Rnordman

Quite frankly, it doesn't matter what buyers think about you or your brand, if they don't think about you or your brand. It doesn't matter how much better you think you are than your competitors, and it certainly doesn't matter how enthusiastic you are about your own business and products. So the question remains, how DO you get buyers interested in your brand? The answer - you don't.   In this blog, explains why you need to get buyers interested in a conversation, rather than in your brand. Earning the right to help your buyers with their challenges is paramount. He also outlines a number of tactics you can implement to help enable this privilege.

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As customers demand more transparency around pricing, businesses incorporate a plethora of sales and marketing strategies to remain profitable. Creating strategies and marketing/sales actions that are understood at the highest level and executed throughout all levels of the company have potential to positively impact your company’s ability to increase prices in the short, mid and long-term.

Which business and marketing strategies optimize future pricing dynamics and performance?

What is the best approach to market and competitor analysis?

Outstanding price performance is the result of pricing organizations that raise the pricing competence of the marketing /sales organization, influence leadership behaviors to support pricing excellence, run pricing projects across diverse industries and implement pricing processes/systems.

Create the potential for improved market dynamics over a multi-year time frame by refining your business and marketing strategies.


During the PPS 25th Annual Pricing Workshops and Conference in Chicago workshop participants will also review the behaviors and actions of marketing and sales, as it relates to price execution, that enhances your ability to positively impact pricing.

Do your customers really know what your solution is worth?  How does your initial price proposal affect your customer’s subsequent purchase decisions, and how do they perceive your “best and final” price?

Economist Dan Ariely and his colleagues from MIT and Carnegie Mellon University studied this question, and came up with some intriguing findings:

 

 

• You have more control over your pricing than you might think, and can “anchor” higher pricing if you do it early in your sales conversations.
• A customer’s initial impressions of your value shapes how they view the ultimate prices they are willing to pay.  Subsequent decisions are made in relation to the first assessment of value, so you must make the first one work for you.
• If your customer already has a reference point for the pricing of your solution (perhaps by comparing it to their current solution, or competitive offerings), it is critical to differentiate your solution and then anchor as high an initial price for it as you can.

Ariely’s experiments showed that buyers can be what he calls “coherently arbitrary” about how they establish that first reference price, and then use it as they assess your value later in the buying process.

For example, researchers “anchored” their student subjects by having them write down the last two digits of their social security numbers, and then how much they would pay for products like wine, chocolate boxes, and books.  The results, as Ariely states, were “predictably irrational.” One surprising illustration: “Although students were reminded that the social security number is a random quantity conveying no information, those who happened to have high social security numbers were willing to pay much more for the products.” Follow-up experiments then showed that research subjects used these first “irrationally” generated numbers as starting points for assessing subsequent price-value tradeoffs.

What does this suggest for B2B sales professionals? When it comes to pricing, you only get one chance to make a first impression. So, knowing your buyer will ultimately pressure you for a “best and final” price, you’ll do better if you “anchor” at a higher price level earlier in the sales process, when you have more control over their perception of your value. Also, since you know the reference point for the price in their mind might be arbitrarily based on old information from previous similar purchases, you will want to identify and present other “comparables” to your solution that help expand their range of reason.

Want to hear Dan Ariely in person?  He’ll be keynoting our Conversations That Win conference in September. Dan will prove why your (and your customers’) decision-making process isn’t nearly as rational as you think.  Register now!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sources:

“Coherent arbitrariness: stable demand curves without stable preferences.” Ariely, D., Loewenstein, G., Prelec, D., 2003. Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, 73–105.

“Tom Sawyer and the construction of value” Dan Ariely, George Loewenstein, Drazen Prelec , Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 60 (2006) 1–10

 

Lead scoring systems have many uses. They help measure how much a customer engages with your company, giving points for each click, view, and download. They also look at a prospect’s individual characteristics, like his title, company industry, and BANT-based readiness, to determine how likely he is to buy. These lead scoring systems are then used in lead nurturing programs, where Marketing nurtures leads until they are determined to be Sales-ready, when they are passed onto a rep.

But problems with these typical lead programs are three-fold:

1. They measure existing – not emerging – demand. To reduce the focus on price in a world of B2B commoditization, Marketing needs to build demand by changing customers’ mindsets. They need to build this new demand by showing their customers exactly how their current situation can be improved (even when the customer considered it just a “cost of doing business”) by using one of the products or services they offer. But most traditional lead scoring systems don’t take this emerging demand into account, and instead focus on existing demand, where a customer already knows exactly what they want and need. MLC members, you can learn more about how to build emerging demand here.

2. They incentivize Marketing to develop more content to boost prospects’ scores. Each click, download, and view gives each customer more points, which makes him closer to pass to Sales as a qualified lead. This leads Marketing to create more content that can be clicked, downloaded, and viewed, which artificially inflates the number of qualified leads.

3. Neither Sales nor Marketing has full responsibility for these prospects. Marketing often nurtures the leads until they can toss them to Sales, often at a pre-selected point value that doesn’t measure their true readiness to buy.

The effects of these flaws can be reduced by developing a lead scoring and nurturing program that measures the level to which prospects have had their mindsets disrupted. This type of lead scoring system both chases the most profitable deal types and prospects, as well as values the quality, rather than the quantity, of content consumed by the customer. Marketers can do this by giving increasing point values to content that is more disruptive, while downgrading (or even eliminating) content that merely informs.

This isn’t to say that traditional metrics aren’t important; a prospect, no matter how much he’s bought into the disruption, won’t buy unless the product is a good fit for his industry or needs, and he has the budget and authority to do so. But instead of having these metrics (along with basic content consumption) as the main indicators of readiness to buy, Marketing should use them as table stakes (e.g., anyone in X industry with Y title or more senior will be nurtured).

MLC members, learn more about the steps you need to take to improve your lead scoring system here.

If you’re creating a sales list of 10,000 people and dumping all of them into your CRM, you’re likely wasting your time.

Prospect details change too frequently (companies, titles, etc) for this to work. It’s better to leave LinkedIn as the source of record (since people “self-update” their profiles). It’s wiser to use an agile approach to pulling lists that correspond with the cadence of your outreach.

If you’re creating sales lists, here are some other best practices:

1. Segment and Specialize

Find people in specific social network groups, specific geographies, industry verticals, etc. Searching within specific categories will give you more fruitful results. The SalesLoft Prospector works to find people within specific groups so you don’t miss the target. Our most successful clients focus on verticals from month to month (ie Travel in January, Finance in February, ewtc)

This allows you to build rapport and connect more easily by reaching out to similar people for an entire month.

2. Use Google

Social network prospects can be found in Google as well. Sometimes better than in the actual social app. Prospector aids in this as well.

Pull in other fields like Industry, Geography, or Number of connections. This allows you to sort prospects, grade your leads, and set up variable fields on your outbound email templates, as explained below.

3. Use Email Templates with Personalized Information

Use email templates with easily customizable areas to quickly reach out to different prospects with a personalized touch.

Here’s an example email using Geography as a way to reach out.

Tools like toutapp and Signals make this a breeze and provide a variety of email tracking and outreach services.

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What ideas do you employ when building your sales lists?

The essential starting point for building a tighter alignment and a more productive relationship between marketing and sales is developing a joint framework for qualifying sales leads. Without a common understanding of who constitutes a qualified lead, it’s simply impossible to get marketing and sales on the same page.

Marketers and salespeople frequently have differing perspectives about who is a qualified lead. When I’m working with a client on a demand generation project, I interview marketers and salespeople separately, and I ask a simple question:  How would you define who constitutes a legitimate sales lead?

The marketers typically say that a qualified lead is someone who works for a company that is in their target market, has an appropriate job title, and has expressed interest (in some way) in what their company offers. The salespeople, on the other hand, will usually say that a legitimate lead is someone who meets the marketers’ criteria and whose propensity (and ability) to buy has been established using criteria such as BANT.

When this kind of disparity exists, is it any wonder that marketing and sales are often at odds?

The solution to this problem, of course, is to involve both marketers and salespeople in the development of a lead qualification framework that both groups will use.

There’s certainly no need to start from scratch when you’re developing a lead qualification framework. With a few minutes research using Google or another search engine, you can find many examples to use as a guide.

Many B2B companies use the Demand Waterfall(TM) developed by SiriusDecisions as the basis for their lead qualification framework, and SiriusDecisions has also developed a “Lead Spectrum” that defines seven lead qualification levels. I am an admirer of the work that SiriusDecisions produces, and I have referred to their models on several occasions in earlier articles.

When it comes to lead qualification frameworks, however, I usually recommend that companies start with a simpler model. Then, you can add lead stages or lead qualification levels if you identify specific needs for the additional detail. The objective is to develop a lead qualification framework that contains as much detail (but only as much detail) as you really need.

The “starter” lead framework that I typically use with clients has four lead qualification levels – Inquiry, Profiled Lead, Sales-Ready Lead, and Sales Opportunity.

The conceptual approach underlying this framework is simple. The first significant event in the lead qualification process occurs when someone identifies himself or herself and indicates some initial interest in your company (or, more likely, in a content resource your company has published). This makes the individual an Inquiry.

Your first task is to determine which of your Inquiries fit within your target market. Depending on what information you collected when the individual identified himself or herself, you may be able to perform this task without needing more information from the lead. For example, if you have a company name, a few minutes of research will enable you to determine whether the company fits your target market definition (in terms of size, industry, etc.). On the individual level, you may have collected a job title during the initial identification, but if not, a little research should enable you to obtain that information. If a lead fits within your target market, you then have a Profiled Lead.

For marketing/sales alignment purposes, the most critical lead stage to define is what I call a Sales-Ready Lead. In an optimized demand generation system, marketing is primarily responsible for acquiring new leads and for nurturing leads until they are sales ready. Once a lead becomes sales ready, sales assumes primary responsibility for managing that relationship. What transforms a Profiled Lead into a Sales-Ready Lead is the level of interest the lead expresses (either explicitly or via behavior) in what your company offers. For a discussion of how I define Sales-Ready Lead, see my earlier post titled What is a “Sales-Ready Lead?”

The final lead stage used in my starter framework is Sales Opportunity. The critical defining characteristic of a Sales Opportunity is that the prospect’s buying process has advanced far enough that you can reasonably project when a buy/no-buy decision will be made. In other words,  with a Sales Opportunity, you can forecast (within reasonable parameters) when a prospective deal will close.

A simple lead qualification framework is not that difficult to develop, and it can drive a significant improvement in marketing/sales alignment.

I’m a sales guy. I started at HubSpot in 2011 as a sales rep and am currently a sales manager in charge of a team that sells HubSpot’s marketing software to marketers. When I’m on the phone with marketers, I always ask the question, “Why does your sales team value you?” Most often, the marketer says, “They value me if I produce good leads”.

I’ve got news for you: Your sales team values you for a lot more than just leads.

From your industry expertise and blog content, to your lead intel and analytics, your sales team values the competitive advantage that you provide. The sales rep is on the front line and you are their weapon. Here are some of the key things I think it's important marketers understand salespeople value and appreciate -- besides just generating lots of leads.

Hiring managers are often anxious about whether a new hire will work out or not. This is particularly the case for inexperienced hiring managers and where there is a longer sales cycle and months must be invested before sales are closed.

We advise our customers to implement an effective on-boarding program for new hires and to exercise sound sales management to increase the chances a new rep will be successful, but there are also several ways to quickly determine whether a new hire is performing to expectations (for more on on-boarding new sales hires, see The First 90 Days – Your Guide to Making New Sales Hires Produce Fast).

Revenue is obviously the mother of all metrics in sales and should absolutely be used along with sales wins to measure success in any period, but these are not always a useful measure during the first 90 days since the sales cycle for many types of sales is longer than 90 days. In these cases, there are other useful metrics for evaluating performance.

Key Metrics in the First 90 Days

Call Counts – How many calls to qualified prospects is the new rep making? Based on baseline ratios of calls to sales, is the new rep making enough calls to be successful?

Meetings – How many meetings at the appropriate level is the new sales person attending each week? They key criteria here is that the meetings must be with real buying influencers and decision makers.

Qualified Leads Added to the Pipeline – How many leads are added to the pipeline that are qualified based on fit, need, budget, and urgency? An important point here is to discount quotes submitted to prospects that are unqualified and/or have no real intention of buying.

To your success!

Image courtesy of  KROMKRATHOG | freedigitalphotos.net

Does Brand “Storytelling” Make a Difference?

What makes great storytellers? Is it their ability to engage listeners, deliver a message, and have two acts a night? We’d say all of the above, especially for businesses interested in boosting sales and online visibility through content marketing.

Content marketing is more than just blogs and social media — it’s a way for businesses to tell their brands’ stories. These stories become everything for companies, considering everything you publish online is there for good. Before diving into specifics, here are a few reasons why storytelling is essential for capturing customers:

• People who’ve never heard of you have a way to learn what you do, stand for, and sell.
• Customers are more likely to trust companies with believable stories.
• A story, as any salesperson will say, is the best way to sell products and services because they are relatable.

The Building Blocks of Brand Storytelling

Telling a meaningful story begins with a brand’s core values. From a content marketer’s perspective, this is figuring out what a company stands for, promotes, has opinions on, and hopes to do for consumers. A business’ “mission” and “value” statements may very well be overlooked on a webpage or press release, but there is likely a story behind how they came to be.

The best story a brand can tell is its origin story. Like our friendly neighborhood superheroes, every company started from nothing and had to build itself up into a reputable place of business. How did this happen? Did a major crisis or near shutdown change the entire trajectory of a product line? People are interested in these kinds of stories because, again, they are relatable to their own experiences.

Unfortunately, few brands go further than a “history” section on their websites. It might have old-timey photos, lots of names, major events, and some other content thrown in, but if it’s not told in an intriguing, narrative manner then no one will read it.

The origin story is a powerful branding tool and becomes a business’ pre-online identity. In a business-to-business sense, potential partners and clients usually check up on a business’ past to predict its future.

Creating Story-Filled Content

Now that that’s all out of the way, onto content narratization. Like with your company’s about/history pages on a website, people want to open a blog and see a clear beginning, middle, and end. Everyone’s familiar with this process, and it’s by far the easiest to write.

For blogging, specifically, you want to start your posts out with a hook, reel them into a “why you should read this” paragraph, fill the body with supporting facts, and finish with a cathartic ending. One of the biggest mistakes for business bloggers (and there are lots, trust me) is being too obvious. This is when companies blog just to blog without understanding the how or why factors of the equation.

“Too obvious” is when a blog is written without narrative. It’s easy, cheap, and no one cares to read it. Do you have 10 tips for your consumers for 2014? Great. Have that content in the body (i.e., middle) and open with examples and anecdotes. Most likely, readers will skim down to pick up the takeaway. To avoid this, you need to publish posts with well-written narrative structure that pulls readers in and forces them to read an entire post (which leads us to the call-to-action, a topic for another day).

Do you enjoy reading your blogs? If not, it’s probably time to find a content marketer with the ability to narratively tell your brand’s story.

Okay, first I’ve been studying social media.

Not formally and not in the triple blind and an army of PHD’s or lab rats kind of way. But rest assured I’ve been studying what it does to businesses and professionals.

My study has concluded that it kills brain cells–and that’s a bad thing. I thought I heard a few years ago that brain cells grow back but I wasn’t able to find any search results that helped:

Social media acts as a stimulant. Only it stimulates the wrong thing. It stimulates a waste of time. Sure it connects you to your friends and family and yes it can help you land business… but for most professionals it isn’t the highest best use of your time.

Why do we do this? Simply because it’s what the market wants… it’s a shiny object and that shiny object is what brings us traffic and leads. I follow the marketing rule that says sell what the market wants but deliver what the market needs. But here’s the truth…

Social media is typically the 4^th or 5^th strategy/tactic we help our clients with.

Typically there are things within the realm of branding, marketing, lead gen, sales, and business development that take precedence. I’m willing to guess that most likely this is the case for you and your business as well.

What About Your Business?

In your business there are greater marketing opportunities than social media. Mainly because social media lacks a key marketing opportunity.

Intent to purchase or more specifically the immediate need or want to purchase your product or service.

Immediate intent isn’t the only problem. We are entering a time of mass social distraction.

For instance, I logged into Facebook yesterday and a few of my friends shared pictures of their dinner. It made me think… before social media did people take pictures of their dinner and then when you came over they said… “you got to see this, here’s what I ate last night… do you like it?”

It’s not just pictures of dinner or mundane updates, this isn’t a new complaint for the social space. The larger noise problem is the massive increase in spam and business participation. The social media space is becoming more saturated each and every day.

For instance, Direct Marketing News reported that Wal-Mart has launched 3,500 Facebook pages so they can distribute local offers. I’m sure other big box stores can’t be far behind with this strategy.

Social Has Lost the Novelty

Not just the novelty for standing out but also as a novelty in connecting with your target market.

It’s not unique or even a competitive advantage to connect in social. Sure, if you stack up a company that excels in social against one that doesn’t they might have a slight edge (although this depends on industry), in the end it has very little measurable effect on the bottom line.

But I’m still beating around a larger point. There are greater marketing opportunities in your business than social.

Even more important are foundational issues like the definition and dedication to your brand promise and your big idea. A dedication to focus and put effort into these will give you a better measurable result.

Direct Response Marketing

I also believe that this focus on social media clouds what should be the focus of most marketing efforts—direct response. This type of marketing is orientated on creating a sale today. Not spending time, effort, and resources on building a relationship for a sale down the road, and this is the promise of social interaction.

I’m not knocking permission marketing (which is what social ultimately is), I’m saying that if you haven’t locked in your direct response marketing channels before you enter social then you’ve have your the priorities reversed.

Direct response done properly creates predictable results—I’ve never seen a social campaign that has predictable results. Also, direct response can typically be scaled—social can scale but the scalability is exposure and has no bearing on actions you take.

That’s why it’s important to get your direct channel machine effective then add the layer of social media engagement.

The Allure of Social Media

But you say social media is free and you can connect directly with your target market… Yes those are valid arguments to participate. But here are a few problems…

First, social media isn’t free—it’s taking a valuable resource, usually your time (or someone’s time) and there is an opportunity cost inherint in that. Second, sure you can connect with your target market and maybe find “brand evangelists”, ultimately it’s still not something you can scale effectively with predictable results.

That’s what you need your marketing to deliver for you. Your marketing should be your best salesperson. It should be something that you can rely upon to deliver sales, leads, or prospects—that’s its sole goal.

Predictable Results in Your Marketing

I’ve never participated in, heard of or seen a social marketing campaign that produced predictable results. I’ve participated in and seen plenty of direct marketing campaigns that have—for this alone I believe direct marketing efforts should be the primary focus of your marketing efforts. If these have not been dialed in then I believe you have zero business participating in social more than a customer support channel.

That’s step 1, focus on building a strong direct response marketing channels then add social. What are your thoughts… is social such a change in tradiational marketing that I’m off base here?

For B2B professionals and sales reps, March seems like another one of those months with a lot of “average days.” But for college students, it’s party time because spring break is coming their way.

What’s the big deal right? You got meetings to go, leads to qualify, sales to make… It’s not like your 20 anymore and not everybody’s Mark Zuckerberg. On the bright side though, certain B2B markets are more active during vacation periods like Spring Break. If your business caters to any of these, now would be a good time to start a campaign and provide them with the services they might need to make the most of spring break.

• Hotels and restaurants – The first obvious choice. Beach resorts and bars are staples for the spring break experience. It makes sense then that these same establishments are getting ready to book plenty of university party animals. Services like janitorial or food supply might be in demand.

• Universities – Don’t be fooled. It’s true that there won’t be a lot of activity during this period. Prior to it however, teachers and administrators could be in preparation as well. Records, schedules, and final submissions can spark needs for data management technology. Why not start fanning it early so prospects might be easier to follow-up once break’s over.

• Transportation – From airports to bus companies, an influx of college students will be hard to miss. You need not even mention spring break but giving them any necessary leg up (tools, parts supplies, and even auto insurance) before it begins can be heaven sent when it’s time to get busy.

• Volunteer organizations – Ever heard of alternative breaks? Not all ‘spring breakers’ are college kids raring to go wild. (Some even argue that the stereotypes are overblown.) For all you know, any place from a local soup kitchen to a children’s hospital can be the alternative destination. Why leave them out as a possibility?

If you want B2B in the strictest sense, that still includes catering to companies that have a consumer market. So where there’s a surge of consumer activity, there’ll be a wave for the business activity and that’s a always good one to ride for B2B marketers.

A marketing team that doesn’t invest time in a proper lead nurturing campaign could be missing out on a major sales opportunity. Lead nurturing through marketing automation allows you to deliver the right message at the right time to your prospects in order to accelerate their movement through the sales funnel. It allows your marketing team to become much more efficient at delivering high quality leads to your sales team. If you’re thinking about getting started, here are five challenges you may run in to and how to overcome them.

1. Timing

One of the first challenges you may run in to is determining how long a lead should be nurtured. The answer depends on a variety of factors; but start by determining your average customer’s buying cycle. If it takes an average of three months for a lead to become a customer, you should plan for a lead nurturing campaign that moves a lead from the top of the funnel to the bottom over the course of three months.

Once you know the length of your customer’s average buying cycle, you can determine how long to nurture a lead based on where they currently are in the inbound marketing sales funnel. Using the three-month buying cycle as an example, TOFU (top of the funnel) leads may need to be nurtured for one-and-a-half months before a MOFU (middle of the funnel) offer is made. Once a lead becomes MOFU, her lead nurturing workflow might last for one month before a BOFU (bottom of the funnel) offer is made. The remaining half-month would be used to send BOFU content in order to nurture a lead to a conversion.

2. Frequency

After you’ve determined the time frame of your workflows, the next step is to set the frequency at which offers should be made. For most industries, TOFU offers can be made most frequently as their barrier to consumption is very low. Their purpose is to educate, not to sell; so they are typically received well because of the value they provide. As time goes on, offers should come less frequently.

MOFU content requires a lot more commitment to consume. If it were sent as often as TOFU, your leads would become overwhelmed and likely remove themselves from the workflow. Reading three or four blog posts in a week is easy. Watching three or four webinars in one week? Not so much.

3. Variety

Now that you know how long your leads should be nurtured and how frequently you’d like to touch base with them, it’s time to determine what kinds of offers are necessary to reach your goal of a qualified, sales-ready lead. For this step, it’s best to start with a content audit.

Determine how many pieces of content you have to offer and where they fall in the sales funnel. This step will help you identify any gaps. You may find that you need more content on a certain topic to educate your leads well or maybe you’re lacking a form of content such as videos, ebooks or case studies. Some of your content may be outdated and need a refresh in order to be effective.

Now it’s time to place each offer in the appropriate workflow. This process will help you determine if you need one more TOFU offer before you can make a MOFU offer and so on. Consult your sales team to see what content they use when speaking with prospects and what forms of content they may need to close the deal. Once your workflow is full of the right content, you’re ready to go live.

4. Tracking

Unfortunately, the work doesn’t stop once you go live with your offers. This is where many marketers drop the ball on lead nurturing; marketing teams must monitor workflows and track their progress. An Excel document that maps out each workflow and the analytics for each offer can serve as a helpful tool for this. Mapping out the analytics can help you identify when contacts become disengaged, or which offers aren’t being received as well as others. You should be tracking email open rates, click-through rates and form submissions to know if your workflows are effective at moving a lead down the funnel.

5. Optimization

Email workflows should constantly be optimized to improve over past performance. Tracking each email offer will tell you which emails need updated or should be overhauled completely. You may also find that the buying cycle you determined in the beginning is actually shorter or longer than expected.

Lead nurturing workflows are a living process that should constantly be analyzed and updated as time goes on. These top five challenges will repeat themselves over and over but as long as you understand how to overcome them, you’ll be producing more qualified leads and hitting sales goals month after month.

Many companies leave the numbers up to the sales team. Hot leads, warm leads, cold leads, lead conversion rates, quotas, etc.

But what about the marketing team?

Leaving any sort of numeric measurement entirely to the sales team is where many businesses go wrong. Marketers need a number to strive for, too!

Marketing team goals usually end up being more general, such as generating larger email lists or increasing website visits and leads. But without creating measurable, time-bound goals (that are also attainable) there is no way to know whether the marketing team is truly reaching its full potential.

Unifying your sales and marketing departments into one aligned Smarketing team will give your company an advantage. That way you can set business goals and then divide them into sales and marketing-specific objectives.

Marketing Numbers

Start by setting an overall business plan, say having one new client a month or increasing revenue X amount by the end of the year. Then work backward to find out how many sales that would require, then how many sales, website visits, etc.

For example, for a revenue increase of $500,000 you might need 10 new clients within the next year, that would mean 500 new leads and 20,000 website visitors. Marketing needs to find a way to get those web visits.

Use that process to determine the number of Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) your company will need to reach its goals. That way the marketing team can take those MQLs and nurture them into SQLs making it easy for the sales team to close a deal.

These can also be linked to specific campaigns, such as a series of emails your team is sending out about a new products or service you are offering. Add numbers to that, too. “We will send out _____ emails with the hope of gaining ______ new clients.”

Another way to add a number to marketing services is to determine where your team would like to be ranked in certain searches. Such as saying that by the end of a specific time period your company would like to be ranked first for those who search a keyword that is hot in your industry.

That will determine exactly what your Smarketing team will be striving for.

Learn From Those Numbers

No campaign is going to be perfect the first time you try it. That’s why measurable goals are so important, so a company can tell when they are succeeding and when they are not.

When you are not reaching your goals it is time to meet with the entire Smarketing team to decide whether the goal was unreachable, or what needs to be changed to attain that in the next month or year.

Specifically the marketing department needs to be constantly learning what can and should be improved in order to help the sales side get high-quality leads so that they can make the sales the company depends on.

Takeaway

Sales and marketing teams are not known for working well together, but by unifying them into a Smarketing team they can work together to achieve overarching company goals. With that, give marketing teams specific numbers to strive for so they can measure their successes the way the sales team does.

Smarketing is the unification of a company’s sales and marketing teams, which allows them to work toward a common goal. There are five steps to integrating Smarketing into your business, and one of the most important is to adopt closed-loop reporting. Closed-loop reporting measures and tracks both sales and marketing metrics and then shares them among the entire Smarketing team. That way everyone is on the same page about where leads fall within the sales funnel and how to close the sale.

Kevin and I will give you all the details in the video below!

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What if someone said.

“Today we are announcing three revolutionary products that will transform your business

The first one allows you to self publish to the world with one click
The second enables you to market your brand without begging the gatekeepers or paying big media. It doesn’t cost a cent
The third is a breakthrough two-way communication platform that is free

But they are not three separate products – it’s “Social Media”.

Would that interest you?

This take on social media…..inspired by Steve Jobs famous presentation to launch the iPhone in 2007, highlights the three vital components of social media.

It’s unrivalled power to publish, market and communicate to a global community in real time.

In essence it is the biggest change to publishing in 550 years (Gutenberg would be pleased), the biggest shift in marketing since the invention of the television and the most important communication revolution since the telephone.

Social media is many moving parts

Social media marketing has moved beyond just being a cool looking Facebook page. Its integration into the web means that you need to consider blogging, multimedia content, search and mobile as integral parts of your social media marketing strategy.

Consider the trends

The maturing of social media is highlighted by the emerging trends that illustrate the creativity of the medium. This includes:

• Brands becoming media companies and publishers. (Red Bull)
• Visual content as a component in your contagious content armoury. (Eg. Pinterest, Instagram, Infographics and Vine)
• Paying to play as Facebook reduces your free organic visibility
• Brands bypassing mass media. (Beyonce)
• The emergence of social media management platforms to help manage, monitor and measure the many components

We also mustn’t forget the rise of Google+ and its implications for search.

What are the challenges?

Despite many people understanding that they can’t ignore social. And they have moved beyond “why” to “how”, there are still many challenges.

One of these is the need for “unlearning”. John Maynard Keynes summed it up well when he said

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as escaping old ones“

This includes flipping old marketing habits on their head. Social media marketing is not about your brand, your products or selling. It’s about your customer.

It’s not about control but it is about managing the splintered chaos that is social media.

These challenges will push many comfort zones to the limits in traditional business models.

The opportunities

Despite the chaos that social media has brought to media there are many opportunities for making your brand visible and credible. Here are four worth embracing.

1. Publishing power is in your hands. No longer do you need to beg the mass media gatekeepers for newspaper inches. publishing has been democratized!
2. Tap into the the potential of free crowdsourced marketing. You can build your own online networks on social media and motivate your own fans and advocates to share and distribute your content.
3. Accelerate the building of your owned and earned digital assets
4. Build online credibility and trust by becoming ubiquitous online as you publish to YouTube, blogs and even Slideshare. Research by Edelman with its annual “Trust Barometer” shows that being seen 3-5 times will create a trust factor of 60%.

Taming the Social Media Marketing Beast from Jeff Bullas

So what are the steps for managing this social media beast?

It means making the investment and taking the time to create a strategy and plan that will provide a cohesive and integrated approach.

Step 1. Get clarity on your target audience

This means not only knowing the demographics but the social profiles and the personas that lay beyond the sterile data and this means asking some questions.

• What are their key problems and fears?
• Where do they get their information?
• What are their aspirations?
• What primary social networks do they use?
• What media do they consume?

Step 2. Set goals

What are your goals and their priorities for your social media marketing? These could include:

• Increase Facebook likes
• Improve brand awareness
• Drive traffic to website, blog online store
• Increase sales leads
• Grow your email list
• Customer engagement

Once that list is done then the priorities need to be assigned.

Step 3. Create content

After you have defined your audience and the prioritised goals are identified then the content can be created that will resonate with your potential prospects and customers to meet those marketing goals.

This will include but not limited to:

• Blog posts
• Ebooks
• YouTube videos
• Images for engagement on Facebook
• Twitter updates to drive traffic to online stores or websites

The content creation will vary depending on your target market and also whether your are a consumer or business brand.

Step 4. Marketing tactics to achieve the goals

You may have many goals but you need to pick your most important ones. Here are a couple of examples.

Goal: Build an email list

This can be done a few ways.

• Offer a free e-book on your blog that requires an email address to download
• Create a custom tab on Facebook that captures an email to download a whitepaper or watch a free video
• Run competitions on Facebook that require registering with an email address

Goal: Increase your social networks fans and followers

The importance of developing your own online distribution network that bypasses the traditional media model of paying for attention is becoming paramount.

So here are a couple of tactics for possible implementation.

1. Offer free premium content for a Facebook “like”
2. Follow the “followers” of other online influencers on Twitter in your niche

Step 5: Monitor, measure and manage

The digital web has one big advantage over the old analog world. You can measure.

So what are some key components to measure, monitor and manage?

• Social network growth
• Leads generated
• Retweets on Twitter
• Shares on Facebook
• Comments on your blog
• Website and blog traffic

And that is just the start of the metrics. Finding out what works and what doesn’t means you can adjust your tactics for optimal results.

So what are the takeaways?

We now live a world driven by the social, mobile and knowledge web and we need to play and to sum it up we need to embrace some realities.

• Unlearn the old paradigms. This means pushing your comfort zones.
• Sitting down and start planning that strategy
• Start thinking like a publisher
• Growing “your” online distribution networks to provide marketing independence

So start building your digital and social assets today.

Want to learn how to make your blog and content contagious and increase your Twitter followers?

My book – “Blogging the Smart Way – How to Create and Market a Killer Blog with Social Media” – will show you how.

After reading content marketing articles for a while, everything starts to sound like an echo chamber. People will tell you the same things again and again. You’ll hear trite advice like “Focus on quality not quantity” or “Don’t promote your product or brand too much”. The end result? You can easily follow advice blindly, without asking yourself if the rule applies to you.

While the most common advice does apply to most people, I thought it would be interesting to gather contrarian advice from experts. Here are 20 content marketing rules that challenge conventional notions (or just isn’t emphasized).

Arnie Kuenn – You need an SEO and link earning strategy

“You have to understand how search engines and social media works (which is how the vast majority of all business content is discovered) and know that links to your content are critically important.”

Arnie’s advice on focusing on SEO really resonated with me because we’ve been bombarded with messages on how SEO is going away. While it’s true that traditional search strategies are less effective, the majority of people still find businesses through search engines.

“We know that it is an extremely rare situation where content becomes popular or viral on its own. Maybe about as rare as winning the lottery. It can be a complicated, arduous process, but you must have a plan in place to routinely, share, promote and distribute your content. That’s how you drastically increase your odds of being discovered and having real users consume your content.” – Arnie Kuenn, CEO of Vertical Measures

We’ve all probably seen this Google Trends chart demonstrating the increasing popularity of content marketing, and the decline of link building.

Yet, this is a red herring, as people have coined alternative terms for essentially the same process. We call it content-based outreach, influencer outreach, and influencer marketing now.

So, while old-fashioned link building may be “dead”, you still need to have an outreach strategy. Think outside the box. Get a quote from an expert and link to them in your post. Or find curators who do weekly roundups such as the ones by MarketingLand. One of the most effective techniques is to reach out to influencers who have shared/linked to a post similar to the one you’re producing, as outlined here by Matthew Barby.

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Marcus Sheridan – Talk about your competition… a lot.

“When it comes down to it, for those companies that are willing to talk about the competition and other products (in a factual and accurate manner), there is a content goldmine just waiting to be discovered.”

Writing about our competition isn’t really sensible advice, so this is why Marcus’ advice struck me as contrarian. However, if executed correctly, it can establish you as the go-to authority in your industry. The keyword here is “correctly” because it’s easy to be biased and talk about the faults of your competitors, as Marcus explains:

“Be honest. Keep it real. Tell it like it is. Be willing to answer on your website the same questions you answer face to face all the time. By so doing, your brand and voice will grow. Consumers will look to you as a leader. So will the search engines. And ultimately, leads and sales will grow too.”

Marcus’ swimming pool blog is a great example of this rule. The blog compares the top brands, best/worst practices, and common challenges faced by buyers. Is it effective? You bet. He gets on average three emails a day from consumers asking him which swimming pool to choose. It’s also a search engine goldmine as some of these brands have almost no coverage outside of his blog. So someone Googling your competitor might end up seeing your post among the top results.

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Joe Pulizzi – Distribute your content on one channel only

“The greatest media brands of our time focused on delivering amazingly consistent content through one channel – WSJ, ESPN, The Huffington Post, etc. Yet, most brands are overwhelmed with delivering as much content through as many channels as possible. Maybe they have it wrong. Maybe less is more. I think 2014 will be the year that many brands go opposite of the pack and really make an impact through one channel.”

It might sound nuts to distribute your content in just 1-2 channels, but it’s something we agree with. It’s easy to get caught up with all the platforms we have available: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Slideshare, Linkedin, YouTube, etc, but none of us have unlimited resources. Focus on one or two of them that have the highest ROI.

If you’re a B2C company that might be Facebook. If search engine traffic will be crucial, then investing your time in Google+ is a smart strategy. Of course, you don’t have to ignore the other platforms completely. You can automate your engagement in Twitter for instance by using Buffer, and use it more as a broadcasting medium, while focusing more on personal engagement in Google+.

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Jeff Molander – Stop focusing on storytelling alone

As content marketers, we should focus on telling good stories to our audience to evoke their emotions, right? Jeff Molander, an authority on social selling disagrees.

“Good stories don’t cause sales. Engagment does not either. High levels of confidence in buyers (created by compelling blogs, videos, white papers, downloads, etc.) and clear, compelling calls to action do.”

While compelling case studies may count as storytelling, his point is that we should strive to tell stories that motivate buyers to take action, and buy your product. Not simply telling stories for the sake of telling a story.

“Your content should spend some time telling a good story AND always give customers a reason to believe that it can happen for them—that they can act on. That’s the part most people are missing.”

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Neil Patel – Creating tools can be more effective than content

Neil Patel has created tons of engaging content throughout his career, whether it’s for KISSMetrics, or Quick Sprout. Yet he claims creating tools can be more effective. When Neil created a free website analyzer, the engagement rates of visitors increased across the board.

“Over the years, I’ve been expanding Quick Sprout in many ways. I have created advanced guides, released a forum and tried multiple types of blog posts. None of these things provided as high of an engagement rate as the free website analyser tool did, which shows that people perceive software to be more valuable than content.”

In a way, you can think of tools as “evergreen content on steroids”. They offer a good reason for people to continually visit your site. One of my favorite free tools out there is SocialCrawlytics, a tool that analyzes content for any domain, and shows you the most shared pages, and the most popular authors. It’s created by Yousaf of RocketMill. Although it’s free, it’s used by thousands of businesses, and probably has given RocketMill extra business as a result. Another example is SEOGadget’s suite of SEO tools, created by Richard Baxter and his team over at SEOGadget.

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Rachel Foster – Don’t rush into the latest social network

When a new social platform arises, our first inclination may be to immediately rush into it, hoping it’s the next Twitter or Facebook. While you may want to register your company username, it may be best to plan a strategy for marketing in that platform, says Rachel Foster, CEO and B2B Copywriter of Fresh Perspective Copywriting.

“Many marketers think that they need to use the latest social network, because everyone is talking about it. However, what really matters is whether your audience uses the network and if they would be open to receiving content from you on it. So, don’t rush into the latest social network without doing your research first”.

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John Bottom – Create content for fewer buying cycles

Most experts will say you need different content for every level in the buying cycle. This probably is good advice if there’s just a couple of steps in the cycle. But creating different content for 10 or more stages can become impractical, says John Bottom.

“Most of my work involves planning content and communications campaigns that reflect the differing behaviours of B2B buyers as they progress though the buying cycle. There is a belief that this is a straightforward path to better results. But in truth most people fail to realise how complicated it can be – and how unnecessary that complication is.

I have seen buying funnels and email nurturing plans that list up to 12 different stages. This is so over-complicated that it becomes unworkable. Most companies do not do email nurturing at all, so to suggest that they base a communications programme on this is laughable. A far better approach is to consider just three stages and to prepare content and messaging for key audiences on just these three.”

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Brad Shorr – Stop focusing on creating content

It’s easy to get caught up on creating more and more content. But all too often, we create content that fails to achieve our goals. It may get a ton of pageviews, even shares and comments, but it contributes very little to the bottom line.

“In general, there’s way too much emphasis on content creation these days. As a result, we’re up to our eyeballs in content that is over promoted and underwhelming. Content may indeed be king, but unless marketers connect content to SEO goals, conversion goals, retention goals, branding goals, etc., the whole castle will collapse. So I would start by figuring out what exactly you want to accomplish and the value of accomplishing it. Then, work backwards to figure out what types of content you need and how much of it you can afford. “

Brad’s advice sounds like hearsay to people used to hearing “Content is king!”. But for some businesses, especially local businesses, creating more content can be a waste of time. That time can be better used investing in Adwords or local advertising.

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Brian Honigman – Views, likes and shares alone are meaningless

There’s a certain obsession with driving as many pageviews, or shares to a content. For instance, during the Super Bowl last year, when Oreo tweeted “You can dunk in the dark”, many in the content marketing industry cited that as a prime example of timely, engaging content. But nobody ever stopped and asked whether that really helped the bottom line of Oreo. (Personally, I ate Oreos once every 2 months in the past, but none in the past year, but that may just be me). Brian Honigman, a content marketing consultant drives home the importance on focusing on the metrics that really matter:

“Many marketers today still think creating content for the sake of developing content is enough to get by. In actuality, they are wasting their time and not impacting their business if the content created for your business doesn’t tie back to your core beliefs, your customers and the interest graph the makes up your brand’s positioning.

An example of this in action is when Jaguar recently released a cat video on YouTube about the holiday season that encouraged customers to come test drive their cars. The video tried to connect the virality of cat videos on YouTube to their core offerings, but this content lacked a true connection to their luxury brand and therefore, was just a video that got 100,000 views and that’s where it ended.

Creating content for the sake of creating content is counterintuitive because all your marketing efforts should have goals that can be measured to prove they provide an ROI. When you create content haphazardly, there is no way to attribute its success for your business. Yes, engagement is important across social media but if these views, likes or tweets aren’t tied to a larger goal then they are simply face value interactions that don’t drive much for your business other than small and momentary blip on the radar of consumers.”

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Ahava Leibtag – Great ideas don’t come from up top

Should your best content ideas come from up top? Ahava Leibtag, of Aha Media Group doesn’t think so.

“I’m not sure it’s counterintuitive, but there’s this feeling that information should come from executives—that we should look above us for the great ideas. But actually, the great ideas for content marketing usually come from the front lines. They come from the people that are answering people’s questions, and selling to them directly and responding to their complaints. When you ask your front line people for information, your content marketing comes alive because it’s based on live people with real concerns, questions and comments.”

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Colleen Jones – Less content is more

The idea that you don’t need to pump out lots of content keeps recurring. Colleen, Principal of Content Science shares the same sentiment. Here’s what she had to say:

“My top counterintuitive advice for content marketing is to start with a strategy–not with creating content. Why is that counterintuitive? Well, many lead generation and customer relationship platforms stress the importance of creating content. I think that well-intentioned message is easy to misinterpret as “Start by creating content.” To create the most effective content possible, you first need a strategy. Content Marketing Institute found that in 2013, the vast majority of content marketers did not have a documented content strategy. I hope that changes in 2014!

When you follow that advice, then you’ll find a second piece of counterintuitive advice is true: Less content is more. When you get strategic–in other words, plan what content your customers need and when–you’ll need to create less content than you thought. And that means your content will be easier to maintain and to optimize for the best possible performance.”

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Jason Miller – B2C and B2B marketing are not so different

“I would say the fact that a lot of the B2B marketing purists keep preaching on how different B2B and B2C marketing are. I mean of course the buying cycles and complexity of the sale are different, but the strategies for social and content are remarkably similar, especially at the top of the funnel. The psychology behind what a person engages with is the same for both as we are ultimately marketing to people, not acronyms.

As B2B companies continue to push the boundaries of their content beyond the traditional white paper they are quickly discovering that the types of content that work for one, often work for the other. I would even go as far as saying that B2C needs the technology that B2B marketers have been using for years to better track and personalize their content.”

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Chad Pollitt – Quantity vs Quality? It doesn’t matter.

Chad’s advice is something that we really agree with. It really does not matter if you produce one high quality content asset a week or 100 mediocre content assets, if nobody is reading your content. Here’s a litmus test: Take a post on content marketing from Mashable, or some high profile publication that is widely shared. Do you really believe the reason that post is widely shared is because it’s the most useful, informative, insightful article? Here’s more of Chad’s thoughts:

“This year has seen dozens of “thought-leaders” chime in on the content quality versus quantity debate. The thought behind it is simple – the more research, ideation and layers of editing used to produce high-quality content cannibalizes a marketer’s ability to produce more content. What’s the right mix? Seems like a fair concern, right? According to the Content Marketing Institute, only 36% of marketers believe they’re using their content effectively.

That means 64% believe they’re not – and that’s a whole lot of campaigns. It’s likely that those campaigns represent a mix of both high quality and frequently published content. The real difference between the 64% and the 34% is audience and distribution. It’s likely that the 36% of marketers who feel they use their content effectively have an existing audience and/or a distribution strategy to include earned and/or paid media.

So, the debate shouldn’t be quantity versus quality. It should be on how many resources to dedicate to content distribution and promotion.”

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Amanda Maksymiw – Don’t spend too much time perfecting your content.

Amanda Maksymiw, from Lattice Engines also shares a similar sentiment. It doesn’t matter if you follow the 80/20 rule, or the 50/50 rule. One thing is clear: you can’t spend 100% of the time creating the best content, and 0% promoting it, as Heidi Cohen emphasizes here. Here is what Amanda has to say:

“My advice is simple. Content marketing doesn’t have to be perfect. Marketers can toil away at a single piece of content for months on end but if the content isn’t being viewed, shared or consumed, it’s lost its value.It is better to focus on creating something that is good enough to deliver value and get it in the hands of your audience for feedback. “

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Belle Beth Cooper – Don’t be afraid to write broadly

Buffer, the social scheduling app is used by almost every social media marketer. How did they get so popular? Through content marketing, specifically writing about broad interesting topics, as explained by Belle Beth Cooper, co-founder of Hello Code and Content Crafter at Buffer (one of our favorite social media marketing apps).

“My tip would be not to discount the benefits of branching out into broad topics. That’s something that’s worked really well at Buffer, and if you’re using content marketing the way Rand Fishkin at Moz suggests you should (to build familiarity and trust, rather than conversions), broad topics are the way to go.”

We think this is sound advice, but may be applicable in certain businesses. For a product like Buffer, social scheduling is used in a variety of industries: from marketing to fashion. So it makes sense that they create content that would appeal to a broad audience.

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Tessa Wegert – Don’t be everywhere online

This might be a bit similar to what Joe mentioned earlier (focus on one distribution channel), but Tessa Wegert adds her own spin to it:

“Content marketing has received a ton of attention this year, in part because there’s so much of it being produced. Our instinct might be to deliver as much branded content as possible, because consumers are eager to be engaged and entertained, but I think it’s in a brand’s best interest to keep these kinds of campaigns in check. Trying to capitalize on every possible opportunity by producing countless videos, GIFs, infographics, and Tumblr pages can actually dilute a brand’s image.

It’s better to focus on the marketing channels that make the most sense, devise a strategy for ongoing content development, and put your energy into making that content as good as it can be. Just as brands can’t be all things to all people, few truly benefit from being everywhere online. “

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Margot Bloomstein – Don’t feed the content beast.

Margot also shares the same sentiment as Joe and Tessa above in regards to focusing on just a few distribution platforms. Sometimes when we hear statistics on how 100 million people are on Pinterest, or Instagram, we immediately jump to the conclusion that those are 100 million potential customers or visitors to your business. But that’s not the case of course. Many of those platforms are even working hard to ensure you don’t get that much free exposure, such as Facebook.

“Content marketing has received a ton of attention this year, in part because there’s so much of it being produced. Our instinct might be to deliver as much branded content as possible, because consumers are eager to be engaged and entertained, but I think it’s in a brand’s best interest to keep these kinds of campaigns in check.

Trying to capitalize on every possible opportunity by producing countless videos, GIFs, infographics, and Tumblr pages can actually dilute a brand’s image. It’s better to focus on the marketing channels that make the most sense, devise a strategy for ongoing content development, and put your energy into making that content as good as it can be. Just as brands can’t be all things to all people, few truly benefit from being everywhere online. “

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Scott Abel – Ignore grammar rules

Should you pay attention to conventional grammar rules when writing content? Scott Abel from The Content Wrangler doesn’t think so.

“Old school grammar rules are often at odds with the world in which we find ourselves today. Creative Writing and Language Arts rules don’t work well in a world in which Language Science rules (think search engine optimization) are needed. So, I ignore many of the “rules” we were taught in grade school grammar classes (to the horror of my wordsmith friends) like “Never use the same word two or three times in the first couple of paragraphs.” The irony here is that this “rule” (if you can call it that) is ambiguous (two or three times in the first so many paragraphs?) and it introduces even more ambiguity in situations where the exact word is not only appropriate, but necessary for comprehension and findability.

The best advice is to write in clear, concise, and specific (not ambiguous) prose. Don’t reach for the thesaurus. Synonyms are evil remnants of days gone by and are almost always unnecessary.”

What do you think?

While some of these rules may not be that contrarian, or may not apply to you, the key takeaway is that you should always ask whether certain strategies apply to your business. Do you have any contrarian rules to add to this list? Share one of them in the comments below. I will tweet a free Starbucks gift card to the best comment after five days.

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Marketing automation may not be the new new thing any more. Which is probably one of the reasons why bringing high-end solutions like Eloqua, Marketo, or IBM into your company can cost thousands and thousands of dollars.

But all is not lost for those who want to just dip their marketing toes in the automation waters.

In fact, for those who want free or very low-cost marketing automation systems, there are at least eight options that have been deliberately designed for incredibly easy entry points — from free to under $200/month.

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The VB Marketing Automation Index: 1,000 marketing pros rated the top systems in 24 categories.

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“There are a lot of people out there that see the power of permission marketing and in-bound marketing,” JumpLead’s Matt Fenn told me recently. “But as soon as they start looking at how they can implement it, they hit a wall of $500 or $800 a month, which is out of the price range of many people.”

That’s why, he says, his company built a product to do what Hubspot does, but at a price point he wanted to pay.

Here are eight companies that did the same thing:

1. Leadsius: $0 entry point

Leadsius is a three-year-old Swedish company that just released its product from a long-standing beta two weeks ago. While it focuses on small to medium-sized companies, the company’s understanding of what “small” and “medium” mean is tempered by the small Scandinavian market it started in — Sweden is home to just about as many people as New York City or L.A.

“In Sweden that is not the same as in the U.S.,” founder and CEO Markus Lundin told me. “We target companies with 10-200 employees … we end where Act-On starts.”

Leadsius has a full-ish suite of features. But the company might be strongest in website visitor tracking and analytics, since that’s where the company first began.

Features:

• Lead nurturing
• Lead qualification
• Email marketing
• Lead management
• Landing page creator
• Web forms creator
• Contact database
• Website visitor tracking
• Lead analysis and reporting

Pricing: $0 to $1,195/month

2. Sales Autopilot: $0 entry point

Sales Autopilot is fairly typical of low-cost entry-level marketing automation solutions: It tries to do a little bit of everything, including some basic customer relationship management (CRM).

Based in Hungary, Sales Autopilot offers complete functionality for free for its fairly extensive list of features, as long as you stay below 400 emails a month and one user. In other words, it’s incredibly easy to say yes to Sales Autopilot, and yet it can expand up to as many as two million emails a month for thousands of dollars in monthly cost.

“You can start using one of the world’s most sophisticated yet easy to use ‘all-in-one’ marketing and sales machines with no cost to you,” the company says.

Features:

• Email marketing
• Integrated email, SMS and direct mail campaigns
• Lead nurturing
• Sales process management
• Customer targeting
• Process management
• Automated marketing campaigns
• ERP integration
• Call center integration
• Built-in CRM
• Built-in e-commerce
• A/B testing
• Website customization/personalization on the fly
• Landing pages
• Surveys and polls

Pricing: $0 to $3,500/month and up

3. Azuqua: $0 entry point

Azuqua is another of those quasi-hybrid systems that does a bit of sales, a bit of marketing, and a bit of customer service. In some sense that can be a bad sign, and sometimes all-in-one system do everything adequately but nothing extremely well, but in another sense it speaks to the ongoing melting of marketing and sales and customer support into a single set of activities with different foci in each.

The company is a very young Seattle-based startup that is built to automate and connect cloud-based business processes into what it calls “workFlõ” scenarios.

For example, someone could tweet about you, which Azuqua notices. The system then analyzes the tweet for sentiment, and routes it to different departments such as sales or customer service depending on what it finds in the tweet. That creates actions in, for instance, Salesforce, which then trigger customer or prospect contacts from your team.

Features:

• Automation of workflows
• CRM integration
• Social integration (but not Facebook yet, apparently)
• Personalization

Pricing: $0 to $250/month and up

4. Spokal: $39/month entry point

Spokal actually has a $19/month entry point, but that version of the service is solely focused on Twitter. And even the $39/month or the full $79/month product levels have only some of the features that you’d expect from a marketing automation system.

But still, for a fairly inexpensive price you get a marketing automation starter system which focuses on inbound leads via content marketing and social media. The biggest feature? Search engine optimization (SEO) help in creating your content to attract leads via search marketing.

“It’s like having a SEO expert, a blogging expert, and a content marketing expert all on staff for a low monthly fee,” a customer quoted by Spokal says.

Features:

• SEO-informed rich content creation
• Social sharing and scheduling
• Lead scoring
• Keyword research
• SEO and social analytics
• Twitter audience building

Pricing: $19 to $79/month

5. JumpLead: $40/month entry point

Like Leadsius, JumpLead first approached marketing automation from a web visitor profiling perspective, with a product that could identify visitors by their IP addresses. That product, however, generated large amounts of data which the company couldn’t handle.

“We didn’t have any capability to manage and nurture those leads,” CEO Matt Fenn told me. “The volume and scale was like sand slipping through our fingers … so we started to build the features that we needed.”

Building features for themselves, JumpLead’s engineers soon found themselves with a product that they could sell to others, with landing page creation, email marketing, contact management, and analytics joining the original visitor identification capability.

For Fenn, the low price is one of the key features:

“It does allow people to just play around with it without a significant investment in time and money,” he told me.

Features:

1. Visitor identification
2. Live web chat
3. Automated notifications and follow-ups
4. Landing pages
5. Web forms
6. Lead scoring
7. Email campaigns
8. Contact management
9. Social media integration
10. Analytics

Price: $40 to $480/month

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We want to hear from you. Fill out our 9-question survey on free or cheap marketing automation systems.

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6. Nurture: $95/month entry point

Nurture pitches itself as an all-in-one marketing automation system for the Fortune 500 to the “Fortune 5,000,000″ in other words, something that works for the one-person marketing department as much as for the big marketing team.

What facilitates that wide reach are an extremely simple interface and the ability to use the system as a stand-alone tool. Some people will use Nurture within their larger company as a personal or project tool, while some will use it for their entire small business.

“It’s got a nice balance of power and features without the bloat and complexity you find in a lot of marketing automation tools,” a customer quoted on the company’s site says.

Features:

• On-site visitors tracking and engagement
• Email marketing
• Surveys
• Customer segmentation
• A/B testing
• Automated, rules-based messaging
• Real-time alerts for sales staff for key leads
• Contact management
• Analytics
• Lead scoring
• Web forms builder
• Landing pages

Pricing: $95 to $3,000/month

7. Infusionsoft: $199/month entry point

Infusionsoft is possibly the best-known and most successful marketing automation system in this list, and there are some good reasons why. Even though its price is low, Infusionsoft offers an all-in-one system that combines aspects of CRM, marketing automation, social media marketing, and e-commerce tools into one package that is very attractive for small business.

That helped it achieve eighth place on our VB Marketing Automation Index among much bigger, tough competition. It’s also the system that generated the most responses in our surveys from companies with under $25 million in revenue. And, despite the low cost, it ranked well in our reader survey on its ability to meet most or all of organizations’ marketing needs.

“The small business market is underserved by software companies,” CEO Clate Mask told VentureBeat in January of this year. “Most vendors in the sales and marketing SaaS industry are gunning for the enterprise clients and their products show it … true small businesses are left having to figure out how to make these systems work for their needs and it usually fails.”

The company offers a huge range of solutions, but it’s worth noting that at the lower price points, some of the features here aren’t included: CRM and e-commerce don’t make it into the lowest package.

Features:

• Calendaring and task management
• Contact management
• Lead scoring
• Customer segmentation
• Email marketing
• Automated campaigns
• Landing pages
• Web forms
• Web activity intelligence
• Analytics
• Social media integration (available)
• Built-in CRM
• Quoting and ordering tool
• Sales automation
• Sales reports
• E-commerce
• Referral programs

Pricing: $199 to $379/month

8. Genoo: $199/month entry point

Genoo says it marries old-school email marketing software and new-school marketing automation in a way that allows you to do more with less. The company also boasts that providing “an affordable way to grow business” is one of its top priorities.

The lowest price level doesn’t include everything, but Genoo does have a very broad marketing automation toolset for its price. It is worth noting, however, that for anyone sending significant numbers of emails, pricing will go up from the base point. And, unlike InfusionSoft, you pay for email right from the first one you send — there’s no included number of emails.

However, Genoo does have an extraordinary number of features for its price point.

Features:

• Website and content management system
• Blogging platform
• Landing pages
• SEO analysis
• Web forms
• Contact management
• Email marketing
• Lead nurturing
• Customer segmentation by demographics and behavior
• Automated programs with triggers
• Social media tracking
• CRM integration
• Built-in CRM
• Lead scoring
• Analytics

Pricing: $199 to $1,499, with emails costing extra

What you need to know to make your content steer buyers to you

An estimated 80% of business decision makers would now rather get company information in a series of articles than an advertisement, a recent Roper Public Affairs study shows.

The right content can drive website traffic, generate leads and deliver revenue, steering the buyer’s journey in the right direction: your direction.

Yet though the power of content marketing is now widely acknowledged, only a minority of organisations have a coherent and co-ordinated strategy in place to optimise that content organisation-wide.

A common problem is that many organisations are still struggling with fundamental changes in the marketing landscape.

The sales funnel is dead: long live the ‘buyer journey’

The days of moving prospects down a sales funnel are over, for example. Consumers now control their own ‘buyer journey’ – a journey where no one influencer has more than 30% of total power and an average of 7.6 different sources are likely to play a role (Forrester).

There’s a lot of content online: but much of it doesn’t speak directly to readers about what interests them. To build a successful content marketing strategy that stands out, an organisation must start with the consumer and develop content that addresses issues they will face – tackling potential obstacles to buying, for example – rather than focusing on product information

Start with the consumer

The best content marketing strategies use a map of the buyer’s journey as their framework. And it is important to remember that the content a buyer will need will vary at different steps along their journey.

A successful content marketing strategy will therefore ensure not only that the right portfolio of content is available, but will include an appropriate strategy for publication of that content to hit key points in the customer buyer journey.

Key questions before you put together your content plan

Before you put together your content plan, these are the questions you and your team should be asking:

What content do we already have?

It sounds obvious, but your first step should be to audit the content you have. Such an exercise will enable an organisation to understand where usable content already exists, which will minimise duplication and reduce waste.

What questions do our customers ask which our content could answer?

You should identify knowledge gaps, the information needed to close the gaps and how the type of content needed at different steps along the way will change.

What content does our sales team need?

Ask them! Marketers often benefit from talking to someone with daily experience of customers. Is there a problem your product solves which prospects mention time and again? Is there a ‘snag’ in the buyer journey which you could smooth out with the correct content? Does the sales team need industry-specific or demographic-specific content?

Help your sales team with suggestions on how to share your content. If a prospect read and enjoyed a particular white paper, your salespeople will want recommendations for what content they should send them next. Emails should be automated if customers abandon an online basket, or visit a particular webpage. It’s not just about producing the right content, but publishing it strategically.

Could software help us manage content creation and publishing?

Putting in place the appropriate systems and processes to help manage and streamline both the content production and publication process can add real value to a business, streamlining the content development process and providing transparency.

Also important in realising the true potential of content marketing is ensuring that structures are in place to enable collaboration between content creating colleagues organisation-wide.

Next steps

In a world in which digital channels, online social activity and rapidly evolving personal technology increasingly enable consumers to side-step conventional marketing messages, content matters more than ever before.

A good content plan:

• Answers the questions customers ask throughout their ‘buyer journey’.

• Doesn’t obnoxiously push products: solving customers’ ‘pains’ instead.

• Gives your sales team the tools they need to engage buyers at every stage.

Start planning now! For more advice download the eGuide Blueprint of a modern marketing campaign

Do you ever wonder how much hidden potential is buried in your lead nurturing pile? The truth is, many businesses have leads that slip through the cracks. Maybe on the surface it didn’t appear to be a good lead, maybe the timing was off because they weren’t quite ready to buy, or maybe your inside sales team was just spread too thin at the time the lead came in. Over the last year, who knows how many good opportunities you’ve been sitting on.

We’ve all been in those situations when your sales team logs a couple calls before giving up and sending a prospect to nurture so they can move on to fresh leads. It languishes there for months before all of the sudden, your top competitor wins the prospect from right under your nose. This happens because once a lead is put into nurture, most reps forget about it. Let’s face it, there’s a sales recency bias. Reps would rather ask marketing for more leads than spend time prospecting “old” leads.

This begs the question: Is there a way for sales to cut down on missed opportunities without zapping productivity? The answer is not as daunting as you think.

The CMO Opportunity

Lead nurturing is a huge opportunity for CMOs. As a matter of fact, Forrester Research says companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost -- that means you can achieve big wins by preventing good leads from going dark.

The key to this is accurately assessing which leads are worth pursuing. In addition to continuing to collect lead intel through site conversions, you can collect external data on your leads --.things like employee count, technology vendors, website traffic, hiring patterns, advertising spend, spam detection, etc. That kind of information gives you a much richer view into your prospect and reduces the likelihood of a good lead getting overlooked.

The real breakthrough is when you take all of those signals and use data science to distill them into a simple likelihood-to-buy score (kind of like a credit score). With a programmatic lead scoring approach, you can look across thousands of leads sitting in nurture to see what you might have missed. Or you can apply the same predictive power to leads as they come, and use it for better determining MQLs so you're less likely to pass over a hot prospect.

Top 5 Tips for Igniting Nurture

Here are some ideas for companies that want to make the most of their lead nurturing programs:

1) Use automated research.

If you’re relying on time consuming manual research and human intuition to determine whether a prospect is a fit for your product, at least some good leads are bound to get ignored. Predictive lead scoring ensures that more leads are thoroughly examined and routed down the right path -- whether that’s straight to nurture or rushed to a sales rep. It works whether you have 10 leads or 10 million leads.

2) Overcome Sales’ biases.

As a sales rep, it’s hard to ignore that certain lead sources are more likely to convert than others. For example, a free trial lead might convert at 4x the rate of a webinar lead. But what if you end up neglecting a diamond in the rough just because it came through the “wrong” channel or had a “bad” title? If your reps trust your scoring, they’ll follow up with leads regardless of lead source, job title, or any other attribute that might have spooked them in the past. When the model says a lead is likely to convert, you want your reps to think twice before sending it to nurture.

3) Create a journey specifically for good leads in nurture.

While most marketers believe that designing a personalized journey for every lead is the right thing to do, it is hard to break the cycle of batch-and-blast email marketing. Campaign managers want to reach as large an audience as possible, so prospects get bombarded by often-irrelevant emails.

When leads with high scores end up in nurture, you’ll instead want to give them special treatment. Many of your best promotions might be prohibitively expensive if you blasted them to everyone, but become affordable when you can target them only to prospects that are likely to buy. A compelling journey for top leads might include special invitations to events, direct mail offers, or 1:1 consultations. Find ways to show them the love so they’ll come back and re-engage.

4) Dig where the ground is softest.

It's best to catch good leads while they’re still warm, but combing through archived leads is still worthwhile. By tapping into outside sources, you can get current information on your prospects even if they haven’t visited your site in months. Maybe they’ve added a bunch of employees, opened up a new office, or invested in a new piece of technology. Find those spots in your nurture fields where the ground isn’t yet frozen over.

5) Dedicate nurture-specific reps and develop new scripts.

Whether they’re working a fresh “contact me” lead or a year-old prospect, your reps need to feel confident that they can strike up a conversation. This means you need to go beyond your standard script when it comes to neglected nurture leads. In addition, it’s important to recognize that inside sales folks may not be best equipped to handle older prospects. Take a hybrid approach and carve off a couple reps to focus on your nurture pool. They won’t be distracted by low-hanging fruit, and you can set quotas for them that are more closely aligned with conversion rates.

From where I sit, there’s simply no reason not to try some of these techniques and find out what kind of leads have been hiding out in your nurturing pile. Let me know what you discover!

Congratulations, you have taken one of the first and most important steps you can take in marketing. You have admitted that you are not your ideal customer. Sounds like a simple concept, but when making marketing and business decisions so often we gravitate towards what we personally like. And why not?

Our entire lives are driven by personal choices. What we wear, what career we choose, what car we drive – all these decisions are driven by personal preference. So naturally, why wouldn’t your customers love what you love? Unless you are the embodiment of the human condition (and if you are, we would love to meet you) chances are that there are strategic differences between your preferences and those of your customers.

Marketing strives to define those preferences through Marketing Personas.

To Be or not to be…. that is the persona?

As emotional human beings we demand our individuality – so why doesn’t marketing accurately reflect this? Marketing personas attempt to put a face and emotions to the facts of a target market group.

Marketing personas are method actors allowing us to step over and experience life in our buyer’s shoes at a much more intimate level. But before we get too emotional let’s review the foundation of Marketing Personas – Target Markets.

The Origin of the Persona:

You may or may not be more familiar with “target markets”, the predecessor of the marketing persona. Target markets have long held rein over marketing land and are best defined as groups of individuals that are separated by distinguishable and noticeable aspects. Target markets can be separated by the following aspects:

• geographic segmentations, addresses (their location climate region)
• demographic/socioeconomic segmentation (gender, age, income, occupation, education, household size, and stage in the family life cycle)
• psychographic segmentation (similar attitudes, values, and lifestyles)
• behavioral segmentation (occasions, degree of loyalty)
• product-related segmentation (relationship to a product)

In the good ol days marketers would make educated guesses about who their target market was based on available information, test that hypothesis and hope they got it right. Before the days of tell-all Google analytics, Facebook user data and hashtags, marketers poured over surveys, census data and Nielsen Ratings. The process stills holds value today but is faster and more accurate thanks to the technology available to the marketing and business industries.

Enter the Persona

Personas pick up where the target market ends. Diving deeply into psychographic and behavioral segmentation, Personas describe a target market group in the terms of an individual – who might define that group of consumers for the brand. When developing a persona, a simple questionnaire can get you started in the right direction:

What Personas can do for your Marketing?

Whether you are a small business or a Fortune 500 – every business can benefit from understanding its buyer personas. By being able to understand your buyers’ pain points, you can uncover ways your company can solve problems, enhance experiences and create brand loyalty.

By understanding your buyers’ habits – where they get information, how they spend their free time and what matters most – the marketer can spend time creating a marketing strategy that places messaging where their buyers will discover it.

Buyer personas help marketers create messaging strategies and purchasing funnels to help qualify leads for sales – spending time nurturing sales that lead to closings, not wasting time on leads that will not perform at this time. If any action in your integrated marketing strategy doesn’t lead back to a well-defined persona, something is amiss!!

Creating a Buyer Persona

Buyer personas are created through research, surveys, and interviews of your target audience. That includes a mix of customers – both “good” and “bad” — prospects, and those outside of your contact database who might align with your target audience.

Remember personas are both an art and a science based on fact and intuition. When creating personas its a good idea to look at the following sources:

• Customer Surveys
• Customer Lead or Source Reports (i.e. How did you hear of us)
• Your Email Statistics
• Tapestry Reports based on location
• Focus groups or customer interviews

Using the information you gathered, now all you need to do is fill in the blanks for each persona with the following:

Background

• Basic details about persona’s role
• Key information about the persona’s company
• Relevant background info, like education or hobbies

Demographics

• Gender
• Age Range
• HH Income (Consider a spouse’s income, if relevant)
• Urbanicity (Is your persona urban, suburban, or rural?)

Identifiers

• Buzz words
• Mannerisms
• Habits

Goals

• Persona’s primary goal
• Persona’s secondary goal

Challenges

• Primary challenge to persona’s success
• Secondary challenge to persona’s success

How we can help

• How you solve your persona’s challenges
• How you help your persona achieve goals

Real Quotes

Include a few real quotes – taken during your interviews – that represent your persona well. This will make it easier for others in your company to relate to and understand your persona.

Common Objections

Identify the most common objections your persona will raise during the sales process

Marketing Messaging

How should you describe your solution to your persona?

Presenting A Persona

Once you have addressed each of the areas outlined in a marketing persona, you can create a one-page summary for that persona, give it a descriptive name and include a photo of what that person may look like.

Names can be fun like Small Business Sally, Dan the Daydreamer or Randy Real Estate Agent.

Each one should be descriptive enough that no one should have to guess as to what the persona is about. After completing your personas be sure to reference them often ensuring that your messaging is targeting one or more personas in a way that positions you to solve their pain points.

B2B marketers who link email marketing with their buyer’s journey for lead nurturing will have more success than sending “batch and blast” emails.

When used properly, email marketing is one of the most powerful weapons in a B2B marketer’s war chest.

Email marketing is more scalable (and less intrusive) than telemarketing. It’s also more personalized and interactive than direct mail. Plus, it’s cheaper and more measurable. Sure, it’s not the only marketing communication tool you use, but it’s one of the most important.

The problem with email marketing, however, is that many companies still view it as a stand-alone tactic. Some marketers and business owners are thinking to themselves (and saying) “let’s do some email marketing,” as if they want to shake the revenue tree to see what easily falls off.

Often, the impulse is to push some unwanted sales messages or company news out to an email list. “Let’s get our name out there.” The problem boils down to the fact that companies still want to sell their way instead of letting the customers buy their way.

That creates a real disconnect because the way people buy is changing. Dramatically.

A Corporate Executive Board study found that B2B buyers are at least 57% through their purchase research before they first contact a seller. Many of the buyers are up to 70% through their research before reaching out to possible vendors.

With buyers doing so much research before first contacting the seller, companies are using content marketing to insinuate themselves into that first 57% of the buyers’ research.

And that is where the really smart email marketing is taking place these days. It is the glue that is holding together the online sales process. Done right, email marketing can be the lubricant that greases the wheels of your lead nurturing machinery.

The best way to approach email marketing is to align it with your sales cycle. And the first meeting you should have is with your sales team to talk about the process your leads and customers go through before buying.

For instance, what kinds of questions are prospects asking the sales team? What are their biggest pain points? How long is the sales cycle? Once you have answers, you’ll want to do a content audit to make sure the information on your website is providing answers the questions your leads want. This process is known as content mapping.

If you have multiple buyer personas, you’ll want to do what makes email marketing even more effective: segmentation. When a prospect fills out a landing page form, ask for information that will help to put them in an appropriate buyer persona segment so that subsequent emails will be more relevant and helpful.

Then, analyze what content your leads are downloading most and think about what they need next. As you start to see patterns, you can then begin to offer proactive answers that can guide them through their research and speed up your sales cycle.

This process of offering your digital hand to prospects to guide them through their research cannot be done without email marketing. And to make your email marketing most effective, you should use marketing automation software.

This enables you to engage and personalize each email communication to your prospects. If you are able to personalize each stage of the sales cycle your lead is in based on their what behaviors they take on your website and the needs of each persona, your email will be enormously effective.

photo credit: kevin dooley via photopin cc

The About Us page is one of the most visited pages of your website. But what happens after visitors land on it–do they stay on your site, look at your offerings, contact you for more information? Or do they disappear?

Part of the trick to keeping visitors and turning them into leads is to tell a powerful brand story, one that grabs and holds their attention like a great novel or movie. If you’re having trouble using stories in marketing, try these 15 storytelling techniques to help you write a better brand story.

 

1. Take the time to prepare

You’ll use your brand story everywhere–blog posts, ebooks, videos, networking, speeches, elevator pitches, sales calls, even your business plan. The list is endless. Before writing any of those materials, you prepare what you want to say and how you want to say it. Why would you treat your brand story any differently?

Write your brand story the same way you’d write a blog post or speech: with lots of careful planning and preparation. That means verifying details and gathering lots of information about the history of your brand, such as dates, quotes, personal anecdotes, and the specific motivations of founders and key executives. This storytelling technique ensures you have plenty to work with each time you tell the story.

2. Learn how to tell a good story

All the preparation and planning in the world will only get you so far if you don’t know anything about the art of storytelling. Make sure your story includes the basics of action, character, emotion, and imagery. Then refine it with these 21 elements of good storytelling.

3. Focus on the active struggle

A story that only shows what happens to the protagonist is boring. Stories that depict a character’s active pursuit–of justice, love, triumph–are far more interesting because the character actually does something. As the great playwright David Mamet said: “If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it will bore the actors, and will, then, bore the audience, and we’re all going to be back in the breadline.” Focusing on the activity, the drama of the story, is what keeps your audience engaged and interested.

4. Skip the slow parts

Because you’ll retell your brand story over and over, you won’t necessarily need to include every single detail every time. Telling the slower parts of the story at the wrong time or to the wrong audience can cause them to lose interest. Cherry-picking the best details for each retelling helps you keep their interest and keeps the story from feeling stale or old if they’ve heard it before.

Your About Us page, for example, might have more of the slow parts than an ebook or sales call because you have more room to tell them and visitors to that page specifically want to know more details than they can get anywhere else.

Consider each retelling individually, and ask yourself if each detail is critical to help this particular audience understand or do what you want them to.

5. Match your brand story to the format

Writing for the ear (e.g. sales calls, elevator pitches, videos, speeches) is not the same as writing for the eye (e.g. blog posts, ebooks, articles, ads). Adapting your storytelling to fit the format prevents the story from sounding wooden, generic, or rehearsed, and it strengthens the appeal to each different audience.

When writing your brand story for audio formats like videos and conversations, pay special attention to:

• volume and tone of voice
• facial expressions
• eye contact
• hand gestures
• pauses and pacing

When writing your brand story for text-based formats like blog posts and ebooks, pay special attention to:

• readability (small paragraphs, bullets, etc.)
• punctuation
• voice and style
• pace of the story

6. Control your pacing

Tell your brand story too slowly, and the audience will lose interest. But go too fast, and they won’t be able to keep up. It’s okay to speed up and slow down the pace of the story according to its tension as long as you can gauge your audience and keep them with you.

Pacing also applies to the speed at which you tell the story in person, when you must pace both the story itself and the way you tell it. This storytelling technique is critical in videos, speeches, sales calls, and elevator pitches, since your voice is the medium.

Image credit: DianHasanWordPress.Com

7. Make it personal

Don’t be afraid to mention your failings and problems. Doing so shows the people behind the brand, and your customers want to do business with people–not faceless corporations. In Warren Buffett’s 2014 shareholder letter, for example, he uses self-deprecation to liven up an otherwise dry communication and bond with his audience.

That bonding helps his audience get to know, like, and trust him, so they continue to invest with him. Brand loyalty and repeat purchases are the true power of personal stories.

8. Focus on the human element

The most powerful stories use emotion to connect with us on a human level. Facts and figures can be persuasive, but stories are memorable. In an Entrepreneur article on brand storytelling techniques, renowned storyteller and PR professional Kambri Crews recommends using emotional moments to help prospects connect with the product or service.

She points out how seeing a video of a child receiving a cochlear implant and hearing his mother’s voice for the first time is so much more powerful than citing research and case studies.

9. Make the stakes clear

In every story, there has to be some sort of conflict or tension. When you focus on what the characters in your story stand to gain or lose because of that conflict, you make them seem real and involve your audience emotionally. Readers and listeners become invested in the action and the characters of the story. They begin to root for the protagonist, wanting him to overcome the obstacles that threaten him.

Focusing on the stakes involved in your brand story can also help you develop and promote your unique selling proposition, emphasizing the problem your customers have and how you came up with a new and better solution.

10. Follow a classic story pattern

If you don’t know where or how to start, a storytelling technique that can help is employing a tried-and-true story pattern. Using recognizable patterns and archetypes helps both you and your audience know what comes next. While this can sometimes make the story a bit predictable, these patterns are classics for a reason.

The most common story patterns are:

• the hero’s journey
• the quest, journey, or adventure
• coming-of-age or discovering oneself
• personal triumph
• historical events/facts
• meet the guru

Image source: Content Marketing Institute

Here are 6 more story patterns perfect for building your brand and inspiring customers and employees.

11. Throw in a surprise

One of the 15 storytelling techniques learned from 2013’s INBOUND Bold talks is to capitalize on the element of surprise. Having a unexpected premise or unforeseen plot twist holds your audience’s attention and makes you stand out from the competition.

12. Make sure you have a solid beginning, middle, and end

Breaking your story into these parts helps you remember the most important moments of the story, maintain continuity between tellings, and control pacing. The beginning must hook the audience, capturing their attention so they keep reading or listening. The middle maintains that interest through entertainment and possibly education, while the end wraps up the story and clearly calls your audience to action.

13. Avoid “moral of the story” endings

Truly powerful stories stay with us and allow us to draw our own conclusions. When you tell your audience what they should learn from the story, you take away their opportunity to consider what you shared and discover things for themselves.

Plus, when you bring up a specific lesson or moral, your brand story feels less like a compelling sales piece and more like a mildly interesting fairy tale–the exact opposite effect of what you want.

14. Use natural language

Audiences can tell when you recite a memorized pitch or use stilted, formal language. It comes off sounding false and forced, and results in losing their interest and attention. On the other hand, when you speak in a way that’s natural, both to you and your audience, you sound like a real person, giving your story a much stronger appeal.

Natural language means not letting an editor polish rough-but-real phrases or remove cliches if using them is natural to you and your audience. For example, New York Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter used natural language to maintain a conversational tone in the narrative of his recent retirement letter with phrases like “bunch of injuries”.

Of course, using natural language doesn’t mean publishing the first draft of your brand story without a editor’s review. It means telling the story in a way that’s true to your brand and your ideal customer. It means knowing your audience well enough to use language that speaks directly to them, and knowing your brand well enough to stay true to your mission, values, and brand personality.

Image credit: WriterEffect

15. Make the story visual

Audiences want to see the story as well as read or hear it. By painting a picture in the audience’s minds, visuals make your brand story more interesting and more memorable, and they make the people in the story more real. There are three ways to make your storytelling more visual.

Setting: When you focus on setting, it’s easier for listeners to imagine the where and when of the story. Was it inside or outside? Near a house, a business, a church, a park? Did the sun warm your face or the full moon illuminate the path? If you have the time, create the setting for your story. If you don’t have much time or space to convey the setting, choose the most important details.

Senses: Utilizing all the senses is another way to bring the story to life. It reinforces the setting and helps the audience use their imaginations. For each moment of the story, consider what you (or the main character) saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and physically felt. You won’t need to mention all 5 senses for every moment, but try to incorporate all of them throughout the story if possible.

Visuals: What kind of visuals you use in your brand storytelling depends on the format, but you should strive to use some kind of visual in every telling of your brand story. Photos, drawings, graphs, videos, slides, infographics, facial expressions, gestures–these all make your story interesting and memorable.

What storytelling techniques do you use to share your brand story? Please tell us in the comments below!

There’s no denying that tensions often exist between marketing and sales teams. This is most prevalent when we see marketing and sales working toward separate goals. However, when the two teams work in alignment, companies can see improved lead quality, increased revenue, and more efficient processes such as lead assignment and follow-up.

Above all, sales and marketing teams need to trust each other; without trust it’s a surefire recipe for disaster.

Key characteristics of a great marketing and sales relationship include:

1. Shared Vision For The Company
Success happens when both the marketing and sales team support a shared vision for the company. This vision should be identified at the top, and delivered in each department. When both teams are rowing in the same direction, your company is best positioned to dominate.

2. Mutual Understanding & Respect
Long-term success for any company can only happen when trust and respect is established between both departments. This can be achieved through collaborative work and when both teams are held accountable for performance.

3. Win-Win Attitude
Great marketing and sales teams understand that if marketing is successful, there will be plenty of leads in the pipe that, in turn, lead to the success of sales team. When both teams understand their individual value in the sales process, both are more focused on a positive and mutually beneficial result.

4. Shared Standards When It Comes To Lead Quality
According to MarketingSherpa, 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified.

Cohesive marketing and sales teams are aligned when it comes to lead quality and evaluation. When both teams understand the process used to score and qualify leads, those leads can be better assigned to sales for follow-up and closing, ensuring that only the most qualified leads are pursued.

5. Communication
The right hand should always know what the left is doing. This is especially true in the context of marketing and sales.

Successful teams work in collaboration with shared agendas. With a focus on regular communication between the departments, marketing is able to arm the sales team with most effective content and tools they need to close the deal.

We also see marketing teams including sales in discovery meetings, where they can provide valuable insights and suggestions in relation to customer feedback and experience from those on the front line.

6. Spend Time Together
When possible, it’s important to get employees from both departments in the same room, on the same call, or in front of the same presentation. Whether through regular monthly meetings, team building workshops or other company events, cohesion is best achieved when colleagues know the people they’re working with.

7. Give Credit Where It’s Due
The best marketing and sales teams share the credit.

When both teams work under a shared vision, toward the same goals, with processes and collaboration supporting their individual efforts, it becomes easier to tie closed deals to the campaigns that sourced them and the sales professionals who closed them.

Simply put, when marketing and sales work together, significantly less leads are lost in the funnel leading to increased revenue for companies. It’s good for team moral, employee job satisfaction, and most importantly, it’s good for business.

Tell us what makes your marketing and sales team awesome.

That it costs 5-7x more to acquire a customer than it does to retain one isn’t entirely true.

The origins of this myth can be traced back to the 1980′s when the Technical Assistance Research Project published research that stated the cost of customer acquisition vs the cost of customer retention was significantly higher.

Soon after the research was published, other institutions like the Customer Service Institute, Consumer Connections Corp., and ITEM Group all “found” similar data.

Truth is, it was mostly propaganda designed to sell high-level executives new customer loyalty programs. If you don’t believe me, try to find a single linked source that supports the 5-7x claim.

I bring this up because time & time again, I see business owners reallocating budgets based on soundbite statistics and ending up with disastrous results. If you want to see your business grow, I can not underscore the importance of analyzing your own data to establish viable benchmarks and goals enough.

In this article, I’d like to help you understand the different metrics associated with customer lifetime value, and explore how we can use this information to make more informed, data driven decisions as it relates to how we budget our marketing spend.

Even if you feel like you’ve got this nailed, keep reading, because there’s some very surprising research that I’m sure you’ll find useful.

Why Determining Your Customer Lifetime Value Is So Important

Before we get into the math let’s talk about why figuring all of this out is so important.

In this must read article by venture capitalist David Skok, he says that the biggest reason start-ups die is because their Customer Acquisition costs vs their Customer Lifetime Value costs often look like this.

image source

From my experience, that’s because so many businesses focus on transactional customer value, and forget to invest in the experience that happens after the conversion.

image source

It should go without saying that you need to invest in making the product better. But if we’re not also focusing on ways to make our existing customers happy & yes even marketing to the people who already bought from us, the cost of acquisition can greatly outweigh the amount how much we can make from a single customer.

In David Skok’s post, he says:

“Life Time Value > Cost of Acquisition. (It appears that LTV should be about 3 x CAC for a viable SaaS or other form of recurring revenue model. Most of the public companies like Salesforce.com, ConstantContact, etc., have multiples that are more like 5 x CAC.)

CAC should be recovered in < 12 months (for subscription businesses)”

In other words, if it costs you $400 to acquire a customer you should have a plan to make $1,200 – $2,000 off of that customer within the next year.

This is why software companies like Salesforce might have a marketplace, where they’ll make between 15-25% off of apps sold through their service…

…or Moz, who partners with other companies to offer member only perks, which likely operate the same way as an affiliate program.

The point of improving your customer lifetime value, as David points out, is to ultimately create balance in your business model that allows you to offset the unavoidable high cost factors that inevitably go along with running your business.

He also emphasizes doing continuous optimization to build a sales & marketing machine.

Seriously, read his post when you get the chance.

Determining Your Customer Acquisition Costs

Ok, so now for the math. Let’s start with the basics. The simple way of finding your your customer acquisition cost is to divide the total amount of marketing dollars by the amount of actual customers that come from those efforts. (Marketing Spend/Customers = Cost Per Customer)

Of course, this is an overly simplistic view of the entire process, but if you’re not currently measuring anything, I’d recommend you at least start there.

If you want to get a little more detailed however, Hubspot provides an excellent example where they break the cost per customer down in 3 steps.

1. Cost of Customer Visits (CoCV)
2. Cost of Lead Acquisition (CoLA)
3. Cost of Customer Acquisition (CoCA)

image source

Using Hubspot’s example, let’s say you spend $1,000 in PPC, which nets you 500 visitors. At this point, you’re paying $2/ visitor.

If 5% of those visitors convert to leads (CoLA) than your cost of lead acquisition is $40 (2/5%)

If 10% of those leads convert to customers, than your cost of customer acquisition (CoCA) is $400 ($40/10%)

Now, depending on your business, $400 will seem either incredibly high, or incredibly low – doesn’t matter – the point is, now that you have these numbers, you have the costs associated with three distinct areas of getting new customers, which can be improved upon by:

1. Exploring new, less expensive avenues for visitor acquisition
2. Working on conversion optimization to convert more visitors into leads
3. Improving sales processes to convert more leads into sales

It should also go without saying that these numbers will also fluctuate for each marketing channel you invest in. Because the math stays the same, keep this in mind, as it will help you to invest in only the most profitable channels for each of your marketing endeavors.

I highly recommend you check out Ted Ammon’s article on Hubspot if you want to dig a little deeper into evaluating each channel to determine it’s worth.

Calculating Your Customer Retention Rate

This is where it starts to get fun.

If you’ve been doing business longer than a few months pay attention to your customer retention rates. Before you can determine the lifetime value of your customers, you should have some idea of how long they’re going to be sticking around.

In order to calculate your customer retention rate you need to know:

1. Number of customers at the end of the period – E
2. Number of new customers acquired during that period – N
3. Number of customers at the start of the period – S

Once you have those the formula is pretty straight-forward:

CRR = ((E-N)/S)*100

So to make things simple, let’s say you started the quarter with 200 customers (S), you lose 20 customers but gained 40 customers (N) so when the period was over you had 220(E).

Using the formula we’ve got ((220-40)/200)*100=90 or in other words, a 90% retention rate. Good for you!

WARNING: Before we go any further, I must stress that you SHOULD NOT be running this calculation to find the average across your entire customer base! Broad sweeping averages like this could provide you with potentially damaging figures if you’re not careful.

The issue is that blending customers into an “average” significantly distorts reality. If you gain two customers – one with a retention rate of 100% and another with a retention rate of 0% – you can imagine how the situation would play out. The first customer would pay forever, and the second would leave right away. However, if you first average the two retention rates together, you’ll have two customers with a 50% retention rate.

From Corey Pierson on Custora

An example of what an averaging all customers together might look like is this:

image source

Pretty bleak, right? In 8 months you will have no customers. “Invest everything you can into acquisition, because they’re all going to be gone!”

Corey goes on to show what calculating retention rates – the right way – over 3 customer groups (Team Awesome, Team Ok & Team Sad) might look like:

This is a far more realistic & more importantly, this data makes it easier to make projections, budget allocations, and have a baseline to build strategies.

If you haven’t already segmented your customer base, I recommend reading this guide by Dee Kumar on Entrepreneur’s Journey, as it will give you some ideas around how to segment your customers.

Calculating Your Churn

On the opposite side of retention, you’ve got churn – the rate of which customers (naturally) stop buying from you.

In an ideal world, figuring out your customer churn looks as simple as this:

image source

Now, if you’re not currently measuring churn, this is an alright place to start. At least you’ll have something to benchmark so you can reduce your churn rate later.

But like Steven H. Nobel talks about in this blog post on Shopify, it is not always that simple.

Variables like customers gained during the period, how long the timeframe you’re measuring, and whether or not churns are occurring evenly over the period, all factor into what your actual churn rate is.

If you want a realistic view of your churn rate for predictive analysis purposes, you need a formula that looks more like this:

with the weights being

image source

“What this metric is useful for is keeping track of changes in customer churn behaviour while giving a rough estimate of what percentage of your customers will leave in the next 30 days.”

If this kind of math scares you (it does for me) don’t worry, Steven gave us an interactive spreadsheet you can download to plug your own numbers into. (be sure to stop by Steven’s blog & say thank you)

It’s important you keep this data as accurate as possible in to measure the impact various retention strategies have on your customer base.

Calculating A More Accurate Customer Lifetime Value

There are several different ways to measure customer lifetime value & the infographic by KISSmetrics will cover a few in the next section.

But for now, we’ll use this really basic LTV equation:

(Average Value of a Sale) X (Number of Repeat Transactions) X (Average Retention Time in Months or Years)

Brad Sugars on Entrepreneur.com offers a very simple example of a gym member who spends $20/month for their membership for 3 years.

$20 x 12 months x 3 years = $720 in total revenue (or $240/year)

Now you could use this, but if you’re a gym owner thinking a large portion of your customers would be with you for 3 years, you’re delusional.

Averages lie. Again, I can not stress enough, segment your customers if you want to get an accurate picture of the data.

If you really wanted to know the lifetime value of your members, you’d have to consider the customer segments that:

• Pay for personal training & group coaching
• Buy supplements
• Pay for additional classes
• Buys teeshirts, gear, refreshments

You’d also need to analyze this data to find correlations between the members who stay and those who churn quickly.

• Do people who sign up for classes have a tendency to have longer retention rates?
• Is there any relation to people enrolling in personal training and supplements?
• Do high churn customers also buy more gear?

Finding the lifetime value of these individual customer segments will give you a very clear idea about the value each type of customer will bring to your business. Once you know that, you can make data driven decisions about how much to invest in acquiring each customer type.

Beyond that, you can use what you learn to create up-sells and cross-sells to increase the lifetime value of each customer segment ( i.e 10% off supplements when you sign up with a personal trainer, half off tee-shirts when you sign up in January)

A Hypothetical Scenario – Starbucks

In this infographic by KISSmetrics, they illustrate various ways to calculate customer lifetime value.

Disclaimer: Commenters on the original post did point out a few issues (detailed after the graphic), but there is still a lot to be learned here so please take it all in:

Even though there are some fundamental flaws, I wanted to share this with you because it is a perfect example of why you have to keep working with the data until you get something accurate.

What did the commenters find wrong?

1. Averaging revenues + Profits (like they did with the total average) ultimately breaks the equation
2. It doesn’t consider the costs associated with delivering the product
3. It should factor in discounts & discounted profits
4. The sample size (5 customers) is probably too low for a company like Starbucks

Of all the commenters, Yosh gave what appears to be a viable solution:

Imagine how much money you’d lose if the projections were wrong.

I know it’s a lot to take in, but it’s important you realize that data is unique every business and situation. It’s never as neat as using one catch-all formula and applying it across the board.

That’s why there are several different methods of calculating customer lifetime value.

Realistically, these formulas should only be used as a starting point to understand your customer behavior then tweaked to fit your business.

This is why you need a good CFO, even if it’s just in the interim.

The Effects Of Increasing Customer Lifetime Value? (Micro Case Studies)

You’ve already come a long way & I don’t want to take up too much more of your time. But I wanted to share these 3 case studies of companies seeing explosive results after nailing their customer lifetime value:

• IBM Increases Revenue By 10x By Correctly Identifying & Marketing To High Spending Customers
• SurveyMonkey Increases Customer Lifetime Value by 150% by Identifying Most Profitable Geo-Demographics
• Hubspot Reduces Churn by 57% & Increases CLV by 215.72% in a year and a half

Conclusion

This quote on Forbes perfectly sums up everything we’ve been talking about:

“Brad Coffey, head of corporate development for [Hubspot], likens the formula to a machine: Put a dollar in at the top and the LTV:CAC ratio will tell you roughly how many dollars come out at the bottom. If your money isn’t multiplying, “you’re going to want to spend some time tuning that machine”

Bonus: 6 Quick Tips To Improve Customer Lifetime Value

1. Use Email to Pre-emptively answer common questions, upsell, and provide customer education.
2. Cross-market & provide lead gen for companies with similar customer bases
3. View every customer interaction as an opportunity to improve customer loyalty.
4. Find ways to build habits around your product.
5. Make customer service easy. According to Harris Interactive, 56% of customers will switch brands if the alternative offered more ways to connect.
6. Incorporate customer feedback to improve everything from user experience to product features & design.

Last week we published the first Social Media Marketing World conference eBook and while it’s had over 15,000 views on Slideshare and many thousands of views here already, I think we’ve just seen the tip of the iceberg.

As a robust sized eBook, it’s full of practical advice including platform specific tips like the following 5 nuggets about LinkedIn.

With over 277 million members, 3.5 million active company profiles and 187 million unique visitors across LinkedIn web properties, there’s a remarkable opportunity for companies to connect with business professionals on LinkedIn. Luckily, when we interviewed a selection of SMMW14 speakers, 5 of them gave specific tips about how to optimize LinkedIn for social media marketing. Here are their excerpts from the SMMW14 eBook:

Martin Jones (@MartinJonesaz)
Senior Marketing Manager, Cox Communications

The Real Value of LinkedIn:
No single social platform will define your personal brand and clarify the unique value that you bring to an organization or project as well as LinkedIn.

Use your personal profile page to tell your story, and do so in a way that is clear, concise and engaging.

LinkedIn is a powerful platform for establishing your personal brand, but only if you take the time to learn it, optimize it and use it.

Jill Rowley (@jill_rowley)
Social Selling & Social Business Evangelist

Optimize Your Reputation:
2014 is the year of #ProfessionalBranding and the #SocialEmployee.

It’s time to move from using LinkedIn as a resume to using LinkedIn for your online reputation.

If you’re in Sales, optimize your profile for the Buyer versus the Recruiter.

Eliminate the #QuotaCrusher #ExpertNegotiator language. Include rich content (videos, infographics, podcasts, eBooks, blog posts) that inform your buyer and helps establish your subject matter expertise.

Always be connecting & curating quality content!

Connie Bensen (@cbensen)
Global Social Strategy & Governance, Dell
(TopRank client)

Optimize LinkedIn for Lead Generation
LinkedIn can be more effective than Twitter and Facebook for B2B lead gen with these tips:

Relevant and timely content. Leverage LinkedIn’s demographic segmentation features to develop content for various audiences and deliver it on time for maximum sharing.

Engage frequently and directly. Post and respond to comments. This will help build your company’s influence and the targeted communication fosters trust and loyalty.

Post company updates and news. People enjoy reading new information about their favorite brands. Post frequent status updates to keep your customers up-to-date on events and offers.

Great brand examples to learn from on LinkedIn include: Dell, Salesforce, Hubspot, and Zipcar.

Viveka von Rosen (LinkedInExpert)
Author & Founder, Linked Into Business

Inbound Marketing on LinkedIn
The key to successful selling on LinkedIn is moving from people “knowing” you to “liking and trusting” you.

• Make sure your profile accurately represents you and your brand.
• Establish connections with your target market.
• Share useful content through the use of updates, group discussions and messages.

Do this and stay top of mind with your connections and before you know it, your prospects will be coming to you!

Neal Schaffer (@NealSchaffer)
Author & Founder, Maximize Social Business

Social Selling With LinkedIn:
LinkedIn, more than any other platform, is most effective when your entire company is behind your efforts.

Don’t just stop at marketing your Company Page: Get your salespeople involved with using LinkedIn for Social Selling.
Get your employees involved as part of an Employee Advocacy program.

Don’t forget the targeted status update opportunities you have for Paid Social on LinkedIn too!

To access ALL of the tips from our 38 eBook participants, just visit our Slideshare page where you can view or download the full PDF.

Also, if you want to hear all of these tips and much more in person, then be sure to check out the Social Media Marketing World conference website.

Disclosure: LinkedIn is a TopRank Marketing client.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2014. | 5 LinkedIn Marketing Tips to Optimize Your Social Media Success | http://www.toprankblog.com

I've worked for a telemarketing company for two years and made a lot of unwanted calls. I have to keep making them because most people don't know how to get rid of us, but the right approach can make all the difference. Here's how you can get rid of telemarketers like me and save us both a lot of time.

Read more...

Recently, we ran our first roundtable session of the year in Singapore with 25 marketing professionals engaged in a candid discussion on content marketing.

These sessions are of a much smaller scale in comparison to our annual Digital Cream events, but it’s something we will occasionally be running throughout the year.

It's an initiative to keep our communities and like-minded peers a little more connected, united and close knitted when it comes to exchanging experiences, sharing of insights, benchmarking with others, etc.

You can view photos from the event here

 

Here are eight content marketing insights and takeaways from the half-day session:

1. Word of mouth-worthy content

Content marketing, when viewed as the need to post something on Facebook everyday, continues to be a concerning area. Are these meaningful messages that deepen the perception and positioning of your brand or just noise?

Delegates recognise the importance in creating brand stories that consumers could resonate with and would want to talk about when the related topic is being brought up.

These positive word of mouth endorsements can be one of the most powerful forms of advertising executed. 

2. We can sell them our products/services, but they come back because of the connection built from stories

You happen to have a great product/service that sells itself, but we discussed that it was never enough.

Delivering delightful experiences and surrounding consumers with content marketing that connects positively on an emotional level could win hearts and minds, and leads to building loyalty beyond reason as pointed out by Steve Jobs’ quote “It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want’. 

3. Circulating content to the right audience

The internet has enabled the distribution of content more efficiently, but some of us are still caught up at amassing views, and haven’t really been sure if the right people are consuming that piece of content.

It’s essential to understand the demographics of your targeted audience and how/where the content consumption takes place. 

4. Consider developing effective evergreen content

A lot of what we see from brands today is relevant at that specific moment. But, creating content that continues to work for you after its been produced can provide a better return be on your content marketing investment.

It also helps to reduce the frequency burden of new content creation as it retains its value over time, a very valuable addition to your arsenal of content assets.

5. Majority preferred having content-related functions stay in-house rather than outsourced

Quicker turnaround times are one of the many reasons for this preference.

But, a lack of skills and limited resources have resulted in initially outsourcing these functions while internal capabilities are being developed, and possibly taken back in-house when this has been achieved.

Organisations seeing the value of outsourcing continue to do so, but these marketers increasingly want more ownership on strategy development.

They are not only briefing suppliers on their goals and what they are looking to achieve, but also specifically on how to achieve them. 

6. Hyper-localisation of content from global

Multilingual websites are just the initial steps. To keep consumer engagement on the pulse, we acknowledged the significance of hyperlocal content, despite the language, cultural and resource-intensive challenges it poses.  

To maximise regional or global content distribution efficiency, marketers should repurpose or cross leverage existing content when possible.

This includes adapting the content to various audience groups, making it relevant and applicable to different markets.

Here we see Coca-Cola adapting a global TVC to the local culture of Hong Kong and effectively integrating the campaign with multiple channels, maximizing its reach coverage and engagement: 

 

7. Create content that matches the different stages consumers are at in their decision making or buying journey

• Informative or inspiring bite size content that drums up interest and awareness.
• Educating or 'edutaining' content such as demonstrations and how-to’s that addresses business problems and objectives.
• Trials or comparison check-lists against potential competitors or substitutes to close warm leads

Read about which content marketing formats worked best in 2013 here. 

8. What used to be seen as a greater challenge for B2B marketers is now perhaps becoming somewhat more attainable

The challenge remains, but B2B companies are starting to see the value that comes with engaging B2B buyers at a deeper and more connected level as they try to humanise their brands.

They are looking at marketing to individuals instead of businesses. These meaningful relationships built will put them in a position to be recalled at top of mind instances, and provide perceivably compelling enough incentives for buyers to act on. 

See also our B2B Content Marketing Best Practice Guide. 

Econsultancy would also like to thank and acknowledge the following keynote presenters and moderators for their time and contributions at our roundtable event:

• Vaasu S. Gavarasana, Head of APAC Business Marketing | Yahoo! Asia Pacific
• Nick Fawbert, Managing Director, Asia | Brand New Media
• Eu Gene Ang, Lead Trainer | Econsultancy Asia Pacific.  

Here’s a list of upcoming events taking place in the APAC region. Subscribe to us to stay updated if you aren’t already a part of our growing community of 250,000+ professionals.

• Digital Cream Singapore – 22 May 2014
• Digital Cream Hong Kong – 26 June 2014
• Digital Cream Melbourne – 31 July 2014
• Digital Cream Kuala Lumpur – 28 August 2014
• Digital Cream Sydney – 24 September 2014

Pacific Crest analyst Andy Hargreaves upgraded Apple to "outperform" this morning, citing the upcoming iPhone 6 as something that would pump up the stock.

In his note on Apple, he included this chart, which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the iPhone business.

The iPhone's growth is slowing considerably as Apple shifts from taking on new iPhone owners to selling upgrades to current iPhone owners.

The problem for Apple is that its market of smartphone buyers appears to be largely saturated. Apple sells a premium product to wealthy customers. Those people have bought their iPhones.

The growth in the smart phone industry will come from less wealthy consumers who buy $100 smart phones in emerging markets. That's not a market Apple wants anything to do with since there's no money to be made.

And in case you need a reminder about why this matters to Apple right now, here's a chart of how Apple makes money from Hargreaves:

So, what does this mean for Apple overall? Years of slow growth are ahead unless it releases a new product that radically stimulates sales. 

Join the conversation about this story »

Social media is still growing rapidly. I’m pointing out the obvious here but social networks are a dynamic medium for entertainment and interaction, including content discovery and product recommendation. 

As such, the auto industry seems almost uniquely suited to social.

While most consumers buy cars infrequently, their interest in them (based on price tag, necessity and if you indulge me, the embodiment of the American dream) often transcends the purchase event.

As such, social analytics has cause to mature in the automotive industry, where it surely stands to play a part in the sales funnel other than simply branding.

I’ve been reading a nice little CMO Council report on social analytics in the auto industry. Here are some thoughts on integrating social into automotive sales.

The passion for cars

The car maketh the man. Not in my eyes (living in London I let my license expire) but in many people’s, this is true.

As the CMO report pithily puts it, people see their cars as a reflection of themselves.

This passion in many consumers translates to social media. Just look at these stats: 

• 38% of consumers say they will consult social media in making their next car purchase.*
• 23% of car buyers say they use social media to communicate their purchase experience.*
• 84% of automotive shoppers are on Facebook, and 24% of them have used Facebook as a resource for making their vehicle purchase.*
• 40% of new car purchases over the next 10 years will be made by millennials, according to 2011 Deloitte research.
• 94% of millennial car buyers gather information online according to eBay Motors research.
• Clicks on auto ads on Facebook climbed from 16% to 39% between October 20012 and April 2013.* 

(* 2013 study by Dealer.com and GfK Automotive Research)

Car enthusiasts represent a considerable consumer segment. Interest in motorsports also translates almost directly to interest in automotive brands. Through NASCAR, brands such as Mazda and Cadillac and B2B brands like Snap-on have attracted many to their social channels.

Mike Martinez, CMO of DME Automotive:

We see a tremendous appetite by consumers for sharing compelling content [about cars] through their networks.

Rob Milne, North American Director of Marketing Operations for Mazda, concurs.

It’s the cars  themselves that drive the most social buzz and excitement. When we get into some of the more human aspects, there’s a little less interest. When we’re showcasing the product, the technology, photos of our engines—that’s when people get excited.

Many car brands are investing most of their social budgets in new model launches, in part because of this consumer focus on the cars themselves, and the perception this is where ROI is to be found.

Facebook is the place

Facebook is still the premier social platform for reaching automotive consumers, particularly if the goal is ongoing engagement, according to every marketer interviewed in this CMO Council report.

Twitter has a place, though it’s more for events. George Hanes, Digital and Social Manager for Kia Motors, calls Twitter 'the king of now' and prizes its ability to drive companion viewing and engage people during live events.

(BMW on Facebook)

Trusted conversation & reputation management

C2C conversations and endorsements on social, as well as on popular review sites, have a big impact on brand reputation, preference and purchasing.

Up to a third of all car buyers consult online reviews sites before choosing a dealer, according to J.D. Power & Associates.

Both dealers and manufacturers have active reputation management programs that address problems and issues while coaxing and amplifying commentary from happy customers.

Jim Vurpillant, Director of Global Marketing for Cadillac, says reputation management is currently where social is having the biggest impact on purchasing.

Just like the old world, word of mouth has a huge impact on auto sales, and social is amplifying that.

And Kathryn Kennedy from AutoNation agrees.

We’ve seen that consumer-generated content and reviews motivate people to drive beyond their normal radius in order to purchase a car from a dealership they’ve seen reviewed positively,

Brands are yet to use social in the sales funnel

The CMO Council report states that marketers from leading vehicle manufacturers, dealer networks and aftermarket brands make it clear that, while many are investing significantly and all are at least experimenting with social, no one believes it is yet mature.

The next step is integrating social more directly into the sales funnel, segmenting customers, as well as using it to deliver qualified leads.

How is social analytics being used in the auto industry?

Automotive marketers are analysing conversations to improve their understanding of evolving brands.

George Haynes of Kia uses social analytics to track and understand consumer attitudes and behaviours. This analysis shows that what attracts and motivates consumers can differ significantly from model to model.

Similarly, Express Oil Change is analysing conversations to optimise search terms and content, and AutoNation is using conversational analytics to understand how consumers influence one another and ultimately purchase behavior.

Sales

Many brands are starting to think about qualified leads. Nissan is experimenting with more personalized interactions, with ‘hand raisers’ - those who identify themselves as interested in knowing more about a car or truck.

And I’m sure many brands are retargeting in social ads, which could be seen as qualified, depending on the criteria. For a while now, test drives and brochures have been available to order through social, too.

But what are the possibilities of social analytics when truly concentrated on the sales funnel?

Tools such as hoojook (co-producers of the CMO Council report) uses natural language processing and machine learning to identify potential leads across social channels and segment them based on where they are in the purchase cycle.

This technology can help determine what type of vehicles consumers are considering and enable the delivery of the right content to move them further into the sales funnel.

Social analytics possibilities

There are a few possibilities detailed in the CMO Council report, but chief among them is simply ‘understanding each customer at an individual level’. This can be specified as:

• Increasing the precision of customer segmentation by analyzing the customer’s influence and preferences across social.
• Gauging the customer’s propensity to buy.
• Engaging in one-to-one communication.
• Optimising customer interactions by knowing where a customer is and delivering relevant, real-time offers based on that location.
• Offering relevant promotions.
• Automating the tracking and managing of a brand’s online reputation by aggregating all reviews on the web, amplifying the positive reviews and managing the negative ones.
• Enticing a competitor’s customers.
• Winning back your dissatisfied customers.

Need more leads? Trying to attract a wider audience? The key is a cohesive digital marketing strategy.

Most times when I’m invited to do consulting or a digital marketing audit, one of the first findings is that the marketing is splintered. What is done on Facebook is not connected to the strategies used on the website, or what is tweeted has no connection to lead capture initiatives on the website, etc. It’s essential to get that corrected!

The online digital and inbound marketing strategy for a business needs to be integrated and cohesive, with all parts working in sync. One of my goals is always to make the complex simpler, and one way I do this is by keying on the three key elements, or funnel parts, that are central to organizing the digital marketing plan. By keeping these three elements as the overarching guide, it provides a framework for everything else.

Each of the three keys has two parts, so in total they create the 6 steps that make up the Digital Marketing Funnel that I use in client marketing initiatives. I’m going to dive into the 3 keys here, because as busy marketers this is the foundation, and if you build within these three arenas, you’re going to have a complete digital funnel strategy.

These three elements are the building blocks and they provide a simple and “doable” framework for owners and marketers to use when setting, planning, and executing their digital strategy.

KEY #1: Attraction and Engagement

This is the top of the funnel and should comprise 50% of your content strategy. When I say “content” I mean blog content as well as social media posts, videos on YouTube and Instagram, podcast episodes, and images on Pinterest, Instagram, and other social networks. Each of these items is a form of content. You do not need to do all of these! You need to do the content forms that help you connect best with your audience and fit your company. Your website /blog is your foundational online asset, so use that as the starting point and primary core component for your content creation efforts.

Attraction and Engagement content needs to be broad, searchable, geared to do just what it says, “attract and engage,” and relevant. This is where you are seeking to grow your audience by reaching out, “planting seed and watering” or put another way it is “chumming the waters” to attract your desired audience. This is not the harvest! It is content that is helpful and serves your audience. It is NOT product specific to your business. Think of it as “chumming the waters” prior to fishing for sharks. It draws in a crowd and gets them excited about your site and the nuggets you are providing, prior to the actual fishing with baited hooks. This post itself is an example of “attraction content”. I’m simply offering you guidance and help, that can assist you to begin thinking through your digital marketing efforts and needs.

Attraction also applies to Social Media posts. Your company social posts cannot be solely focused on your company and products, they need to be social and engage the user. People are on social media to connect and be entertained, and a business must intersect with this! Here are two Facebook examples of businesses doing “Attraction Marketing”:

Neither post is a hard sell at all. The first is just a fun video of an employee at work dancing a little jig! The second post is a great way to connect a major event, The Oscars, to the organization and invite engagement. This is not “salesy”, but it personalizes the business and is a great social connection that attracts interest and interaction. The big bonus and key is that by doing this it is getting great comments and reach, both of which help extend the reach of the Page to other people on Facebook, which is the goal! This helps the Page reach more friends of fans and it helps increase the potential of future posts from this brand being in the News Feed of those who engaged with this post.

KEY #2: Capture & Nurture

The second pillar is Capturing Leads and Nurturing Leads. It’s all about leads! The more you attract, the more leads you have potential to get, the more leads, the more you can grow sales.

This is mid-funnel content, which serves to move visitors into the lead funnel, and from an unknown fan to a known lead. This type of content offers something useful and of value in exchange for a simple name and email sign-up. It can be access to a eBook, a video, a podcast, or a resource related to your products and services that that those interested in your offering would find of value.

The opportunity it provides a business is the ability to grow their email list, through which nurture campaigns to educate and ultimately offer a opportunity to buy can occur. The value is that these can be setup once and then run continuously to reach hundreds and even thousands of visitors. I outline more on lead capture and nurture here >>

Below is an example of this related value exchange. The Facebook Page “Enchanting Lawyer” helps law firms understand and grow their practice with Social Media. One of their latest offerings is a weekly podcast and the Facebook tab offer blends these together by offering a free book on Social Media by the author interviewed on the latest podcast episode. This drives awareness of the podcast while also growing the Enchanting Lawyer email list! Brilliant!

Once these email addresses are captured, an automated email nurture campaign should be launched which again fits within the 3 Key Element strategy outlined here. Start with helpful information that builds trust and educates, moving to a offer only after the fifth or sixth resource email over a 5-8 day sequence.

KEY #3: Convert & Measure

The final element of the 3-pronged content strategy to plan for is the “closure content” or specific sales offer content. This will likely be only 15-20% of your overall content plan mix. If it is more than that, your audience can get turned off from continual sales pitches, particularly on social media sites, but if you are adhering to the content strategy above then your audience will be ready for these timely and specific offers to purchase.

What happens in the top of the funnel is discovery and initial awareness. Then additional touch points are created with more content that is attraction and engagement based, along with helpful resources in the mid-funnel that prepares the ground for the sales offer. Now that trust has been built, and education and understanding has been accomplished, the potential customer is now ready to consider the offer to buy.

The key in specific sales conversion offers is to answer their final questions, and if at all possible to demonstrate the ROI potential to them clearly so they can see how their financial position can be improved by this purchase. The offer should seek to remove final barriers, being concise, and eliminating unnecessary distractions. This can be as simple as having a landing page with the information and clear call-to-action button on your website, or a concise offer in a email. It should not be surrounded by other links and information. Here’s one example of a landing page below. This is the sum total of everything on that web page. There is no extra navigation, no footer links, no sidebar, simply the offer.

When done well, this will be a seamless process where no hard sell is needed, but simply the offer to take a next logical step with your business.

How can you evaluate all of this? Measure. You need to take the time to review metrics at each phase. Your google analytics that should be on your website is the the most basic tool to use. Look at traffic. Is it increasing? Where is your traffic coming from? Is your social posting plan increasing engagement and interaction in your blog comments and on your posts? Facebook Page Insights and tools like Buffer and Hootsuite for other posts can give owners and marketers the reports they need on their digital post mix to help determine what needs tweaked, what worked, and where to go from here.

So that’s it! Keep the 3 Keys in mind as your foundational funnel components! It’s often the most eye-opening for businesses to recognize the importance of the Attraction and Engagement content. This “top-of-funnel” content is critical to getting the increase in views that are needed to grow the leads and ultimately convert more business.

What’s your first doable step you need to implement? How about pinning and printing the 3 Keys below!

Need more help? Contact me!