Speculation is rife the two countries have finally concluded talks on a free trade agreement that will be signed within days.

Editor’s Note: I asked Jean Spencer of Kapost to put together a “how-to” for the content marketing automation software, Kapost. This is a very cool company based in Boulder, Colorado and is making the lives of content marketers around the world easier.

In the world of B2B marketing, content has taken center stage. Nine out of 10 B2B marketers are using content marketing and, as numerous studies explore, inbound tactics deliver promising leads into the sales funnel.

In a world where buyers screen their phone calls and research options independently of salespeople, marketers use content to attract those buyers and nurture them toward purchase, setting up sales with a pipeline of qualified leads and potential revenue. And we all agree more revenue is a good thing.

But what marketers (seemingly) can’t agree on, is what kind of tool will help them deliver results.

Less than half of B2B marketers report having a documented content strategy. But as the number of blogs, tweets, videos, and eBooks increases the deluge can be overwhelming.

You need a software that can manage your content assets, a single place that keeps track of your strategy, production, and analytics.

Say hello to, Kapost (yes, I’m biased…but, seriously, this product rocks. I use it every day. Ask me anything.). Today, I’ll show you how to use Kapost to manage your editorial calendar.

The editorial calendar is the hub for content management—and, as far as we’ve seen, it’s the most requested feature in content organizational tools.

Hopefully, by the end of all these steps, you’ll be a master of the editorial calendar (and drooling to see what else Kapost can do).

 

Step 1: Identify Your Contributors

There are several kinds of people who work on content: admins, contributors, and out-of-house freelancers. Organize these people in the members tab to manage the various roles within your system and allocate appropriate access to the software. This keeps information that needs to be protected in the hands of few.

You can also set up payment rates, invoicing structures, and claimable content options right in the Kapost platform.

 

Step 2: Identify Your Content & Business Goals

Your content should reflect your business’s major events and goals. Start with goals. Identify revenue, sales and lead quotas. Then identify milestones (for example, product releases, trade show events, etc.). Write these into your calendar. Then, plan your content cadence around these.

 

Step 3: Populate Your Calendar

This is the fun part. So we put it in orange. Ha.

Organize and plan content deliverables within the calendar view of Kapost. Using a month view gives you vision into the consistency and regularity of your posts as well as illustrates a diverse cadence of information. For instance, you may have the following production goals: three blog posts per week, one infographic per month, and one podcast per week. These assets can be tracked in your calendar.

Color-coded assets make assessment of your content creation quick and easy.

 

Step 4: Assign Specific Tasks to Each Content Type and Follow Approvals

Use the “Tasks” panel on the right side of the page to manage workflows, authorship, responsibilities, and key details for the production of a single piece of content. This includes submission deadlines, edit deadlines, and publication deadlines. These workflows can be pre-populated as a template, or customizable for each individual asset. Your choice.

These tasks can be reflected in the calendar view, too.

 

Step 5: Collaborate in the Right Spots

Don’t get important information lost in your email inbox. Collaborate on edits, changes, or iterations of a content piece directly in the workspace for that asset. Use the “@” tag to automatically notify team members that their attention is needed.

 

Step 6: Drag-and-Drop Your Content Assets to Ensure Your Assets are Published at the Right Time

(Watch this 6-second screen cast to see the drag-and-drop functionality in action!)

Did your product release date suddenly move? Probably. Things change all the time—and good content marketing reflects those changes.

Easily drag-and-drop your content needs in the calendar view to reflect and business timeline changes. This process automatically notifies authors and contributors of their new deadlines, and keeps your calendar relevant and timely.

 

Step 7: Publish!

Kapost integrates with more than 40 online service providers. This makes it easy and seamless to push or pull information to end publication destinations, for instance WordPress, Facebook, or SaleForces.

 

Step 8: Track Production, Performance, Engagement & Conversions

Here’s where you prove content marketing is working.

Kapost analytics track various metrics like: social engagement, unique page views, conversions, top authors, top content, the amount of content your team is pumping out, and which types of content you’ve produced (as in, how many blog posts vs. webinars vs. eBooks have you created), and more.

Pull relevant information from the analytics tab to track progress and benchmark future content campaigns.

 

All done!

Voila! May your editorial content calendar be organized and effective for the rest of the year. Boom shakalaka.

Jean is a writer for Kapost, focusing on digital marketing, content marketing, the state of the journalism industry, and pushing and redefining the limits of what content marketing can be. She also likes to do crossword puzzles and rock climb.

 

 

 

Online classifieds marketplace, Quikr has recently launched a new feature called ‘Maximum Selling Price (MSP)’ that will benefit both buyers and sellers on the platform. Arriving at a fair cost for used goods is often tough, but Quikr’s MSP tool will act as a pricing guide to help determine fair value for a used good.

Using MSP, sellers can determine a reasonably accurate value for their used goods before posting the ad on Quikr, while buyers can also refer MSP to understand if they are getting a fair price for the used good. Created using special algorithms designed by Quikr, the MSP calculator is currently live on Quikr’s website and mobile site.

Claiming to be a first in India, Quikr has launched an ad campaign to promote the MSP tool on social media including other mediums. The ad film conceptualized by Scarecrow Communications and produced by Pebble Films, creates a funny situation to explain the concept of MSP.

Check MSP before you sell on Quikr

Set around a Goan jetty, a ferry is getting filled with a carnival troupe and a car. Pedro, a stereotypical Goan, hands a note with an address to the ferry man asking him to deliver the car to Mr. Fonseca, whom he has sold it to. Just then a man fishing nearby asks Pedro why he sold it for just Rs. 40,000 and begins to explain about MSP using his tablet.

Pedro enters his car’s details on MSP which determines the car value at Rs. 1,50,000. Shocked, the two of them rush to stop the ferry and the sale, while quickly posting an ad on Quikr. Pedro finds instant buyers ready to buy at MSP on the ferry itself.

Uploaded on February 25 on the Quikr YouTube channel, the ad has received more than thousand views so far. Quikr is also leveraging Facebook and Twitter to spread the word. While the brand’s Facebook page is sharing about the MSP calculator, it is also sharing the ad film with its 1.3 million fan base.

The micro social network Twitter has been leveraged to engage users with the concept of MSP. After the ad video was shared by Quikr’s Twitter handle, the brand launched fun contests inviting users to interpret the Maximum Selling Price for annoying people in their lives. The best tweets won gift hampers.

Q1. What do you think the Maximum Selling Price would be for the crazy friend in your group? Tag them and tell us using #SellThemAt

— Quikr (@Quikr) February 28, 2014

Q2. What would the Maximum Selling Price be for The Demanding Boss? Tell us using #SellThemAt

— Quikr (@Quikr) February 28, 2014

Q3. What do you think the Maximum Selling Price would be for an annoying sibling? Tag them and tell us using #SellThemAt

— Quikr (@Quikr) February 28, 2014

Information with fun

The MSP calculator tool will undoubtedly solve the biggest pain point of Quikr users. And the ad campaign serves well to explain how MSP benefits them, with the use of a story rather than a tutorial. It highlights the easy usage of the tool and is well aligned with the ‘humorous’ tone of communication reflective in Quikr ads.

Hosting fun contests on Twitter has indeed helped boost reach, although the campaign hashtag could have been a branded one. For example, #QuikrMSP would have added the required branding as well to the engaging contest. A good campaign, nevertheless, one which drives home the message and while at it makes it fun too.

Buyer personas and journeys help you determine content needs; set tone, style, and delivery strategies; target the best topics; and understand where and how buyers find information. This cheat sheet will help you create buyer personas and map them to your buyer's journey.

Every successful sale is made, not so much because of the excellence of your product or of your sales pitch, but because, consciously or unconsciously, you have found the human reason why your prospect should buy: You have found the door to their motivation and have opened it. The more you understand the function of human motivation, the more successfully you will sell.

 In its simplest form, motivation emerges as a cycle. It starts with a want or need, expressed or hidden. Inherent in this is a problem, a problem that must be overcome in order to satisfy the want that must be solved. Once solved, the want can be satisfied and the cycle is completed.

 In terms of personal development, there are several levels of needs. You will no doubt be familiar with Maslow’s pyramid of needs. These needs are basic to everyone you sell to, live with, or encounter, and we all of course, are different. Their needs will vary in degree, in shape, and in the nature of their answers. But they are common to all. As you are alert to them, as you understand them, so will your success with others be measured.

 How do people seek to satisfy their needs? Thorndike’s Law of Effect supplies the answer:

“People tend to behave in a way to gain rewards and avoid punishment.”

Again, this varies with different people. Generally, people can be classified into three dominant types:

•          The Achiever

•          The Seeker of Social Recognition

•          The Security-Minded

(But no one is likely to be a “pure” type)

The Achiever is most likely to be oriented toward gaining rewards.

The Security-Minded is likely to be dominated by the desire to avoid punishment.

The Social Type stands somewhere between the two.

These are the dominating factors. But in varying degrees, each has a little of the other two in them.

In terms of selling, whatever the dominant drive of your prospect, they are above all, buying results – please forget features and benefits – which enable them to gain rewards and/or avoid punishment.

In making their decision, the buyer uses the “Minimax” principle – To minimize their losses, to maximize their gains. This is true whatever the personality orientation. The emphasis depends again on their individual motivational drive.

In summary, according to Russell: “The essence of motivation is finding meaning in what we are doing. Motivation is an inner control of the individual.” Only you can motivate yourself.

All these concepts apply to you in all phases of your life and your work, as well as they apply to others. Finding the right meaning in what you do will be the great motivator for a more effective you.

Understanding the nature of what motivates each person you deal with will enable you to help them make a decision favorable to both of you.

The most important fact to remember in influencing the behavior and decisions of others is that people do things for their reasons, not ours!

It’s been a very hectic week – for you too?

Next week over at Top Sales World, we announce the judging panels and all the prizes for this year’s Top Sales Professional Contest - all pretty impressive!

Have a wonderful w/e, wherever you are, and I do hope you can make it back on Monday – JF

This month, we’re featuring apps you can use to grow your lists and leads, manage list activity in customer support scenarios, and build a beautiful custom dashboard with analytics from your account.

Ready to dive into the details?

LeadPages

LeadPages does just what the name implies: helps you easily create and edit mobile-friendly, fast-loading web pages and forms to generate more leads.

From there, you can integrate those pages and forms with WordPress, Facebook or your own site with just a few clicks. No coding or design skills required.

How does LeadPages work with AWeber?

Simply put, the AWeber-LeadPages integration automagically adds subscriber info from your various LeadPages forms to your AWeber lists, so you can take all of those new opt ins who saw your video, or want to get your ebook or premium content, and funnel them right into your specific email lists.

From there, you can continue building the relationship with content, relevant marketing and sales offers, special updates — whatever business goals your email program supports.

Connecting LeadPages to AWeber can be done in minutes, as this quick demo shows:

Want to try it out?

LeadPages offers two account levels, Standard and Pro, which adds features like enhanced support, A/B split testing and advanced formatting options, as well as access to their affiliate program.

In lieu of a free trial option, LeadPages offers a 30-Day money back guarantee.

Learn more and sign up at LeadPages.net

Then, use our step-by-step guide to connect AWeber to LeadPages.

Geckoboard

Looking for a powerful dashboard tool? Look no further.

Geckoboard gathers key metrics from multiple services to create a sharp, concise dashboard.

The widgets supported include data from: CRM, Email, Infrastructure, Project Management, Sales, Finance, Social Media and Web Analytics. (Guess which one’s our favorite.)

How does Geckoboard work with AWeber?

With the AWeber-Geckoboard integration, you can add widgets to your Geckoboard dashboard and see a variety of statistics for your broadcasts and subscribers, such as: Total Subscribers, Total Unsubscribes, Clicks, Sales Count and Value, and many more.

You can also display your list subscribers on a map and view your data sets alongside stats from other services.

Screenshot: Adding AWeber widgets to the Geckoboard custom dashboard

Want to try it out?

Geckoboard offers four plans, ranging from Personal to Enterprise, with more features and users available as you upgrade.

The AWeber widgets are available at all levels, and you can take a free trial for 30 days with no credit card needed. BONUS: Save 10% with coupon code “AWEBER12OFF” valid through 5/27/14.

Learn more and sign up at Geckoboard.com

Then, use our step-by-step guide to connect AWeber to Geckoboard.

LiveAgent

LiveAgent is a multichannel helpdesk tool for customer support.

With LiveAgent, you can manage support via email, voice, live chat, Facebook, Twitter, contact forms and forums. All within one pretty cool interface that’s not only loaded with functionality, but it’s also mobile friendly.

How does LiveAgent work with AWeber?

The AWeber-LiveAgent integration can assist your efforts in a couple ways.

First, while you’re managing a support ticket, you can see which AWeber email list(s) your client subscribes to, in the ticket sidebar.

Plus, you can also subscribe or unsubscribe them from specific lists with just one click. (Subscriptions must be confirmed by the contact.)

Screenshot: View AWeber list status in your LiveAgent sidebar

Want to try it out?

LiveAgent offers three plans, Basic, Professional and Ultimate, with a growing list of features as you upgrade. The AWeber integration is available with any level.

You can try LiveAgent on a 14-day free trial, with no credit card required. BONUS: LiveAgent is offering 10% off a downloadable license for the first 100 customers using the “LA-45K2D47CVF” special code.

Learn more and sign up at LAdesk.com

Then, use our step-by-step guide to connect AWeber to LiveAgent.

Even More Apps (And More On The Way)

We love to help boost your marketing efforts by integrating with the apps and services you use.

Let us know in the comments which integrations you’re currently using, how they’re working for you, and which apps you’d like to see. And look for the next roundup in a few weeks.

Missed our January post? See how to connect AWeber to Clickbank, Wistia or Zendesk.

Or check out the many services we integrate with in our AWeber App Showcase.

In his sharp and engaging new book, The News: A User’s Manual, the philosopher Alain de Botton describes the experience of consuming news as if we are woken each morning by a frantic official armed with “a briefcase filled with a bewildering and then in the end tiring range of issues: ‘Five hospitals are predicted to breach their credit limits by the end of the month,’ ‘The central bank is worried about its ability to raise money on the bond markets,’ ‘A Chinese warship has just left the mainland en route for Vietnam’…What are we meant to think? Where should all this go in our minds?”

His answer is that in a news market overflowing with facts, facts by themselves go unsold; they require a story—and that story, he says mischievously, needs some kind of bias on the part of the author, “a pair of lenses that slide over reality and aim to bring it more clearly into focus.” You can see what he means: our capacity to produce data on everything requires packaging; otherwise, it is like finding oneself in a library where all the books have been disassembled into piles of paragraphs, sentences and words. Our consumption of information requires an algorithm of narrative and the perspective of bias in order to produce focus. The problem — the presiding problem of our knowledge economy — is whether we end up focusing on something that’s actually true.

Just how big a problem this is for industry — and for one industry in particular — is illustrated by a recent study, which, ironically, claimed to uncover the kind of bias we don’t want to see when it comes to assessing the validity of data.

The study, which appeared in PLoS Medicine, argues that industry funding has compromised the evidence on sugar. Systematic reviews of studies on sugared beverage consumption and weight gain — which is to say, reviews which try to sum up the state of the evidence — were five times more likely to conclude no relationship than systematic reviews that had no industry funding. As the headline on Forbes.com put it, succinctly, “Big Sugar Tips The Balance Of The Research Scale.”

This is a powerful indictment precisely because we have heard the same kind of story before: when an industry is in trouble, its first recourse will be to manufacture scientific doubt, or to refer to pre-made scientific doubt. Indeed, should this have not crossed your mind, the PLoS authors tie their findings to past behavior by the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries. Narrative, bias, and focus, provide an overwhelming rationale to file the story under “malfeasance” with a note to disregard the legitimacy of any data produced by that industry’s funding.

But only if the PLoS study is itself true.

The fascinating thing about how this information entered the realm of public debate is not just that no one asked this question, but that our system for producing and sharing such knowledge is poorly designed for asking such questions.

Here is the problem with the PLoS study: it cannot answer the question it claims to answer because of the way it was designed. The researchers looked at systematic reviews conducted between 2006 and 2013. But this period saw a significant change in the kind of research done on sugar and weight gain. At the beginning of the period, there were few randomized control trials and a lot of observational studies; at the end, more randomized control trials, which provide much better evidence of cause and effect. The effect sizes for these trials are still quite small, but when added together, there was more, and qualitatively better, evidence associating sugar consumption and increased weight gain the closer one got to 2013. In fact, the four systematic reviews from 2012 onwards all found mostly positive associations; none were funded by industry.

But can an “industry-funded” systematic review be called “biased” based on studies that didn’t exist when the review was originally carried out? Can a review in 2007 be criticized as biased for not including a study published in 2012?

Now, you might find it odd that this was ever an open debate. Surely we all know as a basic fact that sugar causes weight gain. This is why it is important to remember that the scientific question is not simple weight gain, but whether calorie for calorie sugar causes extra weight gain or whether the specific reduction or elimination of, say, soda, in a diet would lead to weight loss. As the expert panel commissioned to come up with the 2010 dietary guidelines for the US Department of Agriculture noted, the scientific evidence for something you would think would be critical to our understanding of obesity, was “disappointing.”

The PLoS researchers also did not include three reviews, two from 2006 and one from 2007 that did not find an association between sugared beverage consumption and weight and were not funded by industry. They had been included in at least one other systematic analysis of the systematic review literature. While including them doesn’t obviate the temporal flaw in the study’s design, they do show that more academics without industry funding found no effect when asking the same question of the evidence.

Moreover, the PLoS study design (conflict with industry? Yes/no; positive association? Yes/no) also suppresses the fact that the conclusions of systematic review can be mixed, with the authors of one review noting that there is suggestive evidence for a relationship between sugared beverage consumption and those who are overweight, and that such findings should be examined with more randomized control trials. This particular review is labeled as having a conflict with industry not because it was industry funded (it was funded by the National Institutes of Health) but because the authors had past industry funding from the food industry.

This may seem like nit picking. It’s not. But how many people would spot any of this? It certainly didn’t catch the eye of Forbes contributor Larry Huston, who’s an uncommonly good science writer, but then why would it? Why would he be familiar with the systematic review literature on this topic and the evolution of research on sugar and weight gain? (I only know about it because I spent months looking at the academic literature on soda and food taxes and got sucked into the methodological problems hounding the entire field of nutrition.) The New York Times also reported the study without any analysis.

In fact, the people who would immediately know why the PLoS study is misleading are relatively few. Most would not have access to or even an interest in engaging the media, while many would be from industry, the very people the PLoS study effectively warns you not to trust.

But what about peer review? If the past few years have taught us anything, it is that academic publishing is what the Internet was once called — the Wild West. Consider only the complaints aired by a National Institutes of Health workshop, which convened to deal with the problem of why so many findings from animal studies could not be replicated. There was, as the concluding paper, published in Nature said, “broad agreement” that “poor reporting, often associated with poor experimental design, is a significant issue across the life sciences…” In other words, the vices popularly associated with industry-funded studies — a lack of transparency in data, methods, and analysis leading to exaggerated results — were widely prevalent among those funded by government.

Stanford University’s John Ioannidis, who has become a figurehead for a growing movement to improve scientific rigor, warned last November that the state of nutrition research was bedeviled by small sample sizes, weak study design, and poor survey methods. “Almost every single nutrient,” he wrote, “has peer reviewed publications associating it with almost any out­come. . . . Many findings are entirely implausible.”

Even something as fundamental to nutrition research as how much food people consume, which the National Health and Nutrition Examination Sur­vey attempts to find out by questionnaire, was shown last year to be wildly inaccurate. Two-thirds of men, and almost 60 percent of women reported consuming less food than was physiologically plausible.

Peer review is valuable, but it is not a guarantor of reliable knowledge. And while the editor of PLoS Medicine defends the paper in a preface by arguing that industry has particular reasons to be biased (“increased sales of their products”) but that academic researchers don’t (because they are engaged in “the honest pursuit of knowledge”), the distinction has become meaningless in the face of publish or perish academic pressures, publication bias toward positive findings, and the growing awareness that poor statistical methods and weak experimental design undermine so much academic research in medicine and health.

Consider the finding published in Significance, the journal of the Royal Statistical Society, in which Stanley Young of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences tested 52 claims (about the effects of vitamins) from 12 observational studies against the results from randomized control trials. Not one observational finding could be replicated.

Imagine a product with a 100 percent failure rate. Or an airline in which the majority of flights crashed. This, we are reminded, is the nature of scientific inquiry: the path to truth is littered with false positives and null results. But we consume information just like any other product; we take flight on the reliability of data. And if there is no risk to taking risks with that data, from hyping research results to burying statistical data where the sun doesn’t shine, then — as we saw in the world of finance and mortgage backed securities — scientists will take risks, and news organizations will eagerly report their findings. The key difference between academic and industry produced data is that we currently treat the second skeptically. That asymmetry is the flaw in our knowledge economy; it leads to moral hazard — and worse.

The PLoS findings may well be used to delegitimize legitimate scientific perspectives in future debates over sugared drinks and food in general. A cohort of scientists has been impugned, and a younger cohort warned that such is their fate if they work for industry. Like a malign butterfly flapping its wings furiously, the storm damage that a biased finding can do in a dynamic system of knowledge is considerable. And repairing it with the truth is very, very difficult.

With so much information available on click-through rates and Web traffic, it can be tempting to put online marketing campaigns on autopilot. But that's a mistake.

We're a long way from the Mad Men days, when advertisers just stood around bouncing ideas off each other before launching campaigns for the masses. Those might be romanticized times, but advances in computing and the sheer volume of data available today mean marketers can use machines to run far more efficient campaigns than ever before.

And yet there's still something incredibly important that online marketers can learn from Don Draper and his ad team. With so much information coming from so many directions--Web traffic, click-through rates, sales transactions, and conversion paths--it's all too easy to put campaigns on autopilot and forget the powerful role that creative people play in the process. The best online marketing campaigns find that sweet spot where technology and human expertise meet, to produce results that go beyond optimization.

Here are four ways that companies should be shaping their campaigns in a data-driven world:

1. Connect campaigns to business goals. Many marketers have a narrow view of lead generation and ROI that focuses on data-driven outcomes that don't help the business grow. For example, a company might want to earn the top spot in organic search rankings for a keyword without knowing how that outcome drives revenue.

Using vanity metrics to define success can lead to campaigns that feel good but don't contribute to the bottom line. Before launching a digital marketing campaign, step back and evaluate the goals of the business. While it may be tempting to choose targets based on what you can achieve using readily available data, not seeing the big picture can be a very costly mistake.

2. Take campaigns to the next level. One of the biggest problems with automation is that it only evaluates existing data and assumes the best creative is already in place, which means it only looks at how well a campaign is performing instead of how well it could be performing. Without human expertise, your campaigns will improve, but they will never grow. The fact that you have so much data at your disposal can cause you to wrongfully believe you have everything you need to be successful.

For example, take a car-insurance company that ranks on the first page of search results for the phrase "car insurance." Though the marketing team might be thrilled, conversions don't follow. As it turns out, most people search for car insurance using geo-specific keywords, such as "California car insurance." A search engine can't figure that out; it takes a team of experts asking smart questions to come up with a better alternative.

A machine can tell you what consumers are doing, but not why they are doing it. In search marketing, the most egregious example of this is in bid management, in which keyword bids are adjusted based solely on their performance. While auto bid management can make existing ads more efficient, it can't use the results to create an even better ad with a different message that will double revenue.

3. Use data insights across channels. An algorithm can optimize ads within one campaign, but it can't tell you how to apply the lessons you learn to other channels. It takes real people to knock down the walls between marketing silos.

Ideally, pay-per-click advertising and SEO should be joined at the hip, but in many cases the two teams never talk. By casting a wide net in paid search and finding a variety of keywords relevant to your business, you can then use that research to set up a better SEO campaign. And as the keywords climb the rankings in Google's organic search results, paid search efforts can be tailored accordingly.

Those lessons in search marketing can then be applied to additional channels, including other display networks, social media ads, and email marketing. It also leads to a robust content-marketing program with sharable stuff created by people for people--which Google generously rewards via better search rankings.

4. Share the data across the whole organization. The lessons learned in digital marketing channels can also be applied offline across the organization. Instead of trapping the data within automated channels, teams should be sharing insights that can help the business grow in other ways.

After the recent data breach at Target, we saw a spike in searches for small business accounting tools that also included security-related phrases. That's the kind of timely information the sales team would love to have while meeting with prospects. Any time new search terms gain popularity, it's an opportunity for a business to use online insights to inform real-world efforts.

At Wpromote, we call the process of combining data-driven decisions and human marketing expertise "intuitive search intelligence." (The concept has been so successful for our clients that we released an e-book that dives deeper into our approach.)

When it comes to marketing, companies don't need to return to the Madison Avenue glory days, but don't forget them as technology takes marketing to places the Mad Men could have never imagined.

Marketers often lose track of what marketing is all about. These phrases signal that they need to get back on track.

Over the years, I've listened to hundreds of marketing pitches and participated in thousands of conversations among marketers. I've then watched how well the subsequent marketing campaigns actually performed.

Based on that experience, I've identified eight phrases that almost always mean that a marketing group is on the wrong track and will probably fail. Here they are, along with comparable phrases that reflect a more likely-to-succeed approach:

1. "Marketing drives sales."

Marketers use this phrase to communicate their belief that sales is just the tail end of the marketing effort. They have it backwards. Selling is the entire reason any company exists.

Say instead: "Marketing is trying to help make sales happen."

2. "We've been talking to our customers."

Marketers have a tendency to think about marketing as a process of pushing information out, hence talking to customers is a good thing. In fact, effective marketing is the other way around; it draws customers in.

Say instead: "We've been listening to our customers."

3. "We have a worldwide focus."

This phrase is just the worst example of the misuse of the word focus. Because it's impossible to focus on more than one thing at the same time, any marketing effort that has too wide a focus will inevitably fall flat.

Say instead: "Today we are focusing on the following specific objective..."

4. "Shock and awe"

Any marketing metaphor that uses military imagery is inherently absurd and awkward. Warfare is all about killing the enemy; marketing is all about persuading customers to buy. There's really no common ground.

Say instead: Nothing.

5. "Sales doesn't follow up on our hot leads."

Many is the time I've heard marketers complain that they find hot leads that the sales team is incapable of closing. But a hot sales lead is, by definition, one that the current sales team can easily close. If it can't, it's not a hot lead.

Say instead: "Sales team: Please tell us what kinds of leads you can easily close."

6. "Everyone must use this standard presentation."

This ominous phrase comes out when marketing groups want to present a consistent brand image to the world. Only one problem: Every customer is different, which is why salespeople (the good ones anyway) always customize their presentations.

Say instead: "Here are some slides that might be useful."

7. "We are rebranding."

The concept of rebranding assumes that the brand consists of the exterior elements that express the brand, like the logo, font, tag line, and so forth. Brand actually reflects the customer's experience, so the only way to rebrand is to change that experience.

Say instead: "Let's improve our products and services while making them easier to buy."

8. "I am a market strategist."

Strategy, by definition, is long term. Employing somebody specifically to strategize virtually guarantees that your strategy will change frequently, making it impossible to execute tactically.

Say instead: "We've got a strategy; now, let's make it happen."

Preorder my new book and get an exclusive bonus chapter plus a signed bookplate. (Note: Once the book's published, you can't get the bonus chapter.)

How do you take Content Marketing beyond the buzz and implement a practical process for your company that will either tap into existing resources or add new resources and processes and become self-sustaining?

Many companies are realizing that content marketing can help build traffic, create more leads and grow business. In fact, recent research by the software firm Curata found that 59% of US marketing professionals will be spending more on content marketing in 2014 than in previous years.

Although companies realize that that Content Marketing is important, many have limited knowledge on how to convince management to allocate resources for this new or expanded marketing focus. The key to a successful content marketing strategy is to have the backing of upper management. To be effective, content marketing takes time and marketing that doesn’t have an immediate ROI needs the backing of leadership.

The marketing and advertising landscape continues to change and evolve as the effectiveness of traditional media continues to wane and content marketers step up to fill the gap. Content marketing is on everyone’s radar and many marketing departments are scrambling to increase budgets and grow their departments.

There are 5 things to focus on in order to convince the ‘C’ suite to approve your content marketing budget and resources recommendations.

1. Content Marketing Creates Business Assets

Your content should serve a business purpose on your website or blog. That purpose may be to help potential customers answer questions or help them make a decision. Regardless of the specific purpose, the content becomes an asset on the site. In many cases it is ‘evergreen’ content and it will keep working for years; driving traffic and leads which eventually convert to revenue. As your content footprint grows and you publish more and more information on your product or service, you start to become an industry expert and thought leader. Your brand benefits from this and the content adds credibility and authority to your website.

2. Content Marketing Grows Website Traffic

Over time, this regularly published content will help your website gain authority not only with your clients but also with the search engines, thus helping grow sustained traffic over time.

HubSpot surveyed over 7,000 websites and found that websites that regularly published content get 5x the traffic than websites that don’t blog or publish frequently. What would it mean to your organization if your website was able to generate 5x more traffic?

3. Content Marketing Generates Leads

One very popular content marketing format is the ‘Free Guide.’ Free guides allow you to dive deep into a particular topic and give your users a wealth of information to help them with a buying decision.

Yale Appliance does a great job of creating free guides for buying Appliances. Vertical Measures just published a free guide that helps webmasters recover from a Penguin penalty. And one of our clients, the College of Golf published a free guide years ago that is still working for them. This Career Guide To Golf is behind a lead capture form and has allowed this client to capture 100′s of leads since publication.

The lead form gives you precise measurements as to the effectiveness of this type of content marketing. Leads that come from downloads that require an exchange of contact information are generally better qualified leads. The user is serious enough that they have exchanged their contact info for your content. In fact, you may want to take this a step further and track the annual contract value of content marketing leads and compare them to PPC or other forms of marketing and advertising.

4. Reducing the cost per lead

Content Marketing can help reduce your cost per lead over time.

As you start to develop your content footprint, more users will find your site and convert, thus lowering your overall cost per lead. Your PPC costs will remain constant over time and can even improve incrementally if your campaign is managed well. Once you add leads gained from content marketing, your blended or overall cost per lead will drop.

And you can combine the two by using PPC to promote your new content marketing pieces thus increasing the effectiveness of your new content.

According to a survey from HubSpot, content marketing or ‘inbound’ marketing as they refer to it costs 62% less per lead than traditional marketing.

5. Content Marketing impact is measureable

How many leads did your last radio spot bring in? Do you know or are you just guessing? Consumers are growing more and more tired of interruption marketing and are finding ways to tune out. Content marketing is welcomed especially if it’s relevant and contains useful information. Plus, content marketing is trackable. Once published, you will know how users found the content, how long they engaged with it and if they followed your call to action and clicked to other pages on your site. You cannot track traditional media with this granularity.

Speaking of measurable, you should also look to case studies to prove your point. Just Google ‘content marketing case studies’ and you’ll find a plethora of posts with detailed success stories, many with very specific stats that prove the value of ongoing content marketing campaigns. I’ve listed four of the posts I read doing research for this post. They are a good broad brush of B2B and B2C success stories.

Econsultancy.com – Six Case Studies – These B2B and B2C case studies have stats that show content marketing dramatically and positively impacted website traffic and revenue. One example shows that unique visitors increased 81%.

Brandpoint.com – This post highlights how a small B2B site increased traffic by 400% within 6 months and page views per visit by 260%. More than ½ the company’s sales are through organic traffic supporting the fact that cost per leads can drop with content marketing.

TopRankBlog.com – This post includes 11 examples of how content marketing increased revenue and traffic including a campaign by Xerox that generated 1.3 billion in sales. That is the largest amount of revenue generated by content marketing that I’ve seen to date.

TheSalesLion.com – Yale Appliance which was mentioned above as a company that does a great job of producing free guides was highlighted by Marcus Sheridan on his Sales Lion site. This post details how the Yale Appliance website grew from 18,000 visitors to over 48,000 visitors and how they now have over 140 keywords in the top three slots in Google for their search terms.

Summary

Content Marketing works but it takes time to build an audience. Many businesses give up too early in their content marketing campaigns because they set their expectations too high, expecting exponential growth rather than incremental growth at first. By throwing in the towel early, they lose out on search traffic, backlinks, social shares and authority not only from their audience but from the search engines as well.

Content marketing requires a long term commitment and the long term benefits support the up-front costs. Content will keep working for years after it is published, which does not happen with traditional media or paid advertising. The key is to get top management sold on the idea of content marketing and make it one of the foundational elements of your company’s marketing plan.

Organize your presentation to convince management around:

• Building business assets with published content
• Increasing traffic to your website
• Generating Leads
• Reducing the Cost Per Lead
• Proving it works through case studies

Every day, we talk to marketers doubling down on content. They’re hiring content teams, testing new channels and formats, and building campaigns around major content assets. Organizing all of these moving pieces manually can be tricky. And as content marketing goals and operations expand, budgets for content marketing platforms are increasing.

But when’s the right time to invest in technology to manage your efforts? If these five signs hit home, you’re ready for content marketing software.

Sign #1. Complex Workflows

Process is one of those potentially frustrating, but insanely important things that enterprise marketers deal with on a daily basis. You might hate it. You might geek out over it. But either way, process makes for more effective—meaning higher conversion rates and saving $12,000 per acquisition—content marketing.

Organized tasks and timelines need to be in place to ensure on-time creation, editing, approval, and distribution of content assets. This is especially true in enterprise companies with large teams, global marketing operations, and regulated industries. Efficient, communication has to happen between multiple people and departments (for example, legal or regional teams), and it must be mapped to set timelines. A single bottleneck can hold up an entire project or put a campaign launch at risk.

If these five signs hit home, you’re ready for content marketing software.

Content marketing software allows teams to standardize workflows for content types and marketing campaigns, including task assignments, cascading dates (X needs to happen 3 days after Y), and deadlines for completion. But it also allows for flexibility. After all, no two campaigns are exactly the same.

Sign #2. Extensive Brand Guidelines

If you’re working in a regulated industry, you probably have a lot of legal guidelines you need to follow for each piece of content you produce. And regardless of industry, you should have a style guide to ensure consistency across content assets.

Those guidelines need to be accessible to all of the parties creating content for your organization. If everyone is aware of requirements from the beginning, it will cut down on editing and approval time. And if someone violates these brand guidelines, you can quickly point them in the right direction.

Content marketing platforms house all of these guidelines in one central, easily-accessible location. Also, you can require specific fields to be filled out before submission or publication. For example, if a content contributor doesn’t add the appropriate disclaimer to the bottom of a blog post, software can automate reminders when they try to submit that article.

Sign #3. Vast Network of Contributors

If you have a lot of people involved in the content creation and approval process, then it’s worth looking into software to help manage these contributors and their individual tasks or deadlines. Usually, there’s someone who “owns” content in an organization. On our team, it’s Jesse Noyes, our Director of Content Marketing. If he wants to look into how his team is doing on a certain campaign, or the status of a content asset, he has immediate access to that information. He doesn’t need to send an email about it or “check in” with a project owner.

Also, internal contributors—who hail from departments like sales, support, or account management—are incredible resources for content, but they don’t live and breathe brand guidelines or content processes in the way we marketers do. Software streamlines the onboarding process for new contributors by relaying guidelines, setting requirements, and managing invoices.

Sign #4. Content Drives Critical Objectives

You know that marketing teams are responsible for meeting lead, opportunity, and revenue goals. Well, your content marketing team should be held accountable for those exact same goals. If they’re not, then how will you truly know that content is doing it’s job—driving revenue for your organization?

Right now, marketers “do their best” to measure attribution. And between all of the marketing technologies now considered must-haves for organizations (web optimization software, social platforms, sales force and marketing automation, etc.), we’re getting much closer. But these technologies need to integrate with one another to truly see a full picture of activity.

The same goes for content marketing software. It pulls all content efforts into the equation, showing which content assets are generating traffic, leads, opportunities, and sales. It helps to prove that this whole “content marketing thing” is actually working for your organization.

Sign #5. Content Variety and Scale

People consume information in different ways and in different places. A big piece of content marketing is producing and testing new content types, and figuring out which ones resonate best with target audiences and networks. With that in mind, marketers shouldn’t limit themselves to just one type of content. And if you use the content pillar approach to build out campaigns (we do this, so does Marketo, Birchbox, and Content Marketing Institute), it’s easy to produce multiple types of content—and lots of it.

So if your organization is focused on producing some combination of videos, blogs, webinars, presentations, eBooks, interactive content, infographics, emails, social updates, etc., then you should take a look at software. Not only does it help you manage multiple content types and campaigns, but it also publishes content to your distribution channels (blog, CRM, marketing automation, Facebook, Twitter, SlideShare, YouTube, etc.) and pulls metrics from each.

If these points resonate with you, it’s time to take a closer look at a content marketing platform. And while you’re doing your research, here are five questions to ask the sales rep. After all, you want the right tool that aligns with your goals as a content team and marketing organization.

According to a Forrester Research study, companies that excel at lead nurturing are able to generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost-per-lead. Also, Marketing Sherpa’s research shows that marketing departments with lead nurturing in place generate a 45% higher return on investment than those that lack such a program. Despite this, they report that 65% of B2B marketers have not established a lead nurturing program.

How to Develop an Awesome Lead Nurturing Campaign

What are the building blocks of a lead-nurturing campaign that gets results?

Personalize

B2B lead nurturing is not a one-size-fits-all email marketing campaign. Your leads are business managers and executives running against the clock to meet their objectives, and they only care about what’s going to help them get there. If you bore them with the wrong information, and they’ll quickly disengage.

Personalization, of course, requires that you get to know the living, breathing person behind the lead. And getting to know someone requires a two-way conversation where you ask questions and listen to responses. The information you gain can help you classify this person according to their interests, and where they are in the buying cycle. Are they just doing some initial snooping around, or are they in the process of narrowing down their options to a set of finalists?

If you’ve done persona research to determine how clients move through the buying cycle—the questions they ask, the content they consume, and the obstacles to moving forward—you’ll be able to classify each lead into a persona, and stage of the buying cycle, and have a plan for the content you need to offer to help them solve their problem.

Keep it Varied

Because one of the easiest, least costly lead-nurturing tactics is email marketing, it’s often used alone. But it’s just one piece of the puzzle, and it won’t single-handedly give prospects the full picture they need to make a decision. You need an integrated campaign that includes emails, phone calls, blog posts, white papers, webinars, demos and more. Each tactic has its own purpose. And the phone calls are critical for keeping your nurturing campaign on track and understanding what your prospect’s needs are today.

Test, Analyze and Optimize

If you’ve done your research, you have an idea of prospect information needs and what they’ll respond to. However, the proof is in how they actually react to your campaign. And marketing automation is a marketer’s dream because it quantifies the answers.

So ask all the right questions. For example:

• Which emails are prospects opening?
• Are they clicking through from the emails to your website?
• Which white papers and webinars are they responding to?
• How much are your phone calls speeding up the buying cycle?
• On which pages of your website are web visitors spending the most time?

Keep testing tactics and tweaking and optimizing your lead-nurturing campaign based on what the data tells you.

For more information about 3D2B, visit www.3D2B.com or call +1 718-709-0900 or +39 06 978 446 60 (EMEA).

Now the hype of Social Media has passed by the issues with Social media for B2B are:
- Is it worth investing time, capacity and money ?
- What is the result short term ?
- What is the result long term ?
- How to measure the impact ?
- Does it generate leads ?
- Does it generate leads that convert into sales ?
- How to calculate the ROI – if any ?
- Is Social Media perceived as spam like email spam ?
- How does Social Media interfere with and during the sales process ?
- Do (more) Followers and Likes lead to leads ?
- How far does Followers and Likes reach (to potential customers) ?
- Does Social Media build awareness of the brand for B2B ?

Due to accountability, proving real sales and seemingly impossibility to calculate a ROI for Social Media efforts, it might that Social Media for B2B is not worth the investment.

What is your take or experience on Social Media Marketing for your B2B business ?

4 Steps on How to Not Get Fired!”
by Ken Thoreson

On my flight to Seattle I was pondering what this week’s blog might contain; it occurred to me that in reflecting on the past year and looking forward a quick summary of a few basic actions sales leadership must take to succeed would be of value.

Step One: Build an active recruiting plan.  Most sales managers get fired for not hitting the desired sales goals, the issue is normally because they have a lack of salespeople selling their products/services!  You must know what is your average transaction value is vs your yearly or monthly sales objectives? The question you need to know is: “do you have enough salespeople on board to achieve your monthly number of required sales transactions? “ A sales manager must look out 90-120 days knowing your future potential revenue objectives and understand your manpower requirements.  Recruiting is sales leadership’s marketing campaign for sales leads. Build an ongoing program to ensure you have the right talent in place to exceed your goals.

Step Two:  Know your pipeline metrics. This is something I have written about before but it is what can bite the sales manager. You must know the accurate value of the pipeline 90-120 days out (depending upon your sales cycle). The question you must ask is: “do you have enough number of opportunities both in value and number of opportunities to achieve your upcoming monthly quota? If not, what can you do to ensure you build up the pipeline values so that you will have enough opportunities to achieve the monthly objective? It’s November, what is your February pipeline value? Do you have the necessary values to achieve February’s goals when it’s February first?

Step Three: Is your team trained?  Recently, at one of my new clients; my client, a technical team member and myself “listened in’ as two of their salespeople gave a demonstration to a major new client sales opportunity.  It became obvious to the president that the salespeople were not professional or even capable of handling the meeting. It was enlightening and a crucial step towards increasing the need for continued focus on sales training.  The sales team had been neglecting our recommendations as to improving their skill level, and now there will be an increased buy in by management and peer levels to focus on sales skills. 

• ·              Make more sales calls  with your team,
• ·               build in  a quarterly  salesperson skills  evaluation      process,
• ·               increase more role playing in your sales training meetings
• ·              Build a quarterly sales training programs 

Step Four: Improve your professional business acumen. 1) Make sure you read the local business sections in your local papers, the Wall Street Journal, business magazines/web sites,  2) read 3 business books a year and 3)  join a sales leadership  “peer group” of other sales managers to learn how others are increasing their leadership skills. This step will improve your ability to discuss the business trends of the day with prospects and your sales team, increase your stature within your management team and improve how you manage your team.

Follow these four steps and your odds of surviving the normal 18 month window that most sales leaders live under will improve.

Ken Thoreson is the president and founder of the Acumen Management Group Ltd., a North American consulting organization focused on improving sales management functions within growing and transitional organizations. You can reach him at ken@acumenmgmt.com   Ken’s latest book is: “Recruiting a High Performance Sales Team”.

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Integrating with your competitors may not sound like the smartest business plan on the planet.

But that’s exactly what enterprise marketing automation company Mindmatrix is doing as it builds links from its system to Hubspot and the-company-formerly-known-as-Eloqua, which is now Oracle Marketing Cloud.

CEO Harbinder Khera, however, has a plan.

Khera started Mindmatrix in 1998, eight years before Marketo — often thought of as the pioneer in marketing automation — was a gleam in CEO Phil Fernandez‘s eye. The company has been bootstrapped since day one and today has more than 800 customers worldwide, mostly large enterprises.

In the madly expanding world of marketing technology, it’s something different — something that doesn’t exactly have a name yet.

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“Most of the marketing automation vendors are at the top of the funnel, like Hubspot, and a lot of guys in the middle of the funnel, like Marketo,” Khera told me this morning, referring to the “funnel” of sales leads that marketing automation tools help manage.

“We do all that, but our focus has been at the bottom of the funnel: How do you enable salespeople after the warm lead has been passed?”

In other words, Mindmatrix offers solutions in marketing automation, sure, across all of SMS, print, email, web, landing pages, and social media.

But it also offers solutions for asset management, such as personalizing brochures for channel partners and hundreds of sales reps and thousands of customers; sales enablement, which gives every salesperson the same information and tools as the marketing department; and channel or franchise enablement.

The problem with the traditional marketing automation system, Khera says, is it doesn’t go far enough.

Most marketing automation systems feed leads down the funnel but don’t offer the marketing and sales tools salespeople need to maximize the value of those leads and convert them into customers, Khera says. And those tools extend into physical and digital documents, which must retain proper branding but also be flexible enough that the end users — salespeople — can employ them in customizable and innovative ways.

“If you look at pure marketing automation systems, they’re for nurturing leads,” he says.

“But do Oracle’s salespeople have access to that data? Only Oracle has it. In fact, only Oracle’s marketing people have it. How do you give that to a salesperson in Pittsburgh to market that? You can’t!”

There are certainly other systems that pass as much information to salespeople as possible and give salespeople the ability to access the levers of the automation system’s marketing engine. But few vendors, if any, have the holistic focus on sales enablement that Mindmatrix has, without dipping into CRM.

“Nobody has really brought in all these four pieces in one box,” Khera says.

“It makes our branding and marketing job a little bit challenging.”

That’s easy to see.

The company brands itself as “Marketing Automation | Channel Marketing Automation” on its website. And Khera freely admits that the company has faced challenges in explaining what it does. But he’s confident it’s the right strategy.

“It’s not just about email and SMS and social,” he says.

“Marketing spends a lot of time doing print … but no one has automated that.”

Which makes it no surprise that Mindmatrix is hitting the non-tech market.

While its holistic focus sounded a lot like Salesforce’s ExactTarget when I was listening to Khera speak, Mindmatrix differs from ExactTarget in that it integrates the non-digital side of marketing within a digital marketing platform.

After the dot-com bust, when the company’s original customers evaporated, Mindmatrix found new customers in the real estate industry, of all places. Those customers were seeking to support multiple offices and hundreds of agents. That started to define Mindmatrix’ enterprise and channel niche and caused it to focus on more than purely digital assets.

“Our sweet spot is manufacturing that has a lot of channel partners and dealers, or retail with a lot of channel partners, or insurance with a lot of independent reps,” Khera told me.

“But if a small company comes to me and just wants marketing automation, we’re not a good fit. I know they would be under-utilizing our product, and it doesn’t make sense.”

And that answers the natural question as to why a marketing automation system would integrate with Oracle Marketing Cloud and Hubspot, which are also marketing automation systems.

Essentially, Mindmatrix doesn’t view itself as just a marketing automation system, as those systems are traditionally understood. Rather, it’s something quite a bit bigger: certainly lower down the sales funnel, but also comprising a solution that works in complex multi-channel and multi-location enterprises. So integrating with marketing automation systems enables it to address a bigger market while staying focused on its core solution.

All that has helped the company recently land a major enterprise client that has more than 3,000 channel partners and that currently uses Hubspot. Mindmatrix handles the channel marketing management all the way down to the individual sales reps, while Hubspot handles the marketing automation — and both systems share data.

So what category or vertical does it belong to then?

“Sales enablement,” Khera says.

That’s still a fairly nascent category. If you Google it, at least three links on the first page of results are some variant on “what is sales enablement?” The Forrester definition includes that it is the “key linchpin required to help a B2B company bridge the gap between their business strategies and how they execute in the field.” And it’s a space that Eloquo, Oracle, and Salesforce do play in, at least to a degree, as well as companies such as CallidusCloud.

One thing for certain: Marketing technology is expanding to fill more and more niches, and marketing automation is no exception.

Merging sales and marketing teams is kind of like wearing polka dots and plaid. They just don’t go.

That’s exactly the thought process that companies shouldn’t be following. Many executives choose to leave their sales and marketing departments as separate entities when really they should be insisting the two groups work together to form a unified Smarketing team.

Whether or not these two groups like to admit it, what they do is vary similar and equally important to the success of the company they work for. So blaming each other for shortcomings or leads that weren’t converted is not the answer.

The failures and successes of a company are a direct result of both of the teams and can’t be done alone. For the best possible lead generation and conversion rates unify your employees into a successful Smarketing team by implementing these elements:

Funnel Stages

Within your company it is crucial that your sales and marketing teams determine every stage a lead goes through within the sales funnel. And, with that, they must examine exactly how to transition them appropriately and easily within that funnel. The funnel’s stages will vary based on your company’s process, so just make sure you take the time to directly define each step a lead will go through from both a marketing and a sales perspective and discuss how the transitions will go within the Smarketing team.

Closed-Loop Reporting

Examine your company’s data to monitor progress toward your goals, analyze lead quality, and measure marketing return on investment. A closed-loop reporting system will track both marketing and sales metrics on an ongoing basis. Implement marketing software to manage your lead generation as well as a customer relationship management, or CRM, system to track sales activity. These two data systems should be integrated to monitor every lead and client from their first site visit to closing the sale.

Service Level Agreements (SLA)

Create an SLA, or service level agreement, for your new Smarketing team. An SLA is an agreement, similar to a contract, for what each team will provide to the other to make sure that the company is running as smoothly as possible. Typically this entails agreements from marketing to get a certain number of qualified leads and from sales to follow up with those leads in a timely manner. With closed-loop reporting your SLA can also include lead status updates and history, new lead actions, and documentation of contact attempts made. The groups will hold each other accountable for their end of the bargain.

Follow The Data

Don’t base your company’s future on a feeling that you have (unless of course you are a psychic); feelings can’t prove a point or deliver results. Numbers and statistics do that. Run analytics on every aspect of your business, including lead opportunites that were both successful and unsuccessful to look back on to improve both sales and marketing’s overall process in the future. It is helpful to host weekly Smarketing meetings to review and assess the numbers involved with both teams and how to improve them as a whole.

Takeaway

The problem with separate sales and marketing teams is a lack of communication that leads to misinformation and blame. Establishing the sale funnel stages will prepare the team for smooth transitions, closed-loop reporting will provide analytics for both groups, service level agreements will make expectations clear to all involved, and examining and analyzing you Smarketing data will improve the process in the future.

Follow these tips to bring the Smartketing mentality to your company. If you can turn you company’s sales and marketing teams from adversaries to allies everyone profits!

When used properly, LinkedIn can be a very powerful tool for generating leads for your company.

Sadly, most people totally F**K this up.

What I’m about to show you has happened to me at least 100 times, and I have ignored the person who reached out to me every single time.

If you are doing what I’m about to show you, PLEASE STOP! People who use LinkedIn this way are ANNOYING the hell out of people and I don’t want you to be one of them.

Here’s the first offender:

Where in this email does it show that this person knows anything about me? Nowhere that I can see.

I do however, see the words “I” and “We” used too many times. And, to make matters even more offensive, this nitwit has attempted to use a scarcity tactic by saying that he can only take 5 calls a week. Seriously?

Here’s the second offender:

This one is slightly less awful than the prior one. I actually read the entire email, mostly because of the subject line; which made me think (until I read the email) that they were looking for my help.

At no point in this person’s email have they asked me anything about myself or what I might be most interested in. Instead, all she has done is include a link to a video that I am supposed to watch. Really? I don’t know who you are and you expect me to take time out of my day to watch your stupid video without knowing why or what’s in it for me.

Yeah…gonna get right on that just as soon as I finished cutting my grass with a pair of scissors.

Here’s the final offender (I’ve saved the best for last):

Clearly this person doesn’t know a bloody thing about me or my business.

Do I need help with cold calling? Holy crap! I’ve written about how cold calling is dead; I’m a content marketer and I don’t make cold calls.

If she’d taken a few minutes to read even the about page of my blog, that would have been painfully obvious.

After her pathetic attempt at an opening paragraph, the usual thing happens. It’s all about them. “We do this…” and “We can help you with that…” etc…

I don’t care what the hell you do! Why should I? Clearly, you don’t care enough about me to take 60 seconds to learn more about me before you pooped in my inbox.

Buzz off!!

Ok, rant over.

The Right Way to Connect with Others (Who Don’t Yet Know You)

Am I trying to say that you should never use LinkedIn to reach out to a stranger?

No. Definitely not.

What I am trying to say is that whenever you reach out to someone who doesn’t yet know you, if you make the first contact all about YOU, that will be the end of any chance you have of developing a relationship with that person.

The right way to connect with a stranger is to make it about THEM.

Wait. Go read that last sentence again.

It’s all about them….UNTIL, they become interested in YOU.

Only then can the conversation be about you and how you can help them.

Now that you get the concept, I want to show you an example of how to make it happen.

Cold Email Example

In this example, I’m going to assume that a stranger is reaching out to me because (ultimately) they want to sell me their stuff; which in this case, is software that will help me automate my content marketing efforts (pretty sneaky that I’m using content marketing software for my example, eh?).

——– start of email from Bob ——–

Subject: I loved your post about how content marketing changes everything!

Hey Trent,

I just finished reading your post title, “How Content Marketing Has Forever Changed How to Attract Clients and How You Can Take Advantage of This Shift” and I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed it! In fact, I thought it was so good that I’ve shared it on every social network that I use.

Got any other posts like this one?

Cheers,
Bob

——– end of email from Bob ——–

What do you think is going to happen when I see Bob’s email?

Am I likely to ignore it? Uh…hell no.

Bob has stroked my ego…so naturally, I immediately like Bob!

Not only do I like Bob, but I’m going to reply to him…plus, the next time Bob emails me, I’m going to read it.

When I reply to Bob, I’m likely going to tell him thanks for sharing my stuff, supply him with links to a few other articles, and tell him to keep in touch.

The next move is Bob’s to make.

What Should Bob Do Next?

With just a single email, Bob has proven that he’s not a jerk, and he’s got in my good books.

What Bob hasn’t done is try to sell me anything.

So, if I was Bob, here’ s what I’d do next. When I get Trent’s reply, I’m going to reply to that reply like this….

——– start of email from Bob ——–

Subject: Re: I loved your post about how content marketing changes everything!

Hey Trent,

Thanks for the links you sent me. I really enjoyed both posts….especially the part about…x, y, and z. Awesome stuff.

Now that I’ve spent some time on your blog, I can see that you are super passionate about marketing automation. I can also see that you pump out a LOT of content.

How the heck do you produce so much? Do you have a bunch of people helping you? Do you have some systems or automation that helps you to get so much done?

Cheers,
Bob

——– end of email from Bob ——–

See what Bob is doing? He’s not yet tried to sell me his software. Instead, he (smartly) is asking me questions about my business processes.

Why is he doing that? Well, the first reason is to build rapport with me. The second reason is because he’s probing for pain.

If Bob shows interest in me, I’m going to like him…and how do you treat people you like? Nicely!

Not only that, but when you like someone, you are going to be more honest with them.

Now that I like Bob and he’s showing interest in my business, he’s earning the right to direct the conversation where he wants/needs it to go if he’s to make a sale at some point.

When to Talk About Your Stuff

So, when should Bob start talking about how his products might help me?

Not before he’s figured out if I have a problem that his products can solve, that’s when!

Remember Bob’s last email to me? He asked me how I pump out so much content. He might also have asked me if I have clients that I product content for (sidebar: if you need that service, let me know), because if I did, I’d likely need his software even more. (second sidebar: if you produce content for your clients, check out my software).

In my next reply to Bob, I would have told him what he wanted to know. I would have told him that it does indeed take a lot of work to produce this volume of content. I would have told him that I also do it for clients.

Knowing this about me, Bob now has a qualified lead for his software, and in his next reply, he could very easily ask me if I’d like to learn more about how his software might be able to help me out.

Or…even better, if Bob had a case study or article about his software, he’d send me that content first with a little note like:

“Hey Trent, given what we’ve been talking about, I have an article or two that I think you’d like to read. Mind if I send them to you?”

Damn, Bob is smart!

Rather than just send me his links, he’s asked for my permission first! (this is why we call it “permission marketing”)

Obviously, when I reply to Bob, I’m going to say yes…and in doing so, I kind of owe it to Bob to actually ready what he sends me.

Let’s Recap What We’ve Learned

1. Never send someone a cold email that, more or less, says “Buy my stuff!” Doing so is a dick move. Don’t be a dick.
2. Always make your first contact all about the other person because doing so will be well received and they will like you for it.
3. Be sure and share their work and tell them you did so. They will like you even more.
4. Engage in an actual conversation that is about them first until it’s time for it to be about you.
5. ONLY make the conversation about you if they need what you sell (and you’ve done enough digging to have a very good idea this is likely the case).
6. Ask their permission to send them information about your stuff before you send it. That way they are much more likely to pay attention to what you’ve sent them.
7. After you send them information about your stuff, it is totally acceptable to follow up with them to ask their opinion of what they saw. If they had a good opinion, ask them to take another step.

Voila…B2B selling that feels good.

Why everyone doesn’t do this is beyond me.

What To Do Next

If you sell B2B and are having trouble getting your foot in the door, check out my Best Buyer Formula. It is stuffed full of ideas that I have used for my entire career and I have sold tens of millions of dollars worth of products and services to small businesses – using the exact techniques in course.

If you want to really set yourself apart from your competition, you need to integrate content with your sales efforts. If you need help with content marketing, I’ve written a book about it.

If you’d like to grab both products (bless your heart), I’m going to give you a big “I love you” discount!

To get both products, and the 50% discount, you will need to use this order form. (Note: if you want to read the sales pages first, use the links above, but place your order via this link.)

PLEASE NOTE: You must use the following promo code: DMH3BBF.

Whether you’re a professional writer yourself or a marketer tasked with writing powerful, effective content, you need to write like a pro to get the job done. Use these top 10 secrets of professional copywriters to make your copy stand out from the competition and get results.

10. Research, research, research!

The more research you do, the more information you have to work with when you sit down to write your copy. All professional copywriters extol the virtues of adequate research.

The Father of Advertising David Ogilvy, Copywriting Hall of Fame inductee John Caples, and modern million-dollar copywriter Gary Bencivenga all recommend extensive research as one of the secrets of writing great copy.

I learned that good copywriters get to know so much about the product and the prospect and his or her wants, fears, assumptions, and lingo that the copy soon wants to burst forth as if a dam is breaking. I learned that research is the infallible cure for writer’s block. ~ Gary Bencivenga ~

What do you need to research to write like a pro?

• your target audience’s pains, needs, desires, demographics, values

• the product’s features, advantages, and deep benefits

• your company mission, values, style, brand story, and unique selling proposition

• what the competition is doing and how well it works

9. Don’t rush.

Every professional copywriter wishes they had more time. There will always be something you could do to improve the copy, so it’s important to give yourself plenty of time to devote to the project.

You’ll need time to gather all your research and materials; time to actually write the copy; and time to edit and revise and polish until it’s as good as you can make it.

In addition to giving yourself plenty of time, Gary Bencivenga also recommends using copywriting productivity hacks to stimulate your creativity and focus. He’s a big believer in the power of your subconscious and the 80/20 rule, both of which maximize your time without rushing.

8. Focus on clarity, not cleverness.

One of the biggest secrets Clayton Makepeace promotes is clarity. You need to be very clear with yourself about the overall theme and message of the piece, so you don’t get sidetracked. He shares an example critique where the copy had lots of great things going for it, but the writer fell in love with the subject and the sound of his voice.

Because the writer got sidetracked by all things he loved about the product, he overwrote the promotion. In the end, all the great things about the copy were buried under pages of extraneous, unnecessary, off-track fluff.

You also need to be very clear in the way you write, choosing the best words and following the best logical order so your audience never gets confused.

Professional copywriters know that effective copywriting is salesmanship in print; cleverness distracts prospects from the message or story, drawing their attention to you instead–exactly the opposite of what good copywriting should do.

And if your cleverness isn’t really that clever, it will only confuse your audience. Confused and distracted prospects don’t buy.

Effective copywriting is salesmanship in print, not clever wordsmithing. The more self-effacing and invisible your selling skill, the more effective you are. ~ Gary Bencivenga ~

7. Get a solid foundation in copywriting.

There are lots of copywriting tips and tricks you can use to strengthen your writing. But without a strong foundational knowledge of the basics of effective copywriting, these tips and tricks can’t turn mediocre copy into brilliantly successful sales pieces.

One of the highest paid copywriters in the world–he consistently makes over a million dollars every year–Clayton Makepeace says the secret of professional copywriters is this solid foundation. To write like the pros, you have to thoroughly understand the principles of persuasion and direct-response copywriting.

Image credit: Organic SEO Copywriters

That means reading everything you can get your hands on about great copywriting, from articles on Copyblogger to classic books by Claude Hopkins and David Ogilvy (here’s a recommended reading list about copywriting).

It means learning about headlines, trigger words, calls to action, appealing to emotion, and more. It means studying the blog posts, ads, commercials, sales letters and others that make you want to share, click through, or buy so you can figure out why they worked on you.

6. Then never stop learning, improving, and testing.

Having the basics is critical, but it’s only the beginning. Things change so rapidly in technology and marketing these days that staying up-to-date and always trying to improve is what separates okay writers from great professional copywriters.

Nobody has this down pat. Any writer who’s truly serious about the craft recognizes that it’s a lifelong journey up an unscalable mountain. At its core, copywriting isn’t about words, it’s about numbers… leads, opt-ins, sales, and upsells. Words are just the tools you use to generate the numbers you need. Grappling with that reality is a wrestling match to last a lifetime. ~ Jack Turk, head copywriter at GKIC ~

Make sure you follow the big names in your industry and in copywriting and content marketing, like Writtent, Copyblogger, Content Marketing Institute, and others.

Have an editor or another seasoned writer critique your writing to help you nail the voice and style, clarity, principles of persuasion, and other elements. Take notes on their suggestions and apply them to the next thing you write.

Where possible, test your copy to see how well it works and determine what you could do better. Headlines, calls to action, bullet points, button copy, and order are all things you could test to improve your copywriting.

5. Write often. Every day if possible.

Writing is a skill, learning to play an instrument. They both require regular, dedicated practice. Like building muscle memory in your fingers when you play the piano, writing every day builds your writing “muscle,” so you can write faster and easier with more creativity.

Research and learning can only get you so far. Eventually you have to sit down and write, and the more often you do that, the better you’ll get. As David Ogilvy said:

If you have all the research, all the ground rules, all the directives, all the data — it doesn’t mean the ad is written. Then you’ve got to close the door and write something — that is the moment of truth which we all try to postpone as long as possible.

4. Seduce, don’t sell.

An important component of successful content marketing as well as copywriting, seduction works much better than hard selling. That’s because seduction is flattering and draws us in, while hard selling raises our hackles and alerts everyone’s inner BS detector.

In fact, one of the biggest mistakes content marketers can make is the exact opposite of seduction–talk only about themselves.

To seduce, your copy has to be all about your audience. Clayton Makepeace lists the 5 things you must do to create seductive copy:

• First, convince prospects to give you their attention with a headline that capitalizes on their driving emotions–their desires, frustrations, or fears.

• Second, convince them to read your message. Be interesting and offer value if they’ll give you just a few minutes of their time.

• Next, convince them your offer will meet their needs. Show them it will satisfy their desires or assuage their frustrations or fears.

• Fourth, convince your prospects that the price is fair or a bargain by demonstrating the value of your offer.

• Finally, convince them to take action immediately by making it easy to do so.

To successfully do those 5 things, you have to be completely focused on the prospect. That means using “you” way more often than “I” or “we” or your brand name. Follow these 6 rules for writing seductive copy to entice your prospects.

3. Focus on existing problems, motivations, and desires.

You can’t sell a steak to a vegetarian. They’re simply not hungry for it. No matter how amazing your copy is, they will never buy.

That’s because you can’t create desire or motivation in your prospects. The problem, desire, or motivation has to already be there.

Whenever you find yourself educating your readers about a problem they may have, consider it a red warning flag! If you have to educate people into realizing they have a problem, you’re already losing the battle. ~ Gary Bencivenga ~

All you can do is capitalize on those problems, motivations, and desires by crafting a strong message aimed at the right people. Very successful professional copywriter Dan Kennedy talked about 5 steps every prospect goes through between first contact and closing the sale:

• Awareness of a need or desire

• Picking the thing that will satisfy that desire

• Picking the source for that thing

• Accepting the price/value argument

• Finding reasons to act immediately

When your copy can spark that initial desire–not try to create it, but stoke the embers of desire into flame – and guide the prospect through the next 4 steps, it will be much more successful (and seductive). Aiming the message at the right people will make it that much better.

2. Build credibility.

You can’t assume your prospects will simply believe everything you say. You have to make them comfortable, give them reasons to trust you, and back up your claims. You do that by infusing your copy with credibility devices, such as:

• your (or the author you’re ghostwriting for) qualifications as an expert, e.g. job title, years of experience, media outlets that have featured him, books or articles he’s published, etc.

• details, facts, graphs, charts, etc. that prove each point of your copy beyond any doubt

• testimonials that prove your product has worked for others

• reviews and endorsements that validate you or your company

• guarantees and shipping/return policies that demonstrate your absolute confidence in your offering

1. Appeal to emotions.

Ask any professional copywriter the secret to hooking a prospect’s interest, or telling a great story, or getting readers to share or comment on an article, or any number of objectives.

Any copywriter worth his or her salt will tell you the number one technique in the book is appealing to your ideal prospect’s emotions. Logic and proof are important, but they don’t sell by themselves.

“B” writers tend to focus on selling benefits and on logical, “reason-why” copy only…Instead of simply reciting benefits and reasons why the prospect should buy, “A” writers recognize, validate, and directly address powerful emotions the prospect already has about those benefits (or the lack of them). ~ Clayton Makepeace ~

If you can connect with prospects on a deep, emotional level, they’ll remember you better and be more seduced, making your copy that much more effective.

How do you write like a pro? Share your secrets in the comments!

We constantly talk about leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities. What we forget in using these terms is that those are all associated with individuals, like you and me. And there are societal norms for how we treat others in our community:

1) We do not blast emails.

Imagine if, instead of saying I was going to “send my mother an email,” I said I was going to “blast my mother”. How rude! For me, Blast is the “b-word” and, as such, profanity. Treat your leads like you would a friend or relative and before you hit that “send” button, have a little respect.

2) We do not drop leads into our sales funnel.

So you’re at the park with your nephew and you’re playing on the jungle gym. You don’t drop your nephew. Similarly, you don’t drop leads into your funnel, because that would be painful for them. You nurture them along, encourage them, educate them, and wait until they’re ready to go to the next rung. People are not water balloons.

3) Gravity has nothing to do with it.

Another reason we don’t “drop” leads into our sales funnel is that gravity has nothing to do with it. Leads don’t naturally move from stage to stage or closer to a sale unless they have the information they need and the impetus to do so. You’re the tour guide…but that doesn’t mean your leads won’t wander off on their own unless you’re interesting.

4) We do not push leads along the funnel.

Sure, go ahead. Shove them around. See where that gets you. Resentment, I’d bet. Instead, act like you would as host of a party, and introduce leads to your sales reps when you think they might be interested in talking to each other. Think matchmaker, not playing sardines.

Even if you’re selling to buying committees or large institutions, you’re dealing with people. Treat them with the respect and courtesy they deserve.

Retiring is one of the most difficult financial goals to plan for since it requires you to imagine what your day-to-day spending will be like years or even decades from now. For a down and dirty way to figure out (very roughly) how much you'll need to retire, multiply your expected monthly spending by 300.

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As B2B marketers, we are continually challenged with being innovative, driving results, raising the bar for customer experience, revolutionizing lead generation, improving the bottom line, and so on…endless pressure! While consistency, best practice, perseverance and team work are all important, you also need a good measure of inspiration from time to time. Every now and then you come across an inspiring leader who offers much to learn from. History has many that we can learn from but I strongly believe that the complexities and daily challenges of our current times are unique. Leaders who are successful in dealing with the same problems we face are better positioned, in my opinion, to offer the Alexandrian solution to our Gordian knot. I want to take the opportunity to turn the spotlight on some of these leaders of our time on my blog.

Let me introduce you to Jim Davis, CMO of SAS. Why did I choose to take a peek into this CMO’s mind? For two reasons: one, because while many C-Suite executives talk about organizational transformation, Jim has demonstrated his success at taking SAS on the journey from tools provider to software solutions provider. Two, because he propagates the need for a ‘data scientist’ and a ‘marketing technologist’. He also shares the same name as the creator of one of my all-time favourite comic characters—Garfield—and that could be the third reason, but I dare not admit it!

What Can B2B Marketers Learn from Jim Davis, CMO, SAS? Plenty!

Jim Davis, Senior VP and CMO has been with SAS since 1994. While his training is in technology and software development, what I find interesting is his ability to steer his company and teams to bridge the divide between technology and marketing. He is a strong advocate of CIOs and CMOs being able to perform each other’s roles interchangeably. In his own words, Jim says, “Think about it: What makes a relationship work? It’s that keen understanding of each other’s interest. If CMOs and CIOs don’t have that keen understanding of each other’s interest, they won’t stay married, let alone date.”

In my experience, this ‘marriage’ of CMO and CIO positions is still rare in the B2B world. But that’s what makes it all the more desirable. Typically, we see that in most organizations, the CMO’s relationship (or lack of it) limits the access to relevant data and technology expertise. Yes, IT may provide reams of data analytics reports, but this Big Data is often of Little use because it is not in context of value-creation for the customer or employees or both.

Below are a few ‘secrets’ of Jim Davis’ new-age CMO mindset…summarized into a succinct list for your reading and reference.

• Gain a deep understanding of your organization’s product portfolio. Not just knowing the product’s tangible features and benefits but studying how each product meets buyers’ needs.
• Strive to ensure data-based decision making but don’t black box the results and execute on them blindly. Take the time to include data modeling and predictive analytics where the human factor comes into play. Interpretation of data and using it to enhance business value and outcomes is critical. Jim advocates bringing in ‘data scientists’ and ‘marketing technologists’ who can bridge the knowledge divide.
• Stay on top of technology innovations and the competitive landscape. “You can’t think because you studied it in January, that you don’t have to look again until November,” Jim says. “Things are changing too rapidly.”
• Focus on real-time customer interactions. The best way to do this is through digital marketing where online interactions can help you optimize customer experiences. And then take it to the next level where every channel, every customer touch point is optimized to deliver a consistent, high-quality customer experience.
• You don’t have to love technology, but you do need to know what it can do for your business and all its stakeholders—employees, channel partners, associates, customers, shareholders and the community at large.
• Today’s technologies are highly adaptable and flexible. Partner and work closely with the people that know and adapt the technology to fit your organization’s needs. This interaction will help them understand what you want the technology to achieve and why.

I plan to feature more CMOs and other inspiring business leaders on my blog. Are there any you would like to see featured here? What leadership traits do you find inspiring in these executives? Leave me a comment.

TopRank’s Lee Odden recently wrote an article discussing and developing the maturity model of content marketing. The model is very relevant in relation to Matt Cutts’ recent announcement regarding guest posting; while SERP manipulation will almost always eventually lead to trouble, many marketers still have trouble understanding that good, useful content is at the core of all effective marketing campaigns.

Just because they are investing in content marketing does not mean they understand how to develop a mature content marketing campaign. But this model will help companies better understand where they are with their own content marketing services and will be most important to understanding that pushing content is turning off buyers. Buyer persona expert Tony Zambito puts it this way:

“Some have done buyer personas yes – but in review they are laden with buying criteria-centric and supplier-centric language. Lacking in the true buyer insights research to guide content marketing efforts. Instead serving as a guide for marketing content.”

Content marketing that’s developed for specific customer needs throughout the buying journey will win. For B2C customers, the captured audience must be offered deals that will actually bring them through the sales cycle.

Don’t Get Stuck

The first two stages of the five-stage content marketing maturity model are stasis and production. Stasis produces content that is very brand-centric, while content within the production stage is predominantly seen as more concentrated on creating specific, keyword-focused content. The primary goal of this strategy is to use keywords to determine the topics for the content.

But both of these stages ignore the emphasis on the customer’s sales cycle journey and focus too much on search visibility and organic referrals. Brands that are stuck in the first two stages are still getting attention and are likely succeeding but it will be critical for these brands to use this as a guide if they want to compete in this marketplace.

It might be difficult to cast a brand in one of the first two phases while still keeping it positive.

The Utility Level of Maturity

Content marketing can eventually reach a higher level of maturity in which keywords and brand messages aren’t the focus of content planning. Content marketing strategies within the third stage of the model—utility—start to invest in content that contributes to useful experiences for the customer. Content marketing that offers a utility is more focused on customer information needs and exhibits great usefulness. A brand that is a great example of a B2C utility is Just Add Ice Orchids. The company is very active on social media and attracts social communities, authentic engagement and demand emotional connection with the brands identity.

Optimize for Buying Cycle

As a brand’s content marketing matures, its brand narrative will mature into storytelling. But before entering the fourth maturity level—storytelling—a brand needs to be optimized for the buying cycle. Many brands seem to get stuck between the maturity of being a utility and storytelling.

Zappos is a great example of a brand that’s remains between these two stages. Zappos definitely demonstrates brand leadership, but it doesn’t optimize its buying cycle, despite effective mobile and multichannel strategies. An ecommerce company that decides to capture email addresses to use for future marketing strategies may have an opportunity to outperform its competitors. Tactics like blog subscriptions and quid-pro-quo transactions like offering MOFU content (whitepapers, guides) can help gather the desired customer information for targeted marketing.

Storytelling and “Monetization 360″

The storytelling stage introduces the importance of the buyer’s intellectual needs as well as his emotional needs. This is where brand stories create shared experiences and communities, and encourage influencers to contribute. Woot, acquired by ecommerce giant Amazon, is an excellent example of a brand in the storytelling stage.

Research and analysis company Forrester is another example of a brand that’s managed to enter monetization levels of maturity. Forrester sticks to the channels it knows best, which means it doesn’t enter omnichannels. Other brands that have entered the monetization maturity level are PRDaily, Content Marketing Institute, TopRank, Moz, and HubSpot. Huffington Post is a great example of a B2C brand publisher that’s also approached this content marketing maturity level.

Lee points out that an organization’s entire content marketing campaign can’t be completed within just one of these stages. Applying this five-step maturity model to a brand’s content marketing strategy can be effective for gaining perspective and turning a brand around; but success requires commitment and determination.

You have to sell first, prove yourself first, before you can hope to develop a relationship. Leading with the notion that you can build any sort of relationship from the outset, is hopelessly out of touch, but that is precisely what around 90% of front-line sales professionals are still trying to do.

But be assured relationship selling is alive and well, and reports of its death have been wildly exaggerated.

I think in order to fully comprehend what I mean, you need to imagine a couple on a first date – think of this in sales terms as the “exploratory meeting” The two have never met before, but they have both done their homework: They have asked friend’s opinions; they have checked out each other’s Facebook profiles; in fact they have conducted as much research as possible, so that when they finally sit down to eat, the conversation is flowing, and they discover considerable synergy. But this early attraction, and discovery of mutual interests and values in no way leads either of them to instantly think of marriage – the desire to grow the relationship is established, but they are not ready to open joint bank accounts!

Our commercial relationships are very similar to that scenario if you think about it: Trust, which is the basis of all symbiotic business partnerships, cannot be created overnight – it takes time. Don’t ever mistake lust for love!

You see, on day one of any new potential relationship, we are simply in the “Me too” bracket: Lots of other companies may be bidding; we have not yet had the opportunity to demonstrate and prove our uniqueness, let alone our superiority.

If we are lucky enough to win that first order, we establish a foothold – it is never more than that.

At this point, we work diligently to ensure that all of the after-sales tasks are performed reliably, efficiently, and on time. Our aim is to reach that next stage “Me first” In other words, every time this customer has an additional requirement, they call us first for a quotation. We are not yet trusted advisors, but we are preferred suppliers.

Finally, we reach the hallowed ground – if we have followed all the rules of engagement, and if we have continually worked to “earn the right”. We become the chosen ones, and we enter “Only me” territory. We now work with our customers to define strategy; we are not only trusted advisors, but also long-term allies. We have a relationship, and both parties work very hard to maintain it, both aware of the costs of starting all over again from scratch – not unlike a marriage!

So in summary, I repeat, relationships take time to blossom and grow. There is no instant magic dust. But when a strong commercial relationship is formed, it can provide rich benefits – including substantially increased profitability and stability for both partners.

"Content is fire. Social media is gasoline."

Jay Baer uses this analogy to explain the idea that content is the main substance in any digital marketing campaign; social media channels ignite that content and help it to spread. What this means for marketers is that content must be at the core of your digital marketing initiatives. Content is what people find when searching on Google. Content is what people share on social media channels. Content is how brands tell their story and connect with customers. And content is what ultimately drives leads and sales.

But you can't just create a video, post it on Facebook, and expect it to generate tons of awareness, engagement, and sales. You need to put thought and structure behind the content you create and share on social media profiles. Start with these seven tips for managing and maximizing content in social media. Read more...

More about Business, Advertising, Marketing, Facebook, and Twitter

Not too long ago, one of our clients was asking about the best way to roll out a lifecycle marketing (LCM or drip) campaign. For those of you who are not aware of what an LCM campaign is – it is an email marketing technique for sending multiple messages to a group of subscribers in an automated fashion. This client’s goal was to increase qualified leads in order to boost sales.

One of our internal consultants strategized with the client regarding the project and the following criteria was established:

• Use concepts from a newly written client White Paper as the basis for the content of the emails in the campaign
• Use a call to action button to offer the White Paper as a free download
• Use existing prospects in the client’s CRM system that have not been contacted in the previous 12-month period as the target

With each email sent, there were three choices the prospect could make:

• Open the email and download the White Paper
• Open the email but don’t download the White Paper
• Ignore the email

Seven emails were written as part of the series. If a prospect opened the first email and downloaded the White Paper, a thank you email was automatically triggered to thank them. The prospect info was sent back into our customer’s CRM system and assigned to a Representative.

If a prospect opened the first email but did not download the White Paper, they would receive the second email in the series forty-eight hours after they opened the first one.

If a prospect does not open the email at all, they will get the first email again, with a different subject line seven days later.

The project went live about 2 weeks ago and the results have been outstanding, to date. The open rate on the initial email was 12.5% and when the second email went out to the unopeners, another 7% opened the email. When the industry average open rate is 5% – these results are phenomenal. Additionally, the download rate is between 1 and 1.5%, resulting in 60 new leads (out of 2,500 initial emails) in just two weeks.

Want more information on how Net Atlantic can help you get these results? Contact us at (877) 263-8285 or email us at sales@netatlantic.com.

B2B marketing can be like a farming game. You don’t just have to raise a single type of livestock or crop. You end up diversifying them. And in order to keep them growing, you need different resources. Therefore, it only follows that restocking each type of resource requires a different methods.

Telemarketing

For B2B telemarketing, contact lists form their primary resource. The initial screening of the list is one thing but it’s another when you need to start salvaging it after the first campaign. Ask yourself the following questions to determine how much of the list can still be used and how much you’ll need to restock.

• How much can you follow-up? – Some prospects don’t always say either yes or no. Those who are undecided can still be followed-up. As soon as the first round of the campaign is over, take those prospects and start calling them up again for more definitive answers. Also, make sure to exercise proper timing but don’t procrastinate either.

• Can you call back old clients? – Old clients are often another source of recycled leads. But take note, these can quickly double as satisfaction surveys. There could have plenty of business needs you left unsatisfied and you will be called by these people to rectify. On the bright side, it’s a good opportunity to renew ties with more satisfied customers.

• Has your list provider proven reliable? – The results of your first campaign should tell you enough about your provider. This is the case even if there is still hope of recycling and following-up. Other vendors could provide alternative contacts to fill in the gaps. You might also want to consider switching targets.

• Can you improve your telemarketers? – Sometimes it’s just a matter of giving the information to somebody with more suitable skills. Whether you’re outsourcing or have some in-house, look around for people who can do a better job with what’s left of your list.

• Will it cost more? – Finally, you have the ROI question. If an initial list has proven profitable enough already, don’t be too quick to start another round. Check to see if recycling, following-up, or acquiring more data will cost more money than what you’ve made.

Truth be told though, you can argue that telemarketing actually has the simplest resource for restocking. Other forms such as email and content have resources that are just as varied in of themselves. Stay tuned as we cover more tips on restocking these diverse B2B marketing resources.

2014 marks a crucial shift in the global eCommerce landscape that U.S. online retailers need to tracking. For the first time, North America will no longer lead the world in B2C eCommerce sales. According to eMarketer, the Asia-Pacific region will surpass North America’s share by an estimated $42.6 billion in 2014, and the gap will widen to $142.9 billion in 2015.

Other factors, such as increasing access to technology and emerging middle classes in nations like China, certainly have fueled this type of growth. However, this doesn’t mean US retailers will be left out in the cold. In fact, according to a recent report released by OC&C Strategy Consultants, international sales from U.S. online retailers will jump from $11 billion to almost $50 billion by 2020, making up 16% of the overall U.S. online retail market.

OC&C also uncovered that international consumers are using online search tools to do research before making purchases online. This often leads them to discover American brands, especially in the entertainment, electronics and fashion industries. This also leads us to our first global eCommerce lesson for U.S. online retailers:

1.   Develop a country-specific or regional site that will be easily found by your international target market

Doing this gives you an opportunity to focus your site towards a variety of products within your portfolio that would better resonate with the audience you’re going after. For example, an online grocer selling in Chile would be better off featuring Nescafe products over whole bean or ground coffee, as the nation almost exclusively consumes Nescafe. Moreover, just as Americans often refer to tissues primarily by the brand name “Kleenex” or call all types of soda, “Coke” in the southern states, all coffee in Chile is typically labeled “Nescafe.” Therefore, in this case, it would be absolutely critical to have a separate SEO strategy for the region.

Buyer behavior can differ vastly even if they search for more universal brands or product varieties. Often times, the way a product is perceived abroad comes through in the search terms that will be used in Google. Missing the mark here can mean missing sales. Be sure to build a set of buyer personas in each country (or group of countries) you target and make their behavior and language the centerpiece.

2.  Look before you leap

Many businesses feel that as soon as they open their online doors abroad, sales will start flowing in. This can be true – but only if you open that virtual storefront in the right place, at the right time. First, you must look inward and evaluate if you are executing a smooth eCommerce strategy at home. Are there any weaknesses in your infrastructure or variables that have slowed you down? If so, these issues can be amplified when you add international complexities into the mix.

What about brand loyalty? Like the Nescafe example, you might uncover entrenched competitors you may not have considered. Make sure you’re entering a country or region where you can compete first. If you’re already selling internationally, but without an eCommerce presence, try building your online sales there and then consider broader-reaching expansion.

Distribution is another critical consideration. If your competitors are already in a country that you’re targeting, it’s likely they’ve figured out the best answer to this problem. You can’t spend time experimenting with distribution channels as you risk losing revenue and seeing slow, uncompetitive growth. Companies that are leveraging local distribution to fulfill direct-to-consumer orders have a significant head start.

3.  Choose the right device

According to a recent study published in MultiChannel Merchant, mobile payments accounted for 19.5% of all transactions worldwide in December, a growth of 55% year-over-year, up from 12.6% the previous December.

Just as emerging markets have quickly come online in the last decade, they’re also transitioning to mobile devices with a similar vigor. To see success with your global eCommerce strategy, in almost all nations, mobile MUST be a priority.

However, as you cross borders, the devices of choice for online shopping are shifting as well. According to the same study, the travel industry saw the greatest mobile growth with 30% of all transactions being made over a smartphone or tablet. However, there was a clear distinction when it came to cost. Travel was actually the only industry where desktop purchases showed higher transaction values than mobile. In most other industries, tablets led the way in terms of average transaction value, beating desktop purchases in retail, ticketing, and digital goods. This is a clear indicator that international buyers are still more comfortable making larger purchases on a larger screen, but have opted for mobile devices over desktops.

These are just a few key things to consider when developing your global eCommerce strategy. Please take a look at our white paper, Going Global: Planning for International eCommerce Expansion to learn many other considerations and best practices!

Author: Michael Berger

There are many sales intelligence tools in the marketing automation space, all touting to help sales’ productivity by providing insight into buying behavior and helping sales to identify the hottest leads. However, whether you realize it or not, some of these tools actually cause your sales team to ignore critical buying signals. In other words, they harm sales productivity. You can learn more about this in our new ebook, The Dangers of a “Good Enough” Marketing Automation Solution.

So how do you know you’re dealing with a tool that will help your sales productivity? First, consider the “three P’s”.  Any effective sales intelligence tool must do all three well:

1. Provide intelligence about true prospects so that reps aren’t wasting time trying to connect with people who will never be buyers
2. Prioritize follow-up activities so that reps are spending their time on those prospects most likely to become customers
3. Present a prospect’s interests to the rep, allowing the rep to initiate a more relevant and engaging conversation

Using this as a framework, you can easily evaluate the impact a specific sales intelligence tool will have on sales productivity. Here’s a more detailed explanation of each “P”:

Provide Intelligence on True Prospects

Most sales intelligence tools focus on alerting sales reps to activities that are presumed to be potential buying signals.  In order for an activity to be a potential buying signal, it must (drum roll, please)…be coming from a potential buyer! And that’s where the problems begin.

Unfortunately, many solutions have a very, very loose definition of what a “prospect” is.  In some solutions, a prospect is defined based on their level of interest and fit, which is typically determined through the scoring mechanism.  This is good.  In others, an individual becomes a “prospect” simply by filling out a form.  Or worse, some systems tag any lead that is added to the database as a prospect.  This is bad.

Can you guess what happens when a sales intelligence tool constantly alerts sales about activities not tied to an actual prospect?  It’s the same thing that happens when you see a bunch of irrelevant messages in your inbox.  Sales reps ignore them completely – well, the smart ones do.  Those that don’t ignore the alerts end up in a reactive cycle, chasing down low-quality leads that are unlikely to purchase.  And this is a good example of how some sales intelligence tools can hurt productivity.

Prioritize Follow-Up Activities

The ability of a sales intelligence tool to help a sales rep use their time wisely is perhaps the most important of the “three P’s”.  Let’s think about the email inbox example. Wouldn’t it be great to come into the office in the morning, and find your inbox auto-magically prioritized with the most important messages on the top, the less important ones at the bottom, and the unimportant ones hidden away?  I don’t know about you, but I would love that.  I could do so much with that extra time!

Most sales intelligence tools are simply alerting engines.  They don’t leverage lead scores to compare the quality of leads presented to reps through their sales intelligence tools.  Without the ability to compare lead quality on a relative basis, it’s hard to filter out the wrong leads, and impossible to present reps with a prioritized list of leads.  A prioritized list of leads boosts a sales rep’s productivity – much in the same way an auto-magically prioritized email inbox would boost productivity for you or me.

And in my opinion, a prioritized list is absolutely critical, because more than anything else, this is what makes the intelligence highly actionable.  When sales reps come into the office, they see a list of leads, with their best leads (real prospects) on top, and lower quality leads (still prospects) toward the bottom.  The best solutions re-sort that list dynamically as they learn more about each prospect, continuing to reflect lead quality on a relative basis.

Sales reps truly appreciate viewing their leads in this way, as opposed to being interrupted by a constant stream of alerts, many of them meaningless.  Again, this is the difference between a sales intelligence tool that helps, versus one that hurts sales productivity.

Present a Prospect’s Interests to the Rep

The last “P” is important because it helps the sales reps know what to say, whether they’re sending an email to a prospect, or picking up the phone to call them.  The more a sales rep knows about a prospect’s interests, the more relevant his or her messaging can be.

Sales reps should be able to determine interests based on the information within the sales intelligence tool, but this information isn’t always useful.  For example, many organizations trigger an alert when a lead opens an email.  Is opening an email really a strong buying signal?  Not likely, which is why reps often ignore these alerts.

Other sales intelligence tools let the marketer determine what is and isn’t meaningful to the sales rep.  For example, a prospect visiting the pricing page on the public website three times in a week might be considered a buying signal.  Or you might read a strong signal of interest when someone sits through a live demo, or simply visits your booth at a tradeshow (an offline behavior).  These specific and compelling signals are not only more meaningful, but they’re also much less likely to be ignored by a sales rep.

Lastly, look for a solution that provides such intelligence in an easily digestible manner.  Steer clear of tools that dump any useful intelligence into the CRM activity log, where it is lost in a sea of updates and activities, forcing a sales rep to waste time sifting through for useful information.

While significant differences exist between marketing automation solutions, uneducated buyers often see a check box next to something like “sales intelligence tool” and assume the different tools are more similar than not.  And when a company puts a lot of work into creating a highly differentiated tool, like Marketo Sales Insight for instance, this drives a product marketer mad.  Namely, me.  So I thought I’d write about it in an ebook: The Dangers of “Good Enough” Marketing Automation Solution.

Download The Dangers of a “Good Enough” Marketing Automation Solution to learn all about sorting between solutions that can seem similar, but have key differences which will affect your sales productivity, and ultimately your organization’s success.

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When Sales “Intelligence” is Actually Sales Interruption was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

I have a Magic 8 Ball on my desk. It’s about 30 years old; surely the age of sage wisdom for a predictive plastic orb.

So I posed this question (asking it three times to mitigate the fluke-factor): Will smaller companies increase their adoption of marketing automation this year?

To which Magic 8 Ball replied:

• Answer 1: It is certain
• Answer 2: Outlook good
• Answer 3: Reply hazy try again

Twice is a trend, right?

Fortunately, the evidence gets better.

Much better, in fact, according to new research from Software Advice, whose 12-month study (Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2013) analyzed 896 interactions with marketing automation software buyers.

The results are published in a new report: Marketing Automation Software BuyerView 2014.

The takeaway: Small and mid-sized businesses are actively considering marketing automation as a viable tool that can increase efficiencies, improve lead management, and drive revenue.

It’s a good day when Magic 8 Ball and empirical research agree.

Findings that surprised

SMBs take a seat at the table

A handful of findings raised an eyebrow, though the first was less “surprise” and more “happy confirmation” of what Act-On sees every day (and the jump point of this blog post):

A large majority of the companies searching for marketing automation software were small and mid-sized.

Here are the numbers:

Employee Count of Buyers’ Companies

Said Software Advice’s marketing analyst – and author of the report – Derek Singleton, “The prevalence of small companies in the sample is somewhat surprising, given that mid-size and large companies have more aggressively adopted marketing automation systems. However, many vendors are now focusing on selling to the small and mid-size business market.”

Marketing methods are all over the yard

Of equal intrigue was data about the systems that buyers were using to manage their marketing:

Buyers’ Current Methods of Managing Marketing Activities

See the red pie wedge labeled 21%? That’s the percentage of companies using no software systems at all to manage their sales and marketing. Most likely they used (and possibly still use) spreadsheets and one-off emails to generate leads and create demand.

Two other data points to note:

• Only 9% had a marketing automation system in place; meaning 91% were evaluating marketing automation for the first time among the study’s sample.
• A mere 7% of those surveyed used an email marketing program.

“Seems very low,” Act-On CMO, Atri Chatterjee, told CMSWire in reference to the second bullet point. “We see 25% of our wins coming from companies currently using email marketing software and looking to bridge the gap from email to digital with marketing automation.”

I’m in the same camp as Atri – email is the most highly used marketing channel and tactic among businesses of all shapes, sizes, and industries; thus, 7% feels inaccurate. Perhaps the respondents didn’t feel they used email marketing software to “manage” their marketing activities but as a tactical point solution to send out emails.

Findings that didn’t surprise

Lead management is the top motivator

Unsurprisingly, improving lead management was the primary motivation for marketing automation buyers – 40% voiced the need to improve their lead nurturing and lead scoring capabilities.

Automating processes (e.g., triggered messages, drip campaigns) was second on the list, which makes sense since these buyers were, after all, evaluating marketing automation software.

Top Reasons for Evaluating Marketing Automation Software

Leads continue as major features focus

When it came to top-requested features, the theme continued, with leads and data creating a predictable trifecta. The chart is below. Here are the percentages:

• 81% – lead nurturing
• 70% – reporting and analytics
• 64% – lead scoring

Most Requested Marketing Automation Features

The overall focus on “leads” is consistent with what we’ve observed, particularly among businesses new to marketing automation (which comprised the majority of the study’s respondents). That is:

Leads are of the utmost importance to keeping the doors open and the lights on.

Getting leads into the funnel, using data and analytics to gain incremental insights over time, nurturing and scoring leads effectively, measuring results, and iterating to improve … these are all essential and basic needs for any business.

Social and segmentation are “meh”

Although social media marketing receives a lot of hype and import – often justifiably so – it’s no surprise that marketing automation buyers don’t rate it as a must-have feature (a low 6%). Two reasons that I see are (1) there are innumerable options readily available for managing social media marketing, and (2) many companies are not convinced about social’s ROI, and thus are still experimenting with the medium.

Segmentation is another story. It’s not surprising, but it IS illuminating. At least to me.

Here’s the data: Out of 896 buyer interactions, only 3% cited segmentation as an important feature for marketing automation. Assuming each buyer interaction was unique, that’s a mere 27 participants.

One explanation is that segmentation (and social media marketing and even campaign management, for that matter) is not the biggest business pain point. Lead management is. Everything else is secondary until the funnel is humming.

So by that rationale, it makes total sense that segmentation ranks in the basement.

But here’s why it’s illuminating:

One does not have successful lead management without segmentation.

They’re complementary. Yin and yang. Hand in glove. What good is learning about your prospects and customers – who they are, what they’re interested in, where they are in the buying cycle – if you’re not going to use that intelligence to deliver a more valuable experience to them?

Segmentation is what allows you to take advantage of your data and ultimately communicate with your prospects and customers effectively.

And this disparity between lead nurturing and segmentation suggests that among service providers and vendors, there is work to be done to help marketers better connect the important dots and harness the power of automated digital marketing.

And there you have it

As this study and an increasing bevy of research supports, marketing automation is mainstream. For small and mid-sized businesses, 2014 is shaping up to be a good year for marketers, as more and more recognize the power and ROI potential of marketing automation and are making the business case to adopt it.

As Magic 8 Ball would say, “You may rely on it.”

Did you know:
Forrester recently identified Act-On as the only leader for both SMBs and large enterprises? Download the full Forrester Wave Report »

Image of Magic 8 Ball from ursonate, used under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.

In his sharp and engaging new book, The News: A User’s Manual, the philosopher Alain de Botton describes the experience of consuming news as if we are woken each morning by a frantic official armed with “a briefcase filled with a bewildering and then in the end tiring range of issues: ‘Five hospitals are predicted to breach their credit limits by the end of the month,’ ‘The central bank is worried about its ability to raise money on the bond markets,’ ‘A Chinese warship has just left the mainland en route for Vietnam’…What are we meant to think? Where should all this go in our minds?”

His answer is that in a news market overflowing with facts, facts by themselves go unsold; they require a story—and that story, he says mischievously, needs some kind of bias on the part of the author, “a pair of lenses that slide over reality and aim to bring it more clearly into focus.” You can see what he means: our capacity to produce data on everything requires packaging; otherwise, it is like finding oneself in a library where all the books have been disassembled into piles of paragraphs, sentences and words. Our consumption of information requires an algorithm of narrative and the perspective of bias in order to produce focus. The problem — the presiding problem of our knowledge economy — is whether we end up focusing on something that’s actually true.

Just how big a problem this is for industry — and for one industry in particular — is illustrated by a recent study, which, ironically, claimed to uncover the kind of bias we don’t want to see when it comes to assessing the validity of data.

The study, which appeared in PLoS Medicine, argues that industry funding has compromised the evidence on sugar. Systematic reviews of studies on sugared beverage consumption and weight gain — which is to say, reviews which try to sum up the state of the evidence — were five times more likely to conclude no relationship than systematic reviews that had no industry funding. As the headline on Forbes.com put it, succinctly, “Big Sugar Tips The Balance Of The Research Scale.”

This is a powerful indictment precisely because we have heard the same kind of story before: when an industry is in trouble, its first recourse will be to manufacture scientific doubt, or to refer to pre-made scientific doubt. Indeed, should this have not crossed your mind, the PLoS authors tie their findings to past behavior by the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries. Narrative, bias, and focus, provide an overwhelming rationale to file the story under “malfeasance” with a note to disregard the legitimacy of any data produced by that industry’s funding.

But only if the PLoS study is itself true.

The fascinating thing about how this information entered the realm of public debate is not just that no one asked this question, but that our system for producing and sharing such knowledge is poorly designed for asking such questions.

Here is the problem with the PLoS study: it cannot answer the question it claims to answer because of the way it was designed. The researchers looked at systematic reviews conducted between 2006 and 2013. But this period saw a significant change in the kind of research done on sugar and weight gain. At the beginning of the period, there were few randomized control trials and a lot of observational studies; at the end, more randomized control trials, which provide much better evidence of cause and effect. The effect sizes for these trials are still quite small, but when added together, there was more, and qualitatively better, evidence associating sugar consumption and increased weight gain the closer one got to 2013. In fact, the four systematic reviews from 2012 onwards all found mostly positive associations; none were funded by industry.

But can an “industry-funded” systematic review be called “biased” based on studies that didn’t exist when the review was originally carried out? Can a review in 2007 be criticized as biased for not including a study published in 2012?

Now, you might find it odd that this was ever an open debate. Surely we all know as a basic fact that sugar causes weight gain. This is why it is important to remember that the scientific question is not simple weight gain, but whether calorie for calorie sugar causes extra weight gain or whether the specific reduction or elimination of, say, soda, in a diet would lead to weight loss. As the expert panel commissioned to come up with the 2010 dietary guidelines for the US Department of Agriculture noted, the scientific evidence for something you would think would be critical to our understanding of obesity, was “disappointing.”

The PLoS researchers also did not include three reviews, two from 2006 and one from 2007 that did not find an association between sugared beverage consumption and weight and were not funded by industry. They had been included in at least one other systematic analysis of the systematic review literature. While including them doesn’t obviate the temporal flaw in the study’s design, they do show that more academics without industry funding found no effect when asking the same question of the evidence.

Moreover, the PLoS study design (conflict with industry? Yes/no; positive association? Yes/no) also suppresses the fact that the conclusions of systematic review can be mixed, with the authors of one review noting that there is suggestive evidence for a relationship between sugared beverage consumption and those who are overweight, and that such findings should be examined with more randomized control trials. This particular review is labeled as having a conflict with industry not because it was industry funded (it was funded by the National Institutes of Health) but because the authors had past industry funding from the food industry.

This may seem like nit picking. It’s not. But how many people would spot any of this? It certainly didn’t catch the eye of Forbes contributor Larry Huston, who’s an uncommonly good science writer, but then why would it? Why would he be familiar with the systematic review literature on this topic and the evolution of research on sugar and weight gain? (I only know about it because I spent months looking at the academic literature on soda and food taxes and got sucked into the methodological problems hounding the entire field of nutrition.) The New York Times also reported the study without any analysis.

In fact, the people who would immediately know why the PLoS study is misleading are relatively few. Most would not have access to or even an interest in engaging the media, while many would be from industry, the very people the PLoS study effectively warns you not to trust.

But what about peer review? If the past few years have taught us anything, it is that academic publishing is what the Internet was once called — the Wild West. Consider only the complaints aired by a National Institutes of Health workshop, which convened to deal with the problem of why so many findings from animal studies could not be replicated. There was, as the concluding paper, published in Nature said, “broad agreement” that “poor reporting, often associated with poor experimental design, is a significant issue across the life sciences…” In other words, the vices popularly associated with industry-funded studies — a lack of transparency in data, methods, and analysis leading to exaggerated results — were widely prevalent among those funded by government.

Stanford University’s John Ioannidis, who has become a figurehead for a growing movement to improve scientific rigor, warned last November that the state of nutrition research was bedeviled by small sample sizes, weak study design, and poor survey methods. “Almost every single nutrient,” he wrote, “has peer reviewed publications associating it with almost any out­come. . . . Many findings are entirely implausible.”

Even something as fundamental to nutrition research as how much food people consume, which the National Health and Nutrition Examination Sur­vey attempts to find out by questionnaire, was shown last year to be wildly inaccurate. Two-thirds of men, and almost 60 percent of women reported consuming less food than was physiologically plausible.

Peer review is valuable, but it is not a guarantor of reliable knowledge. And while the editor of PLoS Medicine defends the paper in a preface by arguing that industry has particular reasons to be biased (“increased sales of their products”) but that academic researchers don’t (because they are engaged in “the honest pursuit of knowledge”), the distinction has become meaningless in the face of publish or perish academic pressures, publication bias toward positive findings, and the growing awareness that poor statistical methods and weak experimental design undermine so much academic research in medicine and health.

Consider the finding published in Significance, the journal of the Royal Statistical Society, in which Stanley Young of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences tested 52 claims (about the effects of vitamins) from 12 observational studies against the results from randomized control trials. Not one observational finding could be replicated.

Imagine a product with a 100 percent failure rate. Or an airline in which the majority of flights crashed. This, we are reminded, is the nature of scientific inquiry: the path to truth is littered with false positives and null results. But we consume information just like any other product; we take flight on the reliability of data. And if there is no risk to taking risks with that data, from hyping research results to burying statistical data where the sun doesn’t shine, then — as we saw in the world of finance and mortgage backed securities — scientists will take risks, and news organizations will eagerly report their findings. The key difference between academic and industry produced data is that we currently treat the second skeptically. That asymmetry is the flaw in our knowledge economy; it leads to moral hazard — and worse.

The PLoS findings may well be used to delegitimize legitimate scientific perspectives in future debates over sugared drinks and food in general. A cohort of scientists has been impugned, and a younger cohort warned that such is their fate if they work for industry. Like a malign butterfly flapping its wings furiously, the storm damage that a biased finding can do in a dynamic system of knowledge is considerable. And repairing it with the truth is very, very difficult.