually occur?

BINGO… SEARCH ENGINES.

This is WHY search engines make EXPONENTIALLY more than media sites because the intent to purchase is WAY better.

Because odds of you deciding to buy on FIRST exposure is fairly small repetition and followup can increase your chance of selling).

So if you ARE searching for something, you must’ve had a decent number of exposures that would’ve caused you to search for it.

In another words, social media sites are basically doing ALL the work while Google is reaping ALL the harvest.

So what? WIIFM?

Your search leads are more likely to convert to your sales message than social media/display leads.

Sure, higher cost traffic but more likely to opt in to your lead generation marketing campaign.

With this higher cost (i.e. your leads are already prepped), you can go immediately to pricing, testimonials, etc. because they are aware of the benefits.. they already have all the basic information.

So with leads that were generated with non-search traffic, the costs will be LESS but you can’t start automatically with the stuff that’s in the LATTER phase of the sales process.

You have to give them the sales schpiel.

You must answer”What’s In It For Me?” and tell your Unique Selling Proposition.

Why? Because they haven’t been exposed to your message frequently enough. (Fortunately for you, there is retargeting techniques that can easily solve that without breaking the bank.)

Key Takeaway

You have to know where your company’s marketing plan lies – demand generation or demand fulfillment.

This will determine your content marketing, your ad prices, and of course ultimately, your cost per customer.

A typical corporate Facebook strategy looks like this: build a massive community, say brilliant things that make you look thoughtful, and generate as much likes and shares as humanly possible. That will drive traffic and increase business objectives. Well, not really… Facebook is still a good venue for reaching prospects, but the marketing approach has changed over the past decade.

David Serfaty, in the Forbes article Why CMOs Must Change Their Plans For Facebook, suggests that CMOs may be executing against an outdated model of Facebook marketing which does little to drive consumer behavior. According to Serfaty, marketers should consider pivoting their Facebook strategy; they need to lead their brand’s shift towards mobile, which requires a better understanding the Facebook user experience and taking more pride in their Facebook pages.

It’s true that everything is mobile. And if it’s not a key part of your Facebook strategy now, you’ll likely miss the opportunity. By 2017, five billion people will use mobile phones. Today, over 39 percent of Internet usage is through smartphones, while 12 percent is done through tablets. And with the introduction of new laptop/tablet hybrids and wearable technology, the total number is projected to grow significantly in the next three to five years. But it’s not just the approach, it’s about the product or service that you offer. If it’s not somehow mobile connected, it will fall flat among Facebook users.

It’s time for marketers to spend some time getting to know the new ways of Facebook – particularly its custom audience tool, which allows marketers to tailor messages to users at critical points in the sales funnel. This is huge for marketers because ROI is much easier to measure. And the right mix of personalized content on Facebook can bring your customers closer to your brand.

But beyond this lies the most obvious of all: your brand’s actual Facebook page. And it’s not just about how it looks – although that’s very important. It should serve a purpose – mainly to encourage customers to take a positive action toward your brand. Serfaty states it this way: “Facebook wants to become your brand’s de facto online and offline customer acquisition and sales hub.” And it’s true – Facebook’s advanced direct response and targeting solutions give brands the ability to better engage new customers as well as existing customers looking for support. A good example is Nike+ Support, which engages users to learn about how to use Nike’s wearable technology. Another one is Johnson & Johnson, which provides opportunities for consumers to share their stories and learn about health and beauty issues that impact their lives. Ultimately, everything leads back to a product that can help them.

Keep in mind – when tweaking your Facebook approach – it’s all about content balance. Too much and you’ll lose their attention. Too little and you’ll fail to connect the message with your objective. If you incorporate Facebook’s advanced target tools, engage customers through calls to action, and deliver the right mix of words and visuals, you will discover a flowing pipeline of potential customers.

The revolution of sales will not be televised. It’s going to happen quickly and it’s already beginning to change the way business is done across the. Whether you accept it or not, social selling is changing the way organizations sell, recruit, hire and build relationships.

The buzz surrounding social selling continues to grow. More and more businesses are looking for opportunities to capitalize on social networks and technology to drive sales and results. Marketers and social media influencers have spent years talking about the promise of social media and how it would drive real results for businesses. Finally, that promise is becoming a reality, as social selling is becoming real. Some people think we’ve already seen the peak of social media and its impact. We’re of the belief that it’s just getting started.

According to one of the latest eMarketer reports, nearly one in four people worldwide were actively using social networks in 2013. By 2017, the global social network audience is expected to total 2.55 billion people. This type of growth will cross into industries that have yet to be truly disrupted by social media. It will force sales professionals who have felt safe from social selling to embrace the change that is in front of them.

The future is exciting. But so is what’s happening in this space today. We already live in a world where social selling is making a difference for organizations and driving real results to their bottom line. In a recent study from Jim Keenan, it was revealed that sales professionals who use social media are 78% more likely to outsell their colleagues who don’t. And the evidence continues to pile up. Here are a few other reasons social selling has us excited:

Technology: It’s said that technology doesn’t start a revolution but instead that a revolution is started with technology. The revolution of social selling is going to happen on the backs of technology that has come before it. Social selling will only become real through a commitment to leveraging existing social channels within organizations along with the adoption of new and innovative technologies.

Partner Integration: The opportunity for social selling also lies in the ability for organizations to integrate their social selling technologies with existing tools. As we continue to push our technologies to integrate with tools like Salesforce, we look forward to a seamless integration between social selling and the CRM.

Smarter Decisions: At the end of the day, one of the key benefits of our technology is the ability to make smarter decisions. We provide our customers with the ability to see potential at-risk accounts based on reports that show relationship strength over time. It’s this type of insight that can help businesses retain customers and make calculated decisions around their relationship efforts.

Real Results: When a business starts to see results, they start to see the return on their investment. The integration of technology and social selling tools will give businesses an opportunity to clearly see how their sales processes are improving and how these social selling technologies are driving real results.

Social selling isn’t rocket science. Even if you don’t have an analytical bone your body you can capitalize on the power of social selling for your business. There is no excuse for b2b sales professionals to continue ignoring an opportunity to build stronger pipelines and close more deals.

What ways are you using social selling to get ahead?

Effective on March 26, 2014, the Terms of Service agreements for SlideShare and Pulse, will be tied directly into the social enterprise services general User Agreement and Privacy Policy (TOS). LinkedIn will also make other changes to its general Terms of Service agreement.

According to The Next Web, the following changes are on the horizon:

• Member data: In Section 2.14, LinkedIn clarifies it will take steps to let members know about demands for their data unless it is legally prohibited from doing so, or the request is deemed an emergency. LinkedIn also says it may dispute such demands if it believes they are too broad, too vague, or lack proper authority.
• In Section 2.12, LinkedIn clarifies that its corporate offerings include Talent Solutions, Marketing Solutions, and Sales Solutions.
• Mobile numbers: In Section 1.2, LinkedIn includes the forthcoming option to use your mobile number to sign in to LinkedIn.
• Content Availability: In Section 4.1, LinkedIn emphasizes it’s important to be transparent that sometimes laws may require it to remove certain content (e.g. when it’s hurtful or infringing on others’ rights).

With a stronger emphasis on mobile and the willingness to move content (thanks China), it looks like LinkedIn’s new TOS is meant to help the company grow and change with the times.

SEE ALSO: LinkedIn Just Launched A ‘Simplified Chinese’ Web Portal

LinkedIn says it will add terminology that notes for customers that SlideShare can be personalized based on your LinkedIn profile, your network, and your engagement with content from both services. LinkedIn will also clearly note that Pulse will be able to deliver more relevant personalized professional content.

Further details about the direct integration of SlideShare and Pulse have not been revealed at this time.

B2B marketers have taken up the challenge to create great content. They’re investing time, effort and money into content marketing. People are reading their content. But, effectiveness remains elusive.

Only 9% strongly agree with the statement: “I know our digital marketing is working.”

That’s only 92 of over 1,000 marketers. Yet, 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing.  Does this scare you? It should.

What’s the problem?

Well, it would be easy to say that there’s a lack of strategy,but let’s narrow it down to something you can do right now that will help to improve your efforts. One of the biggest failings I see is a lack of orchestration for momentum.

You can write the best content in the world, but without a plan, it’s only a pit stop for busy prospects who may read it but then quickly move on. Content must build interest that translates into intent.

In other words, your content must do more than appeal to buyers. I read a ton of content every day. Some of it is a waste of time, some of it is interesting, but very rarely does any of it make me want more. And, if it does, quite often getting more related content isn’t easy to do.

If you want to get past your content being just a pit stop for buyers, here are a few things to think about:

Take a Serial Approach

Serial publishing is nothing new. In fact, Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers was serialized in 1836. The reason I bring this up is that short-form content is in demand. For B2B marketers with a complex solution, it’s impossible to share all the expertise and guidance needed in short form. But unfolding the story a bit at a time can work very well, especially if you have a very long sales cycle and a number of people who must become engaged to reach consensus before a decision can be made.

Tell Your Audience What to Do Next

One of the things that drives me a bit crazy is when good content is produced without connecting to what comes before or after. It just sits there like an island. And it doesn’t count if you have “sign up for a demo” or “contact a sales rep” as the only options for the audience. Marketers need to embrace a guidance approach. Prospects are busy. They aren’t going to hunt or search for related content. It’s up to you to tell them what to do next. Those who are interested will take action. Reading more than one piece of content on a topic should increment lead score and even trigger more to test the level of that interest.

But we tend to leave our prospects hanging because we don’t think about “If they’re interested in this subject, what else do they need to know?” We don’t create content with follow-ons. Marketers still tend to create content as one-off ideas. This is a missed opportunity.

Provide Cross-Persona Perspectives

In B2B buying there are multiple people with a stake in the decision. Yet, I very rarely see content designed for, say, a Director of IT, that includes an offer of content that speaks to the VP of IT Operations as a “sharing” opportunity. Take a look at all the personas on your buying committee and figure out how to help get your ideas shared among them. This is really helpful in situations where you have problems reaching a persona online, such as those farther up the ranks who may not spend the amount of time on social media as their subordinates do, for example.

Have you thought about how you’ll get them involved? Or are you using “hope” as a strategy and just publishing that content online into an audience void?

Go Deeper

Marketers are often told to go create awesome, helpful content. But, what does this mean? If we’re going to create content that drives business, we need to speak to what our prospects must have, not to what they merely need.

While “grow your revenues” or “cut costs” are always objectives, the phrases don’t mean anything. Take a look at your persona and see what it means in the context of his or her roles and responsibilities.

• A product manager who can get her product to market three months faster than they do now to gain first-mover advantage that could result in larger market share will pay attention to how that can be made to happen.
• A service desk manager who can equip his team with the tools to close out service tickets 20% faster at higher first-response resolution rates while working to reach higher levels of ITSM maturity will want to know how to make that happen.
• An oil field asset manager who can increase proven reserves with a tool that gives his geophysicists greater visibility to the subsurface will have visions of career advancement.
• A start-up CEO who needs to focus all his team’s energy on developing enhancements for his SaaS application and onboarding customers who learns that managed services from a cloud provider can relieve the stress and cost of hiring an in-house IT staff while bringing additional expertise he could not afford otherwise.

You get the idea. Specificity wins hands down against ambiguity. The deeper you can get, the more closely your content matches the context for your prospect’s situation and objectives, the more interest your content will generate.

You’ve got to move them beyond the “So what?” to “That was interesting” to “Tell me more!”

Easy Isn’t Good Enough

Marketers must stop looking at isolated clicks and views for one content asset as the most important KPI for marketing programs. Our content must do more than appeal to buyers one time, it must spur them to action. While it’s great to know that a specific content asset attracted an audience, if that’s all it does, then it’s not doing enough.

One view doesn’t make an MQL. Three or four random views of content on assorted topics will also not produce a prospect intent on buyng.

Business buyers buy to solve a problem that has the potential to cause them to fail at something they’re trying to achieve. So what is your content designed to do?

How are you orchestrating progression for your content marketing programs?

Twitter lead generation cards are a great way to advertise on Twitter and gain leads from interested parties. Here is our beginners guide to setting one up.

Start by logging into Twitter, then select the settings button in the top right of the screen and click on Twitter Ads.

This will then take you through to the Twitter Ads screen, here you want to select ‘Creatives’ from the top options and then ‘Cards’.

You will then be asked to create your first Lead Generation Card. Click this box.

You will now be given the fields in which to enter your information for your Lead Generation Card. As you enter the information the Card will populate on the right so you can see what it might look like.

We also recommend adding an image to your card, to do this click the upload button. Image size is a minimum of 600 pixels wide by 150 tall, with a file size of 1mb or less. IF your image is correct then you will see the four green ticks like below.

Once you have entered in your desired text you will also need to add in where your data privacy policy is shown on your website. Along with the fallback URL of where your users can visit after they have submitted their details. This is great to give the user more information.

Also give your card a name for future reference.

Once you have finished you will be asked to create your card and then to compose a tweet to accompany it.

Compose your tweet in the box. You also have the choice to add paid promotion to the tweet should you wish. Then when you’re ready click Tweet!

Here is how the finished Tweet will look on desktop Twitter. This is what your audience will see.

If your audience clicks more information they will be asked to share their email address.

Once they have entered their details they will be greeted by a thank you message (as specified by you in set up), the ‘Click Here’ link is the Fallback URL.

Here is a look at the Tweet on the mobile version of Twitter.

Once your card has been Tweeted you can log back in at any time to see how many leads it has generated. To download them click the downward pointing arrow. Keep checking back to see if you have gained more, and why not run the card again with another Tweet in the future.

It is possible to integrate you card with specific email providers and CRM systems in the set up, if not you receive a handy spreadsheet with all the info like below!

Happy lead generating!

OTTAWA – Canadians have much to learn from Germany’s famed apprenticeship system despite doubts it could succeed in Canada, Jason Kenney said as he wrapped up a fact-finding mission into how the European powerhouse streams its youth into skilled trades.

“Sure, we can’t pick up the German system and transplant it to Canada — that would be ridiculous,” the employment minister said in a telephone interview, adding it was a “lazy point of view” to be dismissive of the long-established German partnership among government, schools and business.

“Closer collaboration between the education system and employers is so important. Giving kids relevant information about what kind of education is likely to lead to promising careers and remuneration — these things don’t have to be unique to Germany.”

Kenney said Ottawa and provincial governments can also look at “ways of massively expanding paid co-op opportunities for students during post-secondary education” and consider “reinventing” vocational high schools.

The minister has been leading a 30-member delegation of Canadian politicians from five provinces, along with business and labour union representatives, on a trip to Germany and Great Britain to learn about their apprenticeship programs.

The group was in London on Thursday hearing about the British model, a system Kenney called more relevant to Canada because of “legal and cultural” similarities.

One delegate says the trip seems to have invigorated some of the biggest business organizations in Canada, including Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives. Both groups sent representatives.

“We’re not wearing our Ottawa stakeholder hats, we’re looking at this from a national perspective,” said Chris Smillie, senior adviser on government relations for the AFL-CIO’s Canadian chapter, which represents the country’s building trade unions.

“There’s a genuine interest, and lots of what we’re seeing could be done in Canada. The principles behind training have been reinforced and these guys seem really serious about changing the way we do things in Canada.”

One of the knocks against the German system, however, is that children as young as 10 are streamed into a system that combines both general and technical education. Some have suggested that robs students of the freedom to choose their career paths and wouldn’t fly in Canada

Kenney disagreed that the Germans deny children a say in what they want to do when they grow up.

“This is about choices for kids,” he said. “Sometimes the German system is criticized as being brutal with its streaming in the secondary school system. The truth is that they’re just trying to help reflect where kids’ aptitudes and interests are.”

The economic well-being of children was apparently top of mind for Kenney on his European trip.

The minister defended his recent remarks on the Conservative government’s income-splitting pledge by citing a famous American Democratic senator. Kenney found himself in hot water two weeks ago when he said “stable families” were critical to the future economic success of Canadian youth.

“My point was not about any particular configuration of families,” he said.

“Obviously there are kids of single moms and dads who do phenomenally well, and there are some kids in two-parent families that don’t. But my point is we should be empowering families to make the choices they think are best for their kids, and that should entail ending discrimination in the tax code against single-income, two-parent families.”

A litany of social research backs up his remarks, Kenney added, pointing to a 1960s study by former U.S. senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan that warned about the consequences of the breakdown of the African-American family.

Moynihan, at the time a sociologist and research assistant at the U.S. Labor Department, called for more government action to improve the economic prospects of black families.

When the Conservatives campaigned on income-splitting in 2011, opponents accused them of wanting to use the tax system to keep women at home instead of in the paid workforce.

In the interview, Kenney scoffed at that suggestion and suggested a combination of a stable family background and skills training could ensure a path to success for Canadian youth.

“The truth is, yes, there are good outcomes on the whole for kids who go to university, but it’s also true that there are a whole lot of kids with university of degrees who are under-employed in an economy that has an acute skills shortage, particularly in technical areas. We shouldn’t be afraid of saying this.”

The biggest take away from the German portion of the trip, Kenney said, was that Canadian businesses simply must spend more money on training.

“Employers who are serious about their future and about addressing the skills gap need to put more money in the game,” he said, pointing to an OECD report that found Canadian companies have an abysmal record on skills training.

“We need to begin turning that around. That’s where the German system is a great example and inspiration for employers. … The German companies told us that it’s manifestly in everyone’s interest, it’s a huge commercial advantage, if they invest in training.”

Dan Harris, the NDP’s post-secondary education critic, commended Kenney for taking the trip but wondered what’s taken so long as Canada’s youth unemployment rate has lingered stubbornly at about 14 per cent for years.

“Why haven’t they been on this sooner?” he asked.

“We do have some solutions here at home, like a youth hiring tax credit, to give young people that step into employment while making it worthwhile for business. Why haven’t we been doing it? Why instead are we doling out corporate tax credits when not one of them has been tied to job creation?”

— Lee-Anne Goodman

The post Canada can learn from Germany on skills training: Kenney appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The salvation of Quebec’s sovereignty movement has always been the reluctance of many voters and, indeed, of most political journalists to read and remember. Did you know that Jean-François Lisée, the Marois government’s minister for relations with anglophones, expects as many as 300,000 Quebecers to flee the province after a Yes vote in a referendum? Probably not. I’ve never seen anyone quote Lisée about the likelihood of a major post-referendum exodus. Yet he wrote it up in a book he published 14 years ago, and on the off chance anyone forgot to buy the book, he posted an excerpt on his blog, where it remains to this day. Lisée cites estimates between 150,000 and 300,000 departures after a Yes vote, before adding that even though it would mostly only be anglophones, it’d still hurt:

There is no doubt this exodus would be all kinds of trouble for Quebec. The anglophone community contributes to Montreal’s and Quebec’s economic success, to its progress toward a knowledge economy … and powerfully contributes to connecting us with anglophone America, our main client and partner. The departure of 100,000 or 200,000 of them would stop Montreal’s economic recovery in its tracks and aggravate Quebec’s demographic decline …

Funny how he forgot to mention any of that during the 1995 secession referendum.

Lisée goes on to suggest means that might “reduce” this exsanguination from the Quebec economy, and I’ll leave it to readers to consider whether any of them constitutes more than wishful thinking. I’ll note only that he sees in promises of protection for Quebec’s anglophone minority “an important negotiating tool at the Quebec-Canada table” during post-referendum secession negotiations. I’m afraid this escapes me. “In return for allowing us to treat our anglophone minority well, you must … allow us to treat our anglophone minority well … or it will … uh … leave and become part of your workforce.” Then they’ll really have Ottawa over a barrel.

At least Lisée acknowledges that various matters would be negotiated after a referendum, assuming, as federal law requires, that the House of Commons believed a sufficiently clear majority had voted Yes to a sufficiently clear question. It’s usually assumed, in casual conversation, that a Yes vote would be executory: that on the magic night, Quebec would become a country simply because some number of voters said it should. But, of course, secession would be a process of fundamentally uncertain outcome.

We were reminded of this yesterday when the archives of former U.S. president Bill Clinton opened long enough to disgorge the talking points that were prepared for him in anticipation of either result in the 1995 referendum. Here they are. What would a Yes vote mean? “It is up to Canadians to work out,” Clinton would have been advised to say. When would the meaning of the referendum be clear? “It will be some time.” Recognition? “Premature.” NAFTA? “Nothing is automatic.”

These are not trivial considerations. In his 1997 book Pour un Québec souverain, Jacques Parizeau admitted that a  Quebec attempting to secede would have needed international recognition if negotiations with the rest of Canada broke down. Here again, Parizeau wrote it all down for everyone to read, knowing almost nobody would bother. (Much of what follows comes from an article I wrote in 1997 for Saturday Night magazine.) “Far from being a sort of decorative element,” he writes, “the diplomatic preparation of sovereignty would have been the key to its realization if the Oui had won.” Later he calls international recognition “an essential condition” for secession. It’s an important insight: a new country exists only when the nations of the world formally welcome it among them.

But how to win international recognition of an independent Quebec? “The problem,” Parizeau writes, “kept me preoccupied for a long time.” He concluded that Canada would try to block the recognition of Quebec by other countries, “beginning with the United States,” whose approval Parizeau saw as critical. He also surmised that the U.S. “won’t be inclined to recognize [Quebec] unless it really cannot do otherwise.” So Parizeau needed a way to force the Americans to act.

In 30 years of pondering the problem, he could come up with only one solution. He called it “le Grand Jeu,” the big game or the great strategy. And it would never have worked.

“The only way to incite the United States to accept the new status of Quebec is to see to it that France recognizes it as a country within a very brief span of time. The United States could not permit that, not only for historic reasons like the Monroe Doctrine…but because to lose face in that manner, in Canada and throughout America, would be unbearable to them.”

This is not excellent logic. Fear of French recognition of a seceding Quebec would force American recognition of a seceding Quebec over Ottawa’s objections? I phoned Reed Scowen, a former Quebec government diplomat whom Parizeau mentioned in his book as having attended a Washington dinner where Parizeau hatched his grand scheme. (Scowen’s and Parizeau’s recollections of that dinner differed, in amusing ways.)

“My reading of the thing,”  Scowen told me, “is that [if the separatists won a referendum] Clinton would call up Chrétien and say, ‘Do you want us to recognize Quebec?’” And if Chrétien said no, “Clinton would say; ‘Well, okay, look, I’ve got other problems right now. Call me when you get it sorted out.’” As for France forcing Clinton’s hand, Scowen laughed.  ”Whether France recognizes an independent Quebec is really no more important than whether Bangladesh recognizes an independent Quebec.”

So: U.S. recognition would be “an essential condition” of achieving secession over Ottawa’s objection. And there was no way to obtain it. Secession would happen by negotiation or it would not happen at all. And it’s hardly clear that it could happen by negotiation. Quebec’s PQ government may believe it can ignore Canada’s Constitution, but (a) it’s wrong and (b) the rest of Canada couldn’t. Secession would require constitutional amendments and therefore the consent of every provincial legislature. Alberta and British Columbia require their own referendums before ratifying any constitutional amendment. So a Quebec secession referendum would automatically trigger at least two others, on a deal whose terms are also spelled out in the Clarity Act: “division of assets and liabilities, any changes to the borders of the province, the rights, interests and territorial claims of the Aboriginal peoples of Canada, and the protection of minority rights.”

Again, all of this is public knowledge, but not part of public thinking. I promise you that Pauline Marois has never spent three minutes pondering the legal reality that she could not secede without getting a Yes majority in Alberta. You don’t even have to believe the populations of other provinces would want to block Quebec’s secession to suspect the terms agreeable to those populations would be different from those Quebecers might prefer. Especially after a Yes vote in Quebec, a Yes majority would probably be really easy to whip up in Alberta. But the fine print would be all kinds of fun to read. I can’t imagine even good-faith secession negotiations leading to a deal that would pass the amending formula. (Anyone who would excitedly cite paragraph 103 of the Supreme Court’s Secession Reference to me is invited to describe a secession deal that would be acceptable to the populations of Alberta and Quebec.)

Anyway, I belabour all of this precisely to point out why Pauline Marois looks a little spooked these days whenever somebody asks her about her party’s raison d’être on the campaign trail. Negotiating, not with some vague angelic notion of reasonable Ontarians, but with Danielle Smith and Terry Glavin over the terms of deconfederation, in an attempt to stem a stampede of highly educated Quebecers that would, in Jean-François Lisée’s picturesque description, “stop Montreal’s economic recovery in its tracks,” is not super-high on most Quebecers’ to-do list for Q4 2014. How many Quebecers want to hear less campaign talk about sovereignty? Seven in 10, says today’s Léger poll. One of my favourite rules of thumb holds that a party led by a veteran campaigner should have an advantage over a party with a rookie leader, but that’s predicated on the notion that experienced leaders are reassuring. A promise of nonstop secession headache eliminates Marois’s incumbent advantage. She could, of course, promise not to hold a referendum if elected. But that would tear her party apart. I almost feel sorry for her. Just kidding.

 

The post No wonder the PQ doesn’t want to talk about sovereignty appeared first on Macleans.ca.

While I was conducting my daily browse through the world of LinkedIn’s content marketing groups, I came across a comment that really stood out to me. The original discussion was started by someone seeking ideas for how they might boost the effectiveness of their website and increase sales. As you can imagine, there were a number of creative responses — accompanied by a number of dimwitted counterparts. One of the latter popped off the page:

It referenced a “quick” audit. I can’t recall the exact wording, but the gist of it was that one of the people who responded stated that they had conducted a “quick” audit of the site and then followed that statement by making some random suggestions like, “Add two paragraphs per page,” or “create more content,” etc. It wasn’t necessarily the suggestions that got me riled up, but more the notion that a content audit could ever be a “quick” task in your content marketing process. 

If you are ever approached by a content marketing agency that says they have conducted such an audit and would like to create some content for you, just say no! Conducting a “quick” content audit is like trying to figure out why your car won’t start by glancing at the paint.

A colleague of mine recently put together a spreadsheet for an audit we worked on for a client. Based on the sheer size of the effort and the amount of hours she and our team put into the audit portion of this project, I would venture to guess that she would take great offense to the word “quick” being placed anywhere near the word “audit” in a sentence.

To give you an idea of how much can go into an audit, just check out these stats about the contents of the spreadsheet she laid out. Keep in mind that this was for one client:

• 1 Excel spreadsheet
• 11 tabs of data
• 8 URLs
• 1,669 unique URLs
• 2,875 linked pages
• 3,074 lines of data

Even “The Six Million Dollar Man” couldn’t run through all of that data quickly. It takes time, dedication, and patience to conduct an audit that is thorough and really provides information that is deep enough to make valid recommendations for making any steps toward a content marketing strategy. To help you make sure you don’t miss any steps along the content audit journey, here are a few tips to take with you to your laptop.

1. Know your content marketing purpose

Before you set forth on your journey, know the audience that you or you client is trying to reach. Understand their objectives. If you don’t know who is being targeted or what outcome is being sought after, how can you possibly make solid recommendations as to whether what is currently existing on the site is working or not? You can’t.

For example, if you are conducting an audit for a university, there will be a few different audiences that you need to consider. Think about current students, prospective students, alumni, fans of any athletics teams, and so on. Then consider the university’s objectives. Does it want to increase admissions? Focus on graduation rates? Develop stronger relationships with alumni? Disseminate information to the rabid fan base of its football team? The answer, likely, is all of the above.

No matter what line of business you are in, to build a successful content marketing strategy, you need to know the answers to these questions, as they relate to your goals and aspirations. If you don’t have an end purpose in mind, no amount of auditing work will result in the production of valuable content marketing recommendations.

2. Establish a hierarchy of content quality and value

Before you start your process, develop a grading system for the pages you are about to audit. It’s up to you how you ultimately want to rate them, but one way that has worked for us is the traditional letter grade method. Pages that receive an A are the ones that have everything in place and don’t need any revisions or new content. You don’t have to redo every single page. It’s a bit cliché, but keep in mind the old adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Pages that earn a B simply require a little love, but once you start getting into the area of C and below, you are looking at a much higher level of effort to fix the page’s ailments and get it set up to effectively achieve its intended objectives. You will probably find that you have far more pages than you ever knew existed or thought were possible. So if you find some Fs floating around, it may be time for them to go.

Don’t be afraid to drop pages. You might find duplicates of a piece of content in more than one place. You might find pages that were relevant years ago, but somehow lost that relevance and were never removed or updated. Whatever the problem might be, you need to be ready to cut pages if they are hindering the achievement of stated objectives.

Once you’ve got the grading system in place, you need to know what the elements are that you’ll be grading.

3. Have a focus for your evaluation

It’s important to know what to look for, as well. It’s not just the words and images on the page that matter, although they certainly are critical elements to a site’s success. You need to focus on a number of other elements, too, that will help you reach the right audience with the right message and convince them to take the right actions.

So what do you need to focus on, then? Here are a few items that you don’t want to overlook:

• URLs
• Page names
• On-page copy
• Images
• Videos
• Internal links
• External links
• Comments
• Meta-page titles
• Meta-keywords
• Meta-descriptions
• Navigation details
• User experience considerations
• Social buttons

Keep this list in front of you while you work. Have it laid out in a spreadsheet to ensure that you don’t miss any important elements of the content marketing audit process. This will help you keep on track and stay consistent in your evaluation of every page that you visit.

But don’t just focus on your own pages. No matter what line of business you are in, there are others that are trying to do what you do, so your audit should also include a bit of competitive analysis.

Competition check

Ok, by now you are likely totally exhausted, and you don’t want to look at the website you are auditing ever again. Good news. When you’ve exhausted your internal analysis, it’s time to clear your head with a check on the competition.

Who is the competition? Who else is doing what you do, and are they doing it better than you are? Who has the potential to steal some portion of your target market? Don’t just focus on those that are doing business on the same level. Focus on those that are doing it far better, and even on those that are doing it far worse. This will give you a reference point to which you can relate the findings of your audit.

Benchmarking against competitors is a time-tested marketing tool. There will always be someone who is doing it better, different, cheaper, and the list goes on. Finding out what they are doing and how it is working for them can be a highly beneficial exercise that can result in new ideas, innovations, realizations that you may be falling behind, or even realizations that you are at the top of your game and need to be watching your back. 

So that’s all?

It’s a good start, but even after all of that, there are still some other items that need to be attended to. You need to conduct analytics to determine how the site is performing.

Google Analytics can provide you with a great deal of insight into how various pages on your site are performing. It can also tell you a lot about the actions visitors to your site take when they arrive there. Do they bounce after one page? If so, something is wrong. Do they make it through the funnel and end up on the pages you want them to? I could go on about the benefits and uses of Google Analytics for an hour, but you get the idea.

In addition to analytics, you will need to think about branding. What color schemes do you want on your site? Do you have a logo you want to prominently display? Branding is another topic in itself, but it’s something that should be on your mind.

I’m sure you have grasped the point that I am trying to make, but it bears repeating one more time: A content audit is never “quick.” It is a long, involved content marketing process, and if you don’t treat it as such, your resulting strategy will never be as successful as it could be.

We’d love to hear any other tips and tricks you use when conducting a content audit. Please place your thoughts in the comments below.

For more ways to get the most out of your content marketing, read CMI’s Content Marketing Playbook: 24 Epic Ideas for Connecting with Your Customers.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, psychology has emerged as one of the most useful tools used by marketers. It gives us a glimpse into workings of the human mind, along with some useful techniques for subtly influencing it. Below are 11 useful tips that you can use to improve your customer engagement and your conversion rate.

1. Engage the Senses

Buying anything online can be a tricky proposition; people don’t necessarily have a chance to really see or touch the product before they commit to buying it. As a result, you’ll want to help your customers feel as though they know the product intimately. This can include high-quality product shots or testimonials from other customers. In other words: make them feel as though they already own it.

2. Use Emotion to Your Advantage

Humans are emotional creatures, and our range of feelings can be easily played to. The most effective marketing techniques have nothing to do with spewing product specs or shouting about how low prices are; instead, they’ve become about telling a story, about making the audience feel a deep and personal connection with the brands they interact with.

3. Assuage Suspicions

Most of us are naturally suspicious; after all, the Internet is full of people who are only too willing to take advantage of overly trusting people. To that end, guiding customers along toward conversion involves no small amount of reassurance. Try to anticipate potential doubts or suspicions, and then do your best to reassure your customers. There are many ways to do this, such as backing up your claims with authoritative sources and providing reviews from existing customers.

4. Offer Exclusivity

There’s no getting around the fact that online retailers and “big box” brick-and-mortar stores can be both cheaper and more convenient than buying direct. The solution to that problem lies in exclusivity; offer something that they can’t get anywhere else, and you’ll tap into customers’ love of owning something uncommon.

5. Provide Flexibility

If there’s one thing online shoppers hate, it’s a lack of flexibility. This can include everything from the checkout process itself to shipping and payment options. Don’t force customers to register; allow them to check out as a guest if they wish. In addition, offer a variety of payment options to make sure that nobody is left out.

6. Offer Fewer Choices

This one might seem just a little bit strange, but it definitely plays to a well-established phenomenon in psychology. People tend to get overwhelmed when presented with more than one or two choices, which is why it makes sense to simplify your product offerings. By offering just a few very clear-cut choices to customers, you’re helping to ensure that they don’t lose their momentum in the face of an array of potentially confusing options.

7. Draw Comparisons

Customers want to know that you stand behind your product. One way to demonstrate that confidence is to compare your offerings to those of your competitors. Show them in black and white why your products stand out from the crowd.

8. Take Advantage of Crowd Mentality

The reason why social media marketing is so effective is because people love “belonging” – that is, they love being a part of emerging trends. If you can, find a way to tie social media into your product offerings; reveal just how many people have clicked that “Buy” button, or how many people in their networks have subscribed.

9. Explain the Benefits to Your Customers

Whether online or offline, impulse buying is an important thing to capitalize on, and tends to be fairly effective in the eCommerce world. That said, more expensive or involved purchases need to play the game of reciprocity. If you’re expecting your customers to commit to making a big decision, whether it’s parting with their money or simply giving up their personal information, they need to have a very clear idea about what’s in it for them. Don’t by shy about explaining, clearly and concisely, in a way that will provide a feeling of self worth, precisely what they’ll be getting out of the arrangement.

10. Don’t “Sell” – “Impress” Instead

People staple their wallets shut and it takes a crowbar to get them open. The crowbar is, in this sense, direct advertising and propaganda. Show people the same ad enough times (20+) and they might finally cave in, at least once. However, there are other less intrusive and arguably more commendable paths to get wallets open without even showing them a product. This is content marketing psychology working at its finest. For example:

This infographic showcases, as you would guess, the world’s fastest roads. It’s filled with beautiful visuals and insightful statistics. This is content marketing. But, at a more subtle level, there is a psychological process going on. We are engaging the brand by sharing the infographic on social media with our friends and peers which is a type of referral. We comment about it which is a type of rating. By creating referrals and ratings in a setting free of “get your wallets out folks!” we soften the staple and remove the need for crowbar marketing.

11. Stop Forcing the Issue

It’s only too easy to start thinking that you have control over somebody’s behavior. The truth is that all we can do is attempt to influence, guide, and inform; when it comes to clicking the “Buy” or “Subscribe” button, only the customer can make that decision. Anything that attempts to push them more forcibly is only going to come across as off-putting or desperate. What you have to do is state your case clearly; what they do with that information is ultimately up to them.

Many years ago one of my best customers asked me an important question after we had concluded our business transaction.

What’s next?

He asked this question for a specific reason, and that was to help me understand how to better help him.

Every business should know what should be happening next in their business. This holds true for those involved with marketing, sales, customer service, or any other role, because these days all of them are interconnected.

Of course, given that revenue is the lifeblood of every company, it is vital that every salesperson knows at all times what should be happening next.

What’s Next?

When my client asked me what’s next I gave an honest response that revealed (like most salespeople) I had a transaction, as opposed to a relationship selling mindset. Here’s that conversation.

Client: What’s next?

Me: What do you mean what’s next, we’re done.

Client: You don’t get it do you?

Me: I guess I don’t. Help me understand.

Client: What’s next! Upgrade me. Make improvements. Take something out and replace it with something else that is new and better.

In so many words, my client was giving me permission to spend more of his money!

When you have a transaction mindset there is a tendency to think of your relationships with customers as a series of transactions, with gaps in between. This is understandable, because that’s how most traditional sales training programs are structured.

What’s happens after the sale? Traditionally, that is customer service. Following up to make sure the client is happy. However,

Immediately after a sale is an outstanding time to make offers for new business.

A transactional mindset focuses on moving products and services. When this happens, it is difficult to distinguish one company from another. Why? Everyone is selling the same stuff.

The best solution naturally arises in in every selling situation when the business focuses on relationships. This may begin with new information, but which in turn could then lead to additional purchases.

This is precisely why I’m convinced content and social marketing is the new relationship selling.

Invest in the Relationship

Given that more than 50% of all relationship eventually fail, is it any wonder that traditional selling does not work?

How much healthier could your business be if relationships with its customers were stronger?

One of the smartest business building strategies is designing systems that give customers more of what they want. This will necessarily be different for every customer, but generally speaking it will be whatever makes them happier.

Customers are happy when they get what they want. The challenge is discovering what that is, which should be part of your process.

Help Customers Do More of What They Want to Do

The old school method of helping customers was to simply ask, “How can I help you.”

“Make me happier” may be the most honest response to that question. It could also lead to some interesting conversations, so feel free to give it a try.

It’s up to the business to have systems in place that demonstrate its capabilities for taking its customers to a better place in life. This is your business mission.

If you are serious about that mission, then you should always be thinking of ways for helping your customers. Naturally you want them to buy your products and services, but there are countless other ways to help them too.

This is the role of your content marketing. It’s the role of your relationship selling. If you have a valid strategy and a system for implementing it, you always know what’s next.

When I fast forward from that earlier conversation to the present, I know exactly what’s next. It is a derivative of one or a combination of these three direct influences of social media and our greater connectivity in general, that are shaping our business environment these days.

Business is now personal - Leverage the power of the personal brands. Listen to customers. Understand what they want and help them get it.

Markets are Collaborative – Stop selling and start collaborating with buyers. Bring your experience and expertise to the table, combine it with their desires, and see what you can co-create.

Communities are the New Markets – We all live and work in communities. The more involved and helpful you are within yours, the better your business will understand what people want and how you can help them get it.

Want to grow your business?

Stop selling stuff and really tune into your customer relationships.

Relationship selling is the topic of this month, so come back for more insights.

Please share your thoughts in a comment.

Photo Credit

It is a no-brainer – as marketing automation and demand generation continue to mature, the need for well-rounded and experienced demand generation marketers also increases. Recently, MarketingProfs published an article about how to hire the best marketers for your team, which got me thinking – with the different facets of demand generation and their discreet areas of expertise, what is the ideal skill set for the future?

In addition to the skills highlighted by MarketingProfs, the following is my list (in order of importance), for the well-rounded demand generation professional of the not-so-distant future:

1. Demonstrable demand generation experience – a proven portfolio of results – orientated original demand generation strategy, and content marketing examples in action
2. Excellent copy writing and editing skills including web and email copy
3. Experience using real KPIs to make informed decisions
4. Solid understanding and practical application of lead management principles
5. Email marketing experience
6. Certification and experience using a robust marketing automation platform

   

The rise of digital marketing and Buyer 2.0 has brought technology front and center for B2B marketing, creating a new breed of marketer. Now that real ROI and other KPIs have made marketing more accountable for its contribution to pipeline, the days of purely generating awareness are long past. You absolutely need to understand how to set up your measurement and analytics for the entire Demand Process using the technology you have at hand (CRM, MAP, Web Analytics, etc.) in order to effectively create and measure the lead management process and market to your buyer universe. But those skills are easily studied and learned.

The much more challenging skill is that of content production, and not just any content, great content. Content that is aligned to the buyer’s journey and content that converts. Are you able to tell a story? Better yet, are you also able to effectively write (or manage writers), edit and produce that story? That skill takes a journalistic instinct, a critical mind and experience to get results. So if you want to be the most effective and sought after demand generation professional, get comfortable researching and producing content for your buyers, build that portfolio along with getting your MAP certification.

Some will counter and say they’ve got people for content production. And while that’s great to some extent – it leaves you to focus on delivering that content, you have to wonder…if you are the one responsible for demand generation, you’ve got to get yourself involved. Specifically, if you are responsible for the results, you need to have input into that content at a minimum. Otherwise it is not really demand generation, but email marketing.

While you won’t focus on all of the skills above at the same time in your demand generation career, having the exposure to them will prove indispensible.

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There is a lot of attention on “lean startups” and “scaling big” with minimal marketing and sales efforts.

These are great stories and I love reading about the breakout, viral success of a hot startup. But that doesn’t reflect what the majority of startups experience, and it’s even less frequent for one selling B2B software.

Let’s face it: Selling B2B software is complex stuff. There are sponsors, blockers, administrators, users, and other personas at play. Initiating a sale can begin with any one of them. But to sell high-ticket, enterprise solutions at scale, you will need a systematic approach that can be applied by a sales team or channel.

The rise of SaaS/cloud-based products does mean that line-of-business purchasers are less IT-dependent than when there is a hefty on-premises component. That’s good news.  However, many hosted products do need to integrate with existing systems in some fashion and will require some sign-off from IT and others in the organization.

At the risk of making a sweeping generalization, people in the enterprise tend to fall into two buckets: “above the line” and “below the line.” Both are critical to running the enterprise, but they have different roles in the selling process.

Above-the-line people are executives, line-of-business leaders, and the very senior IT folks who set organizational priorities and allocate budget. They are more likely to take risks to move the organization ahead. No decent-sized deal is getting done without support from above the line — or by at least showing irrefutable evidence that your solution is directly tied to solving pains above the line. As the saying goes, “No pain, no change.” They want to understand benefits, not features.

Below-the-line people are managers and their teams. They are accountable to execute projects that support the goals that were set above the line. These folks are also critical, because they will recommend — or veto — specific solutions and supporting projects. They will also seek out solutions to problems they have been given. It’s a big mistake to discount people in your database that don’t carry an executive title, as they can be instrumental in getting a deal started or approved. You need to serve them appropriately.

When selling bigger ticket B2B products that will involve a range of personas, I think it’s helpful to consider a two-pronged approach: top-down and bottom-up.

• The bottom-up approach involves reaching below-the-line influencers. Enterprise sales efforts can benefit from ensuring that this crowd will approve a solution when asked – as well as considering it a place to start. In fact, many of today’s B2B products sold into the enterprise are growing quite well by staying primarily below the line.

The CEO of GoodData, Roman Stanek, did a nice job of exploring the challenges and benefits of applying traditional “old school” selling techniques to reach the enterprise. It’s definitely worth a read.

If you want to sell your technology to the enterprise and buy a big ski chalet in Switzerland, you have to solve real problems for the enterprise, and you should expect to have a substantial sales and marketing operation. Fundamentally, the product has to make work easier, integrate better with other systems, and meet much more stringent requirements than a consumer product would. The enterprise is a large and slow-moving but powerful and valuable animal. Capturing it requires addressing its concerns and its persona head-on.

What he didn’t cover as much is how applying “new school” techniques can assist selling into the enterprise. Inbound marketing tactics, such as content marketing, blogging, and social media, can actually help earn interaction with target segments and drive people to engage.

CXO’s don’t generally try products, but below-the-line people value a product that is easily evaluated and an experience worth sharing. They have been significantly impacted by their experiences trying consumer-based technology in their personal lives. This is a real opportunity for marketing to drive engagement, trials, and potentially even initial purchases when kept below procurement thresholds. Engaged users are a powerful feeder into the sales process.

If your product aspires or requires more widespread enterprise-wide deployment, a laser-focused sales team can help. But in this case they’ll be working to upsell happy accounts or to close bigger enterprise deals. More traditional selling techniques, such as outbound calling or telemarketing, may be helpful in supporting this too, but working from some base will always be more productive than raw cold-calling.

Many startups and early stage companies targeting the enterprise should consider applying lean startup discipline to a mix of new school go-to-market techniques with some old school selling.  The skill and art is determining the right mix!

This story originally appeared on Mark Lorion.

Which content types engage and influence technical buyers?

SterlingKor surveyed over 2,000 key business and IT Decision-makers, to find out how B2B vendors can engage and sell ‘their wares’. So how do vendors engage with these IT and tech purchasers and what type of content will they engage with?

The top influencers of purchase decisions are social, mobile and video content

Key takeaways showed that:

• 45% were influenced by a vendor’s social presence and 55% are searching for product reviews.
• 41% purchased the product within six months of being exposed to a mobile ad.
• B2B companies are looking for information in ‘bite sized chunks’.

The post 5 Ways a Minimum Viable Audience Gives You an Unfair Business Advantage appeared first on Copyblogger.

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The number of people at your prospect company who are involved in a decision to buy your products and services has increased and often can be 4-7 company representatives. What this means is that the one person – that guy or that gal who wants to be your central point of contact – is not the ultimate decision maker signing a purchase order for your products.

Note: this is not a good situation to be in – we’ll discuss strategies around that next.

You  may have to let someone “sell” on your behalf inside your prospect company – one of the worst things anyone in a sales career can ever do. We highly discourage it, but know that sometimes you get stuck and will be at the mercy of one single person within a whole corporate department or even a whole company.

The next time one of your sales opportunities goes “dark” – meaning that your main contact does not return calls, emails, or smoke signals, and you’re feeling a little desperate, think about strategies and tools to help you sell that support your efforts, such as:

Having a single place for all of the information your prospect’s buying team needs. The financial buyer is concerned with different things than a user who is on the decision team or someone who is making sure that the service meets all of their company’s standards. Can’t all of this information reside together?

Do you ever look through dozens of email conversations for something that is critical to making a purchase decision? These are the sorts of issues Cliff Pollan, CEO of Postwire, and I discuss in our recorded conversation.

If you can empower the internal buyer team with the information that they need and have it organized and on demand, it can actually speed up a buying decision quite easily. I’d go so far as to say that if the team gets too slowed down, it can delay the decision right into a stalled opportunity and then to a dead opportunity.

As a seller, we want to be at the right meetings and we need to let the buyer work off of their timetable. It can be a real flurry to see buyers working on something – if you happen to have some sort of an email monitoring program like Signals (that’s what we use) others are Yesware, ToutApp, Buzzbuilder, and FollowUpcc. There are times when one of your contacts goes through an email with proposal information and you can see that it is getting passed around, re-opened, forwarded, other emails are getting opened, and it becomes a whirlwind of activity for them.

Next time you are speaking with a team within a prospect company, make sure you understand who everyone is that is involved. They will have different spheres of influence and their own agendas. Do you know what they are most concerned about?

Once you can identify this complete team (it can be challenging) and understand what they are trying to improve upon or fix, you’ll be in a great position to add value and insight. Adding the right value and insight is most important to becoming the winning partner or provider.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Lori Richardson is recognized as one of the “Top 25 Sales Influencers for 2013″ and one of “20 Women to Watch in Sales Lead Management for 2013″. Lori speaks, writes, trains, and consults with inside and outbound sellers in technology and services companies. Subscribe to the award-winning blog and the “Sales Ideas In A Minute” newsletter for sales strategies, tactics, and tips. Increase Opportunities. Expand Your Pipeline. Close More Deals.

email lori@scoremoresales.com | View My LinkedIn Profile | twitter |Visit us on google+

The post Value Helps Sellers Reach Decision Makers appeared first on Score More Sales.

Today’s guest post by Deb Calvert, author of DISCOVER Questions™ Get You Connected. Download this free chapter today. It’s been said that asking questions is an art, an appealing expression requiring craftsmanship and finesse. It’s also been said that asking questions is a science, a systematic process requiring knowledge gained through observation and experimentation. In selling, there are two schools of thought when it comes to using questions as a means to connect with buyers and advance sales to a close. You can find numerous books and training courses on this subject, and every one of them will lean one...

A study from Forrester Research shows that buyers are frequently up to 90% through the process of considering a purchase before they actually get in touch with the vendor. Customers are doing their research about you before they even think about contacting you, and you should do the same. Learning as much as possible about potential buyers during your prospecting phase will make it easier to build a relationship with them and give them the info they need at every stage of your sales pipeline, and Twitter is a great place to start.

Twitter offers two incredible benefits to salespeople:

• Easy, personalized communication with customers and their communities
• A fire hose of free data about those individuals and communities

The first step is actually finding and connecting with potential customers. Twitter offers a few great tools for finding individuals within your target market:

1. Keyword Searches: Twitter’s search bar allows you to search for Tweets containing specific keywords. You don’t have to do this manually though. In a blog post on Baseline, online marketing expert Susan Payton describes her system of using HootSuite feeds seeded with relevant search terms such as “software” and “small business” to find people who are discussing the types of products she sells.

2. Hashtags: Many of the hashtags used on Twitter are basically empty chatter, but there are plenty that are used by professionals to engage in real dialogue as well. Finding a hashtag that is frequently used by your target market can open a door into that community for you and your brand. For example, many sales professionals use the #SocialSelling hashtag to engage in robust conversation about how social media affects their sales process.

3. Lists: If you start to follow a lot of people, it can start to get overwhelming. It’s helpful to build out Twitter lists to group similar people who you want to keep track of. If your target market is tech company CMO’s for example, curate a list of just tech company CMO’s. You can keep the list private and check in daily with what they’re saying.

Once you find the users and communities on Twitter that might turn into customers for your brand, you can start participating in their conversations. A few well-placed Tweets with useful information for your target audience can position a salesperson or company as a thought leader in their industry, which will translate directly into inbound sales leads. Look for people who are asking the questions your business knows how to answer. That level of authentic engagement is the key to successful sales prospecting on Twitter.

Russ Fradin, the CEO of Dynamic Signal, writes that “…the networking potential and the ability to understand a prospective customer’s pain points is where much of the value lies in social media as a sales tool.”

Once you’re following the conversation and contributing regularly, start looking out for people who need what you’re selling. People often post to their social media profiles asking for recommendations for a particular product type, software, or business solution. The Hootsuite Blog highlights research from Vision Critical that proves social media engagement influences purchasing decisions. Customers turn to Twitter to research the products they need, and you can be there to help them.

When you are truly engaged with your target market on Twitter, you will be able to regularly identify potential customers. You can then gather other information about them and keep track of it in your chosen CRM system.

The final step in using Twitter as a sales prospecting tool is to actually reach out and initiate a direct conversation with a potential buyer. If you follow each other, you can send a direct message letting them know you are interested in working with them.

Relationships are at the core of social selling. Cold calling scripts have no place on Twitter. Learning about your potential customers by paying attention and figuring out how to help them resolve their pain points are the only ways to take prospects you gain from Twitter, and bring them all the way through your sales pipeline.

At Base for example, our marketing team uses Hubspot’s social media tool to create a custom stream of “Twitter Prospects.” With this tool, you can set keywords that a potential customer might be searching for where your product or service is a good fit. For example, we added “best CRM solution”, “looking for a CRM” and “CRM recommendations” to our list. We’re then alerted any time someone Tweets our key phrases so that we have an opportunity to chime in to the conversation.

Takeaways:

• Use Twitter to build relationships with your prospects and customers.
• Utilize social media tools like Hubspot to monitor conversations about your brand, product or service offering.

Download the complete ebook > How To Build Your Sales Pipeline Faster Using Social Media

To learn more about how to build your sales pipeline faster using social media, download the entire ebook.

In this 20-page ebook we’ll discuss:

• How to build a robust sales pipeline using Base
• How to use LinkedIn as a prospecting tool
• How to use Twitter as a prospecting tool
• The importance of building recommendations through social media
• How to make social media and your sales pipeline work together

This article originally appeared on the Baseline blog.

For enterprises, gamification is no longer a novelty.

From SalesForce to Target to LinkedIn, over 350 nationally-recognized enterprises have invested in gamification, with many reporting excellent results.

According to data from M2 Research, enterprise gamification will outpace consumer gamification by the end of this year.

What Is Gamification? And Why Do We Need It?

Applying the strategies of video games to workplace tasks and marketing campaigns can boost lagging sales numbers and inspire droves of loyal customers.

However, it’s not a magic cure-all, as evidenced by its surprisingly high rate of predicted failure.

But dismiss it at your own peril. Everyday, companies are using it to solve big problems in a variety of markets. And it’s precisely this problem solving flexibility that’s making gamification so popular for internal business use.

Every company has different obstacles, but they’re mostly looking for the same results.

Getting employees to use new technology, for example, is a common challenge for enterprises. A business can go through the process of identifying a solution, investing time and money on its implementation, and still end up with a low employee adoption rate.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is an excellent example. Adopting a CRM can streamline an organization’s internal processes and remove headaches for both employees and employers.

CRMs also positively affect the bottom line. The average return on investment is estimated as high as $5.60 for every $1 spent.

However, companies implementing CRMs face a 63% failure rate. When you consider that a company with 200 CRM users can spend over of $2 million on licenses, it becomes apparent why employee adoption is critical.

Combining CRM software with gamification solves multiple problems for businesses. A successful gamification program not only encourages employees to adopt the software at a higher rate, but will also increases the satisfaction they feel from using it.

Let’s look at some examples of companies that have used gamification to encourage software adoption.

Opentext
To drive adoption of their enterprise software, Opentext designed a gamification experience that utilized a leaderboard and rewarded participants with badges and points.

The system also allowed employees to interact socially, by posting status updates and sharing files.

Every time a user performed one of these actions, they received points. When players gathered enough points, they levelled up and gained a new title within the platform.

Opentext originally implemented the system in their IT department, and used other departments as standards to measure against. The result? Over 60% of Opentext’s IT department adopted the software, a significantly higher rate than in non-participating departments.

NTT Data Inc.
NTT Data used gamification to encourage its employees to contribute business ideas through a social media platform they called Socially.By internally crowdsourcing innovation, this Plano, Texas based enterprise hoped to develop faster and more effective processes for resolving customer problems.

The initial adoption numbers for Socially were low: out of 7,000 employees, only 400 participated.

Instead of abandoning gamification though, NTT Data strengthened their platform. The company implemented a “karma points” system that rewarded employees every time they logged in to the platform.

These karma points worked as a currency, and could be traded for prizes.

Five months after introducing karma points, Socially’s community skyrocketed from 400 to 4,000. That’s a 90% increase, for a voluntary program.

The collaborative nature of Socially eventually lead to the creation of two NTT Data innovation centers that examine and design new products and services.

What was NTT Data’s ROI? According to the company’s CTO, the new centers have churned out $5 million in new services, which compares to an initial investment of around $1.4 million.

In addition to its positive financial impact, gamification also improves employee engagement.

In fact, both of these successful solutions featured social elements and motivation mechanisms for increasing productivity – two of OfficeVibe’s Big 5 factors for a successful business culture.

How To Utilize Gamification Within An Enterprise

Based on the success of the previous examples, we can see that gamification isn’t all hype.

But as mentioned earlier, the possibility of implementing gamification incorrectly remains high, mainly due to poor design – which stems from a poor understanding of the technology.

However, gaining an understanding of the basics can go a long way towards becoming one of gamification’s success stories.

Two options exist for enterprises entering the gamification field: develop an internal program, or partner with a gamification vendor to implement a solution.

Developing an internal solution can be expensive, but is sometimes worth the extra cost. If you’re going to wade into the deep waters of gamification design, it’s important to keep a couple of core principles in mind:

1. Keep Everything Measurable: Gamification programs should always be designed to increase a specific metric, whether that’s leads per month or employee satisfaction. Placing measurable results at the heart of your gamification goals will make it much easier to determine the success or failure of your program.
2. Provide Good Feedback: Accelerating feedback is one of the main ways gamification will help increase that metric we just talked about. By accelerating the feedback mechanism, you speed up the rate of adoption for new behavior. This helps you accomplish your goals faster.
3. Develop a Sense of Completion: Employees that always feel behind at work often lose motivation. By dividing a large goal into a series of tasks which can each be completed, employees will feel, and be, more productive.

For businesses that opt for an external solution, the previous list of principles remains important, but will become part of a conversation with a vendor rather than an internal checklist.

Choosing to use a vendor can often save companies time, and help them make informed decisions about implementing a program.

Of course, if companies don’t want to do all the research themselves, they can turn to a software selection tool, such as TechnologyAdvice’s SmartAdvisor, which lets businesses filter solutions based on their individual needs.

Regardless of how businesses choose a solution, the fact remains that industry-leading brands continue to use gamification to increase employee engagement and productivity.

What we’re witnessing now is gamification’s transition from a buzzword to a venerable business strategy.

So, is gamification the next frontier for enterprise?

Do you think we’ve answered “What Is Gamification?“ or do you have any questions pertaining to it that we can help you solve?

Tomorrow morning I’m going to give a content marketing workshop to about 20 entrepreneurs in the Fort Lauderdale area. Of these 20, the majority will strongly disagree(at first) with most of what I’m getting ready to teach them about a very “different” way of doing sales and marketing in the digital age, a fact that [...]

Author: Michael Gerard

Content marketing will be an essential part of leading marketing strategies in 2014, but many marketers are still challenged by its deployment. For our 2014 Content Marketing Tactics Planner, Curata surveyed over 500 organizations about their content marketing strategies. Marketers identified their top three content challenges as limited staff, limited budget, and creating enough content.

These same marketers ranked measuring content marketing ROI and promoting existing content as their lowest priorities. While it’s possible that some organizations are so effective that ROI and promotion aren’t seen as challenges, many companies are simply too focused on creating content. They aren’t giving enough thought to promotion, distribution, and measurement. It’s time to put those priorities at the top of your list.

Measuring the Impact of Content

Limited staff, limited budget, and developing quality content are all sizable challenges, but you also need to know which content leads to engagement, and which content doesn’t resonate. If you have that information, you can cut out the ineffective content, create more of the content that your audience craves, and increase your overall content ROI.

Marketers clearly believe that content marketing is effective. In our survey, respondents estimated that their content positively impacted brand awareness, engagement, thought leadership, SEO/web traffic, lead quality, and lead quantity.

Estimating impact, however, isn’t the same as proving impact. So how do smart marketers measure the ROI of their content and determine which pieces are valuable? Here are some places to start:

Awareness Building

Your content should be developed for your target audience, and provide information that readers will be compelled to share. Where does your target audience spend their time? Make sure your content reaches these locations, whether you’re marketing on news sites, blogs, social media, mobile, or email.

How can you be sure you’re reaching readers? Check the open rate on your emails, shares on social media and blogs, page views on your blog, and click-backs from any site you post material on. If you’re not getting a high enough open rate or enough shares on a certain channel, you can adjust your content accordingly, or focus more time on your most successful channels. To give a basic example, if a blog post on one topic got 10 shares, and another blog topic got 100, produce more of the latter.

Engaging Buyers

Provide your prospects and customers with the information they want – content should always revolve around your customers’ needs. Find out what your customers require in order to move through the sales cycle – what questions do they need answered? What pain points do they need addressed?

Continually ask your customers for feedback. Which topics are they most interested in, and what kind of information are they looking for? Track the impact of your customer-focused content, and keep the conversation going through comments and personalization.

Provide Thought Leadership

Delivering content that provides thought leadership entails diverse sources, new perspectives, and high-quality insights. Become a go-to source for readers, even on topics you’re not an expert on – just curate content from authors who are.

For the best results, be strategic in your choice of channels. Don’t waste your time posting to sites, or on topics, that your readers aren’t interested in. You can use the same basic metrics (shares, views, and click backs) to ensure you’re striking the right note with your readers.

Ways to Improve Your Content ROI

1. Maximize SEO/Web Traffic and Leads

Another great way to improve the ROI of your strategy is to optimize content for search – as long as you aren’t sacrificing value for readers. Search optimization should actually be helpful to your audience – after all, your target audience won’t find your content if the keywords they search aren’t in your titles, subtitles, text, tags, etc. Including internal site links within your blog posts and social campaigns will also increase web traffic.

You can measure web traffic and points of engagement through tools such as Google Analytics or KISSmetrics. Do valuable sections of your site have low traffic? Work on optimizing these areas to get the highest ROI on that content. Also, always include a call-to-action, inviting readers to learn more about your product/service. This will encourage them to spend more time on your site – an important metric.

Put forms (or “gates”) in front of content that indicates an interest in your product, so that you can capture those leads. Over 61% of marketers in our survey saw an increase in quantity and quality of leads as a result of content marketing. If certain campaigns aren’t bringing in enough leads, either add value, or focus more on campaigns that are more compelling for readers.

2. Maximize Your Content Engine

Readers want fresh, relevant content every day, which can be difficult with a limited budget or small marketing team. Balance the demand for new content with available resources by adjusting your content mix. Curated content (content written by other people, which you then organize and share) gives your content offering variety, and keeps your organization from practicing egocentric marketing. When you back up your thought leadership with third-party sources, it lends your organization credibility. 

Content curation helps maximize ROI by quickly delivering more content to readers, without your team putting in extra hours. According to our survey, best-in-class marketers create only 65% of their content – 25% is curated, and 10% is syndicated.

3. Promote Existing Content

Promoting existing content is another easy way to increase your content marketing ROI. Many marketers publish great content, but move on to the next campaign before that content’s achieved its full potential. Re-purpose the quality content you already have with the content marketing pyramid method — turn your ebooks into webinars, webinars into infographics, infographics into blogs, blogs into social campaigns and then curate related content. Be sure to saturate the topic with your content before moving on. This will help you reach a wider audience, using the same content re-purposed into more digestible formats.

Once you’ve started to analyze the impact of your content, you’ll be able to optimize your strategy for higher engagement and better leads.

To learn more about improving content marketing ROI by developing a team, implementing content technology, and improving your content mix, download Curata’s  latest ebook, Content Marketing Tactics Planner 2014. 

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Why You Should Shift Your Content Marketing Focus to ROI was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Google’s Matt Cutts is making headlines again, with the release of a new video that challenges some common assumptions about the role of social media in search optimization. Responding a reader question, Cutts addresses a common perception: that social media signals (e.g. number of followers, likes or retweets) play an important role in the SEO process. Yet it turns out that this assumption is completely false. Google’s algorithm currently doesn’t have any factors in it that relate to signals from sites like Facebook or Twitter. This has major potential ramifications for how you think about the relationship between social media, SEO and CRO.

Image source: Flickr via Entrepreneur

Google’s Reasoning

Let’s start by taking a closer look at what’s driving Google’s decision. Bluntly stated, not leveraging the massive vetting power of the billions of social media users is – at least on the surface – a counter-intuitive decision. According to Cutts, there are two primary reasons that Google hasn’t integrated social signals into search:

• In the past, social sites have denied Google the ability to crawl and index their data. Therefore, any formula that attributes special weight to social sites creates a vulnerability at Google. One decision to deny the search engine access, for any reason, could corrupt search results.
• There’s also a concern that the search engine doesn’t want to crawl and share any potentially sensitive identity information.

For businesses that are active on social media, at least in part for a boost to their search rankings, this is important information. At least for now, social media activity is not impacting your site’s “SEO bottom line.” But that doesn’t mean that social media doesn’t have a role to play in your overall digital strategy (including some indirect Google search benefits). It’s just time to rethink how you’re extracting value from your social platforms and put your best optimization strategies to work.

The Value of Social Media

If you remove search value from the equation, most businesses would still argue that social media plays an important role in their marketing and outreach. In fact, for many businesses, SEO may be perceived as a secondary benefit to any social activity. Instead, social media stands out for its ability to help you build your brand, deepen relationships with your customers, and attract prospects and leads.

But these more “human focused” goals are highly dependent on effective conversion strategies. High-return social media activity is a fairly time intensive undertaking. It requires developing a branded presence, creating status updates, curating material to share, and identifying people you want to connect with. It also demands monitoring, following and contributing to the conversation, and fostering genuine engagement with the people that follow you.

The best social strategies also include a strong dose of conversion optimization theory – from a focus on the copywriting to ensuring the linkages are in place between your social content and your landing pages for a smooth transition.

Google and the Conversion Trinity

Conversion expert Bryan Eisenberg talks about the conversion trinity, which is a useful framework for how you think about the relationship between social media and conversions.

The trinity poses the following points and related questions:

• Relevance: Does this relate to me?
• Value: What does this mean for me?
• Call to Action: What next step do I need to take to capture the value?

It’s important to assume that your social media contacts are asking the same questions each time they look at your Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or LinkedIn accounts. Therefore, the following tips can help you stay on target.

Strategies for Increasing Social Conversions

Apply audience knowledge when choosing networks: When choosing your social media networks, it’s helpful to use your knowledge of your customers and prospects to select the networks where they are most active. Applying data analytics can also help you determine which networks give you the highest returns. Look at levels of engagements, conversions, and the behavior of the leads that specific networks send your way. Extensive research has looked at how users of different networks convert, and it’s not equal across the board – especially when you factor in the type of organization you are and what conversions you’re asking of your followers.

Use copywriting best practices and calls to action: What you write on social media has to be enticing in order to get people to click. Social media has some independent value through simple brand exposure, but the most compelling aspect of social media is driving shares and bringing new audiences to your work. Strong copywriting can help your updates stand out above the noise, and a clear call to action increase the chances of getting a conversion.

Social Media Landing Pages: It’s also wise to consider crafting your on-page content with social audiences in mind. Dedicated social media landing pages can help ease the transition from medium to medium, engage your social visitors, and get them to keep reading.

A Parting Thought

If SEO is a major consideration for you, I have two parting thoughts. The first is that Google is experimenting all the time. Major updates are rolled out on a regular basis (check out Moz’ Algorithm Change History for a detailed log on the search engine’s updates). I predict that there’s a strong probability that social will play an increased role in search in the future. Brands with existing strong profiles will have an obvious advantage if that comes into play.

However, Google+ is most likely to be the search engine’s network of choice. Given their major investments in developing the social platform, it’s a logical choice. There’s already been some search integration with the Google Authorship feature. Google Authorship allows users to tie their Google+ account to content that they’ve written. The benefits are twofold. First, through Google Markup, your Google+ headshot can appear next to search results tied to your account. Studies have shown higher degrees of click through. A second benefit relates directly to search. Google Authorship allows the search engine to track and curate your body of knowledge, attributing weight to your expertise based on your body of work. This may provide a direct return on your social investments in the short-term, and more than likely will increase in value.

The revelation that social activity is having little impact on search was a surprise for many. But this is just an opportunity to really focus on how your social media activity is impacting your business, and increasing your investment in social conversion efforts. In the long-term, strong social engagement can have significant impact on your business’ ability to generate leads, make sales, and cultivate strong brand recognition. Do you have any conversion tips to get more value from your social interactions? Let me know in the comments below!

As you know, B2B leaders must reassess their marketing campaigns to include social media. But do you really understand the impact social media has on your bottom line?

In this infographic by somemto, research has been compiled to reveal the power social media has over your B2B business. For example, did you know over 50% of marketers believe social media is responsible for boosting their sales? Also, the infographic shows that 60% of online shoppers provide feedback on their purchases through social media.

Thus, it’s no surprise that social media tends to double marketing leads, unlike trade shows and direct mail. With that, I invite you to review some of the data somemto has featured in their infographic:

Quick Review of Online Users

• Facebook accounts have been created by 85% of Internet users.
• 49% of Internet users own a Twitter account. Note: Internet users between 55 and 64 years old are increasing their engagement with Twitter.
• Social media websites are utilized by 84% of online purchasers.
• Social networks are used by 74% of customers to help make purchasing decisions.

Top 3 Networking Sites That Drove Results in 2013
According to the infographic, 52% of marketers gained new customers through Facebook; 43% through LinkedIn; and 36% via Twitter. In particular, businesses from the following industries utilized Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to attain new customers:

• Retail/Wholesale
  • Facebook (73%)
  • LinkedIn (19%)
  • Twitter (40%)
• Hardware Technology
  • Facebook (45%)
  • LinkedIn (44%)
  • Twitter (50%)

Take note: Blogs are still necessary in your marketing campaign, as 57% of companies continue to find new customers through blog posts.

View the full infographic for more details, including the percentage of social media usage in Turkey, Ireland, Italy and Finland. What have you learned from these social media marketing statistics? Let me know in the comment box below.

Social media as a tool for B2B marketers is a relatively new phenomenon. Many B2Bs have been skeptical of social media’s effectiveness, particularly because they felt there was no way to measure its ROI. The truth is, the reason B2B marketers have found social media ineffective for lead generation is because many of them are doing it wrong.

Set Goals

Goals are what motivate us to get out of the bed in the morning, they are what propel us toward continually growing our company’s success. Without goals, we are only doing half the work.

When coming up with your goals, it’s best to be realistic – while we all want to grow by 1000% each month, the likelihood of that happening is small. It’s best to look at previous months and see how you have grow in order to make your projections. Once your goals are set, it’s important to outline a strategy to attain them.

Strategize

The so-called “Spray and Pray” strategy doesn’t work – not for traditional marketing, and certainly not for social media marketing. In order to carry out a successful social media marketing strategy, you need to actually have a strategy!

Coming up with a game plan requires you to sit down with your marketing team, and occasionally sales as well, and decide what you want to accomplish and how you are going to get there. Things continually writing quality blog posts, putting on webinars and creating more gated content are all examples of strategies you can use.

Campaigns

As B2B content marketers, we tend to not only promote our company, service, product etc., but white papers, webinars and other gated content as well. In order to keep track of each of these promotions individually, it is important to keep everything in campaigns.

While you are promoting that new case study, you might also want to let people know about a webinar you are putting on. If you are number oriented, and want to see exact metrics of each of your activities individually, the only way you can do this is by creating campaigns.

LinkedIn Groups

If there was a place where your exact target market spends hours a day discussing topics relevant to what your company does, why wouldn’t you be there?

LinkedIn Discussion Groups are the most fertile ground for any B2B marketer. Not only do they provide an opportunity for fantastic networking and establishing thought-leadership, they are also a great place for lead generation – if done correctly.

Don’t Be Sales-y

We have covered on this blog, in great detail, the reasons that overt promotion on your blog as well as on LinkedIn is a poor strategy for B2B.

Content marketing is not meant to make a direct sale, it should be focused on establishing yourself and your company as a thought-leadership. This is accomplished by imparting readers in your target market with useful information. Writing and distributing content that is overtly promotional doesn’t only negatively affect your content marketing, you also risk being flagged for the dreaded LinkedIn SWAM.
Be Yourself

Many marketers make the mistake of writing dry, to the point and boring blog posts, assuming that is what their target market wants.

Even though you represent a business, and you are marketing to a business, the person reading your blog is still… a person. It’s important that your reader understands that your company is not some faceless entity, but rather full of real people who care about their business needs.

Follow Up

Social media is meant to be… social. It’s important that your social media marketing strategy include keeping an eye on all your posts and continually engaging with those that comment. These types of conversations become a tool for nurturing relationships that may, in the future, create a new customer or client.

While checking up on comments for numerous social profiles that you manage may be cumbersome, there are tools such as Oktopost’s Social Inbox, that allow you to engage on all conversations you have started from one place.

Engage

Starting your own conversations is a great strategy, but you also have to keep an eye on your Propinquity Points – places that your target market visits to gain information and discuss industry-relevant issues.
Once these points are identified, it’s important to spend time “listening,” and find discussions that you feel you can add value to.

Measure

Historically, B2B marketers have hesitated from putting real effort into social media – mainly due to a perceived inability to see actual ROI.

How can you know if you have reached your goals if you aren’t able to measure your success?

Today, things are different. Tools like Oktopost – the B2B social media marketing platform, allow people to look at metrics such as clicks, likes, engagements and, most importantly, conversions. Oktopost also lets users see the actual leads that were generated from social media, and exactly which social post caused them to convert.

B2B companies can no longer risk to not have a solid social media marketing strategy. As opposed to years past, B2B marketers have the tools needed to utilize social media in order to generate leads and see actual ROI.