Rnordman

If you read the headlines you may well think cryptocurrencies are a either a radically new way of paying that is our savior from ossified, corrupt governments or on the other side that they are speculative Ponzi schemes. The reality of course is that cryptocurrencies can be both and can be liberating and corrupting at the same time.

My goal with this post is to lay out a simple framework for anybody unsure whom to listen to orient your own views and develop a healthy skepticism for arguments lacking merit often by friends telling you how much money they’ve made.

I’ll lay out the cases for and against cryptocurrencies:

A. The Simple Case for Cryptocurrencies

Currency is something most of us take for granted in our daily lives and don’t give much thought as to where money came from, how it became accepted and trusted and how it’s evolved over time. It’s pretty tough to have a view on cryptocurrency if you don’t have a history of currency.

Currencies only began in earnest about 2,500 years ago and ever since have been a great enabler of democracy and social mobility, not the other way around. By making it easier to capture value for goods & services that ordinary people provide and by creating a means of storing value today that can be used in the future — currencies have literally changed society and the world.

Currencies enabled the creation of the first modern corporation (around 400 years ago to allow groups of shipping merchants to pool together risk), the modern stock markets (so that people could own a portion of a merchant ship & sell this when they needed more cash) and then spawned regulators that oversaw all of this because the minute you have markets you have people who manipulate them unsophisticated new traders out to make money that they hear everybody else is making. Sound familiar?

Currencies also begat debt markets and this credit has lifted millions out of poverty by allowing people to invest in capital equipment that they otherwise couldn’t afford today that can yields profits tomorrow.

(There is a short reading list in the Appendix if you want to learn more.)

The strongest cases for the existence of cryptocurrencies in my mind include:

1. Allowing for a decentralized Internet in which value is accrued to infrastructure, protocols and applications that serve market needs
2. Allowing electronic trade across actors who may not know or trust each other without middlemen who take a heavy toll / tax on the transaction
3. Allowing for (the potential of) a more stable currency than one’s own government for citizens who may live under despotic or irresponsible regimes

1. Decentralized Internet —

This is perhaps the most unsexy part of cryptocurrency but the one that most purists I follow on this topic are most excited about. I believe this use of cryptocurrency will develop and flourish long after the dust settles from the hype and crash of today’s cryptocurrency bubble that we’re experiencing in 2017.

The Internet and World Wide Web themselves emerged from open protocols (HTTP, HTML, SMTP, etc) that allowed businesses, individuals and governments to put information online that was accessible to the masses and connected us all directly to communicate and eventually trade. The Internet allows people in relatively poorer parts of the world to complete work for relatively richer parts of the world at wages higher than a local economy may bear. This has massively enriched the world and one can see why a currency that underpins Internet infrastructure would be attractive.

The crypto in cryptocurrency is of course referring to cryptography or the ability to encrypt your transactions so they can’t be modified after they have been written to the blockchain. You can think of this effort as the same as the US government improving the quality of its dollar bills to make them harder to counterfeit. For any currency to have value it must be trusted to be authentic.

In order to have a secure, decentralized means of transferring money between individuals you need a way of providing services that a modern centralized financial system would offer. For example, you need to know if a transaction was completed, you need to know the parties involved, you need to ensure that they actually own the money that they are transferring and that they haven’t previously pledged it to somebody else. And you need a means of auditing transactions so that they are verifiable. This is what the “blockchain” you keep reading about provides. It is a “ledger” (like your normal accounting system that records debits & credits) that is “public” (anybody can see the transactions that took place) and “distributed” (it isn’t held by one company, it works more like Skype that is distributed on “nodes” all across the world who agree to process & store transactions in exchange for … you guessed it … Bitcoin — or some other cryptocurrency depending on the market).

The Internet that has offered the world so much economic opportunity has also centralized wealth creation into the hands of relatively few people on a scale and in a timeframe never seen before in history. And while many of the people bringing you the great applications and infrastructure you now rely on are benevolent, there is of course a normal incentive for these companies to use their scale advantages to continue to dominate the markets they’re in, making it harder for upstarts to compete.

This market structure in which the few, large players use their market position to eliminate competition is inevitable and it’s hard to blame large companies or countries who want to protect their advantages. It’s Hobbesian economics 101. When you achieve economies-of-scale advantages it doesn’t benefit you to help newer companies draft off of your infrastructure to rise and compete against you. Of course our beloved technology industry did itself rise on the back of infrastructure created by telecommunications & cable infrastructure as well as decades of media production (not to mention enormous tax dollars over decades that created the infrastructure in the first place).

The world in which our communications was controlled by the telephone and media companies of 20 years ago would have been much less innovative than what we have achieved, which is precisely why we need to protect future companies still to be created from anti-competitive behavior of today’s giants.

An example of this stranglehold is distribution systems to find new apps in a mobile Internet is tightly locked down by the oligopoly of Apple and Google. They control the placement of apps in the ecosystem, they get to rule on whether they want you to exist or not and they heavily tax your participation. Unsurprisingly this system favors products by companies that already have enormous resources. In many ways this system now mirrors the “decks” or “portals” that mobile phone companies used to control mobile app distribution 20 years ago.

Distribution of media is also now tightly controlled by YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, Amazon and a handful of others that have huge scale advantages. And our social graphs are locked in Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. Breakout companies become much harder and this isn’t likely to improve unless we give new companies the tools and capital they need to flourish.

Because so many of us (myself included) love out technology providers, few have begun to fully grasp how much centralized control, for example, Amazon has over cloud-based storage and processing and it’s even more dominant in eCommerce and physical, last-mile distribution. I love that Amazon can deliver me products a mere hours after I order them but fast-forward 20 years and if they have no real competition for last-mile distribution this eventually could produce negative consequences for the market and for consumers.

Capitalism encourages creative destruction of systems that came before it in search of better, more efficient alternatives. Oligarchs use market power to stop these new forces. In order for young seedlings to become the giant trees of tomorrow we need a way to protect them and allow them to flourish.

Enter the “decentralized Internet” (i.e. the one not controlled by just a handful of large corporations). If you think about some of the great breakout peer-to-peer file or resource sharing products like BitTorrent, Skype, Naspster, Gnutella, etc. they found a way to use distributed resources across the Internet not controlled by a centralized company. In essence users like you probably used many of these products without complete awareness that your computer became a node and was being used to transmit files.

It’s true the P2P sharing of music was initially destructive to artists and labels but it led to today’s streaming services that you now enjoy and pay for like Spotify, Pandora or Apple Music. Having a library at your fingertip of any song for a subscription fee is of enormous benefit to the consumer but never would have happened without the forces of creative destruction.

Enter blockchain. Like the P2P services that came before it, it decentralizes the transfer of information across any node that will run its services and in this case what is transferred are all transactions between parties on the blockchain and stored on a public ledger.

The existence of cryptocurrencies can create a way to provide economic value for those who provide computing resource or bandwidth to a product built on P2P infrastructure. The currency provides a reward for the best applications that the market wants to use as well as to people on the network who are willing to let their computing power or bandwidth be used.

And of course any kind of application could be written to run on this infrastructure including things like a file management system that could compete with Dropbox, a database or raw storage company that competes with Amazon’s AWS or something that doesn’t exist already in today’s world.

For example, using cryptography and the blockchain I could transmit a blog post or a picture to a third-party who could know authoritatively that this was written word-for-word by me and not doctored in any way (because it is encrypted using cryptography to be uniquely created by me). In a world where perhaps foreign governments start propagating false information to influence our society, guaranteeing authenticity would become a very big deal.

The biggest problem with today’s cryptocurrencies to provide this market for a decentralized Internet is akin to the problems with funding Dutch East India Company exploration in the Spice Islands. If the value of participating gyrates wildly based on information unrelated to the value of this exploration then it’s hard for participants to trust large amounts of capital to the system.

The problem that I see is that cryptocurrencies are not a “stable” store of value. In fact, they operate less like a “currency” and more like a “stock market” or a “commodity” whose price can fluctuate rapidly and thus people buying and selling it seem to be doing so in more of a speculative fashion.

I believe the massive valuation increases in cryptocurrencies we’ve witnessed of late are not based on any fundamentals other than speculation and a drive for a quick profit by many who have gained from the market hype. I don’t believe this does any good for the legitimate long-term purposes of having cryptocurrencies.

For products or services to work with a non-governmental, uncontrolled currency based on cryptography, they have to rely on more than the promise of authentication that cryptography offers today. They need to be able to count on a stable currency or for people to trust they will get fair value from the system in the long run if they invest today.

Of course when you publicly call cryptocurrencies speculation you predictably get lambasted as I’ve noticed if I ever write anything on Twitter. Nobody making massive amounts of money in a short period of time without any real basis for making this money would ever want to acknowledge the arguments of somebody who might stop them from making even more money. That would be like Turkey’s voting to have Thanksgiving dinner.

2. Allow untrusted network participants to trade

If you started a business 200 years ago you could mostly only trade in your local economy and you relied about “traders” who could transport your products great distances to those who might like to buy them in foreign lands. But your buyers were limited so your market size was limited and thus your ability to build at scale was limited unless you controlled armies or natural resources.

The great promise of the Internet was the ability to break down barriers and allow you to sell products and services globally, benefitting buyer and seller. But as with most Internet businesses, over time middlemen become very powerful brokers in marketplace businesses. If you’re a driver you need to Uber or Lyft to give consumers the confidence that you’re trustworthy. If you want to buy artisan goods on Etsy, the marketplace helps you source goods and verify a degree of reputation. Same Airbnb, Upwork, Thumbtack and others.

Middlemen play the role of distribution, authenticating buyers/sellers, clearing financial transactions, providing insurance and restitution if something goes awry.

If distributed systems can be built and if blockchain can record transactions and if network protocols emerge that verify authenticity of users and provide useful services such as creating escrow in transactions then in theory cryptocurrency ought to streamline online business, remove more control from centralized brokers and reduce transaction costs.

This does not mean that all existing intermediaries go away. Mostly I think new types of brokers will emerge and this will drive down transactions costs, improve services and make it easier to do business with people around the globe.

3. More Stable Currency for Some Citizens of the World

Some people don’t trust their governments with a national currency. History is filled with governments who plundered resources on wars or explorations or have provided economic handouts to buy-off the loyalty of certain population and have printed money to meet their obligations. As economists know, sharp increases in the money supply is one major cause of inflation (inflation equals increases in the prices of goods & services) and inflation erodes the value of people holding that currency who hope to save it and spend it in the future. In short, with high inflation today’s money is worth less in the future so you wouldn’t want to “store” your wealth in cash if it is depreciating.

Throughout history Governments have also restricted the flows of capital outside of national boundaries and have tightly tracked stores of capital as a means of controlling and/or taxing its citizens.

If one lives in the United States or other stable economies it’s far fetched to suggest that cryptocurrencies are more stable or more widely accepted than one’s national currency like the dollar. But of course if you live in a repressive regime and value the easier transfer of capital and particularly the anonymous transfer of capital then the additional risks of cryptocurrency fluctuations in value may be more attractive than a currency controlled by your local government.

So I think one’s embrace of cryptocurrency for reasons other than speculative, short-term gains may be inversely correlated with one’s trust for their local government to protect the value of their wealth through a stable economic system and currency.

B. The Simple Case against Cryptocurrencies

In the case for cryptocurrencies I argued that some global citizens rightly don’t trust their governments to have control over their currency or their cash and don’t trust their own government to know what they are doing with their wealth.

For many good-standing citizens of the world who happen to live under oppressive regimes this is an understandable goal. But there are also many people in the world today who favor cash today precisely because they are conducting business that today’s societies don’t want to exist including illicit drug trafficking, the sex worker trafficking market, organized crime, foreign government interference in elections, terrorism, gun smuggling and so forth. What a few season of Narcos and you’ll see the role that untraceable cash plays in greasing illicit activities.

So I would outline the simple case against cryptocurrencies includes three completely related factors

1. Powerful governments won’t tolerate the loss of monetary control or propagating illegal activities
2. Societal pressure to regulate cryptocurrency will increase as more people are duped, as more fraud is discovered, as more hacks occur and as more market participants collaborate to manipulate the value of the currencies themselves
3. Erosion of trust in the public will come as first-time cryptocurrency participants get duped, lose money and develop skepticism for the asset

1. Governmental crackdowns

Governments regularly use surveillance to track illicit behavior and curb or curtail activities. Our own government in the US regularly looks for cases of racketeering, attempts to crack down on the drug trade, tries to prevent illegal sex trafficking, looks out for insider trading on stocks, tries to stop child pornography and so forth.

Of course all of these illicit activities take place precisely because there is so much economic interests at stake in providing “social bads” to people who want to consume them. It’s no wonder that the creation of a currency that has total anonymity would gain favor first with people for whom so much money could be gained by improving the ability to transact without governmental oversight.

No event has gotten the US and other governments so involved in the crackdown of monetary flows than the movement of money for terrorist activities post 9/11. Terrorism at scale can only occur when these organizations can move money around to finance people who make bombs, buy guns, train recruits and so forth.

And if you think the US government is going to allow wide-scale movement of money within the United States in which the government can’t identify the sources and uses of capital you’re kidding yourself.

Also recognize the important the monetary policy plays in government leaders try to preside over stable societies, to offer benefits and services to its population and even to finance wars in foreign lands or to protect one’s interests at home. Whatever you think of these governmental activities I can assure you that governments won’t cede monetary control easily.

China has already made moves to massively curtain Bitcoin activities so that should be a clue of what is to come. You think Turkey is going to be eager to allow the movement of capital it can’t track? Russia? Iran? No way.

I know Putin talks about cryptocurrencies but since his geopolitical strategy seems to be destabilization of democratic regimes and alliances it would seem to me that Russia would have a strategy to use cryptocurrencies in a destabilizing way to its advantage. Think for example if the people with whom you’re trading currency can use huge piles of cash to drive up the value of your currency in a short period of time and then use coordinated groups to then drive down prices through trading and misinformation to destabilize people.

Destabilizing untraceable currency markets unpinning our technology ecosystem must be at least as attractive as manipulating our social media advertising and media markets before an election. It certainly should be food for thought. Of course this won’t trouble your friend who just made 8x on his or her Ethereum coins over the past year. But if you’re thinking critically about the long-term future this should at least be part of your consideration set.

2. Regulation

Many cryptocurrency mega-cheerleaders are radical libertarians that want no governmental control of currency or trade or other forms of regulation. I understand why people are turned off by regulation and of course undue regulation can stifle business.

But for the same reason we have SEC oversight on trading public stocks, we need oversight or nefarious actors will manipulate the system. There is a fascinating story in “The Ascent of Money” by Niall Ferguson in which Ferguson describes how the modern corporation emerged. About 400 years ago merchants from the Netherlands were sending ships to Asia in search of spices widely desired in Europe. More than 50% of all ships that sailed wouldn’t return so groups of people banded together and formed the Dutch East India Company to share the risks and the rewards of their conquests.

This is amongst the first examples of the modern corporation. The company brought back spices and reaped profits that went back into building more ships and sailing back to Asia. The company didn’t distribute the profits to individual shareholders who instead were issued the modern form of a share certificate for their ownership. Because they couldn’t monetize this ownership they started selling shares of their ownership to others, thus perhaps the first stock market and transaction dating back to the early 1600s.

No sooner did people start selling shares in these companies than market speculators started spreading false stories about merchant ships being sunk or about large spice conquests to drive up or down the price of these stocks through false information and manipulation. So oversight became necessary to establish trust in the value of these assets.

This is where I see cryptocurrencies today. I speak to colleagues who participate in trading crypto who tell me that there are coordinate rings on encrypted instant messaging platforms like Telegram to have coordinated buying and selling of new currencies. This sounds to me like fraud, pure and simple.

And I know that ICOs (initial coin offerings) are all the rage amongst startup and some are raising for entirely good and valuable reasons. On the other hand, with no oversight of the ICO process and with the possibility of Dutch East India Company style manipulation by either companies or individual buyers of these currencies, I worry about the integrity of the market unless there is oversight.

What I can tell you from my vantage point? I see companies that have been trying to raise professional money for years and have struggled suddenly gearing up for ICOs because they know there is so much demand from them — precisely because so many people speculatively made money on Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Ask yourself this — how did it go when a bunch of Internet companies when public in 1998–1999 with limited revenues or oversight? Why would pouring hundreds of millions into even earlier stage startups with even less or no oversight be a good idea?

Regulation will come. It needs to come fast.

3. Trust

Between 1998–2000 the world became enamored with the “new economy” and Internet companies that were going public on NASDAQ in the United States. Not to be outdone, the UK promoted the AIM market, Germany the Neuer Markt and France the Nouveau Marché all with the aim of taking Internet companies public.

Many of these countries hadn’t been big stock speculators but the gains of the US Internet companies were too tempting. So ordinary citizens poured hard-earned money into owning any company that could claim to be an Internet company and their valuations skyrocketed with no underlying rationale.

Unsurprisingly a whole generation of first time stock traders became jaded about not just Internet stocks but the entire public stock market system as many people lost a large portion of their net worth. Trust doesn’t come back easily, which is why the role of regulation is so important.

In order for people to trust cryptocurrencies in the long run they will need to believe they are transparent, fair, stable, safe and that somebody is watching over them to provide an imprimatur of trust.

Without trust no currency has value.

C. The Arguments That Should Make You Suspicious

1. Cryptocurrencies offer a better mechanism for companies (or funds) to raise money

ICOs are not a better way to raise capital than traditional routes, they are a different way and can work together with other forms of fund raising including traditional crowd-funding and/or product pre-release funding like Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

I welcome the role that ICOs may play in some technology companies where a legitimate purpose exists for a “coin” or some form of token to exchange value between market participants. But I also believe that the backlash that will happen against ICO fraud will likely burn some people to future participation until and unless there are some frameworks for oversight of the market.

2. Cryptocurrencies will eradicate VCs

I know that people hate having to deal with people to raise money and the idea of being able to turn to an anonymous crowd and if they value what you do they will provide you money is appealing.

But putting large sums of money in the hands of first time or even experienced entrepreneurs with absolutely no oversight is a recipe for disaster. The fundamental role a VC plays is the role of board members and their job is to provide oversight (and even auditing) of the company for the purposes of protecting shareholders. This is the same board role that emerged from the Dutch East India Company to provide more transparency to investors.

So however populist the idea of cutting out people from the process may be, I strongly doubt it will replace the role of the existing venture capital ecosystem. In many ways, it could even become a new tool for earlier shareholder liquidity including the exit of some VC money. We’ll have to see how it all plays out.

3. Cryptocurrencies will drive a reorganization of societies into more libertarian structures

The most vociferous promoters of cryptocurrency include a group of people who have a total disdain for governments and financial markets and imagine a world in which technologists cut out all power structures and create a truly flat world.

I understand the idealistic tendencies in the same way I understand the idealistic tendencies of those who long for socialism or communism. It seems like the world would be a more fair place if it weren’t for leaders who run countries and organizations and benefit from these activities.

The problem without having governmental systems, however imperfect, is that the opposite is anarchy. And through every idealistic movement to bring equality to all ends in newer forms of power structures and usually wants that are less benign as they seek to hold on to power.

I know it seems strange to veer into this topic in my post but the more time you spend listening to cryptocurrency promoters the more you realize that there really a small undercurrent who have an objective of subverting existing order. And no prizes for guessing who would benefit if this order was disrupted.

D. So Where Do I Personally Net Out?

As with many things in life, I’m super optimistic that out of this current wave of innovation around distributed ledgers (blockchains) and cryptocurrencies (like Bitcoin and Ethereum) will come some great leaps forward of innovation that will benefit the world.

At the same time I remain skeptical about the motives of many of today’s market participants and extremely skeptical about the massive run up in valuation of many of today’s crytocurrencies. The arguments “for” of many market participants ring as hollow as they did in 2005 when they told me I was an idiot for believing that Florida real estate prices would drop or in the dotcom 1.0 boom where many companies had deeply inflated values.

As with every situation, I always try to think through, “What are the motives of those who are telling me A or B?” and “what is the intrinsic value of a given asset and what will determine its future value?”

Appendix

If you really want to have an informed opinion money & currency then it would help to read a historical primer on the topic and I have two great recommendations. The first is “The History of Money” by Jack Weatherford (who also wrote one of my favorite books on world order & world trade, “Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World”). And another great book on the role currencies play in the creation of governments and in war & peace read Niall Ferguson’s, “The Ascent of Money.” It’s pretty tough to pretend to have an opinion on cryptocurrency without first understanding the origins and evolution of money throughout the last 2,500 years.

p.s. Because this is a single sitting, top-of-mind post it shouldn’t be thought of like a research paper, it may be incomplete and I’m not trying to be the final authority on the topic. I think of this as more of a 101 primer for those who want to develop their own framework for thinking about the topic.

Photo via Visual Hunt

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Want to Really Understand What all the Hype of Cryptocurrency is About? was originally published in Both Sides of the Table on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Frequent flier and points expert Gilbert Ott knows a thing or two about finding a good flight deal.

As owner of air miles site God Save the Points, he spends his time travelling the globe in first class, writing about the latest hacks in the travel industry. He even once bagged a free ride on a private jet.

But while the power of air miles is widely recognised, Ott says there's another, largely unacknowledged way to bag a sweet deal.

In a blog post, he shares how to take advantage of "error fares" — the mistakes airlines and travel companies make where they make a flight available for much cheaper than intended.

Using a mistake fare, Ott booked a business class flight with Qatar Airways from Amsterdam to Tokyo — via Doha — for just $640 (£473) roundtrip.

"That felt like the best deal I'd ever seen, and then ANA just went and offered $630 (£466) roundtrip business class between Vancouver and Sydney!" he wrote in his blog post. "Yes, Australia in business class for less than people pay for coach. These are just two examples of the insane deals you want to tune in for — error fares."

So how do error fares happen?

"Unlike the old days, airlines file airfares constantly," Ott wrote. "Often, they involve humans or computers, both of which are known to make mistakes, or fail!"

"An error fare could be someone forgetting a digit, like $700 (£517) instead of $7000 (£5,178) (whoops), or offering a deal to unintended cities, amongst many others. These days however, airlines love tempting us into booking extra trips – just because – so some fares that seem too good to be true may not even be an error at all. Just a super limited time deal."

Ott said there are a few things to keep in mind when dealing with error fares.

1. Firstly, you need to know where to find them.

"If this was easy, everyone would do it," Ott wrote.

He suggests following the God Save The Points Facebook page for updates on flight deals, as well as forums where most deals originate first: The Flyertalk Premium Fare Deal forum, "the place for business class deals," and the Mileage Run forum, "where most economy deals can be found."

He also suggested checking out SecretFlying, TheFlightDeal — which specialises in finding "fat finger discounts" — and Fly4Free.

Business Insider has also written about DealRay, a members-only travel app that sends real-time alerts and push notifications whenever it detects massive price drops, error fares, or flash sales.

2. Set up alerts that come to you.

"Why incessantly click around all day, when you could just have deals pushed to you?" Ott wrote.

"Our Google Flights tricks show you how to set alerts for all your favorite bucket list flights, so you may even beat 'the blogs' to finding an incredible deal."

You can also choose to get notifications from God Save The Points' Facebook page. "You can do the same for other great deal sites, and also get email alerts when new fares pop up in the two Flyertalk forums we mentioned. Sure, this requires some legwork, but how much is an unimaginably luxurious trip — without the price tag — worth?"

3. Act fast, because fares don't last.

"These are the fares of peoples dreams, and they happen in all cabins," he wrote. "Whether it's $100 round the world economy tickets or $600 for 40+ hours in flat bed business class, people want in! As such, when word spreads, they don't last. Most fares last mere hours, if that. The key is getting in early, getting in fast, and asking questions later — oh, and don't call the airline."

4. Book directly through the airline, where possible.

"Do you think a travel company wants to be holding the bag when the airline wants all the money from the digit they left out? Yeah… no.

"Airlines and hotels are far more likely to honor any mistake fares booked directly through them — rather than those booked through online travel agencies. They also issue tickets for direct booking faster — which can be a decider in whether the deal is allowed or not.

"So, yeah, do your best to go directly to whoever the operator of the deal is, despite what any blogs say (they make money from the sites they promote)."

5. Wait at least 24 hours after booking to contact the airline.

"If you'd love friends or family to join and they don't get back to you quickly, you gotta cut em' loose. Available dates dry up in seconds, and it really is a race against time. Find something you believe works, do your best to make it work and book ASAP. Once you've booked, don't call the airline or hotel to ask if it is going to be honored. At least not for 24 hours, until others have a chance to book as well, and until the dust settles."

6. Know that it may not work.

"Our biggest fear in publicising error fares, versus just great deals, is that error fares are not always honored," Ott wrote. "That can mean a purchase you made will take up to 14 days to be refunded. For some, that can be quite a game changer.

Back in 2015, travellers went into an online buying frenzy after finding a way to get return flights with United Airlines from London to Newark for as little as £50 (about $75).

United Airlines suspended sales from its Denmark website where the issue originated, but not before thousands of people purchased tickets for a bargain price. However, the airline said it would not honour the tickets due to a software error.

"Know that when you book an error fare, you shouldn't book any other travel plans for at least a few days, until the airline or hotel agrees to honor the deal or not. If you can't afford to potentially have the money waiting in limbo, you may want to opt out, but if they don't honor, you'll always receive a refund. For sure."

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's what happens when two hurricanes collide

From being a channel that was built to be just a simple messaging platform to becoming one of the most effective and popular marketing mediums, we have seen EMAIL MARKETING rise from the ranks. And the sole reason that makes it the star performer today is the fact that it strikes the right chord with the audience. While it helps to develop a relationship with new prospects, it also assists in keeping in touch with current customers.

However, email marketing can be far from a fairy tale, especially when it comes to the performance of an email campaign. Knowing what will click with the subscribers, what will not, and what exactly will tempt them to take action can be a tricky affair.

Moreover, we need to better our strategies and tactics to cope up with the technological advancements that are transforming the market.

Monks jot down 6 hacks to help you enhance the effectiveness of your campaign by tempting subscribers to take action.

1. Offer Relevant and Personalized Content

A subscriber has some expectations from your email. Providing value should thus be your priority, every single time. Whether you are able to fulfill the subscriber’s expectation or not will decide whether they will remain loyal to your brand or not. So, how do we provide this value?

Targeted emailing can work wonders for you, if you do it right. To begin with, you need to segment your lists on the basis of the information you have at hand. Sending out emails to targeted email lists is always wiser than blasting emails to large groups of disinterested subscribers.

Marketers have found a 760% increase in email revenue by sending segmented campaigns.

For your email marketing to work better, you should take into consideration their demographics, purchase history, and the kind of pages they visit or the resources they download. On the basis of this information, you should plan out your campaigns, thereby ensuring subscriber loyalty and preventing unsubscribes.

Birthdays and anniversaries are the best days for sending personalized emails. See how TopShop has leveraged this opportunity in their birthday email.

2. Bowing down to Visual Hierarchy

Your email design should reflect intentionality and meaning, rather than visual appeal that delivers no value to the subscriber. An important aspect of good design is the visual hierarchy that enables the presentation of information in an organized manner with clear headings and sub-headings.

Follow the principle of inverted pyramid wherein the most crucial information comes at the top and rest of the information is arranged in the order of decreasing importance. Directional cues also are a good idea to tempt the subscribers to take action.

Framebridge has executed visual hierarchy perfectly in their email. The CTA has a place above the fold, followed by a detailed description of their product. Social sharing buttons are included in the footer of the email.

3. Exclusivity with Interactive Elements

Interactivity is the best idea to enhance click-through rates of your emails and drive greater subscriber engagement.

Experian states that interactive emails improve unique click rates by approximately 18% and click-to-open rates by 10%.

When planning an interactive email campaign with a menu, countdown, slider, carousel, flip effect, etc., keep in mind that not every email client will support CSS in emails.

So first, you will need to get information about the various email clients used by your subscribers.

For the clients that do not support these elements, you must implement a proper fallback strategy so that the purpose of your email does not go in vain.

EmailMonks has made a wonderful use of interactivity in their Easter email. Have a look!

Quite inspiring, isn’t it?

4. Designing an Actionable, Prominent CTA

Make use of action verbs that draw the attention of readers. Think beyond cliche stuff like “Submit” and “Click Here”. Try out more actionable CTA buttons like “GET MY COPY” and “TRY IT NOW”.

CTA placement and size are also equally important.

Your CTA should be large enough to get noticed and designed in contrasting colors that go well with your brand colors without getting too flashy. Place the CTA above the fold so that it is visible in the first scroll itself or try a Fixed CTA!

OpenAgent tempts the subscriber to take the next action of “comparing agents” through a compelling CTA designed in a contrasting color that matches their branding guidelines.

5. Focusing on Font Styling and Colors

Bright and vibrant colors in emails go a long way in triggering specific feelings and emotions in the mind of the subscriber. You should choose colors based on the cultural background of your target audience and your brand image.

The font size, colors, and orientation also create a visual appeal and enhance the overall structure of your emails. But make sure you don’t go overboard with too many colors that overwhelm the readers.

Take a look at how Coastal has used two different font styles to separate the sections of the email. The font color has been changed for each product for better readability.

6. Adding a dash of Social Proof

Have you ever chosen a hotel simply because of its amazing reviews on Trip Advisor or liked a Facebook page just because it has millions of likes? That’s the kind of publicity social proof does. It holds true even for email marketing. We all trust customer reviews and ratings rather than advertisements and brand taglines.

You can instill a sense of trust in your subscribers by taking help of testimonials, endorsements, social media shares, case studies, and user-generated content in your emails.

88% consumers read reviews to be sure of the quality of the business.

Listed below are 5 principal social proof sources:

1. Customers: Testimonials of happy customers
2. Experts: Trustworthy thought leaders from your industry
3. Celebrities: Celebrity reviews or ratings from credible influencers
4. Friends: Number of friends of the subscriber, who use your products
5. Crowds: Number of people who have used your product or service and loved it

Social Media Examiner includes two testimonials by the webinar attendees as a social proof of their services.

How Can We Help You

EmailMonks can help you create the best of emails, hand-coded by our experts that would surely add value to your email marketing strategy.

Whether you are looking for image-based emails or interactive emails, Monks can create responsive designs that would cater to your needs and business type.

As much as we might want things to be black and white in sales, there is a lot of gray. Even more, the fact that things have changed, does not mean that everything that came before now is no longer effective or useful. Evolution transcends and includes what came before.

“Commissions drive bad sales behaviors and a self-orientation because so many salespeople are motivated by money and will do anything to make more. Salespeople can’t be trusted to do right by their clients because they have a variable component to their compensation.”

For this premise to be true, salespeople would have to actually win sales by being self-oriented conmen and con-women who willingly take advantage of their prospective clients. Those prospective clients would also have to be so naïve as to be easily duped by said money-grubbing salespeople.

What is extraordinary about this thinking is that many of those who hold the belief that commissions cause bad behavior also believe that buyers are extraordinarily well educated, and know as much or more than the salespeople who are calling on them. They are wholly unaware of these conflicting beliefs.

Think about your friends and family members who sell. Are they the kind of people who behave badly and would cheat a client to make a few bucks? Or, is it more likely that they value the relationship more than the transaction, preferring a long-term relationship over a short-term gain. More still, is it likely that the kind of salesperson that would need to dupe their prospective client would be the kind of salesperson that is smart enough to do so?

“Sales is mostly aggressive, by-the-numbers, take-no-prisoner cultures being poorly led by Cro-Magnon and Neanderthals who will do anything to make their number.”

Less than half of salespeople make their number. Most of them will still work in sales after missing their number, and mostly for the same company they work for now. A lot of them find it very difficult to be fired.

There are certainly aggressive, self-oriented sales cultures. There are, no doubt, sales cultures with leaders who can rationalize their willingness to take advantage of a prospective client. These, however, are the exception, and not the rule. The reason movies like Glengarry Glenn Ross and Boiler Room draw our interest is because the behaviors are so rare, not because they are so widespread. Is that what your place of business looks like?

“Thanks to the Internet, buyers know everything they need to know, and so salespeople can no longer create any real value. They are already 57 percent through the process without a salesperson, so all you can do is spend time on social media.”

If buyers know everything they need to know, why are they not already producing the better results that are available to them? If they are doing so much research on the Internet and are aware of all of the choices available to them, why then haven’t they happened upon your offering, recognized what they are missing, and immediately picked up the phone to call you to remedy their existing challenges?

If your clients produce the better results you could help them generate without you, why haven’t they?

The truth about the 57 percent statistic from CEB, now Gartner, is that you are supposed to be creating opportunities when your client is at 0 percent. It was never CEB’s intention that this statistic suggest that you wait passively, nor that you have no value to create. The idea of “challenger” is that you have a unique insight that allows you to create value.

Always and never are generalizations, and all generalizations, even useful ones, are lies.

The undercurrent here is that everything from the past is wrong, so anything new must be correct. This is weak thinking. It starts from a premise that there is a single right answer, and that anything to the contrary is incorrect. The danger in mutual exclusivity is that it eliminates choices. It assumes that there things are black and white, that there is no gray.

In doing so, this thinking ignores the fact that sales is a complex, dynamic, human interaction with too many variables to be defined by a set of finite rules. Its weakness is in its assuming that there is a single approach that is to be used universally. Selling requires choices of action, and that requires the weighing of different options to determine the best course of action based on a set of facts and circumstances that may differ wildly from deal to deal.

Compensation is tricky, and what works for one company will not work for another. Some sales cultures are unhealthy, just like there are unhealthy cultures in law firms, hospitals, and non-profits. Some of your prospects spend time researching on the Internet, and others never do any. And some things that once worked still work exceedingly well, and some are no longer as useful in some cases.

Make good choices and do good work.

The post A Compendium of Weak Thinking About Sales appeared first on The Sales Blog.

In 2014, a Chinese conglomerate called DongDu International Group (DDI) became enamoured with Nova Scotia. The multi-billion–dollar firm purchased more than 1,300 hectares of undeveloped land on the coast and started touting ambitious, if eclectic, plans. Promotional videos discussed the possibility of developing a film production centre, bringing in cruise ships, and building upscale homes, offices and research facilities. In one video, DDI’s chairman says the area could become a “dream homeland for Chinese young people.”

In June, a delegation that included Halifax’s mayor visited DDI in Shanghai, “thus constantly promoting the friendly relations and cooperation” between the two sides, according to a news release from DDI. Three months later, DDI has apparently grown cautious. “We are currently undergoing a strategic review of our businesses in North America, including Nova Scotia,” Ken Creighton, DDI’s regional vice-president for North America, wrote in an email. Creighton declined to comment further.

Such a reassessment is not an isolated event. In recent years, Chinese companies have embarked on a global acquisition spree for everything from sports teams to entertainment companies to trophy assets in commercial real estate. Concerned about the soundness of some of these purchases and the amount of debt companies are piling on, China implemented new rules governing foreign deals in August. These include restrictions on investments in the entertainment, real estate and hospitality sectors, and banned acquisitions in the gambling and sex industries (technology, resources, and agricultural purchases are encouraged).

It’s just one reminder about the challenges of doing business with China: the government still maintains a tight grip on its corporations, and Beijing’s wishes come first. But Canada hasn’t seen much drying up of investment; despite the headlines surrounding Chinese businesses in Canada, foreign direct investment from the Asian giant is still relatively low. According to Statistics Canada, China invested $21 billion here last year, less than the Netherlands, the U.K. and even Luxembourg. The reality is that business between Canada and China is only getting started. The federal Liberal government is trying to forge deeper economic ties with China, notably through exploratory talks on a free-trade agreement. Such a deal (which could take up to a decade to complete) would be historic for both sides. For Canada, it would mark the biggest bilateral deal in decades, while China would score its first trade pact with a G7 country. Politically, any progress on talks could be a win for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Tentative negotiations under Stephen Harper, after all, collapsed in 2012.

But it’s also a minefield. The Trudeau government will have to contend with the question of opening up Canada’s resources sector to Chinese state-owned enterprises, and how to handle acquisitions of sensitive technology. If past trade deals are any sign, China will want to import its own workers for major infrastructure projects here. And the more tied Canada becomes to China, the more Beijing can use its heft to achieve political goals. Meanwhile, observers say China has become even more repressive internally under leader Xi Jinping. Given these challenges, it’s no wonder that, when John McCallum was appointed ambassador to China earlier this year, he pledged to return home every six to eight weeks to talk to the public through the media about why relations “are so important for our future as a country.” In an email to Maclean’s, McCallum said the key for Canada “is determining not only the scale of the opportunity but assessing the risks in moving forward.”

Striking a balance with China—an important economic partner, but also a potential rival on other fronts—is unquestionably a fraught process, and veteran China watchers are concerned the Liberal government hasn’t shown sufficient backbone. “The Trudeau government is only just learning that China needs to be treated with extreme caution as an investment partner,” says Michael Byers, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia (UBC). David Mulroney, a former ambassador to China, is even more blunt in assessing the government’s ability to find the right balance with China. “Nothing I’ve seen has encouraged me to be optimistic,” he says.

Why Canada would want to pursue more trade with China is obvious: the country is too big to ignore. Its growing economy (slated to surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest in a decade or so) and burgeoning middle class provide ample opportunity for Canadian companies to expand abroad and build a new export market, particularly in the agricultural and services sectors. Canada is more determined than ever to diversify its trade relationships in light of U.S. President Donald Trump’s protectionist bent and ongoing NAFTA renegotiations.

Although China is Canada’s second largest trading partner, exports to the country are still a fraction of the volume that goes to the U.S. Last year, the U.S. accounted for 75 per cent of Canada’s merchandise exports. Both Canada and China see this as an opportunity for growth. “It doesn’t hurt that, politically, we are liked in China,” says Eva Busza, vice-president of research and programs at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.

Still, some are puzzled about China’s desire to pursue a free-trade agreement with Canada. Barriers to trade and investment in Canada are already low, and Chinese companies enjoy fairly wide latitude to operate here—especially compared to how closed China’s economy still is to outsiders. We’re also not terribly important to the country’s economy, argues Charles Burton, a political science professor at Brock University. “Our market is a miniscule factor in China’s overall global rise,” he says. “We don’t have something they cannot obtain anywhere else.”

For China, a free-trade agreement is about more than economics. “They see this more in terms of prestige,” says Guy Saint-Jacques, Canada’s ambassador to China until last year. “They want to use this as a springboard for eventual negotiations with the Americans.” Mulroney sees a more worrying strategic angle at play. “At least some of the Chinese strategy is splitting Canada off from the United States, and isolating the United States from its closest allies,” he says. “If they can begin to win over countries that are traditionally very close to the U.S., then they can somehow challenge or weaken it.”

Until recently, China’s big interest in Canada concerned the energy sector. Between 2009 and 2012, Chinese firms invested billions into the sector, culminating with the state-owned oil firm CNOOC’s $15.1-billion purchase of Nexen. Controversy around the deal prompted the Conservative government to implement restrictions on state-owned enterprises acquiring majority stakes in Canadian companies. If the idea was to discourage Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) from buying more energy companies, it proved redundant when oil prices crashed in 2014. “The Chinese bought at the high, and now they’re not getting a return,” says Wenran Jiang, a senior fellow at the Institute of Asian Research at UBC.

Even so, Chinese SOEs have stayed put in the oil sands as other foreign companies are shedding assets, and the federal government is courting Chinese investment again. Minister of Natural Resources Jim Carr visited China on a trade mission in June, in part to send a message that Canada welcomes Chinese investment, including in the oil sands. “Chinese investors are no different than investors from anywhere else,” he told reporters on a conference call later.

That’s led some to wonder about the possibility of reversing course and opening up to SOEs again. “Even if it’s not part of a trade agreement, you’re going to see the Chinese wanting those restrictions relaxed,” says Ron MacIntosh, a senior fellow with the China Institute at the University of Alberta. “They tend to interpret this policy as being against China, rather than the state-owned sector.” Critics of the Conservative government’s SOE policy say it was implemented without grounds or sufficient explanation to China, damaging relations. “There’s no need for a limit,” Jiang says. “Our sovereignty is not in danger for giving up some licensing for exploration rights.” What’s important is to gauge how Chinese SOEs have complied with Canadian laws and regulations over the years. “They’re very much in line,” Jiang says.

The country is still bristling over the restrictions. China’s ambassador to Canada, Lu Shaye, wrote a column for the Financial Post in May, seeking to assuage Canadian fears about SOEs. “China’s state-owned enterprises are not evil,” he wrote, “but babysitters who care for our people’s lives.”

But reopening that debate could set Canada on a perilous path, Byers says. Canada could leave itself vulnerable if it ever finds itself in a conflict with China—a remote but not unforeseeable possibility. “Let’s say China decides to play hardball and suspends production at its facilities in Alberta during a time of conflict,” Byers says. “If you give China too much access to the oil sands, you expose yourself to that kind of retaliation.”

The country’s growing interest in acquiring technology companies is also stoking worries. In the past few years, various Chinese companies and funds have made numerous bids for high-tech firms—some with military applications—in the U.S. and Europe. Not all have been successful. U.S. officials blocked a $2.9-billion bid by Chinese investors to buy a controlling stake in a California-based unit of Dutch electronics firm Phillips last year, while another U.S. semiconductor firm rejected a lucrative offer from Chinese investors in favour of a lower bid from an American company because of concerns the deal would not win regulatory approval.

Chinese firms have been less acquisitive in Canada (the Asia Pacific Foundation’s investment monitor records less than $1 billion in tech deals since 2010) but that’s expected to change. The Liberal government, in contrast to some of its international peers, has shown a willingness to approve such deals. This year, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada green-lit China-based Hytera Communications’ bid for Norsat International, a maker of satellite technology whose customers include the U.S. military, without a full security review. The Liberals also reversed a decision by the previous government, allowing a maker of laser technology in Montreal called ITF Technologies to be purchased by a Hong Kong-based firm. The government defended the moves, arguing there are no security concerns that warrant blocking the deals.

The decisions are mystifying for some. “It was a shocking lapse in my view,” Mulroney says. “It shows they’re either radically misreading Canadian public opinion or they’re so in the thrall of China that they don’t really care.” A recent survey conducted by the Asia Pacific Foundation shows a slim majority of Canadians (55 per cent) support the pursuit of a free-trade agreement and that 64 per cent are concerned Canada will become more susceptible to economic and political pressure from Beijing. Given the concerns, it would have made sense for the Liberals to “have gone out of their way to assure Canadians that they’re not asleep at the switch when it comes to security,” Mulroney says.

Saint-Jacques, however, says politics played a role in the Conservative government’s initial rejection of the ITF Technologies deal. The takeover offer came in the wake of revelations that Chinese hackers broke into computers at the National Research Council in 2014. “The government was so mad that they would have refused any investment proposal that had a little technology associated with it,” Saint-Jacques says. Further, he sees the Liberals making progress on telling China what will and will not be tolerated. In June, China signed an agreement with Canada saying it will no longer conduct state-sponsored industrial and economic espionage (the agreement does not cover government or military spying).

Still, the threat of Chinese government influence is real. Earlier this year, in Australia, a Chinese billionaire reportedly threatened to withdraw an AUD$400,000 donation to the opposition Labor party after an Australian official took a hard line against the Chinese military’s activities in the South China Sea. A Labor senator then contradicted the party’s policy by telling Chinese media that Australia shouldn’t interfere with China’s ambitions in the region.

Australia’s own free-trade negotiations with China (the pact went into effect at the end of 2015) provide Canada with an idea of what to expect. One of the most contentious issues during the talks concerned labour: the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding allowing Chinese companies registered in Australia to bring in workers for infrastructure projects that exceed AUD$150 million—without trying to hire locally first. Unions and opposition politicians decried the deal, arguing it shuts citizens out of job opportunities, while supporters contend free trade will boost economic activity overall.

It’s likely China will push for the same arrangement with Canada, and such a labour deal could complicate already contentious infrastructure projects. Take, for example, a Chinese company that wants to build a pipeline to the B.C. coast to export oil to China. Pipelines are already hotly contested; one using foreign labour would run into even more opposition, and become politically risky for any government to back.

Observers also fear that the greater the economic ties with China, the less leverage Canada will have when it comes to pushing the country on, say, human rights reforms. When Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, China responded by squeezing Norway for years (Norway hosts the ceremony, and its parliament appoints the selection panel).

Byers suggests a better approach would be for Canada to negotiate sector-specific agreements rather than a single, package deal. “That way we’re engaged in an ongoing negotiation,” he says. “If we have things that China wants, we’re not signing them away on a permanent basis but holding them forward as a series of carrots.”

A free-trade agreement really provides one opportunity to get things right. “I’ve always argued you get one kick at the can,” Saint-Jacques says. The next few years, then, will prove crucial for shaping Canada-China relations—regardless of how Ottawa proceeds.

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MORE ABOUT CHINA:

• How Canada could become the missing link between Europe and Asia
• Canada needs a free trade deal with China, says Teck Resources CEO
• China-Vancouver air travel is soaring, despite B.C.’s foreign homebuyers tax
• Three lessons every entrepreneur needs to learn about doing business in China
• Why 2017 could be the time to get back into emerging markets
• 10 lessons for Canadian firms trying to crack the Chinese market
• Canada’s banks sound the housing bubble alarm, finally

The post The hidden risks of opening up trade with China appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

The buying environment is becoming increasingly complex. A few reasons are likely top of mind including the emergence of new competitors, frequency of touchpoints, ever-shortening buyer attention span, and so on. But have you considered how a generational shift in your prospects’ demographics might impact the buying environment as well?

Today’s B2B buying committees are growing more diverse as Millennials take their seats alongside Generation X and Baby Boomers. To better understand the specific ramifications of this shift, SnapApp recently conducted research with over 500 professionals.

I sat down with Aaron Dun, SnapApp’s SVP of Marketing, to learn more about the research. Read on to learn what they uncovered and the implications a generational shift has on the B2B buying process.

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Ashley Minogue: Can you give us insight into the impetus behind this research?

Aaron Dun: This is an incredibly complex selling process, getting harder by the day. Furthermore, the rise of the millennial generation is undeniable. I think traditional B2B marketers on a whole have disregarded the “millennial problem” because they think it’s a B2C thing. They’re all on Instagram or Snapchat – that’s not our problem if we are selling to the B2B enterprise. However, our research shows very clearly that the millennial generation is rapidly aging onto the B2B buying committee.

AM: Your research indicates over 40% of millennials are either making the buying decisions or influencing them today. What does this mean for marketing and sales tactics?

AD: That’s right, marketers and sales reps need to get ahead of the game and start to adapt to this new environment. For example, we have found overwhelmingly in the millennial generation that the whitepaper is actually the least used tool for early stage research. It’s not that the content isn’t good and valuable – it’s just not the right way to gauge buying intent from the onset.

Marketing teams need to recognize that 60% of millennials don’t want to engage with sales until they are in the middle of their buying process. They operate like “sale avoiders” – reps need to be aware of the research that happens before they even interact with a prospect, and react accordingly. This puts even more onus on marketing to educate prospects in the formats in which they want to engage.

Our hope is that organizations will begin to consider how tactics should vary based on the generation of their buyer. On a macro-level, marketing to millennials needs to walk the line between being available and relevant, without being intrusive. You must look for signals of intent to engage when they are ready and have captivated their attention.

Want more information on how Millenials are impacting the buying cycle? Access a library of resources here including the full research report and a quiz to assess how well you know B2B buyers or listen to a webinar here.

The post How Millennials Impact the Buying Cycle: What You Need to Know and How to Adapt appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Why do you need to understand your buyer personas before undergoing a website redesign? Simply put, understanding your organization’s buyer personas allows you to create a website that is not only tailored to their unique needs and pain points but also drives them through their buyers’ journey until they are ready to become a customer.

Your organization’s buyer personas—detailed profile descriptions of your ideal customers—lend a level of strategy and direction to your website’s redesign. After all, complete buyer personas should go into far more than just demographics; they should include psychographic information as well. From challenges and pain points to frequently asked questions, information about their decision-making, and even their purchasing processes, this knowledge will facilitate the creation of a website that will help you attract visitors, convert visitors into leads, and close those leads into customers.

Understanding Buyer Personas Brings the Right Visitors to Your Website

Understanding the reasoning behind your target customers’ online activities can drastically improve not only your organic search traffic but your organic search rankings as well.

Writing the Right Content

Because you understand your personas’ questions, you can develop your website content in a way that presents them with answers. Align your on-page copy with their searches and aim to answer their questions as thoroughly as possible. That being said, isn’t it usually the case that answering one question can lead to many more? We think so; by understanding the follow-up questions that they’ll have, you can be sure that you continue to develop content, such as blogs, that speaks to your personas’ questions and searches.

Optimizing Your Website

While it is possible for you to create a search-engine-optimized website without an in-depth understanding of your buyer personas, what would be the point of doing so? After all, it doesn’t matter how high your website ranks on the first page of Google if it’s only ranking for a search phrase that nobody relevant to your business is searching for.

By understanding your buyer personas, you can optimize your website not for search engines but actually for the visitors you hope to attract. Think of it like having one ear on the ground: By knowing and using the same specific words and phrases that your personas do while they seek information, you can tweak your website copy to match and thus ensure that your website will actually rank for the right phrases and be found by the right people.

Understanding Buyer Personas Makes Your Website User-Friendly

Not only do you want to get visitors to your website, but you want them to stay on your website, return to your website, and ultimately convert on your website. While powerful, relevant content certainly helps you achieve this end goal, a positive user experience is critical to your website’s success as well.

And once again, it is developing and understanding your buyer personas—specifically their preferences and online behaviors—that can help optimize your target customers’ website experience:

Ease of Navigation

In years past, many organizations treated their websites as nothing more than online brochures, simply using their domains as a way to establish their presence in the digital world. Now, however, that same strategy no longer applies.

Visitors reaching an organization’s website now have their own set of expectations. And while some of these expectations are fairly consistent across the board—for example, 86 percent of visitors want to see information about a company’s products or services on the homepage—others are not. That is where understanding of your target customers comes in. Think about their wants and priorities as you develop the structure of your website; what pages do they want to see first? What is their natural progression through your website? Use your persona knowledge to structure your website in a way that makes sense for them.

Imagery Selection

During a standard website redesign, the copy is usually prioritized over the imagery. And while copy is the driving force behind a website—especially from an SEO perspective—we must not forget that imagery is critical not only to a human’s ability to understand information but also for how your website is perceived. In fact, 46.1 percent of people say that a website’s design is the number-one criterion for discerning the credibility of the company.

That being said, here is another instance where your understanding of your personas can allow you to create more impactful content. If your target customers are very visual people, perhaps you should shy away from stock imagery. If your target customers tend to have more design-oriented backgrounds, you might want to include more white space and ensure that your website design follows all design best practices. We as humans process visual information faster than text, so make sure your website’s imagery is set up in such a way as to give you an advantage.

Clear Calls to Action

Even if your website’s navigation and imagery resonate positively with your visitors, there is no guarantee that visitors will become leads or customers—especially not without a clear way for visitors to take their next steps. And that is where your calls to action (CTAs) come into the picture. As you know, CTAs are essential tools in a lead-generating website. But just like with imagery, not all CTAs perform the same. Again, use your knowledge of your personas to make educated guesses about styles of CTAs. Are your personas visual? Try including thumbnails. Are your personas budget-conscious? Try including the word “free.” While you will need to continue testing these efforts, it is your knowledge about your potential customers that allows for a strong start.

Setting Your Website Redesign Up for Success

Your website should make a strong statement about your product or service and the benefit that it can bring to your customers. However, in order to have a truly successful website, you must not only demonstrate your expertise around your offering, but you must do so in a way that the benefits are clear for your potential customers as well.

Doing so doesn’t need to be difficult; simply use the knowledge that you have about your target customers—your buyer personas—to create a website that resonates with them and allows them to work their way into becoming a customer.

In my days as vice president of marketing at several technology companies, I distinctly remember how difficult it was for my team of marketing professionals to command the respect of the salespeople in the company. No matter how much product knowledge we had, that wasn’t enough. We were finally successful in doing so, but only by becoming the company experts on our buyers.

Success stories are only effective as proof late in the sales cycle once a customer has decided to change. Early stage customers, on the other hand, aren’t interested in stories about how you helped another customer reduce the time to create a report from one week to one day. At this stage, they don’t think they have a problem worth solving, so they aren’t looking for proof. That’s why you can’t close a sale with a success story unless you first open it with a “change story.” Without a compelling reason to change, customers will stick with the status quo and “no decision” will continue to be your biggest competitor.

SUCCESS STORIES FAIL AT SELLING CHANGE

Success stories fail at selling change because customers will have forgotten why they decided to change by the time marketing interviews them. By the time they’re produced, they’re stale, because it can take three years from the date of purchase to the creation of the success story: One year to implement, one year to generate success, and one year to find/create. But even if the customer can remember why they changed, the competitive landscape may have changed so much in the past three years that the reasons they did so are no longer relevant. Once sales have convinced customers that they’re drowning with change stories, sales can then use success stories as proof to convince the customer that their product will rescue them.

CHANGE STORIES SUCCEED AT SELLING CHANGE

Salespeople need change stories that shine the light of insight on customer problems and the costs of the status quo. Once customers realize that the risk of the status quo is greater than the risk of change, they’ll be motivated to change. So, if you want to reduce the number of deals lost to no decision, you’ll need to supply your sales team with compelling change stories (80% problem: 20% solution). Once the customer is convinced on change, sales can use success stories (20% problem: 80% solution) as a leave behind for proof.

CHANGE STORIES MADE BY SALES, FOR SALES

You can’t rely on the marketing team to produce change stories, because new customers won’t engage with marketing until they achieve results. Salespeople, on the other hand, already know why customers bought, because they won their business in the first place. Customers are also more likely to share the reasons they changed privately with salespeople because they will have already established a trusting relationship.

Even if marketing could produce the change stories, there are two reasons they’d be unlikely to receive buy-in from sales. First, 90% of sales enablement content produced by marketing is never used by sales (source: American Marketing Association). Second, salespeople usually feel the messaging they receive from marketing is too product-centric, and doesn’t sufficiently sell the problem. On the other hand, salespeople do like to hear from each other why customers decided to change, because this information is based on what got results in the field.

Sales can create change stories by having each salesperson record his or her key customer wins, and they can share them with the group every quarter. This is a useful exercise because salespeople use the same skillset to uncover the reasons a past customer bought as they do to determine why a future customer will buy. Not only will peer feedback improve each individual story, the group will also gain from their pooled knowledge. The result is that sales will be able to share compelling stories that resonate with customers, clarify business value, and create a sense of urgency.

ELEARNING: SNACKABLE & ACTIONABLE CONTENT THAT SELLS

Sales can then select the best change stories each quarter, convert them into two-minute videos (example), and share them through micro eLearning. This way, sales will be able to home in on the deepest concerns of their prospective buyers in the field. Each video could be accompanied by an equally short, two-minute video from one of your company’s Subject Matter Experts (example). In this video, the SMEs would explain how your company’s product, cloud strategy, or competitive differentiation contributed to a specific customer’s decision to buy. This approach is in stark contrast to how product training is normally delivered to sales. Traditionally, sales are flooded with product information in a two-hour webinar. Then, somehow, they are expected to miraculously figure out how to apply it to a specific customer scenario. With this new approach, SMEs will provide actionable content because it applies to a recent customer win.

STORYTELLING: THE ESSENCE OF THE DEAL

This can’t happen unless salespeople learn to improve their storytelling skills. They must learn to share only the essence of why a customer changed or bought. If they include everything that happened in the deal, they’ll drown the message in too much information. They must also learn not to tell war stories about how they won the deal and, more importantly, they must not make themselves the hero of the story. Just like marketing stories that feature their company as the hero, these stories repel potential customers, because customers don’t want to see themselves as the loser in your story. Sales will also need to know how to convert their stories into discovery questions so that salespeople can alternate between sharing stories and asking questions during a call, just like in a natural conversation.

IMAGINE…

Imagine if the sales team at your biggest competitor applied this approach. Sloppy selling would not be tolerated, because salespeople would no longer be anonymous in the field. Once they’re in the spotlight, telling peers why their key customers bought, they’ll raise their standard to match the top performers. And, as SMEs work back from sales, they’ll create content that matters. Against these fierce competitors, do you think your salespeople will be able to clearly articulate the business challenges that would motivate a prospective client to invest in your solution? Or, would they be eviscerated by the competition? Now, imagine what would happen if you deployed this approach today, and your competitor didn’t.

Faced with these two choices, what will you choose?

In order to offer more personalized results to the queries, search engines deeply analyze users’ behavior. In their turn SEO-pros use traffic analysis tools to meet the search engines requirements. For marketing and sales, such information is extremely valuable. This kind of intelligence helps to establish a truly personalized communication with the prospects that eventually lead to a better conversion rate and increased revenue. If you give the users what they are searching for, they will find you.

Statistically businesses see 42% higher conversion rate and 19% uplift in sales when using account-based approach at dealing with leads and customers. Here is how it works in real life.

Intelligence for planning and prediction

To its credit, Google is making some of its enormous cache of data available to marketers via a variety of services: Google Trends, Google Trends for Websites, Google Insights for Search, as well as an array of search tools like the Wonder Wheel. Before developing promo strategies and plans check these trends to identify what topics grab your prospects attention during some specific periods of time.

For example, you’re selling custom T-shirts with different prints online. By checking Google Trends you will see what topic or a query are the most popular at certain times so you can modify your next offering based on this information. So taking in account Pokemon Go boom* in July you could benefit from it in August by selling T-Shirts with Pokemon images.
* Pokemon Go was launched in July 2016 and saw some of the most amazing growth of the video game in history. The downloads reached nearly 750 million times.

A note to remember: If you are not listening to your customers, they will go elsewhere.

Get 3D view of your customers to sell more using SEO data

Why is it so important to know where your customers are coming from, what attracts them and stimulates to make purchases online? Digital market research first of all helps you get to know your target audience, follow the market trends, and develop a successful brand strategy. The better you know your customers, the more effectively you can create and promote the content to increase sales. How to know your audience better?

• Keyword research helps to determine the most frequent queries related to your business. Analyzing this data (keyword volume, for example) helps marketers decode their audience’s most urgent concerns.
• Data and engagement metrics found in Google Analytics such as what pages the lead visited and how much time he or she spent on the site, could tell sales managers what are their customers’ pain points which help to win their trust in the early stages of customer acquisition.
• In the AdWords location reports you can see the places where your customers are physically located, or the locations they showed an interest in. This data helps marketing managers to segment their offline and online ads better. Sales pros can personalize their communications with the prospects with a more targeted approach.

For example, “Near Me” campaigns are one of the most neglected technique for increasing conversions and improving account performance. Moreover, people are getting more and more localized day by day. Whole Foods used location data and geo-conquesting tools to improve post-click conversion rates for its mobile ads, while edging out local competitors. By the end of the campaign, Whole Foods had a 4.69% post-click conversion rate — more than three times the national average of 1.43%.

A note to remember: Marketing success often depends on the “right”: right audience, right place, right time, right message.

Work with HOT leads

Today Internet technology is broadly employed to acquire leads from the website visitors that seek to access helpful information, articles, or downloads. The website may post an interesting report, but require the user to register with their contact information before accessing the promised content. Essentially, contact information collection may also help you get closer to your customers. This way you can empower your lead generation and focus your sales team only on the sales-ready (hot) leads, not all of your website visitors.

A note to remember: Your offers need to be relevant for the prospect’s place in the buying cycle.

More salespeople equals more sales, right? Wrong. Scaling your sales team is crucial to growing a healthy business. Do it at the right time, and your company will grow exponentially. Do it at the wrong time, and your company could shutter within six months.

Don’t just hire with your gut. Take a strategic approach to scaling your sales team, and make smart hiring decisions that will benefit your organization for years to come. Check out these 12 mistakes to avoid when scaling your sales organization.

1. Overpopulating Territories

Scaling your sales team almost always means bringing on new reps. And while that's exciting in its own right, it means that you — as a sales leader — have more balls in the air.

That means more room for error — particularly when it comes to misallocating staff or accidentally overpopulating your existing territories. Successfully scaling a sales team means optimizing efficiency, and if you haphazardly scatter your new hires around, you won't see their full potential and will likely stunt your existing team's operations.

So, how do you avoid that dilemma? Well, you start by looking at three key factors: A territory's potential, its existing accounts, and your reps' broader workload.

Do you have sufficient green space in the territory? Are your current customers in the area productive and satisfied? And do your reps in the region have the bandwidth and energy to get more out of it?

With that information in mind, you can get a better picture of what kind of hires you can make for a given territory — if you need to make any at all.

2. Hiring Out of Desperation

A lot of time can pass between determining you need headcount, receiving budgetary approval, posting a job listing, and thinning the herd of candidates down to a top three.

And while maintaining thorough attention to detail throughout that process is key, that extended period of "hiring limbo" can take a toll on your team — but you can't let that frustration have too much bearing on your decision.

Don't hire someone you're not sold on out of convenience. Have a firm rubric for what you want and expect out of your candidates. If you want someone with a background in SaaS, don't settle for someone who thinks SaaS is an attitude.

Low-quality hires dilute your team's collective talent, can mess with your culture, and ultimately undermine your sales org's results. Make sure you make the best hires you can — even if it takes a while — and your team and business will benefit as you continue to scale.

3. Providing Insufficient Training

If you're not investing in a sensible, effective, comprehensive training program for new reps, you're selling your team short. Onboarding new hires with a single day of orientation and a few weeks of shadowing are certainly convenient — particularly for small or rapidly growing sales teams — but it makes for inconsistent and low-quality work from your reps.

You need thorough, uniform training if you want to ensure that your reps are on the same page and best-equipped to operate effectively. That kind of program sets a high, definitive bar that all of your salespeople are aware of and expected to meet.

Before hiring to fill a gap, take a look at your salespeople and decide whether training or coaching could help them perform at a higher level. If you can make existing reps more efficient, invest there before expanding your team.

4. Using Out-of-Date Compensation Plans

Compensation is the ultimate incentive. It's literally the main reason any salesperson works in the first place — so if you want to ensure that your team remains as productive as possible as it scales, you need to have a thoughtful, effective compensation plan in place.

Misaligned compensation is one of the worst wrenches you can throw in your team's direction and motivation. That's why it serves you to regularly check your plan and ensure it aligns with your quarterly business goals as your team grows.

If you’re expanding to a new territory and prospecting is a big priority for the quarter, compensate your reps accordingly. Is converting those prospects into new business the goal next quarter? Shift the bonus structure to reflect that.

For example, if you want to encourage prospecting, you might offer $100 to every rep who gives more than 10 demos in a week. This ensures reps are being rewarded for the right work. It also makes them more efficient in pushing the business toward meeting the right goals.

5. Tracking the Wrong Metrics

You can't know whether it's time to hire if you're not evaluating the right metrics, but finding them is easier said than done. One place to start is by tracking your reps' base compensation.

Once you have those figures, take a look at their variable compensation at the rate at which they meet their quota. Finally, review their average deal size and churn.

By looking at their on-target earnings, you’ll be able to determine whether your reps are working at capacity. That will give you insight into whether it’s time to hire someone new and, if so, what type of role to recruit for.

Your salespeople should be turning a profit within six months to a year of their hire date. If they’re not, it might be time to replace them or invest in training.

6. Ignoring Role Pollution

A rapidly growing sales team comes with a hefty share of administrative requirements, and if you overlook them, you'll wind up wasting your reps' precious selling time on data entry and other tedious, menial tasks.

You can't afford to pollute your senior reps' jobs by having them pull too much administrative weight — so if you're finding that those salespeople are squandering time that could be better spent selling, consider making your next hire a BDR or administrative assistant as opposed to another sales manager.

Those kinds of hires are cost-effective ways to free up your sales reps to do what they do best, alleviate unnecessary stress, and make your growing team's operations more efficient.

By that same token, you need to make sure roles aren’t being diluted. If you have reps that aren’t functioning at full capacity, see if they can take on more responsibility before making another hire. If they can’t meet the numbers you need from them, it might be time to replace them instead of hiring additional headcount.

7. Not Aligning With Marketing

Forgive the SAT word, but your sales and marketing departments need to be symbiotic — one can't productively function without the other. Even the most effective sales department can only get so far if it's not being fed high-quality leads.

So before you go ahead and hire more salespeople as your company scales, make sure your marketing team has the bandwidth and resources to generate a solid stream of prospect interest for your growing sales team to capitalize on.

Work closely with marketing leadership to gauge whether their department can meet the lead demand that an influx of new salespeople will create. If they're not equipped to meet those benchmarks, consider scaling your company's marketing team before adding to your own.

8. Spending Too Much Time Forecasting Instead of Coaching

Forecasting is crucial to gauging your team's potential success, establishing appropriate expectations, setting quotas, and putting reasonable goals in place — all of which are central components of your team's success. 

You need to forecast thoughtfully and effectively, but you can't get too fixated on the process. In some cases, the time you take to construct and refine your forecasts can run too long and encroach on time you should be spending coaching your team.

Dedicate at least a few hours each week to coaching your team. If you don't, you're selling your sales organization and individual contributors short. Set up weekly or monthly check-ins, build a mentorship program, or implement a quarterly training day.

If your reps aren’t constantly improving, it will affect their growth potential down the line. By investing time and resources into making your employees better, you might be able to accomplish more without expanding your team.

9. Over-Hiring Executive Talent

If you're fresh off a round of funding or in the thick of a high-growth period, the prospect of stacking your organization with high-powered executive talent might seem tempting.

In some cases, that could be the right move for your company, but whether it's successful or not generally hinges on one big question: "Do we have the right people in place to do the actual selling?"

If you already have a scalable and efficient sales process in place, you might be better off hiring reps to work it. If you lack that kind of direction or need a major overhaul of how your sales team sells, making that Fortune 500 hire could be in your best interest.

You don’t want to make an expensive hire that you don’t have the sales team and revenue to support — so try to have your nitty-gritty, lower-level ducks in a row before recruiting high-level talent.

10. Being Afraid to Trim Fat

If you scale strategically, you should be able to avoid making large-scale layoffs — but making periodic cuts is a natural, healthy part of how a growing business operates.

The skills you needed from your reps when your sales org was just five people might not be the same ones you need once it scales to 50. Ideally, your reps will adapt, grow, and refine your skills as your business scales, but that's not always the case.

Some of your team members might get complacent in their positions — leaning on their tenure at your company as justification for their lack of growth.

Keep a pulse on your sales team, and be honest with yourself and your current reps about whether their underperformance warrants replacing them with new hires who will bring more energy, enthusiasm, and life to your organization.

11. Setting Goals Beyond Your Reach

Ambition is obviously key to the success of any growing business — if you didn't have it, you wouldn't be scaling in the first place — but it gets away from a lot of companies as they expand.

No matter how confident you are in your sales team's ability to absolutely nail every last challenge that comes your way as you scale, you need to take a deep breath and measure your expectations.

Make sure your goals are attainable. That could mean ensuring your revenue targets are reasonable enough to let you establish quotas that your reps can hit while still keeping their feet moving.

Understand what your, your reps', and your company's limitations are at whatever stage of maturity your business is in — and adjust your ambitions accordingly.

Also, be sure to break down your broader strategic objectives into more easily digestible operational objectives to keep your reps on track and in higher spirits.

Scaling your sales team is exciting, but you can't let yourself get too excitable. Make sure you temper your ambitions and set objectives that your sales team can reach — if you do this right, you'll put yourself in a good position to hit those high-minded goals, further down the line.

12. Disregarding Retention

You can't scale a sales team without bringing on new customers — that's more or less how scaling happens in the first place — but you can't get fixated on that process exclusively. You have to understand how to retain customers before you start hitting new markets.

Getting to work and focusing strictly on acquisition is a tempting prospect for scaling sales teams — but don't let yourself fall into that trap. A close rate of 25% in a new market doesn't do too much for you if your churn rate within it is 50%.

Take the proper strides to keep your new customers on board. Make sure your reps are keeping in touch with the customers they bring in, ensuring that they're thriving with your product or service. Also, make sure your company has a solid customer support infrastructure in place to keep your customers satisfied.

Acquiring a customer is more expensive than retaining one, and while you can't scale if you rest on your laurels and avoid pursuing new business, you'll undermine your growth if you can't keep your existing base.

Make the right hires at the right time, and avoid these mistakes along the way — and your sales team, executive leadership, company at large, and bottom line will all thank you.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in September 2017 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Being an effective leader is one of the top ways to boost your sales.

The better you are at leading your team, the better your team will be.

Oftentimes, when your sales are sinking, you can trace it back to the lack of management and poor coaching skills.

In order to avoid dealing with sinking sales, it is best to stay on top of coaching your sales reps.

However, we recognize that this may not be as easy as it sounds.

In fact, the daunting task of coaching your sales team is what has led to this staggering fact: according to a survey, the majority of sales managers dedicate less than 5% of their time to coaching their reps.

We too were surprised by this fact, and want to help change those numbers.

Thus, today we are going to share with you the top 5 ways to coach your sales reps to turn them into skilled salespeople.

 

Top 5 Sales Coaching Strategies

 

1. Understand the Difference between Training and Coaching

The first step in successfully coaching your sales reps is to recognize that there is a difference between training them and coaching them.

Training is what you provide your sales reps when they are first hired, so they learn the ins and outs of your company, as well as its services or products.

When training new sales reps, you will teach them how to perform a certain task that they may not have performed before.

Typically speaking, training is conducted according to a handbook.

In other words, training is usually across-the-board the same for all sales reps, and is not really modified specifically for each person.

Coaching, on the other hand, goes far beyond this.

A far cry from the confines of a handbook, coaching is much more personal and is usually done one-on-one.

Rather than teaching someone how to do a specific task (as is done in training), a sales manager would mentor their sales rep on how to further develop a skill.

Keep in mind that sales coaching should not be limited to only those sales reps who are struggling.

High-performing sales reps typically need a bit of reinforcement and attention as well, but rarely do they need the same level of motivation and encouragement that lower performing sales reps do.

 

2. Coach Advancement for All Levels

The coaching you provide your weakest sales reps will be very different from the coaching that you provide to your all-star reps.

With your weaker salespeople, you may focus your coaching time on teaching them the basics (possibly a second time, as it may seem that training was not enough).

From how to generate leads, to how to cold call, to how to ask questions and how to close deals, you may be coaching them through beginner information.

But, when you switch modes to coaching one of your best sales reps, you still want to ensure that he is also getting value from your coaching.

So, rather than going over the basics (which your high-performing sales rep obviously already knows), you want to focus your coaching time on how he can work larger, more complex accounts.

 

3. Adapt Your Coaching Style

Not everyone learns the same way. While, according to the Social Science Research Network, 65% of people learn best through visuals, there are 35% of people who learn best other ways.

Here are all the ways that people learn:

• Visual
• Aural
• Verbal
• Physical
• Logical
• Social
• Solitary

 

So, what works best for one sales rep, is not necessarily going to work for another.

In short, be flexible.

Talk with your salespeople to gather which way they learn best, and adapt your coaching style to best support their learning styles.

 

4. Determine the Problem

You want to go into your meeting with your underperforming sales rep with an idea of what he is struggling with.

While you should also ask him directly for feedback in your meeting, we do not suggest going into the meeting without an agenda in-mind ahead-of-time. 

There is a multitude of things that could be causing your rep to struggle with sales, including:

• Unsuccessful cold calls
• Too much focus placed on product during calls
• Too much focus placed on price during calls
• Not having a conversation with the potential customer
• Not asking the potential customer questions
• Not knowledgeable about your company’s products or services
• Lack of motivation
• Problems at home
• Personality clash with your management style

Once you have a more focused idea of what is causing the problem for your sales rep, you will better be able to coach him to work through that problem, and on to success.

 

5. Document Your Coaching

The best way to keep track of the progress of your salespeople is to document your coaching time with them.

Write down what you talk about during your coaching session, what goals you worked together to create and why reaching those goals is important.

It is crucial that you and your sales team are on the same page in terms of what he needs to do to improve.

This documentation will be your backup in case you find yourself having the same conversation a few months from now, due to the fact that a sales rep has not grown in the direction you both had planned.

The other, more positive reason for documenting your coaching is so that you remember when to praise your salespeople for their work.

No one wants to have a thankless sales manager who does not acknowledge improvement. Praising your salespeople, according to Loyaltyworks, makes them 37% more likely to be happy with their jobs.

Keeping your sales reps feeling important and successful is going to make your job more successful, and thus your company more successful.

This way, everyone wins.

 

Your turn: Have you successfully coached a sales rep? Which method worked best for you? Let us know in the comments below!

The post Top 5 Ways to Coach Your Reps to Become Sales Superstars appeared first on SalesDrive, LLC.

Whether you’re a web developer, CEO, marketing manager, casual blogger, or e-commerce guru - it is worth setting up a heatmap trial.

Anyone who works in the digital marketing world should at least have some awareness of what heatmaps are. Since companies like Crazy Egg have begun huge advertising campaigns - even regular, non-marketing or web-developing types know about them.

In short, heatmaps are used to precisely understand what people are doing on your web pages. They show where people are clicking, and where they are lingering and scrolling too, and can be extremely useful for helping people optimize the journey of their visitors/customers.

Why So Underrated?

A lot of marketing agencies, even the ones that are responsible for developing their client’s websites, don’t bother getting a heatmap subscription. They figure that through a tool like Google Analytics they’ll be able to see what people are doing on their clients’ sites, see what buttons/links they are clicking or not clicking, and be able to restructure things from there. And they can. But they are missing some important tricks.

The Advantage of Heatmaps

1. Speed

When using Google Analytics to spot how people are using your site, you are largely looking at text and numbers. It can take a while to click around and work out what is going on on your site. This leaves room for error too. Many people feel under-qualified to use Google Analytics appropriately, let alone create a report based on their findings and display it to a team. With a heatmap, you can look at a page and BOOM! - you know what’s going on. You know what people are looking at, what they're clicking on, and you can immediately communicate this to colleagues by pinging them a screenshot. Need to collaborate before signing-off on on-site changes? Heatmaps are for you.

 2. The Missing Links

As powerful as some analytics tools like Google Analytics are, they have their limitations. Unless someone clicks on a link or button on a page, they won't register any other activities. Heatmaps can tell you if people click things that aren’t links. Do you have a big picture on a page that people keep clicking, but it isn't linked? Make it a link. Are people clicking things that look like buttons but aren’t? Change them.

 3. The Dead Zones

Another factor that becomes obvious when you look at heatmaps are dead zones. If you look at a page and see blue areas or areas with no hot clicks at all, then ask yourself: Is this a waste of space? Maybe you can trim down the content in that area. Is whatever’s there useful? Is there anything there at all? Can you restructure your page to make better use of space? You may be surprised to see what people don’t need.

 4. Product Pages

General Analytics tools can be great at showing you what links people click on. If you have a bunch of products for sale on your site, you can see which ones are popular very easily by checking their click-through rates. However, you won’t clearly see how their positioning on a page might be affecting sales. Are you seeing people skewing towards products displayed in a certain location, regardless of the products shown? Some simple A/B tests can determine if there is an in-page bias.

 5. Analytics Incorporated

One important thing to remember is that there are heatmap tools that incorporate Analytics functions! If you’re interested in seeing the general user information you get in Google Analytics, like visitor demographics, visit durations, how they found your site, where they entered etc. you can get all that in a tool like Ptengine. This will suit many people who don’t want to get bogged down in the complexity of Google Analytics - or want to keep things simple with just one tool.

In the image below you can see a heat map being used on a famous car manufacturer’s site.

The image on the right shows the confusion of visitors who believe that the red and white panels on the right are clickable. They are actually just a stylized part of the company’s standard policy for customers. You can see how, when these panels are being clicked, few people fill in the form on the left.

However, once this was identified, the company re-contextualized the page, instructing people to fill in the form on the left. The results greatly improved, as did the amount of leads they acquired.

So, those are some of the key advantages of heatmaps, but with a bit of time playing around with one, you will no doubt find more. Do you use heatmaps already? What do you think?

 

At this point, there’s no debating that being data-driven results in improved sales performance. Research shows that 57% of high-performing sales teams rely on analytics, compared to just 16% of underperforming teams. However, there is still serious room to improve, even for these data savvy teams.

When considering valuable sales data, most people think of major pieces of information, like deal value or contact title. Of course, this data is extremely important. But what most companies don’t realize is that there are many smaller data fragments slipping through the cracks, which can also provide lucrative insight.

The Problem with Legacy CRM

Outside of issues like low CRM adoption, one of the main reasons why these valuable sales data fragments get lost in the shuffle is because of data collection and storage practices of CRM vendors like Salesforce.

Rather than providing customers with a continuous data log, these vendors place the burden of capturing historical data on the user, who is expected to take snapshots and store this information in a big data warehouse. Actually using this data and extracting any insights from it is typically very time-intensive and expensive, so most sales orgs simply don’t bother.

In addition, as legacy CRM vendors fill the gaps in their platforms with acquisitions and integrations, reps are required to use a growing number of tools to do their jobs on a daily basis. As these users move back and forth between these disparate solutions, valuable data gets lost in translation.

The Silent Signals of Sales

So what are these forgotten fragments of sales data, and how can they add value to your sales strategy and performance? One way to think of them is as “silent signals,” because while these data points are not items that reps would actively capture, such as entering a loss reason or logging a call, next-generation sales platforms capture these pieces of information silently in the background, making them available for analysis.

Stage Change Velocity

One example of a “silent sales signal” is stage change velocity, or how quickly deals progress through each stage of your sales pipeline. While this information may not seem like much at first, it can actually tell you a lot about the effectiveness of your sales process; for example, if deals are consistently spending long periods of time in a particular stage, this indicates a hang up in your sales process that should be addressed. What’s more, this information can also improve forecasting accuracy by determining win likelihood based on stage duration. Good CRMs will not only capture this data, but will automatically turn it into something that is usable for the sales team, like the below stage duration report.

Skipped Pipeline Stages

In addition to knowing the stage-by-stage progression of deals, visibility into whether reps are skipping sales pipeline stages altogether can also be extremely valuable. Of course, this means that they are also bypassing critical sales process steps, and failing to capture the important information associated with these steps. This could be because they are not using your CRM on a consistent basis, or it could mean that they do not see the value in these particular steps. Either way, it warrants an analysis and conversation with your team!

Time to First Action

While essentially all sales platforms enable reps to log calls (or even better, automatically call and record them), knowing the amount of time that passed prior to reps reaching out to leads for the first time is almost just as important. Not only does this information allow managers to coach reps, but it also enables them to identify the ideal lead-to-outreach timeframe for optimal response rates.

Stop Missing Out

These are just a few of the critical “silent signals” that are slipping through the cracks of your sales platform. It may be time to ask your CRM vendor about their data capture and storage policies to see what you could be missing. For example, 60% of Base customers who were previously using Salesforce capture 50%+ more data with Base. What’s more, 37% say that the quality and accuracy of their data has increased by more than 75%.

For more advice on how to make sure that you are taking full advantage of all your sales data, download this free eBook: Shedding Light on Dark Data: How to Unearth Actionable Sales Insights.

Make no mistake about it. We live in a world where the “the platform platform economy” isn’t just disruptive, it’s killing long-lasting and successful business models. Amazon shook up the retail industry, Napster and iTunes decimated the music industry, Uber and Airbnb are radically changing the transportation, hotel and travel industries.

But, what exactly is the “the platform economy” and how is it impacting businesses?

The Rise of the Platform Economy

MIT Professor Michael Cusumano offers a pretty clean definition:

“A platform or complement strategy differs from a product strategy in that it requires an external ecosystem to generate complementary product or service innovations and build positive feedback between the complements and the platform.

“The effect is much greater potential for innovation and growth than a single product-oriented firm can generate alone.”

Extremely simplified, a platform business serves as a connector between interdependent people and the product or service they are seeking. It’s like saying, “to be in that business you have to know someone.” A platform is the someone.

To get that paper written, you need the software on the computer along with the technologies and processes that were developed in order for you to get that white paper written and published.

The whole software, tech, processes and everything else that goes with it is the platform that allows you to do your paper. It is the medium that facilitates for you in order for you and others to connect together.

Because of this, platforms are linked to the concept of network effects – where the more products or services it offers, the more users it will attract.

There are four major types of platforms:

• Innovation platforms where developers offer complementary products and services. Think of the offerings from companies like Windows, Oracle, and Salesforce.
• Transaction platforms assist individuals and institutions to find each other, such as Amazon, Airbnb, Uber.
• Integration platforms is a technology, product, or service that is a transaction platform and an innovation platform, like the Apple Store.
• Investment platforms have developed a platform portfolio strategy and act as a holding company, Priceland and OpenTable are examples.

Regardless the specific platform they all share these four common traits:

• Connects workers or sellers directly to customers.
• Allows people to work when they want.
• Sellers are paid for a single task or good at a time.
• Payment passes through the platform.

While the “platform economy” has skyrocketed over the last decade, it’s not a new concept.

Old Model, New Concept for Payments Businesses

Back in 1957 Walt Disney diagrammed a brilliant strategy. He showed how his studio would eventually produce characters and stories that would fuel (and be fueled by) a web of businesses. The businesses would range within the larger scope of television, music, theme parks, publishing, and merchandise.

In 1964, IBM’s System 360 family of mainframes featured a common hardware architecture and operating system. This allowed customers to upgrade the systems without having to rewrite their applications. This was followed by the Wintel platform in the 80’s and the internet boom of the 90’s.

Today, this is explained in The Rise of the Platform Enterprise: A Global Survey. Led by Peter Evans and Annabelle Gawer, they’ve said, “Enterprises that leverage the power of platform business models have grown dramatically in size and scale over the past decade.

No longer the sole domain of social media, travel, books or music, platform business models have made inroads into transportation, banking and even healthcare and energy.”

The authors added that, “Platforms are now active in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. Some platforms are household names such as Amazon, Apple, Google and Alibaba.”

Accenture found that the top 15 public platform companies already represent in impressive $2.6 trillion in market capitalization worldwide.”

IDC predicts that by 2018 over 50% of large enterprises – and more than 80% of enterprises with advanced digital transformation strategies – will either create and/or team-up with industry platforms.

How the Platform Economy Has Disrupted the World

Despite the fact that platforms have been in existence for decades, the modern platform economy has completely changed the game.

“Work is being reformatted,” write professors Martin Kenney and John Zysman. “For many, traditional employment – a single organization providing long-term engagement, usually with some form of social benefits — is giving way to gig and contract arrangements.”

Kenney and Zysman add, “business strategies shape job quality. Even in low-margin, low-price business there are ‘better’ job strategies that can provide workers higher wages and benefits. These will contribute to a strengthened competitive position for the firm. In the aggregate, the shifting place and character of entrepreneurship and the reorganization of work may powerfully alter the distribution of wealth and income in societies.”

The Gig Economy

It is projected that the gig economy is going to rise by 43% by 2020.

Additionally, “Global network infrastructure now allows for much larger scale aggregation, no longer dependent on physical exchange,” says Sangeet Choudary, author of Platform Revolution.

“Markets and other forms of virtual value creation are more dynamic and open than before, and increasingly self-governing. These are no longer controlled by contracts or central enforcement.

Value itself is more democratized. Consumers can be producers and vice versa: you can become an Airbnb provider, but also use the service for yourself when you travel.

Payment Platform Data

Finally, the explosion of data, and its use by platform businesses to keep high attention on learning (AI) is perhaps most significant.

Uber, for example, is not just matching rides to travelers, but increasingly predicting and even structuring demand by algorithms that rebalance supply of available cars.

Business models are bigger, more virtual, more dynamic, and more intelligent than ‘platforms’ of the past.”

Unlike traditional business models, the value of platforms are derived from creating scalable, complementary kinds of connections. These include growing markets, ecosystems, and communities.

There’s also more of an emphasis on brand. The end-to-end experience is increasingly important. Attention to the new leadership skills that don’t focus merely on cost, but the best way to create value and overall experience.

Thriving in the Platform Economy

In order to succeed in the platform economy, you first need to think about your strategy and innovation within your organization.

Nicholas D. Evans, author of Mastering Digital Business, suggests that you ask the following questions regarding strategy:

• What percentage of investment should go into ecosystem business models?
• What types of ecosystems should be considered?
• When should an organization choose a hub vs. spoke strategy?
• What is an appropriate pricing strategy which will spur growth of the ecosystem or platform?
• Should an organization hedge its bets by playing within competing ecosystems?
• What sustainable competitive advantage and differentiation can be gained from an ecosystem model versus a traditional value-chain oriented business model?

As for innovation, Evans recommends you follow these five rules:

• Incorporate ecosystems into market and competitive research.
• Take an ecosystem view of the customer experience to enable cross-industry thinking.
• Support and foster intra-ecosystem innovation to move beyond traditional R&D.
• Build the capability to dynamically pull in new partners for co-innovation, beyond your traditional set of business partners.
• Incorporate ecosystem metrics into your innovation dashboard.

Presentation anxiety is one of the major causes of the incredible fail rate of so many business presentations. You may consider yourself a failure if:

Your audience didn’t get it.

You were a nervous wreck.

They were bored.

They forgot most of what you said by the time they got back to their desk.

When that happens, the Mindful Presenter at least has the courage to carry out a full post mortem. In other words, they don’t just put it down to experience. Instead they work out exactly what went wrong and why.

That’s all well and good although the ‘horse has well and truly bolted.’ The experienced Mindful Presenter doesn’t leave this to chance; they don’t wait for the post mortem.

Instead, they carry out a pre-mortem long before they stand to speak. A pre-mortem in any presentation begins at the moment we are called on to present rather than when it’s all over.

The pre-mortem works on the basis that the presentation has already failed so we find out what went wrong before we even sit down to craft it. That in itself sounds more anxiety provoking than just living in hope that all will go well. The reality is it’s a key part of the solution to reducing how nervous we actually feel on the run up to our presentation and the moment we stand to deliver.

I unintentionally upset one of our delegates in a recent presentation skills workshop. On asking everyone to write down and share what they perceived to be their bad habits, this lady who was particularly anxious said; ‘I don’t prepare.’

I responded by expressing my view that what she described wasn’t a bad habit. At this point she smiled, although it was short lived when I told her I regarded that mind-set as more of a bad attitude than a bad habit.

Failing to prepare is simply waiting for the post-mortem. My point was that if she was happy to wait for the post mortem then that must relate to attitude rather than habit.

The pre-mortem allows us to anticipate everything that could possibly go wrong. It’s a means of substantially managing our level of anxiety through anticipating and preparing for everything that could happen.

It works under the premise that you prepare for the worst and expect the best.

The Pre-mortem

It starts with a few very important questions:

What’s so important that I can’t just send these people an email?

Who are they really?

How much do they know?

What do they need?

Why should they care about what I have to say?

What difference will what I have to say make to their personal or professional lives?

What’s my message?

You can be certain that if you can’t answer each of these questions with absolute clarity your presentation will fail and you will be asking them during the post-mortem.

Rather than waiting to ask yourself, “What happened?” a pre-mortem enables you to anticipate all of the issues that can cause you to be so anxious and uncertain. That awareness allows us to formulate a plan to navigate around them.

So what did happen?

1. You weren’t clear on your message

Every presenter believes they have a clear and compelling message to share, yet many audiences have to work really hard to understand exactly what that message is. When you ask the confident presenter what their message is you will often hear a prolonged explanation ending in you wishing you had never asked. We live in a world of social media where the whole world is tweeting. For others to understand your 140 characters you have to think long and hard about the point you are trying to make and why people should care.

The pre-mortem presentation begins with a message that is concise, compelling and transparent. It has to be mindfully crafted to ensure a level of clarity, purpose and impact that your audience will understand immediately.

2. You didn’t have a strategy

Far too many professionals focus on content, content, content when crafting a presentation. In other words, in an attempt to show their audience how much they know, how clever they are and how hard they work they ‘give them everything they’ve got’. If you don’t have a clear strategy it’s inevitable that you will feel unduly anxious because you are making your presentation about you rather than your audience. Once the mindful presenter is clear on their message they then turn their undivided attention to its purpose.

Our purpose revolves around two crucial elements.

• What do we want our audience to do with the knowledge, information, data or insights we are presenting?
• To substantially increase the likelihood of them doing what we want them to do, what is it we want them to feel?

You can have the most clear, concise and compelling message on the planet but if you are not clear on what you want your audience to feel and ultimately do with it you will be anxious.

3. You opened your laptop first

Whilst we have the greatest respect and admiration for technology we are very clear that when it comes to presenting, the last thing you should open is your laptop. Doing so serves little purpose other than to stifle free thinking and creativity. Inevitably it results in us producing a presentation that everyone has seen before.

Instead of pulling out the all familiar templates, take a moment to think about your message and purpose and how both could be presented in a way that stands out from the crowd. My personal favourite is using post it notes as a starting point to brainstorm and support everything I can think of to serve my purpose and animate my message.

4. You made it about you.

No one cares who you are, how many offices you have or how many insurance policies you sell. They don’t care about your title, how many letters you have after your name and they certainly don’t care whether you are nervous.

All they care about is whether you respect and value their time by telling them something you couldn’t have just sent in an email or ‘Googled’ for themselves.

Don’t tell them how nervous you are or how little time you have had to prepare. Tell them only what matters to them.

5. You didn’t practice effectively

Far too many professionals believe that practicing their presentation means that they simply have to read it to themselves a few times. Practicing takes time, mindfulness and effort. The mindful presenter will practice their presentation in 3 ways:

• They know their key message, purpose and content well. That doesn’t mean that they memorise everything they have to say they just know with clarity, conviction and passion what their point is.

• They practice the way they share and express their content verbally. They consider and practice every aspect of the way they express themselves in terms of energy, volume, pitch, pace, intonation, contrast and pauses.

• They practice their non-verbal expression. In other words, how do they stand, look, make eye contact, move and even smile.

6. You didn’t ask ‘so what?’

Everything you say, everything you show and everything you do should be preceded by you asking yourself the all-important question ‘so what?’

In other words, imagine that for everything you say, everything you show and everything you do your audience asks you ‘so what, why should I care’.

If you don’t have a good answer to all of these questions you should be nervous.

7. You didn’t know the answer

One of the major issues we are asked to help people with in our presentation skills workshops is answering questions they don’t know the answer to whilst retaining their credibility.

There is no silver bullet or magic wand to deal with this issue effectively although the pre-mortem technique is to create your own ‘War room’.

That means anticipating in advance every conceivable question you may be asked. It means finding the appropriate knowledge, authority or expertise to help you to identify those ‘killer’ questions.

8. You didn’t take care of yourself

You’ve spent an inordinate amount of time crafting, preparing and practicing your presentation. Now it’s time to look after number 1.

Before you stand to speak you owe it to yourself to take good care of yourself physically, mentally and emotionally.

• Exercise
• Breathe
• Meditate
• Visualise

Your job is to do whatever it takes for you personally to look after yourself and put yourself in the peak position required to enable you to speak with impact.

The following TED Talk by Daniel Levitin explains the concept of pre-mortem thinking further.

 

Is May 25, 2018 a big day in your life?

It certainly will be if you are an email marketer who does business in the European Union. And that’s even if you are based in the United States. It’s the date that the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect.

It’s a very big deal.

GDPR is the most significant change in data privacy regulation in the EU in 20 years, and it has global implications.

“This regulation will apply to all companies selling to and storing personal information about citizens in Europe, including companies on other continents,” writes Jennifer Lund at SuperOffice.

“It provides citizens of the EU and European Economic Area with greater control over their personal data and assurances that their information is being securely protected across Europe. If your business offers goods and/or services to citizens in the EU, then it’s subject to GDPR.”

“Many people might think that the GDPR is just an IT issue, but that is the furthest from the truth,” Lund adds. “It has broad-sweeping implications for the whole company, including the way companies handle marketing and sales activities.”

Todd Ruback at eMarketer says implementation of GDPR is part of strategic effort to spark EU tech growth.

“This is one step in the larger pan-European strategy called the Digital Single Market [DSM],” he writes. “They’re trying to create conditions within the EU to spawn the next Facebook or Google—essentially an EU tech company.”

The new regulation’s impact will be sweeping

“The EU GDPR will impact the lives of more than 500 million people in 28 countries and will attempt to provide consumers the improved privacy and protection they’ve been demanding without stifling a business’ ability to innovate and market itself,” writes Kevin Lynch at Instapage. He adds that the coming regulation will have “a profound effect on business, regardless of the size of an organization. Facebook, Alphabet, Apple, and possibly you, will have to adhere to the wishes of the consumer and guarantee that they have ultimate control over how they want their data used.”

Penalties for not complying with the new rules will be stiff. According to Lynch, authorities “will have the power to fine anyone in violation of the GDPR. Fines can go up to four percent of annual global sales or €20 million (US$21.1M) — whichever is higher.”

It’s worth noting that Britain has indicated that GDPR will be enforced in that country, despite its pending exit from the EU.

Preparing for GDPR

“The GDPR guidelines will mean you will need to review both how you capture and how you process user data,” writes Alan Ilhan at Email on Acid, who shares eight steps he’s tailored specifically for non-UK marketers to help ensure compliance on Day One.

–Awareness – Make sure decision makers and key people in your organization are aware that the law is changing to the GDPR.
–Information you hold – You should document what personal data you hold, where it came from and who you share it with.
–Communicating privacy information – You should review your current privacy notices and put a plan in place for making any necessary changes.
–Individuals’ rights – You should check your procedures to ensure they cover all the rights individuals have, including how you would delete personal data or provide data electronically.
–Subject access requests – You should update your procedures and plan how you will handle requests within the new timescales.
–Lawful basis for processing personal data – You should identify the lawful basis for your processing activity in the GDPR, document it and update your privacy notice.
–Consent – You should review how you seek, record and manage consent and whether you need to make any changes. Refresh existing consents now if they don’t meet the GDPR standard.
–Data breaches – You should make sure you have the right procedures in place to detect, report and investigate a personal data breach.

It may be natural for marketers to view GDPR as burdensome; however, Lund sees an upside.

“While GDPR does create challenges and pain for us as businesses, it also creates opportunity,” she writes. “Companies who show they value an individual’s privacy (beyond mere legal compliance), who are transparent about how the data is used, who design and implement new and improved ways of managing customer data throughout its life cycle, build deeper trust and retain more loyal customers.”

GDPR resources

In addition to the resources linked to above, these resources can help marketers understand and prepare for GDPR:

GDPR Portal – The “official” GDPR website

GDPR:Report – “How marketers can take action on GDPR today”

The Direct Marketing Association – “What U.S. marketers must know and must do about GDPR”

Econsultancy – “How should non-EU businesses prepare for the GDPR?”

Conservatives are those companies who have achieved high investment but low innovation in social care. There are a number of reasons why companies might end up here but most often it’s due to legacy systems, internal bureaucracy, and a lack of executive awareness or interest in social care. While these brands have the capacity to invest heavily in social care tools and to deploy specialized teams of agents, they’re unable to make the best use of them. This category often includes large companies in regulated environments, such as Finance and Insurance.

Let’s look more closely at the characteristics of socially Conservative brands.

How Conservatives can benefit from becoming more socially maturity:

• A happier more motivated team of social care agents
• Decrease public venting by adopting private messaging channels
• Impact the bottom line by diverting care issues from traditional channels to social

Here’s the Social Maturity Index once more:

The characteristics of Socially Conservative Brands:

1. Restricted agents

Conservative organizations typically have many layers of process management which can restrict their agents from providing effective social service. Even if armed with the correct tools, their templated responses can ring hollow and customers will grate under their unwillingness to innovate and help them find resolution. It also, more often than not, leads to the customer being diverted to a traditional channel to seek full issue resolution. Not great for the consumer or the business, especially when McKinsey found that customers who start and end their service journey on social have a satisfaction rate 15 percentage points higher than those that are deflected to traditional from social channels.

2. Risk-averse policy and formal personality

Large organizations are typically more risk averse and thus disinclined to provide the type of personalized social media engagement that their customers crave. Legalese and technical language creep into Conservative support team parlance and agents have a difficult time breaking out of their formal personalities. Yet, break out they must, for consumers expect brands to show some personality on social. Good social service is emphatic, whilst still remaining efficient in resolving the customer’s issue. Less is often more, but the tone in which you say it is important.

3. Legacy technology

At Conservative brands, marketing teams often still control social media tools. Where they own these tools, they’re often shackled by legacy systems that require complex integrations which are owned by many business units and operated and budgeted by IT organizations. At telecommunications companies, for example, there can be many different CRM systems for various wired and wireless product lines; at financial services companies like banks, information security requirements may weigh down the speed of resolution.

How can Conservatives advance to full #SocialFirst leadership?

They key for Conservative care teams is to secure executive interest in social care solutions. It’s with top-down support that they’ll be able to clear out layers of bureaucracy and successfully partner with other business units to define their holistic social care approach.

Find executive sponsorship and innovate

Social maturity within Conservative organizations requires a mindset shift which opens the doors to innovation. Teams, managers, and tools must undergo reorganization to make social care faster and filled with personality, and it takes executive sponsorship to effect this change. Those executives will need to align with their peers to rewrite rules to allow restricted agents to offer customers more creative, personable, and social-friendly resolutions, and to partition social care agents off into a dedicated team.

Create a social care playbook and track performance

This is one case where process can be used to fight process. Unshackle social care agents from their formal personalities with a social care playbook written in tandem with the Marketing and PR teams. This document should identify a clear brand personality, outline the nuances of different social media platforms, and define terms like ‘resolution’ as well as various social-focused key-performance-indicators (KPIs). These KPIs are key to building a case for the ROI of social care.

Invest more heavily in integrations

Social care is measured in minutes, not hours and agents can’t wait for laggy, back-end systems. Invest more heavily in a social care solution with a robust API that can integrate with many different systems in real time. Authenticating customers in-channel is a step in the right direction to solving channel deflection. At Conversocial this capability is called Social Bind. Social Bind offers a way to authenticate customers through private social channels without ever having the customer’s PII (Personally Identifiable Information) pass through the social network.

Conservative organizations can ascend to #SocialFirst leadership if they can eliminate internal barriers to innovation. This means finding sponsorship from executives who understand the value of social care, by defining new brand guidelines and metrics to measure success on social care, and by pushing through the necessary technology hurdles to make the social care system work at scale.

Conservatives who make it through this gauntlet will find themselves among the Contenders in social maturity, but the journey doesn’t end there—Leaders face their own, unique set of hurdles.

For many content marketers, social media strategy never gets beyond the spray-and-pray process of sharing a new piece of content with the widest audience possible, and then measuring if anybody engaged with it. It’s based on an idea that if you just keep creating new content and pushing it out, results will come.

But, as Jonathan Crossfield puts it, “In social media, the audience pulls the strings.”

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In #socialmedia, the audience pulls the strings, says @kimota.
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As content marketers, we must take a step back. Just as we put time into creating a content marketing strategy, so too do we need to create a social media strategy specifically tailored to our content goals. And this begins with establishing the right social media KPIs (key performance indicators) for those content goals.

After all, if our social media strategy is built around intuition rather than KPIs, it’s unlikely to serve our content well.

Social media strategist Jeremy Goldman knows a thing or two about this. He’s the author of Going Social and Getting to Like, and he’s the founder of Firebrand Group, a brand management consulting firm that counts L’Oréal and Unilever among its many clients.

CCO: Going Social was published four years ago, and yet still contains lessons for today’s social media strategists. What are the most significant changes since then?

Goldman: When Going Social was about to come out, I was freaking out for the reason you just stated … social media moves so fast. How do you write a book like that without it immediately becoming outdated? I realized I had to avoid writing about the mechanics of how you respond to comments on Facebook or how you participate in a Twitter chat since those could easily change at any moment. Instead, I focused on how social media is based on the principles of communication that have predated social media by a few millennia.

As for the most significant changes? That’s easy. Social media is pay for play, and good luck running any meaningful strategy purely around organic reach. When I wrote Going Social, mid-sized businesses could actually find ways to get creative and win at social media without a paid media budget. Oh, how times have changed.

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Good luck running any meaningful #socialmedia strategy purely around organic reach, says @jeremarketer.
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CCO: In the context of content marketing, how do you wade through the seemingly infinite social media metrics to get to the social media KPIs?

Goldman: First, it’s completely normal to get metrics and KPIs mixed up to some extent. In fact, I’ve seen people at even senior levels flub this. Metrics are simply measurements quantified. KPIs are metrics that you’ve determined are mission critical to your business.

You touch on something very important here: These days we can measure more than ever before. However, that isn’t necessarily a good thing in that it causes some organizations to lose focus. Just because we have more metrics doesn’t mean we need more KPIs.

The more KPIs your organization has defined, the less focused it likely is. I had one company boasting that it was determined to go from four KPIs to 16 KPIs in the next fiscal year. Is that always a good thing or does that dilute the value of a KPI?

CCO: Speak to the newly minted content marketing manager. What are the first steps they need to take to figure out the best social media KPIs for their content marketing goals?

Goldman: That’s going to depend on the organization and the scope of the particular role, so the first thing is to figure out how to be of greatest value to the organization in general. If the best thing is to get eyeballs on the company’s latest white paper, the best KPIs may be visits to the lead-gen form connected to the white paper, and the total number of white paper downloads – simple as that.

CCO: What are typically the most important social media KPIs for content marketing, and how do you create a sustainable, team-oriented process for driving toward them?

Goldman: Again, it’s going to depend on the organization, but I think sales leads is probably the number one KPI for content marketing. If you’re not making any sales, it’s hard to keep the lights on, and it’s hard to write good content without any lights. Tied to that, customers coming from those leads are a powerful KPI, not to mention traffic on specific pieces of content.

I like that you ask how to have a team-oriented process because that’s something not enough people touch on. It’s important to have the entire team pushing in the right direction. Every team member must understand not just team KPIs but what role each member of the group needs to play to reach them. You can’t all be rowing in different directions. I see that happen all too often.

CCO: You’ve helped both scrappy start-ups and massive transnational companies establish their social media KPIs. What themes run through each, and what can content marketers, regardless of the size of their company, learn from them?

Goldman: Small companies and large enterprises have far more in common than you’d think. The biggest parallel is a desire to run before figuring out what path they should be taking. We live in a society that rather harshly judges anyone who takes a second to breathe. If you’re not doing, you must be a slacker, right? But the reality is that setting KPIs and then revisiting those KPIs on a regular basis are beyond critical, and both start-ups and monolithic enterprises don’t do it often enough.

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Setting KPI’s and then revisiting those KPIs on a regular basis are beyond critical, says @jeremarketer.
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CCO: Can you offer some tips on establishing the best social media KPIs for your content marketing goals?

Goldman: Understand your brand. Your organization presumably has a mission statement – a reason for being. It may sound like a lofty place to start, but you can’t succeed without an understanding of the firm and where it’s looking to go.

Determine your own role. Make sure you know what your role is in the company. You would be surprised at how many content marketing managers are spending their time in slightly different areas than their managers would like.

Survey your metrics. Look at all the metrics your organization is tracking. Don’t assume everything is important. Likewise, don’t assume a seemingly valueless metric can’t be immensely helpful.

Determine your KPIs. Break down your list of metrics and pick a few you’re determined to work night and day to measure your success by. Make sure you’re not picking too many – no more than six and, in some cases, fewer will do.

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Determine your KPIs. No more than six and, in some cases, fewer will do, says @jeremarketer.
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Refine on an ongoing basis. There’s a chance you may have picked the wrong KPIs, your role may have changed, or your organization is heading in a new direction. No matter which one occurs, reviewing your KPIs on a regular basis lets you course correct and select new ones.

A version of this article originally appeared in the August issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our bimonthly, print magazine.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How to Establish the Best Social Media KPIs for Your Content Marketing Goals appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Predictive analytics is probably the hottest thing in marketing analytics right now. Predictive analytics go beyond describing consumer behavior to predicting how consumers will behave in the future based on data.

If you’ve never heard of it, don’t feel bad–marketing lags behind many other business disciplines in using data to drive decision-making. In fact, marketing still struggles with descriptive statistics, which merely describe behaviors, such as visits, ad responses, etc.

Marketers shouldn’t feel bad about their reliance on squishy analytics, such as increased awareness. In the past, marketers just didn’t have access to data, which was locked in the minds and hearts of consumers. Gaining access to this data was very expensive and time-consuming, forcing marketing managers to use less accurate and nuanced data such as customer demographics and point of sale data, according to this infographic by Absolutdata and alteryx.

But, with digital marketing, marketing managers now have access to a plethora of valuable data and many struggle with how to use it although that access might be restricted to data analysts and they may lack the skills necessary to draw insights from the data.

So, today, I’d like to share some strategies for using predictive analytics, which, are exactly what they sound like. They predict behavior, rather than simply reporting on it.

What are predictive analytics?

We talk about 3 types of analytics:

1. Descriptive
2. Predictive
3. Prescriptive

Today, we’ll focus on predictive analytics, but if you’re interested in learning about the other 2 types of analytics and how they can help improve ROI, check out the links above.

Put simply, predictive analytics, as their name implies, try to predict the future, while descriptive analytics describe the past and prescriptive analytics help plan the best course of action (for instance, what are the best routes for buses in a major city).

Companies struggling to understand or implement descriptive analytics are now challenged to adopt this new form of analytics. A big part of the problem is data and the skills to analyze it are restricted to a limited number of data scientists who, often, lack the conceptual background to know what they’re looking for when it comes to predicting consumer behavior.

Benefits of predictive analytics

According to SPSS:

Organizations that incorporate predictive analytics into their daily operations in this way improve their business processes, enhancing decision making and gaining the ability to direct, optimize, and automate decisions, on demand, to meet defined business goals.

And, based on survey data, Forbes says:

A vast majority of executives who have been overseeing predictive marketing efforts for at least two years (86%) report increased return on investment (ROI) as a result of their predictive marketing.

Only 5% say they’ve not experienced an improvement in ROI or a decline in ROI from their efforts at predictive analytics.

Uses of predictive analytics in marketing

Arguably, predictive analytics support most enterprise activities, but I’m focused on marketing. Here are some uses for predictive analytics in marketing:

1. Segmentation

Segmentation involves separating a market into subgroups with similar attitudes, demographic, geographics, or behaviors. After segmenting your market, you position your product to appeal to the wants and needs of the chosen segment(s)–your target market.

Data aids in crafting your target segment(s) and determining the most effective positioning for each. Predictive analytics also helps to identify the most profitable segments based on historical consumer behavior within each segment.

Marketing managers use this data to allocate resources to reach the most profitable segments.

2. Forecasting

According to HBR, the biggest use of predictive analytics is in developing demand models that forecast sales and revenue–the starting point for budgeting.

3. Demand pricing

Demand pricing, often called yield management, involves pricing products based on differences in elasticity of demand between consumer groups. For instance, business travelers are willing to pay more for a seat on an airplane than casual travelers, so you can charge them more and reduce the price to casual travelers to make your flights more competitive and still meet ROI goals.

Using predictive analytics, firms conduct a series of experiments to determine factors affecting the impact of price on demand. Using these predictive models, firms develop optimum pricing strategies that maximize ROI.

4. Improve customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction greatly impacts retention and loyalty. It also improves other positive consumer behaviors, such as recommending the brand to others. Any improvement in customer satisfaction impacts ROI, potentially significant. That’s the entire basis for the rise of relationship marketing, where marketing shifts its focus to pleasing existing customers than attracting new ones. Data suggest that it’s 5X less expensive to keep an existing customer than replace that customer.

Using data from customer service calls, mentions on social media, etc offer insights into factors leading to poor customer satisfaction. Using predictive tools such as conjoint analysis allow firms to discover which product improvements generate the greatest improvement in customer satisfaction.

Challenges to implementing predictive analytics

Looking at the infographic, we see that 43% of those surveyed feel that gaining access to the data is the biggest problem affecting their ability to use the data. Much of the data is housed in numerous functional silos, units of the organization, or across country borders making it difficult to get a clear picture of how customers respond to marketing efforts. Another 39% of respondents report difficulties integrating data across various places where it is stored. Creating actionable insights from the data is reported with only 37% of respondents. My guess is that this number.

Creating actionable insights from the data is reported with only 37% of respondents. My guess is that this number is even larger, in reality, and a function of the old adage “you don’t know what you don’t know”. Using data mining techniques mindlessly doesn’t generate insights and may obfuscate true relationships hiding in the data. Instead, knowledge of consumer behavior should guide analysis by identifying variables likely to impact important behaviors.

And, this is the real difficulty. Marketers aren’t often trained in data analysis techniques and the colleges and universities firms count on to teach these skills shrink from the job because they fear losing students or getting poor evaluations from students who hate analytics and math. To mitigate this problem, firms sometimes hire engineers who possess sufficient analytical skills, not realizing the true impact of their lack of knowledge about marketing concepts.

Solutions

An obvious solution is to improve the analytical skills of marketers either by paying to train marketers or by hiring marketers with analytics training (which is easier said than done according to the infographic above showing 57% of firms have trouble hiring employees with analytical skills).

Alternatively, firms can buy software solutions that don’t require high-level analytical skills, such as those produced by the authors of the infographic.

That still leaves the issue of data spread all over the organization. Solving this problem requires firms develop comprehensive data collection and storage plans that ease integration across different units. Combining data from different databases requires a key to link the data together as well as skills such as SQL to manage the integration. Again, software exists that allows firms to integrate with little technical knowledge.

Single channel prospecting is a thing of the past.

Here’s why. The fastest growing companies depend on multiple channels to boost connection rates. In 2016, TOPO’s Sales Development benchmark report revealed that 80% of high growth sales teams were using the triple touch method — sending an email, leaving a voicemail, and a LinkedIn InMail within minutes of each other.

But in a sea of emails, phone calls, and LinkedIn messages, it can be hard to stand out to your prospects. That’s why many sales organizations are expanding their campaigns with additional channels like video and direct mail. The increased popularity of these channels is quickly bringing the five touch prospecting method into being.

So with five touch types to incorporate into your sales process, what’s your best course of action? Let’s dive into how to build your campaigns around the five-touch method.

1. Email as the Campaign Foundation

Email still reigns as the most effective and efficient way to reach out to prospects. It’s the easiest way to provide valuable content to your prospect that triggers them to respond, making email an incredibly powerful channel within your sales campaigns.

Due to its robust nature, your email should be the cornerstone of your five-touch campaign. Your email’s primary purpose is to provide your prospect with information about your company, product, and industry. But your email can also support the other channels you use within your campaign. They will be the adhesive that keeps your entire campaign together.

When building out your cadence, schedule out your content-centric email templates three to five days apart (depending on your sales cycle). Then, plan additional email touches around the alternative channels that are in your cadence. If you connect with someone on LinkedIn, reference their profile in the next email you send. Follow a voicemail with an email that sums up the purpose for your call, and prompts the prospect to respond.

2. Calls to Boost Conversions

Getting a prospect on the phone is the best way to have an authentic, two-way conversation. The struggle most sales reps experience with calling prospects isn’t really about the conversation that takes place but making the connection in the first place. Some people even claim that the cold call is “dead” due to lack of connection rates.

But by incorporating call steps into a multi-channel cadence, the additional channels revitalize your call’s capabilities and increase overall conversion rates. Organizations that hit prospects with the combination of a voicemail immediately followed by an email have reported a 10% increase in email conversions.

To get the most out of your call steps within your cadence, always leave voicemails. Engagement platforms like SalesLoft allow you to pre-record voicemail messages and drop them into calls when you don’t connect. Even if you don’t get in touch with the prospect, your message is out there, and you will follow it with an email. Later in your cadence, if the other channels have not provoked a response, set some time to war dial — an hour devoted to calls without voicemails aiming for connections.

3. Social Touch for Greater Awareness

As a standalone channel, social would fail miserably. The power of LinkedIn and social media in general stems from the ability to generate further awareness of your company and product. TOPO reported that one company reported zero responses to LinkedIn InMail messages, but then experienced a 30% increase in connection rates when they added a LinkedIn touch to their campaign.

Within a SalesLoft cadence, social touches fall under “other” steps. This means that they take place outside of your standard actions, like emails and phone calls, but they are still an important step in your process. By incorporating social touches as a defined step within your cadence, you can log the activity that occurred (e.g., connected on LinkedIn). Then keep track of email response rates that follow your social touch to analyze increased awareness.

4. Video for Face Value

Prospects receive emails and are blown up by phone calls every day. But a personalized video adds a human touch and creative element to your standard process. Since technology has made it so simple to share videos, the personalized video is well on it’s way to becoming a common touch within campaigns.

With SalesLoft, you can incorporate videos directly into your cadences with our Vidyard integration which makes it super easy to send personalized videos at scale. One best practice tip is to send a video with you holding up a whiteboard with the prospect’s name on it. Bring a lot of energy to the video as you discuss your product and call the prospect to further action. The next day email your prospect and ask them, “What did you think of the video?” If the video alone didn’t prompt a response, your persistence to leverage the second channel should encourage the prospect to interact.

5. Direct Mail, the Endearing Touch

The last channel to use within your five-touch campaign isn’t new at all. Yes, that’s right, snail mail is making a comeback. Sending prospects a letter or a tangible item in the mail delivers an exciting element to your campaign. Direct mail takes your campaign away from the prospect’s desk, keeping you and your product at the top of their mind throughout the day. Plus, let’s be honest, it’s really awesome to get something in the mail that’s not a bill.

While you can send a personalized note at any point in your sales process, kicking off a cadence with a direct mail send is the most effective use of this channel. A prospect who receives an item — whether it’s a baked good, relevant book, or branded swag — will be very quick to remember you when you start to email, call, or connect with them throughout the sales journey.

The phrase “strength in numbers” rings true even when it comes to your prospecting methods. By combining these five channels throughout your cadence, you deliver a more personalized and valuable buyer experience that will have your prospect jumping at the sale.

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The post The 5 Prospecting Channels Your Sales Process Needs appeared first on SalesLoft.

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

So begins J.D. Salinger’s iconic novel, Catcher in the Rye, arguably one of the finest opening sentences of any American novel ever written.

I’m not here to talk Salinger or the writing life or the greats of 20th century American literature. This is a marketing blog, not a book club.

I am, however, going to talk about introductions, and how to write them well.

We hear a great deal of talk about the importance of headlines, but much less is said about the value of a great introduction. Sure, you need a tempting headline to catch your reader’s eye, but without a strong, compelling introduction, the best headline ever written won’t save you.

In this post, we’ll take a look at five of the many different ways you can open a blog post, article, interview, white paper – pretty much anything with words. This is by no means a comprehensive or definitive list; there are almost as many ways to introduce your writing as there are ways to write. There are, however, some general techniques that lend themselves well to marketing copy that can be extraordinarily effective.

Introduction #1: The Quote

I chose to open this post with a quote not because I’m a fan of Catcher in the Rye. Truth be told, I’m not the biggest Catcher fan (despite my personal appreciation for Salinger’s immense literary talent and commitment to being a hardcore recluse).

True dat. Image via XXY Magazine.

The real reason I chose to open with that quote is because introductory quotes are a lazy but highly effective way of grabbing your reader’s attention without doing any real work – especially when the quote in question has a negative or otherwise memorable tone, as Salinger’s (or rather, his protagonist Holden Caulfield’s) does.

Before you’ve even read the quote in its entirety, you’re already wondering what was so lousy about the quoted individual’s life, or what “all that David Copperfield crap” really means and why the person being quoted doesn’t really feel like going into it.

Why Is This Type of Introduction So Effective?

Before we get into why this technique is so effective, it’s worth mentioning that opening with a quote only works well if the quote itself is interesting. There’s no point using a quote as your introduction if it’s something boring or predictable.

No kidding

Aside from the quote itself, which should ideally be as attention-grabbing as possible, the fact that quotation marks are used indicates – obviously – that a specific individual said those words. It may not sound like it, but this can be very enticing to the reader, encouraging them to read on to see who said it. This is especially true if the quote is controversial or contrarian.

Let’s say you’re writing a piece about the potential impact of artificial intelligence on human society. Sure, you could open with a bland, generic introduction about how AI and technology have revolutionized the world as we know it, but you could also let someone else do the talking for you.

“With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like – yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk in conversation at MIT’s AeroAstro Centennial Symposium in 2014.
Image viaMIT.

The quote above is one of many such memorable insights offered by technologist Elon Musk about the potentially existential threat posed by AI. Yes, it’s a little sensationalist – Musk certainly knows how to leverage provocative language to great effect – but it’s also a lot more interesting than most of the introductions I’ve read in articles on the topic. (Note that this particular quote was not used as an introduction in any piece I’ve found or read on the topic, and is used solely for illustrative purposes.)

It’s worth noting that this technique can be a little tricky or unorthodox within the context of established journalistic conventions. As anyone who’s ever worked with me as an editor could tell you, I’m a stickler for the correct attribution of quotes, which demands that, in most cases, the person being quoted should be identified after the first complete sentence. If we follow this convention (which we should, unless we have a very good reason not to), our example quote from Musk (with additions italicized) would read:

“With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon,” Elon Musk said during an interview at MIT’s AeroAstro Centennial Symposium in 2014. “In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like – yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out.”

Don’t mess around with artificial intelligence or arcane demonic rituals.
Image viaThreadless.

Unfortunately, if we (correctly) identify Elon Musk as the quoted individual after the first complete sentence, this introductory technique loses most, if not all, of its impact.

Notice how Salinger’s opening quote from Catcher in the Rye is a single sentence? This allowed me to include it without worrying about correctly attributing the quote as I would have if I’d used Musk’s quote as my intro. If in doubt, talk to your editor – they’ll thank you for it later.

Introduction #2: The Statistic or Fun Fact

Did you know that the first American movie to show a toilet being flushed on-screen was Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 psychological horror classic, Psycho?

TFW the water’s too hot

Everybody loves trivia, and even if you’re a hardcore Hitchcock fan, you might not have known the fun fact above.

This technique is another powerfully effective way to grab your reader’s attention from the outset. It’s also one of the most commonly used introductions in a lot of marketing writing. This makes sense; it establishes the general topic of the piece in a fun way and offers the reader something snappy and memorable.

However, the real reason using facts or statistics as an introduction works is because it pushes our emotional buttons.

Why Is This Type of Introduction So Effective?

When it comes to content, whether a 500-word blog post or a 4,000-word long-form journalistic feature, some emotional triggers are more effective than others. In particular, there’s a scientific principle known as the von Restorff effect (named for the German pediatrician Hedwig von Restorff who first wrote of the phenomena in the early 1930s) which states that people tend to remember unusual things much more effectively than routine, expected things.

How it feels reading bad articles

This is an extension of our natural survival instincts; our brains are wired to perceive strange or unusual things as potential threats, making them much more memorable as whatever strange thing we’re fixated on might kill us. It’s also why, if you don’t take much else away from this post, I can practically guarantee that you’ll remember the Psycho toilet-flushing fact, which you can and should use to impress your friends at your next get-together at the pub.

We use this technique a great deal, and not only in introductions. To this day, I still remember that you’re 475 times more likely to survive a plane crash than you are to click on a banner ad – a fact I first included in a post for the WordStream blog back in 2014. Admittedly, I had to look up the publication date of that post, but I didn’t need to double-check the statistic itself because it’s just that memorable.

Something to consider next time you despair about
your display conversion rates. Image viaNBC Los Angeles.

Take care, however, to select your facts and statistics carefully. In the banner ad example above, this stat isn’t just memorable because of the staggering odds against you clicking on a banner ad, but because it’s framed within the context of surviving a plane crash – a particularly striking hypothetical scenario, and one that aligns closely with the survival instincts I mentioned earlier. Merely tossing in a statistic about how many daily active users Facebook has, for example, will not have the same effect. Just as you should think carefully about the quotes you use in your introductions, choose your statistics with similar care.

Introduction #3: The Classical Narrative

In May of 1940, as war raged across Europe, a squad of infantrymen belonging to the famous Manchester Regiment encroached upon the village of l’Epinette in northern France.

Both German and Allied forces sought to capture the strategically located village, and the Manchester Regiment came under heavy fire from the Nazi soldiers. The squadron eventually managed to pin down the Nazis with suppressing fire, and as the German soldiers took cover behind the low wall of a farmhouse, one of the Germans cried out. His commanding officer glanced over at the dying soldier, believing him to be shot, only to see a long, feathered arrow protruding from the man’s chest.

The man, the legend, Captain “Mad Jack” Churchill.
Image viaDirk de Klein/History of Sorts.

The Nazi soldier had been killed by the improbably yet fantastically named John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill, also known as “Mad Captain Jack” Churchill, the only soldier known to have carried a longbow – and an authentic claymore sword – into battle during World War II. Churchill held a deep appreciation of his Scottish heritage, and when asked why he carried such a large, antiquated weapon into battle, Churchill respectfully replied that, in his opinion, “any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed.”

As much as I’d love to tell you more about Mad Jack Churchill – and unbelievably, there’s plenty more to tell – I used this tale as an example of how employing a classical narrative in your introductions can be extraordinarily powerful. Granted, this particular example as I’ve presented it isn’t technically a true narrative; it has a beginning (the approach of the Manchester Regiment upon l’Epinette) and rising action (Churchill killing a Nazi soldier with a bow and arrow), but it lacks a real ending. Still, hopefully you see what I’m getting at with this example.

Why Is This Type of Introduction So Effective?

Simply put, traditional stories work so well as introductions because, as human beings, we’re hardwired to respond to stories. Far from mere entertainment, stories served humanity for millennia as cautionary tales and a means of survival, and even today, with all our technology and knowledge, a good story told well is still one of the most gripping forms of entertainment we know.

Original artwork by Elena Stebakova

Just as a good novel draws you in from the outset and keeps you reading, using a traditional narrative as an introduction offers all of the same benefits to your piece. This technique allows you to introduce one or more characters – in our example, Mad Jack Churchill – before moving on to the dramatic rise that every good story has. This grabs the reader’s attention immediately, and if done well, can serve as an almost irresistible hook for the rest of the piece.

Introduction #4: The Question

If you had to, would you rather fight a single, horse-sized duck, or 100 duck-sized horses?

Image via Flipline Studios

Asking questions can be a powerfully effective technique in introductions. It poses a hypothetical scenario to the reader and invites them to imagine their response and relate their own lived experience to the material that follows. From the outset of your piece, you’re engaging the reader by asking them to apply their own judgment or opinion to the topic at hand – in our example, preferential combat with an improbably large duck or a small army of improbably tiny horses.

Why Is This Type of Introduction So Effective?

Posing questions to your readers in your introduction is an effective technique precisely because you’re inviting your reader to think about a highly specific scenario. This technique is similar to the use of statistics or facts in introductions; by asking questions of your audience, you’re providing them with a potentially memorable situation and inviting them to consider their perspective on the issue. For example, I’d personally rather fight 100 duck-sized horses than a single, menacing horse-sized duck.

I don’t know, maybe? Image via TED/Ganesh Pai.

However, this technique is not without its pitfalls. Firstly, this method has been thoroughly exploited by thousands of clickbait publishers as a lazy way to entice people to click through from a question-based headline to an inevitably disappointing article. Whether the question is posed in the headline or the introduction, many people are understandably fatigued by and wary of questions in content.

Secondly, there’s the problem of structure. In my waterfowl combat example above, there’s no “correct” answer. This means the question is virtually impossible to conclusively answer, which can lead to disappointment in your reader, especially if you pose a question that they expect the rest of the piece to answer. This blog post about conversion rates is a great example. Larry asks a question of the reader in the headline, and the rest of the article answers and supports that question with data and logical, scientific reasoning. Now imagine if he had asked the question yet failed to answer. How would this make you feel as a reader?

Introduction #5: Setting the Scene

By 2017, the world economy has collapsed. Food, natural resources, and oil are in short supply. A police state, divided into paramilitary zones, rules with an iron hand.

Although this introduction could aptly describe our current geopolitical nightmare, it’s actually the introductory text from Paul Michael Glaser’s 1987 cinematic adaptation of Stephen King’s disturbingly prescient short story, The Running Man (which King wrote under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, before you hardcore King fans yell at me).

This technique is known as setting the scene, and it can be a highly effective way of drawing your reader into your piece. (If you’re interested, David Hogan’s 1996 action movie Barb Wire also came surprisingly close with its speculative take on what a dystopian 2017 might look like.)

Why Is This Type of Introduction So Effective?

This introductory technique is similar to the narrative example, in that the writer sets the stage for not only what is happening at the outset of the piece, but for what the reader can expect to follow. This method can be incredibly powerful when dealing with emerging topics or subjects with strong newsworthy elements.

Editorially, this technique offers many benefits to the writer. It allows you to choose and establish a clearly defined position on an issue, and enables you to quickly assume a contrarian stance on contentious topics. It also allows you to manipulate the emotions of your readers by summarizing and highlighting the positive or negative aspects of a story how you see fit, or to support the points you want to make.

Stylistically, this introduction can be structured similarly to narrative introductions – by telling a self-contained story at the outset of the piece before transitioning into the rest of the content – or by helping the reader get up to speed quickly on a developing topic they may not be aware of, as many in-depth news reports from Houston in the wake of Hurricane Harvey did. Many reports framed the catastrophic damage caused by Harvey within the wider political contexts of disaster relief funding, contentious proposed cuts to scientific research, and the volatile political climate that surrounds emergency management in crisis-prone regions such as the southern and southeastern United States.

A well-written introduction setting the scene can help your readers quickly understand why what you’re about to say is important, as well as giving them a solid grounding in the often highly nuanced background information essential to understanding complex, multifaceted issues.

Introduce Yourself

Hopefully you’re spending plenty of time coming up with catchy headlines for your content. I hope that you now have a greater appreciation for the value and importance of a solid introduction, too.

Next time you sit down to write, spare a thought for the daring bravery of Mad Jack Churchill charging into battle with his longbow and claymore like a Viking warrior – then ask whether your intro would make Mad Jack proud.

5 Ways to Write an Introduction [Summary]

1. Start with a quotation
2. Open with a relevant stat or fun fact
3. Start with a fascinating story
4. Ask your readers an intriguing question
5. Set the scene

Just 10 years ago, content marketing was an unfamiliar term for companies trying to employ new marketing strategies. Fast-forward to 2017 and many early adopters of content marketing are beginning to see the fruits of their labor.

The Content Marketing Institute reported in its 2017 B2B Content Marketing survey that 62% of B2B content marketers said they are “much more” or “somewhat more” successful with their content marketing than they were last year. 63% of B2C companies said the same. Just a year earlier, only 30% of marketers said their content marketing efforts were paying off.

‘Unglamorous’ Industries Can Benefit

One thing seems certain: content marketing isn’t going away. Among those that stand to benefit the most from content marketing are B2Bs working in what we at SPROUT Content affectionately refer to as unglamorous industries. In these industries, content marketing offers an effective alternative to standard transparent marketing strategies that solely benefit the brand. Still, no matter what the industry, many companies don’t know where to start when it comes to launching themselves into the content marketing space.

Before getting started with an initiative of your own, it’s important to remember the basic tenet of content marketing — the content you’re creating needs to be high quality if you want it to work. Consumers are more savvy than ever — that’s exactly why traditional marketing tactics are far less effective than they once were. They’re going to demand tailored, valuable information and you’ll get nowhere fast with sub-par content. According to CMI, 82% of consumers said they feel more positive about a company after reading custom content, and 90% find custom content useful.

“Consumers are more savvy than ever and now demand tailored, valuable information. You’ll get nowhere fast with sub-par content.”

In content marketing, it’s about both quality and quantity, but the quality has to come first. So, let’s take a look at what some of the most successful SaaS marketers are doing and how these strategies can be applied across industries — from the most glamorous to the less so.

1. Kissmetrics – When it comes to a solid strategy and quality content, Kissmetrics excels. When Neil Patel co-founded the analytics software company, he and his team created a custom content strategy that has enabled Kissmetrics to hold its own in a world where Google Analytics reign. The success of the company can be largely attributed to content that provides value to customers across a host of topics, not just what the company is aiming to sell. What’s more, Kissmetrics focuses on quality over quantity and understands the value of influencer marketing. Some of its best content comes from influencers and industry experts who provide valuable advice and insight through guest posts.
2. Shopify – Shopify publishes a huge amount of helpful and in-depth content and guides, showing the online retailers that use the platform that it is invested in their success. Its blog provides useful tips and advice, and features respected influencers. It also offers a its content resources in a variety of formats, including videos, podcasts and case studies. This mix of content has helped the e-commerce platform establish trust and therefore, generate leads.
3. AppRiver – A cloud-based email and cybersecurity solutions provider for businesses, AppRiver provides useful and informative content to its clients and others. Blogs keep users informed of the latest trends and security threats, and white papers provide in-depth information for businesses looking to improve security or put security measures in place for the first time.
4. Data Box – By creating mobile-first KPI dashboards that are accessible within a single platform, Data Box helps its customers identify what KPIs matter most to its business by defining, setting, and tracking business goals. The company uses its authority to publish content to educate others on best marketing practices and leverages influencer and SEO best practices by regularly featuring the marketing expertise of trusted and respected experts in its blogs with links back to their blogs.
5. Curata – Curata leverages machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence to power a content curation platform and a content marketing platform. Its blog explores effective content marketing, dialing down into content strategy, curation, creation, promotion, and other tools. Like Data Box, this SaaS company also regularly features industry peers, offering them recognition based on their expertise and credentials.
6. Expo Logic – Through its software and services, Expo Logic makes trade show and event planning seamless for its customers from check-in, to displays, to lead capturing. But its content goes beyond just the moving parts of setting up for an event. The company assists clients with lead retrieval and other aspects of gaining new customers. Expo Logic covers topics including the latest technologies that can enhance the tradeshow experience, from SnapChat to Uber. Content is engaging and heavily focused on how its customers can use their trade show presence to generate maximum revenue in their business.
7. Thanx – In an age of loyalty program saturation, Thanx has set itself apart in its approach by focusing on relationships over discounts. The company has proven to its customers the benefit of focusing on the highest-spending customers to generate the maximum value for their businesses. Its content centers around educating clients and prospects on best practices, and also draws attention to focusing on real and proven data in determining the best way to design their loyalty programs.
8. ThingLogix – As tech-savvy as you fancy yourself, you may not have heard of — let alone understand — the concept “the Internet of Things,” aka IoT. But ThingLogix has developed an entire platform (called Foundry) around it. Essentially, IoT refers to devices that collect and transmit data via the Internet — from cell phones, to wearable devices, to cars. The Foundry platform serves as the interconnection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data. Content marketing can certainly be a boon when you’re on the cutting edge of a concept like IoT, and ThingLogix is leveraging its blog to become a trusted authority on the new, and widely misunderstood topic.

No matter the size, or how exciting or seemingly mundane your business may be, just about every company can benefit from the trust-building and far-reaching benefits of content marketing. By developing engaging and informing content you’ll gain the trust of prospects and clients who will come to rely on you as an expert in your field, rather than simply a company looking to make a sale.

Your sign up form is the first step to gaining new email subscribers, and it can make or break a visitor’s decision to receive your emails. So it’s important that the copy and design of your form is effective and converts. But often, it’s challenging to know what to write on your form and how to design it for conversion. To give you direction, we’ve collected some of our favorite sign up forms in this post and explained what makes them work. Take inspiration for your own form from these nine examples and tips.

1. Visually represent your incentive

A sign up form with a visual representation of your incentive, like this one from Spoon Graphics, is an effective way to entice visitors to subscribe.

Being able to envision the tangible benefits of signing up to your email list can often be that extra push over the edge in a person’s decision to subscribe. Not to mention that sign up forms with images receive 94 percent more views than those without images.

2. Present an unfavorable alternative

This sign up form from Boast gives subscribers a discount just for signing up, like many retailers do. What makes this copy different is the alternative Boast gives to those who choose not to sign up.

If visitors don’t want to sign up, they can click “No thanks, I prefer paying full price.” at the bottom of the form. Who wants to pay full price? Not many people would like that alternative. By positioning opting out as an unfavorable alternative, Boast gets visitors to think about the negative consequences of not subscribing and gives visitors a compelling reason to join their list. This copy can increase opt-in rates, because it positions subscribing as the better option.

3. Display a percentage complete tracker

The top of this sign up form from Amy Schmittauer shows visitors how close they are to completing the sign up process.

With this strategy, visitors may be more likely to complete your form, because they can visualize how close they are to being finished. Plus, it demonstrates that they’ve already done half the work, which will make them more inclined to finish the form.

4. Use one form field

Privy uses a sign up form that’s quick and simple with a single form field to make the subscription process easy for visitors.

This works because forms with less fields are more likely to increase your conversion rates since visitors spend less time signing up. One thing to keep in mind is that without asking for the subscriber’s name you can’t personalize your emails. Think about your business’s needs and goals to determine how many form fields are right for you.

5. Let subscribers choose their preferences

Wistia’s sign up form lets subscribers choose their newsletter preferences, which can give them a more personalized email experience.

This can also help with form conversion rates as it allows subscribers to choose what kind of content they want in their inbox. When subscribers are able to personalize their experience, they’ll get more value and engage more.

6. Create color contrast

BizChix uses a simple sign up form relying on the brand reputation as the incentive for joining the community while the color contrast attracts the attention of visitors.

The contrasting colors of this form stands out on the website. Using a bright color, like yellow, on a black and white website draws attention to the sign up form, which can increase the number of people who complete it.

7. Write conversational copy

When you use conversational copy in your sign up form like Kate Spade, it grabs the visitor’s attention and feels more personal.

Visitors don’t expect to see phrases like “Oh hey!” or “Hey you!” This copy attracts their attention, which you can use to hook them in and tell them what value they’ll get from being subscribed to your email list.

8. Be creative and witty

Justuno uses creative and witty copy on their sign up form to delight visitors.

Instead of using buttons that just say “yes” and “no,” this sign up form makes a joke with a personalized comparison. The visitor will imagine themselves as a sponge, which implies that they can soak up a ton of knowledge. Who wouldn’t want to be a sponge that soaks up a ton of knowledge, especially when it comes to getting more conversions?

9. Use social proof

Social proof is a strategy where you leverage herd mentality to convince people to take an action. Because if someone sees that everyone else is doing something, they’ll be more likely to do it themselves.

Jane Mukami’s sign up form lets new visitors know that over 4,000 people are subscribed to her email list. Besides leveraging social proof, this also works because it builds trust. If visitors know that other people have signed up for her list, they’re more likely to believe that she publishes trustworthy and valuable content.

Implement these ideas for your next sign up form

Pin these sign up form ideas on Pinterest to save as inspiration for later! With these nine ideas for a creative, new sign up form, you can bring a breath of fresh air to your website and email list. If you’re looking for more strategies and resources for creating a sign up form and lead magnet, enroll in this short video course: Email List Growth Blueprint. It’ll help you build the perfect tools for growing your email list.

Are you struggling to grab the attention of people in the busy social media news feeds?

One way to fix this is to come up with better and more attractive blog post headlines.

There is an art to writing post headlines and bloggers have to learn this art in order to better attract visitors.

This guide features proven headline formulas, real-life examples of successful headlines, structural rules and trigger words to use when creating your own headlines.

Let’s get started.

Why the headline is the most important part of a blog post

The majority of people that see your posts will see the headlines only.

Without a compelling headline, not many will actually click to visit your blog article.

Your potential visitors are busy people.

You are competing to get their attention and a share of their valuable time, and you compete against many other things.

Their work, their family and friends, their social network, their interests, all the other media and websites and many more factors.

To attract visitors and draw them in you must write powerful, relevant and eye-catching headlines for your blog posts.

Your headlines must be sharp.

They must make people curious and prompt them to click on your link no matter the distractions and the competing choices in their news feeds.

If you achieve this, your headlines will help your posts get more clicks, more shares and more engagement.

Test your blog post headlines using these tools

There are tools you can use to analyse your headline for emotional impact.

Try this Headline Analyzer and this Emotional Value Analyzer.

Write at least five headlines per blog post

Some bloggers feel that it is difficult to explain what their post is about in a few words.

Maybe that just shows that the post is not interesting enough and not written in the most optimized way.

In other words, an article that you cannot explain in a punchy headline may not be an article that you want to publish in its current state.

Many writers would spend the majority of their time on the body of content itself and then just create a last-minute headline to finish it off before publishing.

This is not the optimal way of doing it.

Instead, you should try and spend much longer time on figuring out the best headline for a blog post.

After all, not many will read the body of the content unless the headline attracts them in the first place.

Spending more time on the headline should be devoted to writing several different alternatives.

Writing more than one headline for each post forces you to think more about the headline and makes you think outside the box.

This also gives you more options and interesting angles when posting and re-posting your content in social media.

Your first couple of choices might be something you’ve tested before or might be just something that comes first to your mind, but making yourself think of more than five headlines gets you in a more creative mindset.

Eventually you’ll get to something that is not your typical headline and that might just be the one that works best.

Don’t resist this.

Five headlines are not much actually, the people from Upworthy recommend you write at least 25!

Look for inspiration

Newspapers, magazines and websites online can be great idea sources, full of inspiration and ideas for your own headline writing.

Keep an eye on them.

Magazine front pages are full of irresistible headlines.

Just take a look at front pages of Men’s Health or Cosmopolitan.

Also, online sites such as Buzzfeed, Upworthy and The Daily Mail have their headlines and listicles as a big traffic driving factors and major reasons for their success.

Explore them, learn from them, note interesting styles and formulas, and try and implement them on your own site.

Some bloggers use social media to test out ideas for posts before writing them.

You could try this out too.

Send out a tweet with a quote, a statement or a piece of advice and see how people react.

If you see a larger-than-normal amount of responses and engagements, it might be a topic you could expand into a complete blog post.

Structural rules for headlines guaranteed to get you clicks

It is difficult to pinpoint a distinct pattern of blog post headline writing as there isn’t one really.

If there were a simple solution, we would all be getting thousands of clicks and shares.

There is a lot of guesswork and trialing involved.

Here are some structural rules, tips and ideas that you can follow in order to reach the widest audience and boost clicks when writing headlines.

• Develop a headline that tells people exactly what the article is about and what is in it for them so they know right away whether or not it is something they would like to click on.

• Know who you are targeting and what problem you are solving and directly address the need of your audience.

• Tell a story and make people curious in your headline but do not give everything away. Just give them a sneak preview by including statements such as “You won’t believe the number 5” or “Number 7 has worked incredibly well for me”. This forces them to click to check out the full thing.

• Work in curiosity, benefits or a combination of the two in your headline. Talk about “secrets”, “hacks”, “techniques”, “strategies”, “warnings” and “mistakes”. Make people feel they will miss out on something amazing and important unless they click on your post.

• Promise quick and easy to follow, how-to advise, instructions, guidelines and solutions to challenges your readers are facing. People love “simple”, “easy”, “fast”, “instant” and “quick”.

• Create a great resource of information. Make it “the ultimate”, “the complete”, “the definitive” or “the best”. Everything something needs to understand about one topic in one single post.

• Try adding numbers and top lists to your headlines. The larger the number the most interest there will be. Everyone’s bored of top 3 and top 5, but top 77 might just do the trick.

• Ask questions. Write headlines in a question format. Just make sure to break the Betteridge’s law that says that every headline that ends with a question mark can be answered with a word “no”.

• Namedrop celebrities and other names your audience recognizes. I’ve compiled lessons learned from names such as Stephen King and Steve Jobs with great success.

• Be conversational and direct. Refer to the audience. Make your headlines self-referencing to your visitor by adding “You” or “Your”.

• Make your headlines condensed. Examine your headlines with a critical eye to make every word count.

• Be informal and personal. After all, you are competing in Twitter streams and Facebook news feeds amongst posts from friends and family.

Proven headline formulas you should try on your site

Most winning headlines can be distilled down to a fill-in-the-blank formula template.

These templates can then be used for any topic that you are covering.

For some ideas and examples of the above structural rules try writing your headlines using the formulas below.

Do save this blog post so you can reference these when developing your own post headlines.

• How To ___________ – Step-By-Step Guide
• The Ultimate ___________ List
• How To ___________ In 10 Minutes
• The Pros And Cons Of ___________
• The Easiest Way To Make Your ___________
• 12 Sure Fire Ways To ___________
• 8 Shortcuts For ___________ In Record Time
• Get ___________! 12 Ideas That Really Work
• The Lazy ___________ Way To ___________
• 16 Lies ___________ Like To Tell
• 13 Warning Signs That ___________
• The Shocking Truth About ___________
• 10 Things Your ___________ Won’t Tell You
• How Safe Is Your ___________ From ___________?
• Do You Do Any Of These ___________ Mistakes?
• Don’t Do These 17 Things When ___________
• 16 ___________ Mistakes You Don’t Know You’re Making
• 11 ___________ Mistakes That Make You Look ___________
• 15 Things Your ___________ Needs To Hear You Say
• Unlock The Secrets Of ___________
• 7 ___________ Secrets Every ___________ Should Know
• The 16 Essentials Of ___________
• How To Take Charge Of Your ___________
• How To Make ___________ Work For You
• What ___________ Can Teach You About ___________
• Can You Really Trust ___________?
• 5 Little Known Ways To ___________
• 3 Little Known Factors That Could Affect Your ___________
• Get Rid Of ___________ Once And For All
• 12 Cool Tools For ___________
• The Complete Guide To ___________
• 18 Tips To Jump-Start Your ___________
• 14 Things I‘ve Learned About ___________
• 18 ___________ Hacks: A Cheat Sheet For ___________

One note from me is not to overuse any one of these as that would make them less effective.

Use emotional trigger words to engage people

Trigger words engage people on an emotional level and they work exceptionally well in headlines.

They are also some of the most persuasive words in the English language.

Here’s a list of some trigger words you can start with:

• Amazing
• Avenge
• Banned
• Blissful
• Boost
• Breathtaking
• Conspiracy
• Controversial
• Cure
• Delightful
• Discover
• Empower
• Energize
• Exposed
• Eye Opening
• Forbidden
• Greatest
• Insider
• Jaw dropping
• Jubilant
• Magic
• Massive
• Mind blowing
• Overcome
• Payback
• Provocative
• Reclaim
• Sky rocketing
• Spectacular
• Stunning
• Surprising
• Uncensored

Deliver on what your headline promises

An important point to make is that you should not oversell in your headlines and that you should always deliver what you promise.

Do your best to write a compelling blog post headline but do also deliver the quality content.

There is nothing worse than clicking on a great headline and then seeing the content that is not being able to live up to the headline.

The headline is worthless if the post does not deliver on its promise.

The headline frames the rest of your visitor’s experience on your site.

Visitors would feel tricked into viewing and nothing is more frustrating than clicking on a killer headline but getting a weak article.

Think how Google displays the headline in their search results

Google may not be as important in driving traffic to a blog as it was before the rise of Facebook and other social media platforms, but it can still be a very valuable way of getting your content to more people.

You should make sure your headlines display well in the search results.

Google shows between 50-60 characters only – it shows exactly what fits in a 512 px.

If the headline is longer, they will not display the full headline.

In cases where your optimal headline is longer than that, try and do a shorter and more concise version for search engines only.

WordPress SEO WordPress plugin previews your search results snippet the way it will look in search results.

It also allows you to write the “SEO Title”.

This is the title that will show in search results while you still keep your original title on your post itself and in social media shares.

Some of the most successful blog post headlines in the history of my blog

An important part of the headline writing process is analysing the data and implementing the learnings to improve your future headlines.

An easy way of doing this is to go through your blog visitor data and see which posts worked well and which don’t.

Let us take a look inwards at some of the most visited articles on my blog and analyze the headlines.

Here are some examples of my posts that have been quite popular that you could learn the format of and adapt to your own content:

• Best WordPress Plugins: 18 Most Downloaded WordPress Plugins Ever
• 8 Thesis Theme Design Tips To Make Your Site Better
• From 0 To 200.000 Visitors, 8 Blogging Lessons Learned
• 10 Elements Of Style Of Post Writing
• 24 Plugins That I Currently Use On My Site And Why You Should Use Them Too
• How To Install WordPress – Step-By-Step Guide
• 8 Things Every Blogger Can Learn By Studying Perez Hilton

What I learned from my past headlines is that having a “how to” or “top list” headline works great to attract visitors.

Other things that seem to make headlines more clickable are quotes, numbers and popular names.

These types of headlines make a specific promise of what’s in store for the visitor, they also make the visitor curious to find out more, or they attract the click thanks to the use of a popular name that the visitor has feelings for.

Just keep on writing and improving

What makes people click is a difficult question to answer and I hope that this article has explained you a little bit behind the art of headline writing and inspired you to work on your upcoming headlines or even go back and rework the headlines of some of your existing posts.

The last piece of advice is to constantly test your headline writing, see which articles get most shares and views and do more of what works best.

Some of your headlines will suck and will fail but you have to accept it, move on and keep writing more.

All you have to do is explain to people why they should click and read your article and not the next one that is in line waiting on their Twitter feeds.

Good luck!

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – “You have a blessed day.”

That’s how the African-American cleaning woman took her leave in the vast hotel complex where I was staying in the heart of America’s Bible Belt.

In the South — where evangelical Christians handed Donald Trump the keys to the White House ­­— the guitarist in the lobby of the 2,800-room Gaylord Opryland Hotel sang “God Bless the U.S.A.”

Tennessee, in the rolling green hills of the Appalachian Mountains, is often referred to as the “buckle” of America’s famous, or infamous, evangelical Bible Belt. Things are different here. They’re also complicated.

The whites, blacks and Hispanics that I interacted with tended to the cheerful side of things, including the few who wore “Trump” T-shirts. Many had a soft-spoken charm, despite the region being branded a land of hate — especially in the aftermath of the violent “Unite the Right“ rally last month in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the northeastern tip of the Bible Belt. 

Although nowhere else quite compares to this vast U.S. Bible Belt, it should not be forgotten that Canada has its own Bible Belts — in B.C.’s Fraser Valley and the Okanagan, in parts of Alberta, southern Manitoba, southwestern Ontario and parts of the Maritimes.

Evangelicals make up a formidable 25 to 30 per cent of Americans, but evangelicals are also culturally and politically significant in Canada, at roughly 10 per cent of the population. So it’s valuable to understand them, especially if we think we stand for religious tolerance.

Hundreds of millions of evangelical Protestants in Canada, Africa and Asia take their cues from what goes on in the U.S. Bible Belt.

This Tennessee city, for instance, made international headlines in August when an evangelical coalition released the “Nashville Statement.” The “Christian manifesto” condemned “homosexual immorality and trans-genderism.”

Even though the Christian mayor of Nashville said the statement was poorly named and didn’t reflect the city’s inclusive values, she felt the pressure to sign onto it.

“It’s impossible to get elected in the state of Tennessee and identify as non-religious,” said Pastor Frank Stevenson, who leads the predominantly black City of Grace Church and is a dean at Tennessee State University.

“People are judged on how often they attend church,” Stevenson said on a panel organized by the Religion News Association.

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Fifty-two per cent of the residents of Tennessee are evangelical Protestants, the highest of any U.S. state.

Tennessee has also for decades sent Republicans to Washington, D.C., handing Trump 61 per cent of the vote in 2016. The Pew Research Centre found 81 per cent of white evangelicals marked their ballots for the mogul.

When the Baylor Religion Survey polled Americans who voted for Trump, it discovered they tend to call themselves “very religious,” think Muslims are a threat to the country, consider the U.S. a Christian nation and believe an authoritative God would not allow climate change to destroy the Earth.

Some forms of religious expression in Bible Belts are extreme.

Spirit of Error blogger Holly Pivec spoke about the rapid rise in Bible Belts around the world of a charismatic movement known as the “New Apostolic Reformation,” in which adherents are exhorted to “get drunk” in the holy spirit and some children are taught to try to raise the dead to life.

This U.S. Bible Belt is also where some white preachers really do dance at the altar with poisonous rattlesnakes, to show how much they trust God’s power.

Rev. Paula White, who is a spiritual adviser to Trump, exemplifies how faith and politics overlaps in the Bible Belt.

White told the Religion News Association conference that Trump is “100 per cent Christian … a person of repentance,” after earlier saying he was “anointed by God.”

Yet even the predominantly Republican Bible Belt is more diverse than many believe.

The majority of voters of the city of Nashville, for instance, supported Hillary Clinton. And despite the predominance of moral conservatives, the city offers whiskey-filled downtown nightlife, where country-rock music blares.

Even though there is “cultural value” in portraying oneself as Christian in the U.S. Bible Belt, Steve Stone, head of The Memphis Friendship Association, also wryly noted many people just say they’re active in church, so they can turn the conversation to other topics.

In other words, many in the Bible Belt aren’t as devotedly Christian as they pretend.

Many of Tennessee’s evangelicals are also black, since African-Americans make up 17 per cent of the population. And black evangelicals swing strongly to the Democrats.

Stevenson said both blacks and whites have avoided countless opportunities to have their congregations become more racially integrated.

In addition, he lamented how “black-on-black crime is not being addressed by the African-American church.”

For every news story that goes viral about a black man being killed by a white U.S. police officer, Stevenson said, “I preach 16 funerals for young African-American men killed by African-American young men.”

Despite Stevenson’s skepticism about his own racial group, some activists in a panel on “Religious Hate in Trump’s America” nevertheless repeatedly emphasized the dangers of white Christian nationalism, pointing to the deadly confrontations in Charlottesville.

However, Jewish scholar Leonard Saxe countered that he regrets how the mass media served as a “megaphone” for the small group of whites who stirred up mayhem in Charlottesville. The Bible Belt, Saxe suggested, is not dominated by white bigots.

A take-away impression from my time in the Bible Belt is that, when it comes to assessing white extremism, particularly of the Christian kind, the vast majority of people in this region are moderate in behaviour, while extravagant in their supernaturalism.

Like many evangelicals in Bible Belts dotted across Canada, Trump-supporting Tennessee evangelicals are poles apart from North America’s liberals.

While urban liberals tend to put their energy into defending the religious freedom of, say, niqab-wearing, Shariah-following Muslims or Sikh nationalists pressing for a theocratic state in India, many of those same liberals mock Bible-Belt-style evangelicals.

Yet tolerance is supposed to cut all ways. Like them or not, the Bible Belt’s unfashionable Christian inhabitants are the kind of “different” people that rest of us are called upon to take seriously, and even respect.

That’s the challenge of living on a continent in which people like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau say “diversity is our strength.”

Are we ready to get more real about all that slogan entails?

dtodd@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/douglastodd

If you don’t create some differentiated value throughout the sales process, starting from the very first meeting with your dream client, then you can expect to be commoditized. If they don’t get the experience of working with someone that they believe has a greater ability to help them produce results than any of their peers, your client will not perceive you as different enough to pay more.

In a larger amount than you might imagine, you are the value proposition.

If you don’t have the insights, ideas, business acumen, and situational knowledge that allows you to position yourself as a peer, a trusted advisor, and someone who can provide good counsel, then you are going to look and sound a lot like your competitors. When you look and sound like everyone else, you force the client to find the differentiation on their own, and the easiest place to find that is in your pricing.

It is your job to explain why you are different, how you are different, and how that differentiation is worth paying more to obtain.

The delta between your price and your competitor’s price is your problem to solve. You have to be able to explain why your prospective client needs to make that additional investment to produce the better results they need. You are also responsible for explaining how underinvesting is going to put their results at risk, and potentially cause even greater challenges.

You have to be able to justify the delta between your price and your competitor’s pricing. If you want your prospective client to understand the difference, you have to teach them. You have to help them defend the investment inside their own company.

If you can’t differentiate yourself and your offering, if you can’t provide value outside of your solution, and if you can’t justify the greater investment your solution requires, you’re going to need a pencil sharpener.

The post You Are Going to Need a Pencil Sharpener appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Four salesmen sit amidst brimming ashtrays and unused phones. Their eyes are weary and faces tight. A large green chalkboard full of meaningless names taunts them.

“Put that coffee down,” shouts a man as he cuts through the smoky room.

Yes, this is a famous scene from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross.

Wearing a crisp suit and a gold watch, Alec Baldwin’s character strides to the chalkboard. The man with the plan outlines his winning strategy…

A lead generation funnel.

Wait, hold up…

What is a lead generation funnel?

Think of it in terms of a real funnel. As things enter the funnel they get whittled down into a more purified/clean form. If you just want juice, you strain out the pulp.

A lead generation funnel is no different. It’s the process of starting with, and sifting through, a large number prospects, identifying which ones are viable as sales leads, and then nurturing these qualified leads into paying customers at the end of the funnel.

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The lead gen funnel is a tool for defining who your best leads are, understanding where they are in the lead generation process, and outlining how your business will move leads down the funnel and have them come out at the end as paying customers.

It’s the pipeline that feeds your business.

Despite this, 68% of B2B organizations have not mapped out a lead gen funnel!

Why?

Because planning and building a successful lead generation funnel comes with a lot of moving pieces. Misalign one, and the whole process is broken.

As a result, marketers don’t get started, because they don’t really know where to start.

And, that’s the impetus for this in-depth guide. You’ll learn how to create a lead funnel that delivers only the most well-nurtured and qualified leads to your sales team.

The result: Less time screening, more time selling.

A taste of what you’ll learn:

• How the buying process has changed (and what it means for your business)
• How consumer psychology impacts the lead generation process
• How to craft a well-oiled lead funnel
• How to engage customers across each stage of the buyer journey

Lead generation funnels are for closers. Grab a cup of coffee and let’s go!

 

How Does Lead Generation Work?

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One of the easiest ways to explain how lead generation works is to highlight how it differs from demand generation.

Now, you could be forgiven for referring to them as the same thing. But, while these roles are often overseen by the same person, and sometimes overlap, they are fundamentally different.

Demand generation is what a brand does to drive awareness and capture attention. It’s what makes consumers engage with a brand without yet having tried a product or service.

It lets people know who you are and what you can do to help them.

Lead generation is how a brand turns customer awareness into conversions and sales.

It picks up where demand generation left off, and focuses on driving interest and inquiry into specific products or services.

Lead generation tactics allow you to advance the attention of your target audience in meaningful ways. From top to bottom of the sales funnel, it’s critical to position your brand as a trusted advisor.

After attracting prospects, your job is to build credibility and nurture the lead further down the sales funnel.

How the New Buying Process is Changing the Lead Generation Process

Almost 3 million blog posts are published each day. Consumers are drowning in information.

Bombarded by endless marketing messages, audiences are becoming more selective.

Studies confirm that 70-80% of today’s consumers ignore ads, while seeking out and prioritizing organic content from trustworthy sources.

Bottom line: Modern consumers are in absolute control of the buying process.

In fact, 93% of B2B buying processes begin with an online search, and 94% of B2B buyers will research online before finalizing a purchase.

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Today’s information-rich buyers are becoming less responsive to yesterday’s sales tactics.

Creating a successful lead generation funnel hinges on its ability to build trust and capture the interest of the buyer before talking to a sales rep.

These trends align with the increased budget applied to online lead generation activities, especially website optimization, social media and SEO:

For CMOs and senior level marketing executives, the top priorities for lead generation rest on increased measurable ROI from campaigns:

Basically, CMOs are looking for processes that increase the quality of leads their marketing campaigns are generating, not the quantity.

This means more leads need to be educated and nurtured before ever meeting making contact with sales, especially in a B2B context where there are typically multiple stakeholders involved in the decision making process:

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This is a fundamental shift from the “old days” where the concept of lead generation was finding a pool of names and passing them to sales. Buyers expected to speak to sales, and sales expected to speak to uneducated prospects.

Everything about that has changed. The sales cycle is giving way to the modern buyer journey.

Buyers are now more educated than ever before. According to Forester, consumers are now up to 90% of their way through the buyer journey before they ever speak directly to your company. There mind is already pretty much made up.

 

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“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.”

– Herbert A. Simon, social scientist and Nobel Prize Winner

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

You need to be creating not just content, but an experience, that captures and retains attention. Marketers need to be proactive, to send the right messages and information at the right time.

Vendors need to be seen by buyers as trusted experts in their field, and have a clear point of differentiation in the market.

The Lead Generation Process

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The funnel is a tool for defining your leads and understanding where they are in the lead generation process. The end goal is to capture, educate, and nurture leads until you’ve converted them into customers.

When moving prospects towards a sale, there are three stages to consider: top of the funnel (ToFu), middle of the funnel (MoFu), and bottom of the funnel (BoFu).

Let’s examine the critical processes within each stage of the funnel:

#1 ToFu: Top of the Funnel

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“The lead generation process starts by finding out where your target market ‘lives’ on the web.”

– Wayne Davis

This is the awareness stage — when you’re attracting the widest audience of potential leads.

Engage ToFu prospects with entry-level educational content suited to specific needs in the discovery phase. Focus on driving relevant traffic but not filtering conversations.

Since these new leads aren’t yet ready for sales, collect customer information, but refrain from direct sales activities. These folks are not ready yet.

This stage introduces your brand and establishes your thought leadership in the space.

To succeed with ToFu lead generation, leverage:

• Interactive video
• Events
• Interactive infographics
• Assessments
• Social media
• SEO

Here are 28 other B2B content examples to get the creative juices flowing :)

#2 MoFu: Middle of the Funnel

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Once prospects are engaged, they move into the MoFu stage. The challenge here is continuing to educate leads who are still not fully qualified to buy.

Middle funnel content bridges the gap between initial awareness (ToFu) and the final sale (BoFu). It nurtures the decision-making process, and forms the meat of your conversion funnel.

Middle funnel content is generally more important to B2B companies because the sales cycles are more complex. You need to spend more time building and nurturing relationships with prospects in this stage.

Conversely, MoFu content in the B2C space is more geared towards customer relationship management.

So, what does the right MoFu content look like?

To find out, you need to answer two questions:

1. Where do mid-funnel prospects come from?
2. What are the goals for MoFu prospects?

The goal of MoFu content is to guide your prospect through the buyer’s journey, providing material that will help prospects evaluate your brand, build loyalty, and establish a preference for your brand over the competition.

While this may seem obvious, only 6% of B2B marketers rate their content marketing strategy as “highly effective”:

There is a clear break in the path between content creation and conversion.

You can have ToFu content pouring in the leads all day long, but if the epicenter of your lead funnel is weak, you’ll fail to educate and build the relationships needed to bolster your close rates.

According to MarketingSherpa, companies leveraging lead nurturing (MoFu) content see 45% more leads over companies not using lead nurturing.

The key to a successful MoFu content strategy rests on audience segmentation. While age, gender, geography and demographics are valuable segments, the secret sauce lies in the behavior-driven segmentation.

That is, connecting with individuals in a relevant and valuable way, at the right time in the buyer journey.

MoFu content comes in many shapes and sizes. Here are a few examples:

• Interactive white papers
• Calculators can quickly show the potential cost and/or time savings a buyer could realize by trying a specific product.
• Case studies are a great way to show, not tell, exactly how you can provide value through the eyes of the consumer.
• Webinars
• Spec/ comparison sheets
• Segmented newsletters can be used to serve content specific to the stage of the funnel the consumer is in. For example, CoSchedule, a WordPress editorial calendar plugin, sends different content to individuals based on their level of activity, or lack thereof:

The middle of the funnel hinges upon engaging leads with consistently relevant content in a timely fashion. By nurturing your most interested leads, you gain trust and move them into the consideration stage.

At this later part of the mid-funnel, you’ve achieved a marketing qualified lead. Clarify which leads should be expedited to sales or need more nurturing by implementing a lead scoring system.

#3 BoFu: Bottom of the Funnel

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By now you’ve collected leads with ToFu content and nurtured them with MoFu content. The next stage hinges on acting upon buyer intent to close the sale.

Qualified leads are comfortable with your brand, so be forthright in helping them evaluate your product or service. Sales and marketing should work together to nurture the decision-making process.

Minimize cold feet, emphasize the value proposition, and convince the buyer your brand is the right choice. This often requires a direct interactive experience, such as a demo or trial.

People want to try before they buy.

Some examples of BoFu content:

• Free trials
• Demos
• Consultations
• Coupons/discounts

Ok, so we now understand the core stages in the lead funnel. Now it’s time to build it out.

The 6-step Lead Generation Process

We’ve seen how prospects and leads move through the lead generation funnel. Now it’s time to pull apart the process and show you exactly how to craft your own lead generation funnel.

#1. Planning

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The first step is planning how you will reach, nurture, and close leads within the funnel. Sales and marketing should draft a detailed buyer journey for each buyer persona and establish what constitutes a qualified lead.

Start by outlining your targets. Then plan how you’ll capture audience attention at the ToFu stage, nurture, educate MoFu leads, and close deals in the BoFu stage.

Detail how you’ll acquire leads and what will happen after they’re in the funnel.

Devise a content strategy to educate leads, plus coordinate conversion strategies that align with early interest and signal buying behavior. Sales and marketing must also align their objectives and goals, as well as KPIs and metrics.

Predict success by planning each stage and how leads will progress down the funnel.

#2. Education

Content that educates buyers and establishes your credibility is essential to generating and sustaining interest from your audience.

Design a holistic content journey to guide leads down the funnel while simultaneously capturing customer data for use in lead nurturing.

For example, start by distributing interactive white papers and blog posts from your website. Then, follow up with drip email.

When making a purchase, 75% of B2B buyers use social media for decision-making. Personality tests, surveys, and interactive contests are effective at driving engagement across both social media and email.

Remember: lead gen means reaching your customers where they are.

Maximize customer education by leveraging the channels and content types preferred by your audience. Infographics are liked and shared 3x more than any other content. Here is an example of how iLevel Solutions used an interactive infographic titled “Risky Business: What Private Capital Firms Need to Know About Using Spreadsheets for Portfolio Monitoring” to show the damaging effects of simple spreadsheet errors:

Sharing interactive infographics on social media is a great way to enhance the impact of your ToFu lead generation and MoFu education stages.

Four times as many people would prefer to watch a video than read about a product. Leverage interactive video to educate leads and capture their information at the later funnel stages.

Education is the cornerstone of the lead gen funnel. To achieve sales, every stage of the funnel must leverage high-level content that progressively engages and converts leads to buyers.

#3. Capture

After designing content to attract visitors, capture their information so you can convert them into a lead. Collect customer data from every channel, using:

• Content upgrades
• Gated content
• Landing pages

You can also accelerate your lead generation efforts across all funnel toucnhpoints using interactive content:

Embed CTAs and turn every content asset into a lead generation machine.

Interactive content is 33% more effective at educating your buyers, and generates 2x more conversions than its static counterpart.

But, don’t just take our word for it.

Capturing lead data yields a rich customer profile to assist with lead nurturing. It also improves lead qualification when deciding sales-readiness.

#4. Qualification

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“61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to Sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified.”

– MarketingSherpa

While more leads are better, simply capturing leads doesn’t make them sales-ready. Prospects undergo lead qualification to determine if they’re ready to talk with sales or require additional nurturing.

Align sales and marketing to determine what constitutes a lead, a marketing qualified lead, a sales opportunity, etc.

These definitions and agreed-upon thresholds are pivotal at the bottom of the funnel, as both departments act in unison to effectively close a sale.

Prematurely trying to close a customer wastes both leads and resources. Lead qualification is a critical step here—the gateway to knowing when leads are sales-ready, who those leads are, and which leads require more time.

Outline the following metrics to ensure your teams act decisively and capitalize on leads effectively:

Prospects

A prospect fits your buyer personas but hasn’t expressed interest yet. Determining if a contact is a prospect is the first step in the sales process. Do they satisfy the necessary criteria or are they just browsing?

Leads

A lead is an unqualified prospect that’s starting to show buying behavior. Again, marketing and sales should brainstorm about what constitutes buying behavior.

MQLs

An MQL is a Marketing Qualified Lead, someone who’s expressed interest in your product or service. Lead qualifications will vary but look to engagement history and market fit to determine if a lead deserves further attention.

SQLs

An SQL is a Sales Qualified Lead, someone who has shown strong buying behavior and has been vetted by marketing and sales for the next sales stage. Only SQLs should get passed to sales reps. These are the individuals with the pain, budget, and authority to purchase.

Sales Opportunities

A sales opportunity has been qualified, entered the sales cycle, and has committed to your brand. These individuals have shown high levels of interest, have been contacted, and directly benefit from your product or service.

Closed Sales

A closed sale is someone who’s paid for your product or service. Once you’ve closed a sale, continue to nurture your post-sale customers to encourage them to make upsells, cross-sells, referrals, and provide valuable product/service feedback.

#5. Cultivation

To ensure only the most qualified leads are getting through to your sales team, implement a lead scoring model and a lead nurturing system.

Marketing automation is a critical ingredient in the cultivation process. It will allow you to connect your personas with the right content at the right time.

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According to InfusionSoft, if you allow more than 30 minutes to pass before following up with an engaged lead, that lead is 21x less likely to turn into a sale.

According to Demand Gen Report, nurtured leads produce an average increase of 20% in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. This is because nurturing helps you identify the right buyers and the right time, effectively shortening the sales cycle.

Annuitas Group found that nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads and boost revenue. Since nurtured customers are familiar with your brand, they’re open to making larger purchases.

While automation and lead nurturing at critical to cultivating leads, it is essential to have a clearly defined lead scoring model in place so marketing knows when it is the best time to hand off leads to sales.

(i.e. classify as a SQL)

Lead scoring is a process shared between sales and marketing that ranks qualified leads according to their sales-readiness. Through lead scoring, you will know if a particular contact fits the profile of your ideal lead.

For example, a website visitor receives +1 points for reading a blog post, +3 for citing a product page, and +10 for watching a demo. Account for both demographic data and behavioral history when assigning points.

Assessing leads against your points system lets you fast-track the highest-scoring leads to sales and accelerate your pipeline.

#6. Conversion

Lead conversion is where you pass SQLs to sales. Once interest has been shown in the previous steps, there’s not much selling to be done. Sales reps look into the leads engagement history prior to the call, noting whether there’s been sufficient buying behavior.

The sales call will assess buyer readiness (pain/ budget/ decision), and determine if your brand is a good fit for the lead.

The key is helping the SQL understand how they can solve a specific problem with your product or service.

Always Be Measuring

Your lead generation process should be constantly scrutinized by both marketing and sales to ensure campaigns are generating a measurable ROI.

Bringing on new leads, nurturing them, converting them, and retaining customers all require constant attention to key touchpoints along the funnel.

Use the metrics mentioned earlier to identify leaks in your lead funnel. Where are people dropping off?

Retool your content to suit buyer personas and lead behavior. Optimization ensures that your lead generation funnel reaches, nurtures, and converts the greatest number of qualified leads for sales.

Closing the Funnel

Congratulations, you’re now prepared to craft an effective lead generation funnel. If you haven’t already been drinking coffee, grab a cup – you’re about to close a lot more deals.

Given the surplus of information swarming the web, today’s consumers prefer to engage with brands who provide the most valuable content resources. Savvy marketers cut through the noise by leveraging interactive content throughout the funnel.

The lead generation funnel allows brands to reach their best leads, nurture that interest, and capture necessary data before delivering truly qualified leads to sales.

Start your lead funnel process by planning a strategy, setting goals and coordinating a cohesive content strategy that aims to educate leads.

Educating leads for a conversion is the funnel’s primary purpose, so invest in premium content assets to nurture and engage potential buyers through every stage of the buyer’s journey. Capture lead data to elevate the impact of your messaging, then use lead scoring to determine which leads are sales-ready.