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You have an idea for a startup, you’ve put together a team and now you want to find an investment. Your idea is important but your potential investors will probably be even more interested in figuring out whether or not you’re aware of who exactly your competition is. An investor under the impression that you don’t understand who your competition is, or worse – aware of a competitor that you’re not aware of, won’t take you seriously.

This post will teach you how to find your competitor landscape, why you need to and why people are afraid to talk about their competitors.

Why you need to find out who your competitors are?

In short – it will give you the upper hand over them. To compete – and win – versus anybody, you first need to know exactly what you are up against. The first benefit of knowing who your competitors are, is understanding your competitive advantage. What differentiates you from your competition? What are you doing differently and/or better than the rest of them? Knowing this helps your potential investors get a clear picture of your strengths, and/or weaknesses that need eliminating.

The second benefit is closely tied to the first one – it helps you and your investors understand your competitors’ weaknesses. Is there something they are doing poorly which you could be doing better yourself? Learning from their mistakes will help you increase the gap between you even further.

Then, there is learning from all the good things they are doing. Is there a way to use this intelligence to improve your product, or services? Can their practices give your customer support a welcome nudge? Do your investors see how you can improve and grow over time?

Understanding how your competition operates, how they engage with clients, which business models and pricing they are using, as well as the mistakes they are making, is a great brainstorming tool which can help you come up with new and innovative ideas. You wouldn’t be the first one to use such intel to come up with a great new tool that’s solving a real pain point in today’s society.

And finally, knowing your competitors helps you get a clearer bird-eye view of your entire industry. How much funding are they getting? Is the funding going down just a couple of big-game start-ups, or is it spread across the industry? Is the funding growing, or shrinking? All of this can help you determine the strength of the industry and that, in turn, can speak volumes of the demand, helping you position yourself better when it comes to discussing investments.

These are some of the biggest advantages of having detailed knowledge of your competition, and something that is not optional if you are really serious about succeeding with your start-up. So, how do you do it?

How to find your competitor landscape?

There are four main ways to map your competitor landscape:

1. Look for products solving similar problems as your own
2. Look for funding on CrunchBase
3. Analyze marketing efforts via SimilarWeb or Google
4. Do some heavy review reading

So the first step is to find products that are similar to your own and that solve the same problems as your product does. This is an important first step as it helps you count how many companies you’re up against. You can see where they’re located, how many employees they have on average, how old they are, and how big of a market they cover.

Determine who the big players in the industry are, and analyze their business models. Pay attention to their user interface and user experience. Is there anything they’re doing differently than you, or similarly to you? If you find something within the UX/UI world that works – mimic it. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

Once you map out all your potential competitors, the next step is to see how much funding they’re getting. Luckily for everyone, Crunchbase is here to save the day. This site is going to be your new best friend. Learn when they were founded, how many venture capitalists invested in them, and with how much funds they’re currently operating. This will also help you determine who the ‘big players’ are in the game.

Another important step is to see how they’re marketing themselves. You can have the best product in the world that will be worth jack squat if nobody knows about it. So, say hi to your second best friend – SimilarWeb. Use this site to understand how your competitors are generating traffic. Is there anything you are not doing at the moment? Is it working for them and can you use it too?

Also, don’t forget Alexa and the Google keyword research tool – these are important sites that will help you find keywords you can rank for with your own marketing efforts. Last, but definitely not least – make sure you read up reviews of your competition online. There are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of customer reviews from your competition. Having a product that’s driven by the market is an awesome approach, bound to make a difference. That is most easily achieved by understanding what your competition’s customers like, and what they dislike. Obviously, once you hit the market, you’ll be getting reviews of your own, so make sure you don’t neglect them. It is a time-consuming endeavor, but one that is definitely worth the effort.

Closing comments

Those looking to draw in investments need to pay really close attention to their competition, because that is definitely something investors will want to know. You need to have a better product than what your competition is building. You need to understand other competitors’ business models, their executions, pricings, and most importantly – investments. Having less intel than your potential investors means they will probably perceive you as frivolous, not really committed. Luckily enough, with the strength of the internet and some time invested, you can easily map out your competitor landscape.

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As the modern saying goes, “Content is king.” Content marketing is booming, and bloggers who offer a variety of content will stand out from the crowd.

In particular, those who offer multimedia content can get ahead of the pack. People learn in different ways, through visuals or audio, for example. Creating videos, audio files and podcasts offer more value to your target audience.

With top sites like YouTube (for video) and Soundcloud (for audio and podcasts), it’s never been easier to upload your multimedia content. After uploading it, you can create an embed code to copy and paste into your WordPress blog.

However, because it is so easy, some bloggers get lazy. They copy and paste the code without adding anything else to the page. That’s not going to offer much value from the search engines point of view. Google needs keywords on a page to determine search engine ranking.

It’s not going to offer much value for your target audience, because the title Podcast #23 tells them nothing about what is in the file and whether or not it will be of any use to them.

A good idea is to offer a keyword-rich set of program notes. Or even better, add time stamps to the notes so the audience knows where to find the content they are most interested in.

Best of all, “chunk” content with small snippets of information your users will love by including a direct link to the time stamp they need. A direct link means they won’t have to try to scrub to find the right spot in the media file. Scrubbing can be very frustrating and eat up a lot of valuable time. Instead, your audience can access the content with just a click.

Using all of these best practices for your content can be quite time-consuming if you are trying to do it all manually. However, there is a solution that will save you time and give your audience what they need.

The Link Timestamp WordPress Plugin Solution

The Link Timestamp WordPress Plugin can link the time stamps to the embedded content automatically. Create your show notes and time stamps. The plugin will do the rest.

Being a successful blogger and information publisher is all about offering high-quality information to your audience that is easy to access and meets their needs. Taking the time to create multimedia content is just the first step, however. If you don’t offer show notes with time stamps, you could be leaving money on the table.

Chunked Content Increases Sales

One of the best uses for the plugin is to chunk your video sales letter or product demonstration. List the features and benefits and link to the specific sections in the media file. Your audience will see the value of this strategy immediately.

Do you want to link time stamps to topics or speakers? Create the code manually in seconds. You can do the same with particular how-tos and concepts.

If you are selling information rather than a physical product, a well-organized and informative presentation will set you apart from others in your niche and leave them wanting more. Your content will offer better value because it is easier to use, putting you ahead of your competition.

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When self-service first entered the public consciousness, customers saw it as businesses forcing them to do work they shouldn’t have to do. Now, customers are singing a different tune, preferring to not involve a business — or any human, really — unless necessary.

When a business does enter the picture, customers prefer its service to find the right mix of human interaction and automated convenience that provides just as seamless an experience. What’s more, they want it on their own terms and in a time frame that’s near-impossible to meet without the technology they originally scorned.

In other words, expectations for self-service continue to increase. These days, customers would rather speak to a bot than an actual person and generally crave an easier, more seamless buying experience. Embracing self-service gives brands the ability to smooth out that buyer journey and provide a service that can stand up to competition for years to come.

Help Customers Help Themselves

A McKinsey Global Institute study estimates that automation can increase productivity by 1.4 percent each year and notes that it keeps businesses aligned with current cost structures. However, if automation is not paired with some level of self-service, a company risks pricing itself out of business.

Self-service is all about helping customers buy rather than “selling” them a product you think they want to buy. Sure, you still do the necessary work to convince them your product is the obvious choice, but it’s now through education.

You’ll arm your website with a bot to answer questions, and then make sure there’s a bot to assist potential customers and provide them hints and answers during the purchase. It’s all part of the pre-purchase process.

From there, of course, you need to put a troubleshooting bot on the site to address any unexpected issues. Those answers will center on customer care, ensure visitors feel taken care of and build customer loyalty. The easier brands make self-service for customers, the quicker they’ll latch on to the concept.

Simplify Self-Service

Brands that skip self-service will miss out on customers who prefer this level of engagement. In fact, you could alienate a growing segment of the population that demands purchasing products and services in this way.

For any company looking to make its self-service options as easy as possible, the following is a good place to start:

1. Think beyond basic automated telephone service. For years, companies have used interactive voice response to gather general information from customers before routing them to the appropriate representative. But natural language processing has come a long way since then to help fulfill customer requests.

Start thinking about all the different interactions that voice response can now handle. Can you leverage this technology to automate even more of the customer experience? You know what sort of questions agents repeatedly field, so use that knowledge to enable a truly self-service option for customers.

2. Consider your tech stack. It isn’t uncommon to partner up with a company to help build demos that amplify the business value in the current crop of self-service tools. But besides being able to implement the technology, you need the means to optimize it over time so it can get smarter and work throughout the entire customer experience.

Take Sephora, for instance. It launched a chatbot on Facebook that allows users to upload a selfie to try on its more than 90 million different lipstick shades. The company recently optimized the bot to detect and estimate the shade of lipstick a customer is wearing in the photo and provide a color match in store. Make sure your technology is on top of every innovation possible to keep customer interest in your self-service tools high.

3. Never forget the context. Companies tend to cobble together many single-use bots to enable self-service. The main problem with this tactic is that the technology isn’t connected: Once customers get to the point of actually needing the call center, all context is lost.

What you need is essentially a digital worker factory in which you can add use cases and train the bots — not only to answer increasingly difficult questions, but to also connect to a knowledge base that’s linked to the CRM environment. Then, the context of the bot conversation can be carried over if a live conversation is needed.

For so long, we’ve been led to believe that self-service is a bad thing — which it can be when done badly. But if you think about the customer journey and build tools that enable a seamless experience, you’ll meet expectations, which isn’t a bad thing when it comes to customer service.

Are you looking to get your brand into the self-service game? Check out the e-book “To Bot or Not to Bot” to see whether it’s the right move for you and your customers.

Yeah, I get it.

Most of you think the CRM is a waste of time. Most of you think the CRM just slows you down and that it’s a pain in the ass. You see it as something that benefits management, and you get sick and tired of the sales manager asking, is it in the CRM?

I feel you.

The problem, however, isn’t the CRM. It’s you and how you use it. You aren’t using the CRM correctly. You’re approaching the CRM the wrong way.

If used correctly, the CRM is the by far the best tool you have to manage the entire sale, from contact to contract and therefore make you a better salesperson.

I remember my first sales job. It was 1996.  I was an account executive for The Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce.  My job was to sell chamber memberships to Denver area businesses.  The cost of joining the Chamber ranged from $325 to $10,000. My job was to cold call businesses around the city to highlight the value of a chamber membership to their business and business growth.

In 1996 e-mail was JUST beginning to be a thing. Ther Internet was just beginning to be a thing. There was no texting. There was no LinkedIn, Facebook or any other social media site. But even crazier, there was no Saleforce.com.  Act was the CRM of the time. There was also Goldmine (a shout out to my boy and Goldmine founder Jon Ferrara), but that was it.  The Chamber didn’t have either of these fantastic CRM’s. We were given an application called File Maker Pro and told to build our own CRM.  Yup, I had to create my own CRM with a rudimentary database application.

Being my first job, and not very computer savvy, I took a look at what the other reps had built for themselves and copied that. They all had the expected fields, contact name, phone, address, notes section, next call, etc.  But that’s about it. I remember, most of the reps self-built CRM’s were nothing more than a glorified contact list.

What did I know? It was my first sales job. It seemed good enough for me. I copied theirs and jumped in.

It didn’t take long for me to realize it wasn’t nearly enough.

To be good at the at job required lots of cold calling, I mean lots. It was 90% of the job. You wouldn’t make quota unless you made the calls and set up the meetings. I wouldn’t call it a sweat shop. However the more aggressive you were with your calling, the more successful you’d be. Unfortunately, with all the calling, it quickly became apparent to me that I couldn’t keep it all straight with the current contact centric, self-made CRM. I needed more.

Over the following year, I continued to customize my CRM to help me win deals and stay on top of opportunities. I created fields to remind me to follow up on cold calls where I left a message. I created fields to remind me to follow up after I sent out information on the Chamber. I created fields that helped me understand their buying motivations. I created fields to track my next steps and deal strategy. I created fields to highlight the product or offering they were considering.  I created field after field to better manage the sale and improve my chance of closing the deal and letting nothing slip through the cracks.

What’s most notable about this, is because everyone’s CRM resided on their computer, there was no “network, ” and each one was custom made, management never saw our CRM. It wasn’t a tool for them. They had no or little visibility into our CRMs.  They were for us and strictly for us, not management reporting.

My CRM became by best friend. Because of it, I set countless sales records at the Chamber, including largest single sale, biggest month, etc. and my CRM was at the center of it all.

Lesson 6 – Use the CRM, PLEASE!

If you want to get better at sales, start learning to use the CRM as a selling tool. Stop looking at the CRM as a form of management compliance. A well used and managed CRM will fundamentally change how you sell. It will shorten sales cycles, increase average deal sizes, keep you from hanging on to opportunities too long, and keep things from falling through the cracks.

The best approach to using the CRM is customizing it to your selling methodology. If you can’t add new fields, you can certainly use the fields that exist to capture the information you need to sell better and offer your buyers a better selling experience.

To use the CRM to sell better there are some required fields or data types that you need to capture in the CRM to make it your friend and help you sell better.

If you want to sell better make sure you’re using the CRM to capture the following:

1. The intrinsic motivation of your buyer – Why does the buyer want to buy? If you don’t know why your buyer needs to change, you’re wasting your time selling. Always add why all the stakeholders want to change. (Great post on this here.)
2. The business problem(s) the buyer is struggling with – You must document exactly what the business and technical issues the buyer is trying to eradicate. The buyer issues and problems must be captured in the CRM in the most robust, buyer specific terms. It must be defined or quantified and documented as such. It can’t be vague or high-level. Inevitably you will come back to this through out the sale. Don’t skimp here, be thorough.
3. The next yes (or next sale with in the sale) – An opportunity can not be won without a series of little sales. Little sales are the commitments buyers make to move the sale along. It can be a willingness to meet in person, willingness to do a trial or agree to introduce you to the CEO. You must know at every stage of the sales process what your next yes is and it must be documented in the CRM. ‘Cause, that’s the only thing you should be working on.
4. Your deal strategy – every deal must have a deal strategy. Your deal strategy is your approach or method for ensure you win the sale. Your deal strategy needs to be in the CRM for you and everyone else to see and read.
5. Next steps – Many sales reps do manage this in their CRM, and that’s a good thing. The key with next steps is to be very clear what it is you’re asking the buyer to do and what you need to do to make that happen.
6. A robust description of the current state – The current state is what’s going on now in the account. I call it the editorial. It’s the robust description of what’s happening in the account today. What’s working, what’s not working. Why is the organization struggling? What’s wrong with the current process? How’s their business being affected? How long has it been going on? What are the key metrics and how are they being impacted, etc?  The more robust the current state is documented, the higher the probability of close.
7. A description of the future state – The future state is the vision or hope of the buyer once they’ve fixed everything and gone with your solution.  The future state is what the buyer wants to accomplish.  Make sure the future state is clearly documented in the CRM. Again, you’re going to want this through out the sales process.  Make it robust, quantifiable, and measurable. It will be your best friend if they go dark.
8. Key Influencers and their unique motivations – In addition to your buyer, you need to document the entire stakeholder team and their buying motivation. Who’s involved in influencing the decision and what’s their motivation?
9. Tasks – This one is obvious for most of you, but I still get surprised. Make sure all your tasks are time bound and have reminders. It’s too easy to lose track of deals and not stay on top of them without calendar reminders. For EVERY opportunity, there should be a scheduled task that you’re working on with a reminder and a delivery date.
10. Accurate close dates – Make sure all your opportunities have accurate close dates. This is as much for you as it is for management. You should be able to run a report and determine if you have enough opportunities to make quota.
11. Accurate deal sizes – All your deal sizes need to be documented and accurate. No guessing! Like close dates, you want to be able to run a report to determine if your pipeline is healthy and

If you want to get better at sales, learn to use the CRM as a tool to better sell. If you want to get better at selling, learn to use the CRM to better position you with your buyers, manage your buyer motivations, overcome objections, create deal strategies, and address blockers and champions.

The best sales people know how to use the CRM as a tool for success, not as a data dumping ground. The best salespeople use the CRM like any other tool, to make their jobs easier and to make themselves more efficient. If you want to learn to sell better, learn to use your CRM as a tool. It will make all the difference.

The post How to Sell Better: Lesson 6 – Use The CRM appeared first on A Sales Guy.

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Sales can be tricky if you run a start-up. While there is no way to ensure that your sales pitches are successful all the time, here are a few tips you can use to make your interactions with your customers more fruitful:

Search for buyers before the sales process starts

As a start-up, visibility is key. Start marketing your product or service even before it hits the market. Write blogs, post it on social media and tell your family and friends to spread the message. The more the number of people who know about your upcoming offering, the higher the chances are of making a sale.

Think like the consumer

As a start-up that is offering a new product, you have the opportunity to design a product that suits your customers’ requirements. Thinking like the consumer will go a long way in identifying the product or service you need to provide.

Don’t scale too soon

Most start-ups make a mistake here. By trying to scale too soon, they lose sight of their primary objective– long term customer acquisition and retention. When you focus on scaling-up, you make unnecessary investments in materials, machinery, and people. This will impact the cost of the product you are selling. Additionally, in an attempt to gain new customers, you may fail to respond to the needs of the loyal few who have been with you from the beginning. This will result in your existing customers shifting to a competitor.

Be flexible in pricing

Depending on your industry, it can be difficult to make profits in the initial years of setting up the business. Additionally, as a start-up with no previous successes to show for, you will not be able to price your products high. Start out small and be open to making changes to pricing. Accept that you may have to spend more and earn less initially. This will ensure that you don’t let go of consumers who are eager to purchase your product, but at a lower cost.

Make your product positioning obvious

Do your research wisely and identify which business segment you want to serve. This will help you identify all the key players you are competing with. When marketing your product, position your offering in direct competition with the product of a competitor. This will give customers better insight into what your product can offer them. It will also help you plan your sales pitch to highlight your value offerings.

Work on customer retention

On average, the cost of acquiring a new customer is about five times higher than the cost of retaining one. Engage your customers with reward programs, discounts, and offers. Customize your service if it is operationally and financially feasible. Go the extra mile to communicate with them on an on-going basis.

Focus on value addition

Understand how you can add value to your customers. From product design to after-sales service, you have to add value at every stage of your interaction with the customers. This will develop goodwill and help with retention.

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Despite the continued rise in content marketing, it’s surprising to discover how many B2B marketers don’t use buyer personas to guide their activities. This is a missed opportunity!

Understanding your prospective customers’ wants, needs and goals is critical to creating an effective content marketing strategy. This knowledge should form the strong foundation on which all other activities and materials are built. Developing a buyer persona is the best way to truly understand your target audience at a deep level.

What are buyer personas?

Think of a persona as a fictional character that represents your target customer and gives you a detailed look at who they are, what they want, and what drives them.

For many businesses, of course, a single buyer persona doesn’t work. Different segments often require different personas—though you don’t want to get carried away, either. For most organizations, creating two or three detailed buyer personas is sufficient to help guide the marketing process.

Key areas of a buyer persona

So how do you go about creating an effective buyer persona? While there are a lot of potential areas to consider, here are five key elements of a strong buyer persona:

1. Demographics: The best way to tailor a marketing message is to know who you’re talking to. Ask yourself, “Who is my buyer?” For buyer demographics, you need to consider two core areas: personal demographics, such as title or role and age range, as well as company demographics, such as business size, industry, and geography.
2. Psychographics: While buyer demographic information describes who a buyer is within their company context, psychographic information describes why they buy. This includes critical information such as values, spending habits or patterns, aspirations, and more as relevant to your specific product or service. For more on psychographic information, please see my recent post [link].
3. Goals: What challenges are your buyers looking to address—and how can your product or service address that need? This is an area that many B2B marketers understand well, at least at a high level. But, in creating your persona, dig down deeper. What are your potential buyers hoping to achieve? What are the effects of achieving this goal for the company and for them personally? What are the consequences of failing to achieve these goals?
4. Influences: What forces are acting on your buyer to affect their buying decisions? This can include external individuals, such as key influencers with high-profile platforms, or internal individuals, such as bosses, team members or subordinates. Remember, rarely in a B2B setting is one person solely responsible for buying decisions—so who are the other individuals influencing the buyer’s decision, and where will they impact the buying process?
5. Objections: Keeping all the above information in mind, try to see your company and product/service from the buyer’s point of view. What objections or reasons to hesitate will your buyer find when considering your product or service? Are you a new company competing with established competitors? Does your new product seem risky when compared to “tried and true” alternatives? By understanding these potential issues and their root causes, you as a marketer can address these objections and develop marketing messages that resonate.
   Using buyer personas in your marketing process

The process of creating personas is in itself valuable. To create a detailed and believable persona means looking deeper for answers, seeking patterns in past customer behaviour, and viewing your products or services with a more critical eye.

However, the long-term value comes from the personas themselves. Buyer personas create a structure for your marketing strategy and influence your messaging. Personas also operate as a “true North” document for your team. By revisiting the written persona while creating communications materials, team members can ensure that they stay aligned with the strategy and hone their messages for the right audience.

The result is better marketing materials that are aligned with your target customer’s true goals.

A study from market research company Forrester found that more marketers are focusing on performance-based marketing. Performance marketing is “the new normal,” according to Forrester. Performance advertising is a competitive differentiator today; it will be table stakes tomorrow.

What is performance marketing? Performance marketing uses clearly defined and measurable business objectives as the basis of payment or optimization. This includes cost-per-action (CPA) models, such as affiliate marketing, and programmatic ads that optimize based on real-time performance metrics.

How Performance Marketing Works

The Basics

The CPA model of payment is critical to understanding how performance marketing works. Advertisers and marketing companies are paid only when a specific action, such as a sale, lead or click, is completed.

This model is what separates performance marketing from other forms of advertising. In traditional advertising, fees are paid up front and do not depend on the success of the ads. Advertisers in performance marketing only pay for successful transactions.

As a result, performance marketing reverses the traditional value proposition of advertising and allows marketers the ability to measure advertisements in real time, according to the Performance Marketing Association. “Performance marketing is trackable and measurable down to the click. Advertisers can measure everything from the cost of acquisition to incrementality (e.g., new customers of new customers or average order value),” the association says.

Application in Retargeting Campaigns

A number of e-commerce companies are challenged with the task of retargeting and converting customers throughout their marketing funnel. If customers leave the website before making a purchase, marketing to them can be effective because they’re already engaged with the brand. An incentive could motivate them to follow through with the purchase.

Forrester reports that better ROI and market pressures are driving performance advertising adoption for retargeting marketers. Across retargeting and other types of campaigns, performance marketing leads to a number of capabilities and advantages.

• Personalized Advertising: “Over half of enhanced retargeting marketers said they were driven to pursue [performance marketing] because their customers expect personalized advertisements,” according to Forrester. Performance marketing allows marketers to target specific customers and measure how well these ads are performing.
• Data: Performance marketing gives marketers specific data on how well advertisements are doing. A retargeting marketer can gauge effectiveness and respond accordingly. These insights are true for any type of campaign. “For executives to extract the most value from their affiliate channel, they must be able to track the true source of every lead, inbound call, download and sale across multiple channels, platforms, media and points of contact … just like non-affiliate channel counterparts,” according to Insights Association. “When that kind of spotlight is placed on partner activity and conversion attribution, affiliate performance becomes infinitely easier to evaluate and affiliate programs begin to deliver much greater results.”
• Technology: Marketers have access to powerful tools that can help with tracking, attribution and targeting. Mobile marketing company TUNE recommends that mobile marketers examine marketing automation and tracking tools that can enhance efficiency and improve ROI of performance marketing efforts.
• Mobile and Desktop: Outside of desktop displays, 46 percent of marketers surveyed by Forrester are retargeting across multiple devices and channels, including mobile web, mobile in-app, email and social platforms.

Marketers are integrating these principles and tools together to improve performance marketing. “These marketers are taking the necessary steps to delight their customers by creating more personalized, targeted marketing programs across channels, thereby delivering more relevant content for customers,” Forrester says.

Performance Marketing in 2017

Traditional Retail: Online-to-Offline

Performance marketing has grown in the retail marketplace because retailers face pressure for efficiency due to Amazon.com and falling foot traffic, eMarketer reports.

“Over the past decade, many iconic retail brands have seen their market values decline precipitously,” according to Byan Leach, founder and CEO of mobile shopping app Ibotta. “A wave of anchor store closings this year followed a holiday season that saw store traffic fall dramatically. Meanwhile, Amazon now has more value than all the major, publicly-traded department stores in the United States.”

For companies like Target and Walmart, less than 5 percent of their annual revenues occur online. “How can traditional retailers use technology to beat the online retailers at their own game?” LiveRamp asks. “By embracing performance marketing like never before.”

Online-to-offline marketing techniques allow traditional retailers to use online performance marketing campaigns to drive offline sales. For instance, a retailer can use technology to create an online rebate that is redeemed in the store. This all takes place under a performance marketing model, and each rebate can be tracked.

“Emerging technology is not solely an ally of online retailers,” LiveRamp says. “By embracing new tools and techniques that unlock the power of performance marketing for the offline world, leading retailers such as Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft Stores, Best Buy, and Hallmark have developed smarter and more efficient promotions that are helping invigorate their offline businesses.”

Increasing Sophistication

Performance marketing allows for a better understanding of the consumer journey, eMarketer says, which “has enabled a more nuanced use of multichannel marketing with appropriate attribution.” As performance marketing becomes more advanced, marketers will be able to take advantage of more opportunities to know and interact with their audience.

Marketers are using more sophisticated retargeting methods such as video ads. Lexus used Facebook’s audience segmentation technology to deliver a single ad campaign that involved more than 1,000 individual videos. The award-winning “1000:1” campaign reached 11.2 million Facebook users.

“Maybe it’s time to consider video as the best performance-marketing tool in the marketer’s arsenal,” Jason Baadsgaard, chief revenue officer of marketing company of Eyeview, says at Convince and Convert. The future of performance marketing could be found in its integration with video advertising, personalized advertising and other advanced methods of targeting and appealing to customers.

The internet has proven to be a haven for opportunities that can propel your business to reaching greater heights. It has become a place to not only promote your business and get leads, but it also creates a platform where you can improve your reputation, increase your profitability, and focus on the specific market you’re targeting.

It’s with these that business owners tap onto the internet when it comes to improving their marketing efforts. However, the digital world is fast changing. And with it comes the need for a more holistic marketing approach – integrative marketing strategy.

What is integrative marketing strategy?

This business plan is all about integrating different tools to ensure that you’re targeting the right audience. This is done through the efficient use of traditional advertising practices and an improved public relations reputation.

But what makes this strategy stand out is that it also incorporates the latest trend and technological advancements such as the use of apps and social media. By factoring in all of these different aspects, you come up with a better marketing strategy which adheres to the current trends.

As unrelated these tactics may appear to be, they aren’t that different from one another. By just combining these techniques with one another, you come up with a holistic strategy that answers to the needs of today’s current digital landscape. This leads the path to the explosive business growth that you’ve been yearning for the entire time.

According to a blog post at Furman Transformation, one of the biggest mistakes that companies make in treating the different tactics as exclusive of each other. However, little do these businesses know that combining these techniques to form your all-inclusive strategy to promote your products and services is the best way to reach out to your audience.

Create a goal-based SEO strategy

Simon / Pixabay

The first thing you need to consider when working on your business’ explosive growth is your SEO strategy. It’s all about first knowing what your online goals are.

Do you want to increase your sales by getting more leads? Or perhaps you want to develop a highly-engaged audience?

It’s in asking these questions that you can think of the right course of action to make. Once you’ve answered those questions, you can then move forward and deal with your on-page and off-page optimization campaigns. It’s at this stage that you come up with the right keywords to target your specific audience.

This is also the time when you need to focus on your link building campaign. By doing this, you’re increasing the chances of giving your site a higher SEO ranking.

Maintain quality content

pixelcreatures / Pixabay

Gone are the days when you can just spam content on your site and place whatever “highly-searched” keyword you can think of. Google is now more meticulous than ever when it comes to quality, which is why it’s important that you ensure the readability of your site’s content.

It should not only be grammar-perfect, but it must also have the right keywords that are naturally placed. And remember, your keywords shouldn’t appear to be stuffed with your content. It’s through this that you’re able to increase your business’ visibility in search engines, thus reaching more potential clients.

Create a social media empire

LoboStudioHamburg / Pixabay

Dealing with your SEO campaign and creating quality content are effective ways to boost your business into a success. However, it’s not enough to make the most out of the situation.

You need to make use of social media to amplify your already-good marketing techniques further. Social media is a very influential platform that targets the mainstream market.

Create a Facebook or a Twitter account of your business. Or perhaps try video marketing and share them up on YouTube.

Not only do you reach out to a greater audience, but your business also gets a more legit and client-friendly reputation that is in tune with the current trend of millions if not billions of people.

And take note, making your presence known through these social networks is completely free! Though there might be advertising plans you might want to use, it’s still a budget-friendly approach compared to dealing solely with your technical SEO and content-building campaigns.

Final Verdict

With all of these being said, you can see how important it is to combine different marketing techniques in creating a highly-effective marketing strategy. Remember that incorporating these various techniques into a single comprehensive master plan is the way to go in this modern digital era.

There are a lot of opportunities knocking on our door; why not make use of them instead of just dealing with one technique? By following the tips discussed in the article, you can develop a successful integrative marketing strategy that’ll surely boost your business’ ultimate potential.

I love birthday parties, and this year, I decided to throw together a party for myself. My goal was to entertain my inner-child, friends, and family during the festivities, and I immediately started searching for vendors who could help me accomplish the party of my mid-life crisis dreams! As I went through the planning process, it was surprising to me how difficult it was to get returned calls from companies who were spending online advertising dollars to get my attention. It all started with my plan to have a bounce house. With adults and kids on the guest list, it was the perfect fit.

Three Companies, Three Customer Experiences

I contacted three bounce house companies located near my home. For the sake of our story, all of the company names have been changed. I called and filled out a contact form for Bounce Houses Today first. Next, I left a voicemail message for Touch the Sky Bounce Houses, and lastly, I called and spoke to a company representative from Bounce Houses & More.

Company One: No Follow Up

Bounce Houses Today did not get back in touch with me either via email or phone for one entire week. Coincidentally, I was most interested in their inventory and the competitive prices shown on their website, but without any follow-up from their side when I was ready to start finalizing plans, I decided to move on, which translates to wasted advertising budget dollars for Bounce Houses Today.

Company Two: Delayed Follow Up

Now on to the second company: Touch the Sky Bounce Houses. I previously called and left a message but never received a call back. I attempted again with a call and left my email address in my voicemail. Four days later, I received an email response, but I decided to move forward with Bounce Houses & More because I was ready to put my plans together much sooner.

Company Three: Prompt Lead Response

Like I mentioned, Bounce Houses & More answered the phone when I called, so I was able to confirm availability, pricing, and find out what I needed to do to get everything booked for my party. Also, the company representative spoke to me about what I wanted to do for my party, and he suggested that I add a SnoCone machine to the festivities. Although the prices were much higher than what I saw available from the other companies, I appreciated the fact that I was able to get the information I needed easily and quickly.

Despite the fact that the cost was higher, especially after adding on to my order with the upsell of the SnoCone machine, I decided that I was most comfortable doing business with someone who responded to me in a timely manner. The company was proactive when I contacted them, seemed interested in helping me have a fun day, and even took advantage of an opportunity to add to my initial order.

All in all, the party was everything I had hoped it would be, and I was so happy that Bounce Houses & More responded to my request for service promptly.

Is your business taking advantage of the leads that come to you from your digital advertising efforts?

Given the explosive increase in the prices of crypto assets this year, there is a growing discussion on how to value them.

This is a very good thing.

Andy Kessler weighs in on the topic in this WSJ piece which was published over the weekend.

You should go read the piece as it does a good job of dissecting the economics of the transaction processing system that underlies Bitcoin (aka the Bitcoin Mining Network).

Andy finishes his post with the following statement:

at some point the market will wake up and apply rational valuation techniques. That price—$4,361—implies a lot of belief in Bitcoin as a long-term store of value well beyond the economic value of the transaction platform. 

Like Andy, I hope and expect that the market will apply rational valuation techniques to crypto assets. There are a number of people trying to do that. I think the work of Chris Burniske is very solid.

My issue with Andy’s analysis is that he’s conflating the market value of the Bitcoin Mining Network with the value of Bitcoin, the crypto token.

My partner Albert says it well in this tweet:

Yes. He’s definitely confused. Like equating total value of gold with the value of companies that mine and trade gold.

— Albert Wenger (@albertwenger) August 28, 2017

Blockchain technology upends many of our traditional notions of what networked applications look like.

Our former colleague Joel captured this “upending” well in his seminal post on Fat Protocols, in which he says:

What’s significant about this dynamic is the effect it has on how value is distributed along the stack: the market cap of the protocol always grows faster than the combined value of the applications built on top, since the success of the application layer drives further speculation at the protocol layer. And again, increasing value at the protocol layer attracts and incentivises competition at the application layer. Together with a shared data layer, which dramatically lowers the barriers to entry, the end result is a vibrant and competitive ecosystem of applications and the bulk value distributed to a widespread pool of shareholders. This is how tokenized protocols become “fat” and its applications “thin

Networked applications that run on top of the shared data layer of blockchains will be forced into commodity pricing and rent seeking will be nearly impossible. Those who build the Visas and Mastercard networks on top of Bitcoin will never achieve the economics of Visa and Mastercard. But that is the point. The Bitcoin protocol will capture those economics and the only way you can participate in that is by earning or buying and owning the crypto token (ie Bitcoin).

And so that is what we must model, analyze, and understand. We cannot use EBITDA multiples to do this work. We need to turn to other tools and that is what Chris and others are doing.

I applaud Andy for putting this critical issue on the table and hope that he and other serious market analysts and observers will take the time to understand what is really going on here and help us all figure out how to properly value it.

Speculation is rampant right now and without the proper valuation tools, we lack the ability to arbitrage and profit from that speculation. We need that.

Gilead is spending $12 billion to buy Kite Pharma, a biotech that has no approved therapies yet. 

The drugmaker's therapy that's a few months away from a possible approval is a highly personalized cancer treatments called CAR T-cell therapy. It's a form of cancer immunotherapy — or a therapy that harnesses the body's immune system to take on cancer cells.

For Gilead, which is known for its HIV and hepatitis C medications, this is an entirely new area of cancer development. 

"The field of cell therapy has advanced very quickly, to the point where the science and technology have opened a clear path toward a potential cure for patients," Gilead CEO John Milligan said in a news release. "We are greatly impressed with the Kite team and what they have accomplished, and share their belief that cell therapy will be the cornerstone of treating cancer."

Here's why cell therapies could be game-changing

Short for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, CAR-T treatment removes a person's cells from the body, reengineers them, and then puts the cells back in the body, where they can attack cancer cells. That means that a person's own cells are the therapy, which makes it more difficult to manufacture than your average pill. 

In July, a Food and Drug Administration panel voted in favor of approving one of these treatments made by Novartis. One of the panelists called it "most exciting thing I've seen in my lifetime." The FDA is expected to decide whether to approve that therapy, a treatment for pediatric acute lymphoblastic lymphoblastic leukemia, by October.

Gilead won't have to wait long to see if the FDA will approve Kite's leading cell therapy, which is called axicabtagene ciloleucel or axi-cel. In November, Kite is expected to get an answer from the FDA regarding its CAR-T treatment for a type of blood cancer called aggressive B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma. In data Kite released in February, the company found that out of 101 patients, 36% had a complete response to the treatment after six months.

The one-time treatments won't come cheap. While companies might price the drug based on how well it works, axi-cel's price tag could still be $325,000. Analysts expect the therapy to generate $1.7 billion in sales by 2022. 

While its axi-cel program is the farthest along, Kite's also working on another CAR-T cell therapy that's in clinical trials to treat multiple myeloma, another form of blood cancer. The company's also working on cell therapies to treat solid tumors that are still in early clinical trials.  

SEE ALSO: Gilead just bought a cancer-immunotherapy company for $12 billion

DON'T MISS: Biotech stocks surge as Gilead announces a $12 billion takeover

Join the conversation about this story »

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A few years ago, when podcasts did their annual “Predictions for next year” posts, just about every single one of them had a mention of how we would have access to more data in our marketing. In fact, in 2017, marketers like me (see title above) like to point out that (almost) ALL marketing is driven by data: a customer insight or reported analytics that prove what worked or didn’t work, and especially in true data-driven channels like targeted paid media and email marketing.

I think we can agree: we’ve gotten more data over the years. Marketers use between 3 and 15 (!) data sources in their programs. Emma reports that 84% of marketers say they have “enough data” these days. The problem more often than not is that we’re still not putting it to use. Either we don’t have the right case for the right access, or it doesn’t all live somewhere we can get to it easily or make sense of it, or frankly, we don’t have the (wo)man power to dig in and bend it to our will.

In today’s landscape, we don’t need MORE data; we need to make our data more USEFUL.

Making data useful for marketers has 2 components: First, we need to focus on what data actually moves the needle for a marketing campaign. Not all data is particularly useful. You can use any of it, but only some will actually impact your results.

Second, you have to be able to get to it. It all needs to talk to each other (or at least it should all talk to the marketing system you’re using) with rules on who talks and who listens, how often, and with which pieces of information in tow.

Let’s take a look at putting data to work for your email program in 6 steps. In this case, we’re talking specifically about using data in email marketing, but frankly, most of these still apply, regardless of what channel you’re talking about.

(Spoiler alert: You’re probably already doing 2 of them. You’ve already started!)

#1 –Define the goals of your email campaign or program

Actually, write them down. In “pen” (digitally speaking). Partially so you can post them up somewhere you can look at them – or, rather, they can stare at you from the walls of your office – every day. These should be marketing goals that ladder up to or support your Big Business Goals (BBGs).

That seems obvious, but for example, I’ve had a client whose business goals were to open 10 new stores in existing markets in the next 12 months. Their marketing goals were to grow Same-Store Sales by 10% year-over-year. Those goals are actually in direct competition with each other! Those new stores in the same markets are likely to steal a little business from your existing stores. That may not be a bad thing at all if your overall revenues jump 10%.

#1, part B: Get buy-in on these goals! Make sure everyone who determines how you spend your marketing budget – or evaluates your job performance – agrees that these are the goals you’re all working towards. Who signs your checks? What does that person think your goals are?

It seems silly, but you’d be surprised how often marketers gloss over this step or think they know what their manager or executive team would say their goals are…

#2 – Define the Metrics You’ll Measure

What is the measuring stick you’ll be using to determine if you reach this goal? These should be tailored to fit the goal itself. Again… obvious, but for example, if your goal is to get more online orders from your campaign, open rates shouldn’t be the metric you’re using. Online revenue from email should.

In the example above, a 7% lift in total revenues year-over-year (if your benchmark growth is, say, 5%) would be a great goal: it’s specific, it’s based on trend data, it’s fairly reasonable, and it’s entirely related to the business goals the company is trying to achieve.

For email marketing, your goals would then get even more specific: for example, you could aim for a 7% lift in revenue from email marketing, measured via Google Analytics.

If you have a long-tail or B2B sales cycle, you might consider email’s impact on sales. For example, we could set a goal for a 10% increase in calls or appointments scheduled for those who receive a nurture email campaign vs those that didn’t (if you’re brave enough to do a holdout campaign… Check out my example of this below!)

I’ve seen this be a point of Analysis Paralysis for clients before. If you get stuck trying to define these, think of it this way: What statement or announcement at the end of the year makes your boss give you a high five? “We drove 7% more revenue from email this year, contributing 15% of overall online revenue!”

What statement or announcement at the end of the year makes your boss give you a high five?

#3 – Take inventory of all the data sources you have

This is where you get to sit down and answer a bunch of questions like these:

• What fields of information do you have from each source, e.g., first name, last name, address, last purchase date, items purchased, zip code, sales rep assigned, etc.
• What systems gather data about your customers, prospects, transactions, and experiences? What are all the ways that contacts make it into your email database or CRM system? For example, your point of sale system, your website, your sales team/CRM system, etc.
• How are these fields of data organized? Some are organized by contact, like name, email address, zip code. Some are organized by transaction, like basket size, number of items, customizations to an order, etc.
• Which data are synced from/to which data systems? How often? What data system/data source “wins” in a discrepancy?

#4 – Make a list of what data moves the needle

Data can boost the results of your email marketing in 3 different categories:

1. Data can determine the timing of your email, i.e., automation and segmentation, ensuring the most effective use of your program.
2. Data can determine the content of your email, i.e., personalization and dynamic content, a.k.a. the juicy stuff.
3. Data can determine the impact of your email, meaning you’re learning something from each send to use in the next campaign. Make the most of your best-performing campaigns.

What “moves the needle” is different for just about every company and industry, and the best way to answer this question is to test it.

What “moves the needle” is different for every company. The best way to answer this question is to test it.

Armed Forces Bank actually (bravely) held out 10% of their new customers, just to be able to prove that their new welcome series lifted engagement, account balance and decrease in accounts closed.

They were using data to trigger the timing of the first email… but also the 3^rd. They had a period where new recruits would go to training and be offline. Different programs lasted different amounts of time, so rather than guess or estimate, they used sign-up date to trigger the first two emails in the series and then graduation date to trigger 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Their results? They saw a 20.9% lift in average account balance, a 39.9% lift in savings accounts opened, and a 12% reduction in closed accounts after the program. This is all 100% attributable to this 6-part email series: it was the only difference between the test and control groups, who both got other forms of communication/marketing.

Spirit Airlines uses data to determine the content, timing, and results of their emails. Spirit offers super low-cost flights because they “unbundle” their fares. If you don’t need to check a bag or don’t want a beverage in-flight, you don’t have to pay for it. That also means that everything costs a bit extra from snacks to drinks to checked and even carry-on bags. That can be a shock for first-time Spirit fliers if they don’t know what to expect!

So, Spirit sends a special series of emails to first-time fliers educating their customer on the Spirit way to fly and ideas on how to save, like booking their bags online before they check-in at the airport and printing their boarding passes at home.

While the only way to know for sure what “moves the needle” is to test it, the second-best way is borrowing ideas from podcasts, conferences and case studies like the ones above. Check out the Barkley blog, Marketing Sherpa/MEC Labs and eMarketer for measurable stories. Also, try subscribing to Behave.org, previously called Which Test Won, for a weekly email that shows a split test and its results.

#5 – Define what data you’re missing in order to make magic happen

Basically, this is taking #4 minus #3.

Which data-driven ideas would you like to be using for your own customer base?

Do you have the data you need to make it happen? If not, why not? Where does it live? Can you substitute similar data? Can you budget for an integration of that data with your marketing tools?

An important factor here is making a case for access to data. What is the potential value of the campaign that uses that data? This becomes a case for gaining budget and access to that data.

TIP: Crunch the numbers early! If you think that you can change behavior by a few percentage points (20% lift in a certain behavior is unlikely, for example) and see $XX,XXX revenue, but the cost to gain access to the data and build the campaign is $YYY,YYY, then the value of that data doesn’t pay for itself. It’s time to pick a different campaign idea from your list of case studies.

This happens plenty with differing industries: Airlines have and use a ton of data… because each additional purchase they can stimulate is worth hundreds of dollars. A quick-service restaurant that sells burgers and ice cream treats only makes a few bucks per order. It doesn’t mean that data doesn’t pay off for them, it just means they have to figure out which data to use and when to invest in integrating new data points.

#6 – Choose your data hub

Once you answer #4 & 5, you’ll probably be revisiting where and how you store all of your sales, marketing, customer, and even company data. This doesn’t have to mean a system overhaul!

Figure out which data hub is right for you and your company:

1. It may just be your email service provider. If you have entirely offline sales and are a consumer-facing company, the data that you have or need may all fit within your email platform. Use nightly secure FTP file drops (auto export & import) to sync data to and from other systems as needed. Or, check out Zapier for a few (free or paid) plug-ins to common platforms.
2. If you have direct sales or service contact with your customers outside your store, i.e., business-to-business companies, you’re likely using a customer relationship management system to house your customer data, plus the notes on interactions from humans and technology alike. In this case, your CRM becomes your master hub and you can sync your accounting data, contracts, service tickets, and more right into one main data system that is largely aligned by contact.
3. When you have more than 5 data sources, OR if you don’t need a CRM (you don’t sell or service customers individually), OR you have data that you want to put to use in marketing that isn’t organized by contact (i.e., store data, inventory data, transactional data, mobile app data, etc.), you’re likely ready for a bigger solution like a Data Management Platform or Data Warehouse. It’s a custom database solution, specifically for housing multiple types and large quantities of data to make them useful, by creating a single, robust view of customers across all data points.

Predictably, a data warehouse will probably be more of an investment than just using your ESP or CRM and doing a few data integrations. This is why it’s important to start from the beginning and define your goals and the potential payout of achieving those goals. Can your data system and integrations help you achieve those measurable goals? If so, it might be worth it.

With all your data in one place and a plan in place to put it to use, you’re ready to write your own case studies of putting data to work in email (and all) marketing.

Leveraging influencer outreach is a powerful marketing strategy you need to pay close attention to. Simply creating content is not enough to secure those coveted higher rankings keeping you up at night. You need to expand your audience reach and connect in a more meaningful way.

Most marketers know the value of having a superb content marketing strategy. Stats compiled by Business 2 Community (B2C), found that 93 percent of marketers utilize content marketing. However, leveraging influencer outreach can have a colossal impact to your marketing strategy. In fact, influencer outreach can boost your conversions three to ten times. This is certainly the ideal when building your audience and getting higher rankings.

Influencers come in many forms, including industry experts, analysts, quality content developers, and even critics. They are powerful assets, influencing the actions of their followers. An influencer can increase content reach, accelerate business growth, and offer high authority inbound links.

geralt / Pixabay

Let’s take a closer look at how you can leverage influencer outreach to surpass your marketing goals.

Intrigue Your Potential Influencers with Timely Topics and Newsjacking

In order to leverage influencer outreach, you need to choose topics that will intrigue your intended influencer’s audience, according to marketergizmo. Influencers will not risk their reputation on topics that have little weight among their followers. If your topics fit, the audience will engage in a more meaningful way.

Research your intended influencers. Read their blogs and social media posts. After a bit of research, ask yourself a few key questions; What’s in it for my influencers? How will they benefit? Will their audience gain any helpful info?

Newsjacking is another way to leverage influencer outreach. Newsjacking is simply piggybacking breaking news in order to gain access to an otherwise unreachable audience. According to Small Business Trends, newsjacking became popular in 2011 by marketing expert David Meerman Scott in his book Newsjacking. It continues to have a place in many marketing strategies.

Develop Quality Content Supported by Expert Sources and Quality Media

If you want to leverage influencer outreach for higher rankings, you want to make your content count. According to a marketing study by Tomoson, 59 percent of marketers will increase their budgets for more influencer marketing.

Put that money to good use through quality content and media. The Tomoson study also found that, “51% of marketers believe they acquire better customers through influencer marketing.” However, poor content and media may yield little.

Developing content beyond the standard 500-word count is an essential strategy for gaining influencer interest. Research conducted on word count by MarketingExperiments found longer copy to perform better by 40.54 percent.

Photos, videos, and infographics are equally as important. A study found that 65 percent of marketing executives believe these media strategies are vital to brand awareness. Video marketing stats by SYNDACAST found that 51.9 percent of marketing professionals say videos have the best ROI.

Approach Influencers Carefully Building the Relationship Over Time

Approaching influencers and building a relationship is certainly an essential aspect to gaining higher rankings. Those social media posts will eventually fade, but a positive influencer relationship is invaluable and long lasting.

This is a vital step in leveraging influencer outreach. Simply approaching influencers to promote your content or brand will end in plenty of unanswered emails. You want to approach influencers with their best interest in mind first.

Approaching influencers with a, “what can I do for you” attitude will help your relationship with him or her rank higher. Be prepared to contribute to their goals prior to asking for anything in return. After all, they are the ones with the community you want to access.

Engage with your intended influencers by first having social media touch points. Comment, like, share, and retweet their content. Leave meaningful comments on their blogs, and use their content as helpful advice across your social media channels as well.

When the time comes, craft a thoughtful pitch email that is individualized. This is your first date, so make the most of it. You want to intrigue and catch your intended influencer’s attention from the get go.

Influencer Outreach Produces Higher Rankings and Better Monetization

Your influencer efforts will ultimately result in the high authority inbound links that produce higher rankings. These authoritative links are what you have been after the whole time. Authoritative links will boost your search engine rank, as well as an increased monetization, according to Forbes. And now with Google’s Real Time penguin and the potential for links being devalued on a real time basis, these influencer links are increasingly important and can signify the difference between a failed or successful online marketing strategy.

When you leverage influencer outreach, you will enhance your marketing efforts in a powerful way. Your influencers will link to your content and their followers will engage, resulting in supercharged inbound links and the higher rankings you want. Increase your content reach, accelerate business growth, and gain high authority inbound links by building those long lasting influencer relationships.

Resisting the things you need to do to succeed doesn’t do anything to lessen the need to do them. What’s worse, however, is complaining and whining about having to do them. Heightening your negative emotional state makes things worse, as does the search for evidence that might absolve you from having to do the work.

You can whine, complain, and commiserate with others that you shouldn’t have to prospect, especially using the telephone, but while you are whining, your competitor is dialing the phone—and they’re calling your dream client (or your existing client).

Griping about your irrational competitor’s willingness to sell at a price that would be impossible for you to meet doesn’t help you to create greater value, nor does it help you to justify the delta. You can complain, but your competitor is working to sharpen their skills when it comes to value creation without complaint.

Complaining about clients and prospects doesn’t do anything to help you produce better results, and it doesn’t do anything to help your clients produce better results either. The same clients that you whine about having to take care of are the clients your competitors are trying to take from you. Your competitor is grinding away trying to create a new opportunity inside your client, and your attitude towards your client can open the door for them.

Whining and complaining don’t do anything to improve your results, but it does disempower you, and the negativity prevents you from doing the work you are capable of. Worse still, you have competitors who are willing to do the work that you whine about, who are indefatigable in their efforts to produce the results they need, and who are competing for you for new business—and to competitively displace you.

Grinding > Whining.

The post Grinding > Whining appeared first on The Sales Blog.

What is influencing today’s consumers’ online shopping behavior? Where is he or she in their buying cycle? How long does it take them to make a purchasing decision? What factors are they evaluating in order for them to make a product selection? Most would agree that the answers to these questions require insights into consumer behavior. Most would also agree that these insights need to be collected and managed in a privacy-friendly manner that protects the consumer’s personal information and are utilized to serve the consumer’s best interests.

So why should we understand the behaviors of our customer base? Because understanding the audience’s needs, motivators, and purchasing timeline will help us to add relevance to our customer’s buying journey. This is what consumers actually want – relevant communications from the companies they’re seeking to interact with. They don’t want to be accosted with irrelevant communications by marketers who are trying to make their numbers for the quarter at the expense of the consumer’s best interest. By understanding consumer behaviors, we are able to tailor our approach to fit in with their buying behaviors and provide the most relevant communications to them.

As consumers have transitioned to utilizing multiple digital devices, websites, and apps to make purchases, it has become more streamlined for organizations to gather and track consumer interactions and, therefore, are able to provide this relevancy. It’s now possible to gain insights such as:

• The explicit and non-explicit interaction a consumer has with your company and product
• The products and content users find most interesting (based on number of visits/views, level of engagement, etc.)
• The number of times a customer visits your website before making a purchase
• What additional sites they visit for the same or similar products
• The information they consume to help them make a purchasing decision
• How long they are in market, what sequence of patterns are observed before they make a decision

This level of insights provides us a view of the consumer needs with the opportunity to help the consumer along the purchasing journey with relevance. We can even drill down to individual customer preferences, allowing for almost complete customization of marketing touchpoints, messaging, offers and content. This modern ability to curate consumer behavioral data and provide the most relevant communications to consumers allows all participants in the consumer buying journey to benefit:

How Lead Generators Benefit

For lead generators and/or publishers, this means a number of benefits to their business. Lead generators spend a significant amount of effort driving traffic to their websites with the goal of converting it to a qualified lead for their advertisers. The challenge is that a very small portion of their website traffic ever converts into a lead. With the ability to access consumer insights data, the lead generators have better visibility about the person who is active on their website. The more intelligence that they are willing to share with their brand partners about consumer behavior, the more effective the lead generator can be at creating engagement.

Engagement can be the ability to identify the consumers’ implicit needs, leverage insights to interpret what additional information or what level of engagement is needed; and create value and trust as part of the consumer experience. This can potentially mean driving higher quality leads which they can offer to brands, while providing a better experience for consumers. That includes making sure that consumer engagement is done in alignment with consumer preferences and consent, reducing the risk of compliance issues with regulations such as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), and avoiding anything which would erode consumer trust. To ensure consumer engagement is done in a privacy-friendly manner, organizations like LeadsCouncil have published their standards, which aim to ensure lead generation and consumer engagement practices are accomplished within a framework of trust and transparency. All of this put together ensures trust for the lead generators, for the brands they represent, and ultimately for the consumer who can trust that their privacy is not compromised.

Knowing what behaviors and data to look for, lead generators and/or publishers can also get better at finding those ideal consumers. This means increasing their inventory of high value leads and the potential additional revenue which they can derive for their business. And given the intelligence that they can add based on their insights & engagements with consumers within their digital properties and content, they have unique data which they can share as a value-add to enhance their relationships with brands.

As the data economy and technology continue to evolve, business models also continue to evolve. Lead generators have the ability and option to share more data and insights than ever before, allowing everyone to more fully benefit from consumer behavioral insights, driving greater value for business, and for their customers. Across the adtech & martech landscapes, this evolution is in full force, and we believe it is happening now in lead gen. We all have the opportunity to ensure this evolution from “lead acquisition” to “customer acquisition” happens in the right way – with trust, transparency and relevancy for consumers, lead generators and brands.

How Advertisers Benefit

Today’s consumers live, work and play in a digital world. They use multiple devices, social accounts and names, nicknames and usernames to identify themselves. They demand access to products, services and content how, when and where they want it. And they expect that when brands interact with them, it will be personalized and meaningful. That means advertisers need to not only compete with all of the other media that consumers interact with, but when they do interact, it needs to be relevant, timely and impactful.

Advertisers Can Benefit by Enhancing the Consumer Experience

Everyday consumers interact with the advertiser’s brands and content, and their behavior gives contextual clues about their intent to take future actions. They research colleges and universities before selecting a program and a major. They browse auto sites before choosing a car and where they want to purchase it from. They research housing, neighborhoods and mortgage rates. All of these actions provide insight into where they are in their buying journey and what their propensity to buy or act is.

Advertisers Deliver Highly-Relevant Content to Help Consumers in Their Buying Journey

The results of these interactions are rich stores of behavioral data. Data which advertisers can use to more intelligently provide consumers with the type of meaningful engagement that they demand. Especially when a consumer raises her hand and requests information, such as a price quote, a recommendation for insurance or any other considered purchase.

By combining that behavioral and intent data, with other data stores both on and offline, advertisers have the opportunity to create “intelligent” and highly-relevant engagements with consumers. Intelligent, meaning timely, in-context, and aligned with consumer expectations as to how they want to experience it.

Advertisers Build Trust With The Consumer

Advertisers and brands who invest the time and resources to build intelligence into their marketing programs will see more satisfied, loyal and “engaged” consumers. When consumers get what they want, how and when they want it, it builds trust and loyalty with your brand. In some cases, you can become the trusted resource or adviser, building influence which can be used to benefit other brands. And in the end, you will see more successful conversions of consumers into customers. And also, conversion of one-time customers, into brand loyal, long-term customers.

What’s equally important is building trust with the consumer that you are not abusing your knowledge of them and not infringing on their privacy. In today’s world, there is so much data readily available about the consumers you interact with, and surprisingly, not a lot of clear law or regulation about how you can and cannot use it. This is a privilege that if abused is to the consumer’s detriment and therefore to the marketer’s ultimate detriment. Most smart marketers get to this conclusion: Just because you can use data in a certain way, doesn’t mean you should.

How do we decide what we should do vs. what we could do? There are many grey areas in this new world of prevalent consumer data, and so it is paramount in building trust that marketers think about the consumer’s value and privacy first in order to create a trusted relationship. Keep the relevancy and consumer value in mind, and this creates trust and wins for the marketers; do not, and you create mistrust, noise, and ultimately less effective consumer engagement for you and your company.

Optimize Your Marketing Programs – Understanding How, When and What to Deploy

Working with partners and vendors, advertisers can gain access to an immense amount of data about their consumers. The key is to get the right data, regarding “leads” and combine that data to identify where a consumer is in their journey, and what their intent is at that given moment.

Using that intelligence, you can make better, data-driven decisions about which offers to send and provide them when and how your consumer wants them.

Ensure Consent-Driven Communications with Consumers

Given the current regulatory environment, it is also critical to ensure that engagement with consumers is done with their consent. This is an important part of the process and will allow advertisers to avoid issues regarding compliance with regulations such as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), while also meeting consumer expectations as to how they want to be contacted. In this end, advertisers who are conscientious about this will see increased response and conversion rates, while avoiding legal and PR issues which could impact their brand and consumer sentiment.

In addition to following regulations and staying out of legal trouble, we must also follow the idiom that just because we technically can market to a consumer in a certain way at a certain time doesn’t mean we should. The digital world has developed its own set of norms, organizations, and rewards and punishments. For example, send too many unwanted emails, and you not only alienate your consumers, but you end up on spam lists; abuse your privilege of unprecedented access to data in today’s world, and you’ll develop a reputation of a brand who is pushing your products & services instead of being a trusted resource to help consumers on their buying journeys. Those brands who are trusted resources and advisors will always win in the long run.

How Consumers Benefit

Consumers today have high expectations. They are savvier, more educated and empowered than ever before. Consumers online behaviors move across their work computer to their personal laptops to their smartphones without thinking twice. One minute they are responding to work emails at their desks and the next they are shopping with their phones. As consumers navigate their way through their buying journeys, they expect that they will be able to engage with brands on their terms. This means, they want to receive communications, advertisements and content, but only when they are ready and only if it is helpful to them. And only from the brands they want via the mediums that they choose.

Advertisers and Brands Need to Become Trusted Advisers

As a result, the ability for the branded advertisers to align and react to consumer interactions with the goal of meeting or exceeding the consumer expectations, is key to creating customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. Consumers are looking for help from the publisher and advertisers websites that they visit along their buying journey. They need content to help them make informed decisions. They are looking for readily available online resources to make recommendations to aid in the decision process. But these recommendations need to match the consumer’s wants and needs, all while building comfort and trust between the publisher, the advertiser and the consumer.

Consumers Want a Personalized and Targeted Experience

When visiting a website, consumers want to receive personalized, targeted content based on their preferences. They don’t want to be sold to. They expect advertisers to help them inform and support them along their buying journey. The consumer communication experience can and should be improved by leveraging consumer insights – the consumer wants this.

Consumers are looking for brands to align their messaging and product offers by understanding the timing of their needs. Websites should be able to witness the consumer interactions online and leverage this behavioral data to improve the consumer communication experience.

Consumers Need the Content and Tools to Make Educated Purchase Decisions

Consumers expect that they will be able to access the appropriate resources, tools and content that they need to make an educated decision. They are depending on brands and their websites to help guide them as to what they should evaluate, as well as how to evaluate, which product or solution is the best fit for them. The faster that a brand can respond to a consumer’s needs with deep, meaningful consumer interaction, the more comfortable and likely the consumer will be to act and purchase from them.

It is About Satisfying Consumer Needs

Consumers are not interested in what a publisher or brand wants to offer via their website or other content. Consumers are coming to a brand’s website for a specific functional purpose or need. The better a publisher or brand website can protect consumer from irrelevant content and unwanted, high-frequency over-communication, the more likely the consumer will revisit the website and consume more content.

In the end, consumer interactions with publisher and/or brand websites provide rich and highly targeted information that can be used to inform engagement. Using this data properly will allow consumers, publishers and advertisers to be aligned and build trusted, win-win- win relationships.

Over the last couple years, I’ve spent an increasing amount of time diving into the possibilities Deep Learning (DL) offers in terms of what we can do with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Some of these possibilities have already been realized (more on this later in the post). And, I could not be more excited to see them out in the world.

Through it all, I’ve felt there are a handful of breath-taking realities that most people are not grasping when it comes to an AI-Powered world. Why the implications are far deeper for humanity than we imagine. Why in my areas of expertise, marketing, sales, customer service and analytics, the impact will be deep and wide. Why is this not yet another programmatic moment. Why the scale at which we can (/have to) solve the problems is already well beyond the grasp of the fundamental strategy most companies follow: We have a bigger revenue opportunity, but we don’t know how to take advantage? Let’s buy more hamster wheels, hire more hamsters and train them to spin faster!

Today I want shed some light on these whys, and a bit more. My goal is to try to cause a shift in your thinking, to get you to take a leadership role in taking advantage of this opportunity both at a personal and professional level.

I’ve covered AI earlier: Artificial Intelligence: Implications On Marketing, Analytics, And You. You’ll learn all about the Global Maxima, definitions of AI/ML/DL, and the implications related to the work we do day to day. If you’ve not read that post, I do encourage you to do so as it will have valuable context.

In this post, I’ve organized my thoughts into these six clusters:

There is a deliberate flow to this post, above. If you are going to jump around, it is ok, but please be sure to read the section below first. You won’t regret it.

Ready to have your mind stretched? Let’s go!

What’s the BFD?

I’m really excited about what’s in front of us. When I share that excitement in my keynotes or an intimate discussion with a company’s board of directors, I make sure I stress two especially powerful concepts that I have come to appreciate about the emerging AI solutions: Collective Continuous Learning + Complete Day One Knowledge.

They are crucial in being able to internalize the depth and breadth of the revolution, and why we strengths AI brings are a radical shift beyond what humans are capable of.

The first eye-opening learning for me came from the Google Research team’s post on Learning from Large-Scale Interaction.

Most robots are very robotic because they follow a sense-plan-act paradigm. This limits the types of things they are able to do, and as you might have seen their movements are deliberate. The team at Google adopted the strategy of having a robot learn own its own (rather than programming it with pre-configured models).

The one-handed robots in this case had to learn to pick up objects.

Initially the grasping mechanism was completely random – try to imagine a baby who barely knows they even have a hand at the end of their shoulder. Hence, you’ll see in the video below, they rarely succeed at the task at hand. ;)

At the end of each day, the data was collected and used to train a deep convolutional neural network (CNN), to learn to predict the outcome of each grasping motion. These learnings go back to the robot and improve its chances of success.

Here’s the video…

It took just 3,000 robot-hours of practice to see the beginnings of intelligent behavior.

What’s intelligent behavior of a CNN powered one-handed robot?

Among other things, being able to isolate one object (a stapler) to successfully pick-up a Lego piece. You’ll see that at 15 seconds in this video…

Or, learning how to pick up different types of objects (a dish washing soft sponge, a blackboard eraser, or a water glass  etc.).

I felt a genuine tingling sensation just imagining a thing not knowing something and it being able to simply learn. I mean pause. Just think about it. It started from scratch – like a baby – and then just figured it out. Pretty damn fast. It truly is mind-blowing.

There were two lessons here. The first related to pure deep learning and its amazingness, I was familiar with this one. The second was something new (for me). This experiment involved 14 one-handed robot arms. While not a massive number, the 14 were collectively contributing data from the start – with their many failures. The end of day learnings by the convolutional neural network were using all 14. And, the next day, all 14 started again with this new level of collective wisdom.

For a clear way for me to capture this lesson, I call this Collective Learning.

It is very powerful.

Think of 14 humans learning a new task. Peeling an apple. Or, laying down track for a railroad. Or, programming a new and even more frustrating in-flight entertainment menu for Air Canada (who have the worst one known to mankind).

Every human will do it individually as well as they can – there will be the normal bell curve of competency. It is entirely possible, if there are incentives to do so, that the humans who are better in the group will try to teach others. There will be great improvement if the task is repetitive and does not require imagination/creativity/intrinsic intelligence. There might be a smaller improvement if the task is not repetitive and requires imagination/creativity/intrinsic intelligence.

In neither case will there be anything close to Collective Learning when it comes to humans.

Humans also do not posses this continuous closed loop: Do something. Check outcome (success or failure). Actively learn from either, improve self. Do something better the next time.

Collective Continuous Learning. An incredible advantage that I had simply not thought through deeply enough.

Here’s the second BFD.

Machine Learning is already changing lots of fields, the one I’m most excited about is what’s happening in healthcare. From the ability to speed up discovery of new medicines to the unbelievable speed with which Machine Learning techniques are becoming particularly adept at diagnosis (think blood reports, X-rays, cancers etc.). 

An example I love. 415 million diabetic patients worldwide are at risk of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) – the fastest growing cause of blindness. If caught early, the disease is completely treatable. The problem? Medical specialists capable of detecting DR are rare in many parts of the world where diabetes is prevalent.

Using a dataset of 128,000 images Google’s  Accelerated Science Team trained a deep neural network to detect DR from retinal photographs. The results delivered by the algorithm (black curve) were slightly better than expert ophthalmologists (colored dots)…

Specifically the algorithm has a F-score of 0.95 and the median F-score of the eight expert ophthalmologists was 0.91.

As richer datasets become available for the neural network to learn from, as 3D imaging technology like Optical Coherence Tomography becomes available all over the world to provide more detailed view of the retina, just imagine how transformative the impact will be.

Literally millions upon millions of people at risk of blindness will have access to AI-Powered technology that can create a different outcome for their life  – and their families.

#omg

A recent incredible article on this topic is in my beloved New Yorker magazine: A.I. VERSUS M.D. You *should* read it. I’ll jump to a part of the article that altered my imagination of possibilities.

An algorithm created by Sebastian Thrun, Andre Esteva and Brett Kuprel can detect keratinocyte carcinoma (a type of skin cancer) by looking at images of the skin (acne, a rash, mole etc.). In June 2015 it got the right answer 72% of the time, two board-certified dermatologists got the right answer for the same images 66% of the time.

Since then, as they outlined in their report published in the prestigious journal Nature, the algorithm has gotten smarter across even more skin cancer types – and consistently performs better than dermatologists.

Most cancers are fatal because they are detected too late, just imagine the transformative impact of this algorithm sitting in the cloud easily accessible to all humanity via their five billion smartphones. This dream come true: low-cost universal access to vital diagnostic care.

Oh, and here’s a profoundly under-appreciated facet of all this. These health algorithms (including and beyond the one above), are incredible at corner cases, the rare long-tail anomalies. They don’t forget what they have seen once or “rarely.”

This is just a little bit of context for the key point.

A dermatologist in a full-time practice will see around 200,000 cases during her/his lifetime. With every case she sees, she’ll ideally add to her knowledge and grow her diagnostic skills.

Our very human problem is that every new dermatology resident starts almost from scratch. Some textbooks might be updated (while comfortably remaining a decade of more behind). Some new techniques – machines, analytical strategies – might be accessible to the resident. But, the depth and breadth of knowledge acquired by the dermatologist at the end of her career with 200k cases, is almost completely inaccessible to the new resident. Even if they do a residency at an hospital or with a old dermatologist, a newly minted dermatologist will only be a little better than when the old one left school.

Consider this instead: The algorithm above processed 130,000 cases in three months! And every day it will get smarter as it’ll have access to the latest (and more) data. Here though is the magical bit. Every single new algorithm we bring online will have total access to all knowledge from previous algorithms! It’s starting point will be, what I call, Complete Day One Knowledge.

As it gets more data to learn from, as it has access to more compute power, it will get smarter and build upon that complete knowledge. The next version of the algorithm will start with this new high mark.

There is nothing equivalent to Complete Day One Knowledge when it comes to humans.

Combine having Complete Day One Knowledge with Collective Continuous Learning (networked hardware or software all learning at the same time) and it should take you five seconds to realize that we are in a new time and place.

Whatever form AI takes, it will always have access to complete knowledge and through the network each instance will make all others smarter every single instance/moment of its existence.

Humans simply can’t compete.

That’s the BFD.

Stop. Think. If you disagree even slightly, scroll back up and read the post again.

It is imperative that you get this not because of what will happen in 10 years, but what is happening today to the job you have. If you still disagree, scroll down and post a comment, I would love to hear your perspective and engage in a conversation.

Bonus 1: There is an additional valuable lesson related to open-loop grasp selection and blindly executing it vs. incorporating continuous feedback (50% reduction in failure rates!). The two videos are worth watching to see this in action.

Bonus 2: While we are on the subject of objects… Relational reason is central to human intelligence. Deepmind has had recent success in building a simple neural network module for relational reasoning. This progress is so very cool. Additionally, I was so very excited about the Visual Interaction Network they built to mimic a human’s ability to predict. (If you kick a ball against the wall, your brain predict what will happen when the ball hits the wall.) The article is well worth reading: A neural approach to relational reasoning. Success here holds fantastic possibilities.

Wait. So are we “doomed”?

It depends on what you mean by doomed but: Yes. No. Yes, totally.

Artificial Intelligence will hold a massive advantage over humans in the coming years.

In field after field due to Collective Continuous Learning and Complete Day One Knowledge (not to mention advances in deep learning techniques and hardware :)), AI will be better at frequent high-volume tasks.

Hence, the first yes.

Neuralink at the moment is a concept (implantable brain-computer interface). But many experts (like Ray Kurzweil) believe some type of connection between our human brain and “intelligence, data, compute power in the cloud” will be accessible to humans.

I humbly believe that when that happens, over the next few decades (think 2050), humans could get to parity with AI available at that time. We might even have an advantage for some time (if only because I can’t let go of the thought that our brains are special!).

Hence, the no.

As we head towards the second half of the current century, AI will regain the lead again – and keep it for good. I don’t have the competency to judge if that will be AGI or Superintellignece or some other variation. But, with all other computing factors changing at an exponential rate it is impossible that intelligence will not surpass the limitations of humans and human brains (including the one with a version of Neuralink).

Here’s just one data-point from Jurgen Schmidhuber: Neural networks we are using for Deep Learning at the moment have around a billion neural connections compared with around 100,000 billion in the human cortex. Computers are getting 10 times faster every 5 years, and unless that trend breaks, it will only take 25 years until we have a recurrent neural network comparable with the human brain. Just 25 years.

Hence, the yes totally.

I have a personal theory as to what happens to humans as we look out 150 – 200 years. It is not relevant to this post. But, if you are curious, please ask me next time you see me. (Or, sign up for my weekly newsletter: The Marketing < > Analytics Intersect)

AI: A conversation with a skeptic.

Surely some of you think, to put it politely, that I’m a little bit out there. Some of you’ve heard the “hype” before and are deeply skeptical (AI went through a two decade long tundra where it failed to live up to every promise, until say 2010 or so). Some of you were promised Programmatic was AI and all it did was serve crap more efficiently at scale!

I assure you, skepticism is warranted.

Mitch Joel is the Rock Star of Digital Marketing, brilliant on the topic of media, and a very sweet human being. Amongst his many platforms is a fantastic podcast called Six Pixels of Separation. Our 13th podcast together was on AI. Mitch played the role of the resident skeptic and I played the role of, well, the role you see me play here.

If you can think of a skeptical question on this topic, Mitch asked it. Give the podcast a listen…

(Play at Six Pixels of Separation)

As you’ll hear multiple times, a bunch of this is a matter of thinking differently about the worldview that we’ve brought with us thus far. I share as many examples and metaphors I could to assist you in a journey that requires you to think very differently.

If you are still skeptical about something, please express it via comments below. Within the bounds of my competency, I’ll do my best to provide related context.

Ok, ok, ok, but what about the now? (Professional)

While I look at the future with optimism (even 150 years out for humans), what I’m most excited about is what Machine Learning and Deep Learning can do for us today. There are so many things that are hard to do, opportunities we don’t even know exist, the ability to make work that sucks the life out of you easier, better, smarter, or gone.

In a recent edition of my newsletter, TMAI, I’d shared a story and a call to arms with specific recommendations of what to do now. I’ll share it with you all here with the hope that you’ll jump-start your use of Machine Learning today…

I lived in Saudi Arabia for almost three years. Working at DHL was a deeply formative professional experience. My profound love of exceptional customer service, and outrage at awful customer experiences, can be directly sourced to what I learned there.

Saudi Arabia is a country that saw massively fast modernization. In just a few years, the country went from camels to cars. (I only half-jokingly say that Saudis still ride their cars like camels – and it was scary!).

Think about it for a moment.

From camels to cars. No bicycles. No steam engines. None of the other in-betweens other parts of the world systematically went through to get to cars. They were riding camels, then they were riding cars. Consider all the implications.

We stand at just such a moment in time in the business world. You know just how immersed and obsessed I am with Artificial Intelligence and the implications on marketing and analytics. It truly is a camels to cars type moment in my humble opinion (it might even be a camels to rockets moment, but let me be conservative).

Yet, executives will often give me examples of things they are doing, and they feel satisfied that they are with it, they are doing AI. When I probe a bit, it becomes clear very quickly that all they are doing is making the camels they are riding go a little faster.

That all by itself is not a bad thing – they are certainly moving faster. The problem is they are completely missing the opportunity to get in the car (and their competitors are already in cars).

It is important to know the difference between the two – for the sake of job preservation and company survival.

Here are a handful of examples to help you truly deeply internalize the difference between these two critical strategies…

If you are moving from last-click attribution to experimenting with first-click or time-decay, this is trying to make your camel go faster. Using ML-Powered Data-Driven Attribution and connecting it with your AdWords account so that action can be taking based on DDA recommendations automatically, you are riding a car.

(More on this: Digital Attribution's Ladder of Awesomeness)

If you are moving to experimenting with every button and dial you can touch in AdWords so that you can understand how everything works and you can prove increase in conversions while narrowly focusing on a few keywords, you are making your camel go faster. Switching to ML-powered Smart Targeting, Smart Creative and Smart Bidding with company Profit as the success criteria, for every relevant keyword identified automatically by the algorithm, you are riding a car.

Staffing up your call center to wait for calls from potential customers is making your camel go faster. Creating a neural-network that analyzes all publicly available data of companies to identify which ones are going to need to raise debt, and proactively calling them to pitch your company's wonderful debt-financing services is riding a car.

Hand picking sites to show your display ads via a x by x spreadsheet that is lovingly massaged and now has new font and one more column on Viewability, is making your camel go faster. Leveraging Machine Learning to algorithmically figure out where your ad should show by analyzing over 5,000 signals in real time for Every Single Human based on human-level understanding (die cookies die!), is riding a fast car.

(To see a delightful rant on the corrosive outcomes from a Viewability obsession, and what you might be sweeping under the carpet, see TMAI #64 with the story from P&G.)

Asking your Analysts to stop puking data, sorry I mean automate reporting, and send insights by merging various data sets is making the camel go faster. Asking your Analysts to just send you just the Actions and the Business Impact from those Actions is riding a car. Asking them to shift to using ML-powered products like Analytics Intelligence in GA to identify the unknown unkonwns and connecting that to automated actions is riding a rocket.

If you are explicitly programming your chatbot with 100 different use cases and fixed paths to follow for each use case to improve customer service, that is making the camel go faster. If you take the datasets in your company around your products, problems, solutions, past successful services, your competitors products, details around your users, etc. etc. and feed it to a deep learning algorithm that can learn without explicit programming how to solve your customer's service issues, you are riding a car.

I, literally, have 25 more examples… But, you catch my drift.

I do not for one moment believe that this will be easy, or that you'll get a welcome reception when you present the answer. But, one of two extremely positive outcomes will happen:

Win-Win.

Hence, be brutally honest. Audit your current cluster of priorities against the bleeding edge of possible. Then answer this question: Are you trying to make your camel go faster, or jumping on to a car?

While Machine Learning has not solved world hunger yet, and AGI is still years away, there are business-altering solutions in the market today waiting for you to use them to create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Ok, ok, ok, but what about the now? (Personal)

If this post has not caused you to freak-out a tiny bit about your professional path, then I would have failed completely. After all, how can the huge amount of change mentioned above be happening, and your job/career not be profoundly impacted?

You and I have a small handful of years when we can create a personal pivot through an active investment of our time, energy and re-thinking. If we miss this small window of opportunity, I feel that the choice will be made for us.

This blog is read by a diverse set of people in a diverse set of roles. It would be difficult to be personal in advice/possibilities for each individual.

Instead, here’s a slide I use to share a collection of distinct thought during my speaking engagements on this topic…

In orange is a summary of what “Machines” and humans will be optimally suited for in the near-future. (Note the for now.) Frequent high-volume tasks vs. tackling novel situations.

In green, I’m quoting Carlos Espinal. I loved how simply and beautifully he framed what I imagine when I say tackle novel situations.

Over the last 24 months, I’ve made an whole collection of conscious choices to move my professional competencies to the right of the blue line. That should give me a decade plus, maybe more if Ray is right about Cloud Accessible Intelligence. Beyond that, everything’s uncertain. :)

Summary.

I hope you noticed I ended the above paragraph with a smiley. I’m inspired by the innovation happening all around us, and how far and wide it is being applied. I am genuinely excited about the opportunities in front of us, and the problems we are going to solve for us as individuals, for our businesses, for our fellow humans and for this precious planet.

In my areas of competence, marketing, analytics, service and sales, I can say with some experience that change is already here, and much bigger change is in front of us. (I share with Mitch above how long I think Analysts, as they are today, will be around.) I hope I’ve convinced you to take advantage of it for your personal and professional glory.

(All this also has a huge implication on our children. If you have kids, or play an influencing role in the life of a child, I’d shared my thoughts here: Artificial Intelligence | Future | Kids)

The times they are a changin'.

Carpe diem!

As always, it is your turn now.

Were Collective Learning and Complete Day One Knowledge concepts you’d already considered in your analysis of AI? Are there other concepts you’ve identified? Do you think we are doomed? Is your company taking advantage of Deep Neural Networks for marketing or analytics or to draw new value from your core back-office platforms? What steps have you taken in the last year to change the trajectory of your career?

Please share your insights, action-plans, critique, and outlandish predictions for the future of humanity, :), via comments below.

Thank you.

The post The Artificial Intelligence Opportunity: A Camel to Cars Moment appeared first on Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik.

When I say, “website design,” what comes to mind? Graphic design? Interface design? User experience design?

How about analytics design? That’s what Andy Crestodina thinks of. Andy – who has provided web strategy and advice to more than a thousand businesses, and written the book Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing – encourages all companies to consider analytics when designing or redesigning a website.

The bad news: If you fail to make analytics-friendly design decisions, your website will work against your analytics, preventing you from getting insights that could benefit you.

If you fail to make analytics-friendly design decisions, your site will work against you, says @crestodina.
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The good news: It’s easy to make analytics-friendly design decisions.

This article summarizes some of the advice Andy gave at Content Marketing World in his talk Web Design vs. Analytics Setup:

• Put your blog in its own directory.
• Make a page for each product, service, and topic.
• Post PDFs sparingly.
• Put thank-you messages on their own pages.
• Post contact forms, not email links.

Put your blog in its own directory

To set up a blog to get the most out of analytics, choose a URL structure with care. Your URL is your site’s backbone. Andy says, “The structure of the URL has everything to do with how well you can do analysis. It also has a big impact on search-engine friendliness.”

The worst place to put your blog – for SEO and analytics – is at a separate website, a separate domain. In fact, Andy says, never launch any website on a separate domain. When people link to a separate domain, the domain authority of your main site is diluted.

The worst place to put your blog for #SEO & analytics is on a separate domain, says @crestodina. #CMWorld
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An OK place to publish a blog is a subdomain: blog dot website dot com. It’s easy to set up a subdomain; a lot of companies choose this URL structure for their blogs. A subdomain doesn’t have to be hosted on the same server as everything else on the website.

A better place to put your blog is at slash blog. Everything after the slash is in a directory (folder) off the root of that website. Only when blog posts are in their own directory can you easily get data about the performance of individual posts.

Andy gives this example of how easy it is in Google Analytics to review the performance of individual posts when those posts are all located in a directory. Go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages, and enter “/blog” in the filter field. Then, “Kaboom, there are all your blog posts,” Andy says.

Click to enlarge

Next, Andy clicks the comparison button:

Click to enlarge

In this case, five of the top 10 blog posts are in the same category. (The categories don’t show up in this screenshot.)

Click to enlarge

When he saw this report, Andy says, the insight was obvious: “We should publish more in that category.”

In short, put your blog in a subdirectory of your website so you can get analytics for individual blog posts. Then you can adjust your content strategy accordingly, for example, publishing more content on the most popular topics and doing more to promote your high-value, low-traffic posts.

Make a page for each product, service, topic

Just as your blog’s URL structure determines how much value you can get from your analytics, so, too, does the way you structure your web pages. Andy notes that web pages, unlike blog posts, are typically about a company’s products and services. People searching for the content about your products and services are more likely than blog readers to consider a purchase.

“Marketers need to understand the difference and set up product and service pages for analytics accordingly,” Andy says.

He starts by showing what not to do and cites a long page about a company’s services – all of its services. The page title is Services. The problem with lumping all the services onto one page is that Google doesn’t rank websites; it ranks web pages.

“Every page has a chance to be relevant for a topic. Every page has the chance to rank for a phrase,” Andy says.

Make a page for every one of your services, and give each page a title based on what people call that service. As Andy says:

A page called Services might work for people searching on the term ‘services,’ but who’s going to search for that? We have built a thousand websites, and never once have we built a page called Services or Solutions. I’ve done thousands of hours of keyword research, and, trust me, no one is searching on ‘solutions.’

In fact, create a page for every service, every product, and every topic. This approach helps not only with SEO but also with analytics. In Google Analytics, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages, to see the performance of each service or product or topic – as long as each has its own page.

Create a separate page for each product, service, & topic for more helpful analytics @crestodina. #SEO
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Click to enlarge

When you set up your pages this way, your analytics can help you identify pages performing well or poorly. You can see where your content is weak, where it’s strong, when people bounce, and what’s ranking. You get none of these insights if you lump all your products into a product page or all your services onto a service page.

Post PDFs sparingly

Yes, PDFs are easy to post. Resist the temptation unless you also post the content as a web page. With the exception of gated content (files people can download in exchange for their email addresses), PDF files, according to Andy, are “a terrible thing to put on your website –  the rust of the internet.”

Here’s why:

• People can’t easily share content that’s locked in a PDF.
• Search engines can’t rank PDF content.
• Analytics can’t measure the performance of PDF content.
• PDFs aren’t accessible for visitors with disabilities.
• PDFs aren’t interactive.

Resist the temptation to post a PDF unless you also post the content as a web page, says @crestodina. #CMWorld
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This chart conveys the pros and cons of PDFs vs. HTML pages:

How much PDF rust is on your website? Search for “site:WEBSITEURL/ .PDF” (as shown in the example below). You’ll see the approximate number of PDF files on your website. Go look at each of those. “Make sure you have an HTML version for every one of those pieces of content,” Andy says.

Andy’s advice boils down to this: Make PDF the secondary format and post PDFs only for documents likely to be printed or shared with a particular layout.

Put thank-you messages on their own pages

From the viewer’s point of view, a thank-you message is a thank-you message. From a content marketer’s perspective, you get more useful analytics when you put thank-you messages on their own pages, separate from your sign-up forms.

Here’s an example of a page that includes both the sign-up form and the thank-you message. As soon as someone fills in the fields to request a demo (thereby becoming a lead), the thank-you message appears below the form – on the same URL as the form. “There is no JavaScript trigger. There is no destination goal,” Andy says.

Click to enlarge

A thank-you page has its own URL, enabling you to get reports on conversions specific to that page.

Here’s how to set up goals for a given thank-you page:

1. Go to Admin > View > Goals.
2. Under “Destination,” enter the thank-you page’s location.
3. Under “Value,” select a number. Don’t leave that box empty. Fill in an arbitrary number rather than nothing at all.

Click to enlarge

4. Set “Funnel” to ON.
5. Under “Screen/Page,” fill in the address of the previous step (the page that precedes the thank-you page).
6. Set “Required?” to YES.

Click to enlarge

Andy recommends making separate thank-you pages for each type of conversion for several reasons because you can do the following:

• Set a unique goal for each page.
• Customize the message on each page. (For example, you thank a job candidate differently than you thank a newsletter subscriber.)
• Invite people to take a unique subsequent call to action. (Andy says to give a call to action at the bottom of every page on your website, including each thank-you page. Example: “Get our latest advice every two weeks. Subscribe.” Last year, Andy’s company got 377 newsletter subscribers from the thank-you page after the contact form. “No cost. Free. Super fans.”)
• Offer people more content – maybe a piece of advice. (Take every opportunity to talk to people separately based on who they are. Andy says, “Conversions are a big opportunity. They’re your first chance to talk to people based on their new status.”)

And there’s no downside to having multiple thank-you pages. Additional pages don’t cost more. They don’t make analysis more difficult. In fact, some people believe small sites have a ranking disadvantage since they lack “mass” and “gravity.” Andy suggests building sites with many pages. “I can’t think of a benefit to having fewer pages,” he says.

Post contact forms, not email links

What’s worse than a thank-you message on the same page as the contact form? Email links instead of a contact form.

The page on the left gives email links as the way for site visitors to contact the company:

Click to enlarge

Email links have drawbacks:

• They don’t lead to a thank-you page, so you can neither track those interactions in analytics nor automatically deliver additional content or subsequent calls to action
• They can’t be stored in a back-up database
• They may not get through
• They don’t send an autoresponse email unless one is set up for that email address
• They don’t route themselves based on what the sender says
• They attract spam (Spammers write robots that scrape the internet for live email addresses and then spam those addresses.)

This chart conveys the pros and cons of contact forms vs. email links:

In general, avoid posting email addresses on websites. Use contact forms instead.

Avoid posting email addresses on websites. Instead use contact forms, says @crestodina. #CMWorld
Click To Tweet

Conclusion

Your company’s website needs more than graphic design, interface design, or user-experience design. It needs analytics design. Consider Andy’s suggestions:

• Put your blog in its own directory.
• Make a page for each product, service, and topic.
• Post PDFs sparingly.
• Put thank-you messages on their own pages.
• Post contact forms, not email links.

What else does your team do to set up your website for analytics?

Sign up for our weekly Content Strategy for Marketers e-newsletter, which features exclusive stories and insights from CMI Chief Content Adviser Robert Rose. If you’re like many other marketers we meet, you’ll come to look forward to reading his thoughts every Saturday.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Designing for Better Analytics: 5 Decisions Web Designers Fail to Make appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

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On the heels of the approval of its acquisition of Whole Foods by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Whole Foods’ shareholders, Amazon has announced how it intends to proceed with the grocer. Several changes are due to take effect today, with others set to be implemented in the coming months.

• Amazon will help Whole Foods improve its logistics and merchandising, allowing it to offer sustainably lower prices. The e-commerce giant is immediately dropping prices on select items like bananas, avocados, and salmon, with promise of more to come. Given the competitive organic grocery environment, Amazon likely hopes combining Whole Foods’ quality with lower prices will entice customers and boost the grocer’s falling sales.
• Prime will eventually become Whole Foods’ customer rewards program, adding value to the Prime subscription through additional savings and in-store benefits.This affords Prime a valuable new perk to attract subscribers, and will encourage Whole Foods shoppers to buy more, as 62% already have a Prime account, according to a survey by Morgan Stanley.
• Amazon Lockers will be installed in select locations, allowing shoppers to receive and return Amazon orders at Whole Foods stores. Placing these lockers in stores frequented by Prime subscribers should boost omnichannel activity for Amazon and move the e-commerce giant closer to truly frictionless commerce, according to Greg Portell, lead partner in the retail practice of A.T. Kearney.
• Whole Foods’ private labels will be sold through Amazon.com, AmazonFresh, Prime Pantry, and Prime Now. Amazon has already been building out its food offerings with the introduction of Amazon Meal Kits alongside AmazonFresh. Adding Whole Foods’ labels like 365 Everyday Value will bring on more desirable products that could entice shoppers to try its grocery delivery service.

However, questions still remain about how Whole Foods will fit into Amazon's wider grocery strategy. Although it seems a likely scenario, Amazon has yet to address whether it will use the grocer as a fulfillment vehicle for AmazonFresh, replacing Whole Foods' current delivery partner Instacart. It's also unclear if Amazon plans to use Whole Foods to implement any of the automation and store concepts it has tested on its own.

The e-commerce titan could introduce store concepts like pickup-focused locations, implement its Amazon Go tech, or push the grocer to focus on smaller stores like its 365 markets. This could help Whole Foods create a better experience, as its locations are notoriously crowded, enabling its parent company to take the reins in redefining the grocery store. While it's unclear which of these paths Amazon will venture down, as its recent announcement indicates, we're likely to see more changes coming sooner rather than later.

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More than half of all time spent in digital media is within users’ top five apps, according to comScore’s 2017 US Mobile App Report. Users spend 90% of their mobile app time in their top five apps, making up 51% of total digital time spent.

Perhaps more alarming is that half of the time spent on smartphones is within just one app. That drops dramatically to 18% of time for the second most used app. This suggests that unless a brand's or business' app is the first or second most used (most likely Facebook- or Google-owned), it's unlikely to get any meaningful share of users’ attention.

While the report paints a dire landscape for the US mobile app market, changes in the behavior of millennials (those 18 to 34 years old) suggest a bright spot:

• App downloads are picking up steam after a period of stagnation. Sixty-four percent of millennials download new apps more often than they did a year ago. And 57% download new apps more often than they delete old ones. This is promising considering that monthly app downloads have languished in recent years.
• In-app purchases are commonplace. Nearly half (46%) of US millennials made five or more in-app purchases for digital goods in the past 12 months. And just 30% said they didn’t make any in-app purchases. The majority of app publishers and developers rely on in-app purchases to monetize their apps. 
• Users are more willing to permit app notifications. In 2017, 43% of app users say they often or always agree to an app’s request to allow push notifications. That’s up 16 percentage points from the 27% of US users who said the same in 2016. This is a boon for brands and publishers — push notifications are an extremely effective app engagement tool.

Nevertheless, the report shows the astonishing influence Facebook and Google have over how US mobile app users spend their time. And given the increasingly large share the top five apps have, it’s likely to only become more difficult for brands and publishers to receive any share of users’ time.

Alternate app experiences such as Apple’s iMessage apps, Google’s Instant Apps, and Facebook Messenger’s Instant Games could provide brands and publishers with new avenues to reach consumers where they’re spending their time. While these services are nascent, they do provide a promising option for businesses moving forward.

In 2009, Apple coined the phrase “there’s an app for that,” and within six years, its prophecy had been fulfilled.

Apps had become the primary way people navigate the internet, overtaking mobile and desktop web browsers. And now they account for the vast majority of time spent on mobile devices.

But, despite this dominance, an intensifying engagement crisis is putting the ecosystem at risk. App usage is consolidating and once they've tried an app, users mostly aren’t coming back for more.

This shift could usher in a "post-app" era, which could transform the way consumers access the internet and digital services. Mobile tech giants Apple, Facebook, and Google have each put in motion strategies that best ensure they emerge not only unscathed, but ahead of their competition. At stake is the dominance of an industry projected to reach $102 billion in value globally by 2020.

BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has written a report on the end of apps that assesses the evolving app landscape, examines how the existing app model is threatened by the decline of broad app usage, profiles the promising new tech in the space across Apple, Facebook, and Google, and explores barriers standing in the way of user adoption.

To get the full report, subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and more than 250 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. >> Learn More Now

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Theodore Levitt was the first to introduce us to the idea that “people don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole” – and his quote has surely now become one of today’s most relevant and widely quoted sales aphorisms.

It reminds us that our primary purpose if we are to achieve lasting success in complex B2B sales, is not to sell our products or services but to reliably solve our customer’s problems and satisfy their needs.

But what if the need isn’t that obvious – or if the customer’s perception of their current need is that it isn’t critical enough to justify the case for change?

Interesting or important needs will often be enough to stimulate the prospect’s interest in searching for a solution. But – particularly if they see change as potentially risky or costly – they are only guaranteed to commit to action if they regard the need as critical.

And, let’s face it, our customers will inevitably recognize many more “needs” than they have any realistic ability to address. They will prioritize, and they will choose to abandon many buying journeys that might appear to us to have started so promisingly.

That’s why we need to systematically drill into the “need beyond the need”. Whether the customer approaches us with an already-recognized need, or whether we create the need as a result of our actions, we need to go beyond the obvious.

GETTING BELOW THE SURFACE

If we stay on the surface of the problem, there is a very real possibility that the customer will conclude that although the problem is undoubtedly an irritant, they can live with the consequences and conserve their resources for dealing with other needs that they believe have a higher current priority.

We need to resist the temptation to rush in and prescribe our solution at the first indication of a potential need. Instead, we need to hold back and invest in uncovering the detailed implications and potential root causes.

QUALIFY THE OPPORTUNITY OUT OR MAKE IT STRONGER

In doing so, we will either succeed in making the problem bigger than it at first appeared, or come to the conclusion that the problem simply isn’t important enough to justify the investment required. We will either qualify the opportunity out or make it stronger.

This approach isn’t just helpful to us: it’s also of tremendous value to the customer. With our help and support, they can sharpen their own thinking about the issue and either make a stronger business case for change or avoid perpetuating a wild goose chase.

Here are some of the initial questions we might want to drill into:

• How did they become aware of the issue in the first place?
• What are the obvious symptoms?
• How is the issue impacting their role, department or organisation today?
• How might the issue impact their role, department or organisation in the future?
• Who else is affected, or could be affected?
• What impact is the issue having on them?
• What would happen if they decided to stick with the status quo?
• What’s the relative priority of this issue compared to other projects?

INTRODUCING UNCONSIDERED IMPLICATIONS

Our discussions will be much more valuable to the customer if we share experiences of other similar people in similar organizations and – most powerfully of all – if we can introduce a series of unconsidered implications that are associated with the identified issue.

These unconsidered implications, once recognized and acknowledged, can often make the difference between a need being seen as merely interesting or important and one that is recognized as being so critical that it must inevitably drive action.

WIDENING THE VALUE GAP

This exercise establishes the foundation for creating the widest possible value gap between their current situation and the better future that we alone could help them achieve. It also cements our position as a problem-solving adviser, rather than someone who is simply looking for a sale.

Despite our efforts, the hole may prove to be a shallow one – or as a result of our efforts, the prospect may come to recognize that they actually have a far deeper problem than they might have first imagined.

By drilling in, we change the dynamic of our relationship with our prospective customer. We give ourselves the opportunity to more accurately qualify whether the prospect is really likely to act and whether we have a realistic chance of winning.

There’s another oft-quoted phrase that suggests “when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging”. I’m inclined to propose the following variation “when you find a customer who needs a hole, get drilling”.

I can’t resist adding this final thought: this may well be the only scenario when it is socially acceptable for a sales person to be boring…

The dreaded blank screen stares back at you. Your to-do list is growing. You’re bleary-eyed. All you want to do is to kick up your feet at the end of a long day and enjoy your favorite beverage. It’s up to you, however, to turn the stubborn empty page into a tasty blog post that your audience devours. And that leaves you struggling to shoehorn the creation of a blog post into the days when you don’t have a minute to spare.

You try to avoid it. Perhaps you could get away with creating fewer blog posts. But who are you kidding? You’ve seen the stats. Like it or not, the more you blog, the more visitors your website will attract, and your website is the center of your online marketing universe.

The truth is, blog posts feed your inbound marketing program’s success. You can’t afford to have it fall flat on its face because it’s starved of content. After all, your reputation is on the line. So how do you go lickety-split from that blank screen to words that tempt and satisfy? You have to change how you write.

In this blog, I’ll give you 7 easy ways to beat writer’s block and become a content creation machine.

Don’t Skip Your Homework

I know. You didn’t want to hear that you had to do your homework. Can’t you just say the dog ate it and move on? Perhaps. But you’ll pay the price. If you do the upfront work to set the foundation, everything else will fall into place more easily.

Start with your persona research. Understand your buyers and the questions they ask throughout the buying cycle, then fill your editorial calendar with topics they want to learn about. That way you’ll always have ideas up your sleeve. You won’t be wracking your brain each time you write or second-guessing whether your audience is interested in the subject matter.

Learn to Steal

Now that you know what you’re writing about, it’s time for a little pilfering. Yes, I agree. Stealing is not ethical. Also, your blog post needs to be original to climb the search engines and to turn people’s heads.

So where does stealing come in?

Headlines.

Headlines can make or break your post. Remember, attention spans are shrinking. You have eight seconds or less to capture someone’s attention.

Where’s the proof for that 8-second mantra? Well, Microsoft did some digging into the question “How is technology impacting attention spans?” They discovered the average human’s attention span had shrunk from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013. (Apparently, that’s less than the attention span of the average goldfish. But I’m not sure how they measured that one.) Who knows what the attention span has shriveled to by now? The point is, you have to grab attention immediately.

Fortunately, there’s a time-saving way to do that—use tried and proven headline formulas. Yes, just like math there are formulas for writing too. Just fill in the blanks and work your magic.

Finally, to make sure you’ve put the right words into the blanks, plug your headline into this handy headline analyzer, courtesy of the Advanced Marketing Institute. It measures the emotional content of your headline. Since emotion moves people, it can tell you when you have a winner.

Play with it to increase your score. It’s fun.

Break Your Outline

To write quickly, you need an outline. It’s the bare bones that give you confidence that you’re headed in the right direction.

It should include the key points you want to make and, of course, your introduction and conclusion.

Be prepared to break it.

As you write, you’ll continue to research and new juicy thoughts will float into your brain. When they do, reevaluate. Maybe there’s a new fascinating twist your article can take. Use your judgment, but allow your blog to take on a life of its own. Perhaps you’ll even surprise yourself with your conclusion.

So, don’t let your outline stifle your creativity, but do let it create momentum that moves you forward effortlessly.

Don’t Write

It seems paradoxical that you can write a blog post without writing. With today’s technology, however, you can do just that!

All you have to do is speak to a voice recognition app. These apps can transcribe up to around 160 words a minute. But it’s not just the speed at which they put words on a page that makes them powerful. It’s the speed at which you can release those words from your brain.

If you’re typing, you have to focus on the words that spring from your fingers until they’re firmly planted on the page. On the other hand, if you’re speaking, you can release them from your mind as soon as you’ve said them. The app continues to transcribe them as you proceed to the next thought.

Voice recognition software frees up critical brain space.

There’s another situation where speaking works well—that’s with those subject matter experts who too often refuse to write articles. But you know what? They love to chat about what they know best.  Interview them. They’ll be flattered.

They know their stuff well, so you don’t want to slow your interviewees down. Record what they say and get a service to transcribe it. Afterward, you can take the transcript and shape it into something valuable.

Blog Drunk

Ernest Hemingway once said, “Write drunk, edit sober.” Now, given his love of martinis and mojitos, Hemingway just might have been serious.

However, don’t take me literally on this one. I just want to emphasize that the first time you write something, treat it as a big ugly draft, a.k.a. a brain dump. Let go of your inhibitions. Don’t judge as you write. Judgments are just speed bumps in your writing process.

You can edit your thoughts once you have them on the page. Then edit it again and again. It’s like putting the finishing touches on a sculpture.

Get Distracted

You’ve heard the advice. Shut down your email alerts. Turn off your phone. Close the door to your office. Set a timer. Get it done. Nope. That’s not the best approach. You’re not reading a legal document or crunching numbers. You can’t power your way through it. You’re creating something out of nothing. According to an article in Scientific American, “Insight problems involve thinking outside the box. This is where susceptibility to ‘distraction’ can be of benefit.” They conclude that when you’re less focused, you may consider a broader array of information and gain more insight.

Play some music. Let the cat sit on your lap. Take a break to gossip with your officemate.

Here’s the really good news. You don’t even have to sit (or stand) at your desk to get your blog done. You can do it in chunks, allowing for distraction breaks. Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist, says dopamine in the brain is the key ingredient for creativity. The more, the better. So how do you get more of it? Do something that helps you to relax. Start your blog, then leave it. Go for a run. Sleep on it. Break for lunch. After all, your brain needs to mull it over—not in the forefront, but in the background. So why strain yourself when you can let your unconscious mind do the heavy lifting?

Writing a blog in pieces may take more time from start to finish, but overall, you’ll spend less time in front of that screen.

Hire Some Help

One way to rid yourself of blog writing is to hire it out. That way you can conquer the other items on your to-do list. You could, for instance, enlist the services of a freelance writer or marketing agency. You’ll find they have expertise in writing blogs and offer rapid turnaround. If you’re not ready for the works, there’s one thing you absolutely should move off your desk—proofreading. Even the best writers use proofreaders.

Here’s why: most people’s brains are wired to screen out the details and see the big picture. The ability to generalize allows us to take in a lot of information at once without becoming overwhelmed. The problem, however, is that proofing is all about the details. Also, as Nick Stockton, a science journalist for WIRED Magazine explains, our brains create maps of familiar places, enabling them to consider other things. That’s why you forget the details on your daily commute. Even without them, your car practically drives itself to its destination.

The same is true for proofreading. When you proofread your article, you already know where it’s going. If a word is missing, your brain fills it in. Result? It’ll take you forever to proof your own work, and because your mind plays tricks on you, you’ll likely mess it up.

Clearly, looking at a blank screen and hoping for it to turn into a blog article is no fun. If you make a few changes to how you approach blogging, you’ll no longer dread it. Just pluck one, two, or all of these tools from your writing toolbox, and you’ll feel empowered to conquer your editorial calendar. After, you can bask in the satisfaction of watching your web traffic and engagement skyrocket. End the workday on time and go home feeling successful, satisfied, and relaxed.

How do you beat blogger’s block? What methods have you incorporated from my tips above in your writing practice? Tell me about it in the comments!

The post How to Create Quality Blog Posts Surprisingly Rapidly appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

source: fPat Murray/Flickr

JCPenney is down to its last cents. In March, the company announced it would close 138 department store locations, and its stock hit an all-time low price of $4.73, less than its opening day price in 1978. Its sales figures have shown a desperate downturn, down 37% from 2006. All roads lead to bankruptcy for the once-respected retailer.

What went wrong?

After the financial crisis, JCPenney was poorly positioned to adapt to changing consumer behaviors. They were dependent on foot traffic from suburban malls, which were failing because too many had been built, people were buying less, and online shopping was gaining momentum. They were loath to build a satisfying e-commerce experience because their core customers skewed older and less tech-savvy. Even now, search “JCPenney mobile” and the first result is a physical store location in Mobile, Alabama.

The fall of JCPenney marks the end of an era of American shopping, one that relied on customers seeking a particular kind of convenience — a one-stop destination where you could get everything you needed, from big-and-tall suits to BBQ brushes, at middling prices. As the megastore dies out, however, new modes of shopping are taking its place.

Welcome to the ‘Death of Retail’

The demise of JCPenney is part of a larger phenomenon that has grim reaper analysts announcing the “death of retail.” With Amazon and other online shopping outlets offering a greater selection of goods than ever before, customers no longer need the bundled convenience of department stores and shopping malls. A forecast from Credit Suisse predicts that by the end of 2017, 8600 stores will close, and by 2022, 25% of American shopping malls will no longer exist. As of March the report seemed to be on track, with 3571 closures announced. JC Penney sits in the troubled company of its competitors, including Sears, Macy’s, Dillard’s and Nordstrom, who are all downsizing. In May 2016, 6,000 in-store retail jobs were lost.

source: Forbes/Green Street Advisors

On the other hand, Amazon is seeing enormous growth. In 2015, Amazon announced $82.7 billion in sales, compared with Walmart’s $12.5 billion. Amazon has quite literally eaten other retailers with acquisitions of Whole Foods and Zappos. In an incredible statistic, half of U.S. households have Amazon Prime subscriptions. Industry standards are being reset in Amazon’s image. In order to survive, retail brands have to offer free shipping and returns, lower price points, instant checkout and delivery everywhere.

source: Business Insider/Bloomberg/Deutsche Bank

Consumer preferences don’t indicate that Amazon should be the only shopping option on the planet, however. Buyers still want the personal care and attention that specialty shops offer and the prices that big, efficient businesses do. They want to identify with brands. And finally, they want the shopping experience to be stress-free. The changes in shopping are only making the retail industry more democratic, competitive, and crowded than ever. Yes, the so-called “death of retail” is a misnomer. In fact, where JC Penney reported its worst holiday season ever in 2016, the overall sector saw the best numbers in recent history.

Survival of the Stylish

The best and brightest retail brands have bet big on technology, employing cutting edge methods for more personalized service. Their dedication to modernization has earned them the trust and admiration of a new generation of buyers, who are used to having everything at their fingertips. And while businesses are sweating to keep up, shopping has never been breezier.

So without further ado, let’s look at some of the downright Darwinian adaptations companies have made to stay alive in the face of doom, gloom, and Jeff Bezos.

The best and brightest retail brands have bet big on technology, employing cutting edge methods for more personalized service.

Urban Outfitters – Think big, stay local

Urban Outfitters speaks authentically to millennial customers through hyper-local marketing efforts and behavioral analysis. In early 2017, they sent out a series of push notifications directed at women in cities who like going out. The notification about finding a party dress linked directly to a page in the Urban Outfitters app where users could buy one. The campaign was hugely successful, resulting in a 146% lift in revenue and a 75% increase in conversions.

How did they do it? They:

• Created segments of women who had checked into nightclubs or bars from their phones in certain cities. To ensure the data was accurate, Urban Outfitters partnered with location marketing specialists at PlaceIQ and mobile marketing wizards Appboy.
• Sent out a personalized push notification with an emoji for added fun
• Deeplinked to the dresses page in the app so customers didn’t have to search once they swiped open the notification

The notification was the opposite of disruptive to those who received it. Rather, it provided a brief message in a familiar SMS-like format. It proved that the UO app was worth the download, offering relevant information that was unavailable elsewhere, without sounding like spammy brandspeak.

PacSun – It pays to be social

Once a mallrat staple for surf bums and wannabes, Anaheim-based PacSun has proven that they can keep pace with a new teenage demographic by showing a deft understanding of what makes compelling social media content. In particular, they’ve leveraged the power of Instagram. Through evocative filters, recognizable faces, and crowd-sourced photos, PacSun has amassed over 1.8 million followers on the platform. To get young ‘grammers’ attention and stand out in the feed, they:

• Invest in famous influencers – PacSun has partnered with Kendall & Kylie Jenner since 2012 on a clothing line, which they promote heavily on Instagram.
• Invest in microcelebrities –They’ve smartly picked up on the rise of lesser-known influencers, who amass followers on Instagram through a combination of looks, personal style, and je ne sais pas. PacSun always tags models in posts, like Sophia Gasca, who has 45K followers herself.
• Started a multi-dimensional hashtag – #mygsom stands for “My golden state of mind” and centers around the theme of California cool. The tag has amassed over 206k Instagram posts of surfers, skateboards, sun-drenched afternoons, music festivals, palm trees and mountains from users around the world. The company also launched a content-rich site around the tag, complete with a contest to win a trip, and a rewards program for buyers of PacSun goods.

A strong online identity has the power to shape real-life consumer behavior, especially for young buyers who spend tons of time on social media. PacSun has struck gold with a true-to-its roots, nostalgia-tinged brand identity, and the real people who live out its free-spirited dream. Teenagers naturally want to be a part of it.

Fabletics – Site to store, without breaking a sweat

At first glance, it seems Fabletics is reverse-engineering the death of retail by turning its online business into brick-and-mortar shops. Kate Hudson’s subscription-based athleisure brand charges consumers $49.99 monthly for discount athletic apparel. They recently opened 22 stores with the aim of providing shoppers with what e-commerce cannot: the ability to try before they buy, and an opportunity to bump into other shoppers who embody the fit lifestyle they aspire to.

A larger-than-life Kate Hudson adorns the wall of a Southern California Fabletics store. Source: L.A. Confidential

Their site-to-store strategy is based on a few key factors:

• Syncing online with reality – “We want to completely mirror the stores to the online experience,” parent company JustFab CEO Adam Goldenberg told Forbes. He also mentioned that 40% percent of Fabletics’ in-store purchases have been made by online shoppers who wanted to try things on in person. If they’re not ready to purchase, or something’s out of stock, customers are able to record what they liked about a product and access that information from the Fabletics site or app anytime.
• Selling subscriptions in person – Fabletics store employees are encouraged to recruit shoppers to the online VIP program, making the most out of face-to-face conversations.
• Compare and contrast – Fabletics positions stores next to its more famous (and more expensive) competitors, Lululemon and Athleta, making the association between the brands more apparent.

An e-commerce-first brand like Fabletics may already be a step ahead of other retailers, but by adding stores, the company is committing to its longevity. No matter where the point of sale happens, Fabletics knows that customers crave the personal interactions they have with sales reps, the sense of belonging to a community of healthy people, and the thrilling feeling of finding the perfect fit.

Starbucks – that’s a latte loyalty

Like Fabletics, Starbucks aims for a seamless and personalized digital-to-real life experience. Its strongest digital asset is its industry-leading loyalty program, Starbucks Rewards, which rewards customers not only with free beverages, but also more personal convenience as use increases. In 2016, Starbucks Rewards had over 12 million members and surpassed the $1 billion mark in funds uploaded by users to their loyalty cards. In Q1 of 2017, rewards customers accounted for 36 percent of the company’s U.S. revenues.

The Starbucks Rewards interface. Source: AppleInsider

The new AI-based Barista chatbot. Source: Starbucks via Geekwire

The Rewards program has gotten much more sophisticated over time. Source: Starbucks via Geekwire

How does Starbucks create a Rewards customer experience that keeps people coming back for more? It offers:

• Digital pay – Loyalty members get a physical debit card that they can add money to, but a digital version is included in the Starbucks app, so customers don’t have to take out their wallet to pay. From the app, they can also place orders to pick up in-store.
• Gamification – Starbucks Rewards is based on a gratifying system of stars that you earn for every purchase and referral made. When you reach gold member status, you know you’ve made it. It’s addictive and fun.
• Personalized promotions via AI – The company recently announced an artificial-intelligence backed suggestion tool that would make real-time offers to loyalty customers based on spending habits and purchase history. “[N]ow, if we would like you to attach a food to your favorite drink, we present to you foods you are likely to select, or that you’ve selected before,” CTO Gerri Martin-Flickinger said.

Despite being the most ubiquitous coffee shop on the planet, nothing about the Starbucks user experience is impersonal. Even if the artisanal place next door roasts their own beans and bakes their own croissants, Starbucks offers the advantage of having your favorite drink waiting for you, prepared just the way you like it. Returning feels like home, especially when drinks are on the house.

H&M – Coolness via collaboration

H&M still gets most sales out of its physically imposing stores, but the mega-retailer might as well be galaxies away from the suburban mall. One source of continuous new business for the Stockholm-based corporation is collaboration with avant-garde fashion designers. H&M has done one collaboration per year since 2004, starting with Karl Lagerfeld. The high brow touch applied to cheap items makes for an irresistible mix for young shoppers who want to be known for good taste.

How H&M keeps collaborations fresh:

• Cutting edge content – For its latest collaboration with industry darling Erdem, H&M released an elaborate promo video directed by Baz Luhrmann, of Great Gatsby and Moulin Rouge fame.
• Figuring in fans – H&M’s most commercially successful collaboration was with Olivier Rousteing of Balmain. 29-year-old Rousteing is hugely active on Instagram, known for responding to comments from fans, and posting photos with celebrity friends. He has amassed 1.4 million followers as a result. H&M doesn’t release sales figures on its collaborations, but on launch day of H&M x Balmain, its website crashed and brawls broke out.
• “Surprise factor” – The designers H&M picks encompass diverse visions, personalities, and price points. The same shoppers are not necessarily drawn to each collection. “We always want to give the customer something they wouldn’t really expect,” Donald Schneider, creative consultant to H&M says, which explains why the uber-glamorous Balmain followed the downtown cool of Alexander Wang.

By collaborating with talented designers, H&M distances itself from its mass-market category, and aligns itself with the values of urban culture mavens. The designer collaborations appeal to the customer who loves to go to art galleries but can’t yet afford to buy a painting for his apartment. Taste, which is often just another synonym for wealth, becomes accessible through these collaborations, breaking through to the core of how customers want to present themselves and be seen by their peers.

Adapt authentically for smooth sailing

There’s no right way to do personalized shopping, and each of these brands have had to develop stronger company identities in order to appeal to customers who are motivated and inspired by authenticity. It’s a step in the right direction, away from a boxy anonymity and towards an adaptable humanity.

Building a strong retail brand in the digital age takes guts, and success requires a willingness to grow and change without giving in completely to zeitgeisty gimmicks. By paying close attention to the kind of interactions customers prefer, retail companies are trading in a one-size-that-doesn’t-really-fit-all mentality to a size that fits you, which is a change everyone can get behind.

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Google is refunding advertisers whose campaigns were placed via DoubleClick Bid Manager on websites with fake traffic, The Wall Street Journal reports.

This ad fraud problem happened over the course of a few months this year, mainly in 2Q, and hundreds of marketers and ad agency partners have been informed by Google about the problem over the past few weeks.

Advertising executives aren’t fully satisfied by the refund because it only a covers a fraction of the total cost to place the ad. Google is offering to refund its "platform fee," which amounts to 7-10% of the advertiser’s total purchase. This is a service fee that Google charges to connect advertisers with ad tech providers that are plugged into DoubleClick Bid Manager. These other ad tech providers then work to place an advertiser’s campaign on the appropriate website.

This incident highlights two of the pressing issues in ad tech and programmatic advertising:

• Invalid traffic, or ad fraud. An estimated $6.5 billion in ad spending will be lost this year to fraud, down 10% from 2016, according to a report by the Association of National Advertisers and WhiteOps. This can happen in several ways, including pages that use bots (non-humans) to inflate impressions, or exchanges that "spoof" inventory low-quality websites with minimal traffic as premium ad space.
• Transparency and the "ad tech" tax. The complexity and opacity of the programmatic ad supply chain make it difficult for ad-buyers to track where their dollars are spent. In a hypothetical situation in which an advertiser places an $100 ad through DoubleClick, Google would keep 7-10% and relay the purchase through to its ad tech partners for them to place the ad on the right website, and whichever ad exchange or ad network is used would also take a cut from the remaining budget – this is known as the “ad tech tax.”   

However, Google is working on a solution that should prevent this from happening again, and that should increase transparency and accountability in digital advertising. The company is investigating which of its partners are responsible for placing ads on websites with invalid traffic and is developing technology to automatically give advertisers full refunds in the event of ad fraud.  

The company is reportedly in talks with 100-plus exchanges, ad networks, and publishers that are on DoubleClick Bid Manager, and asking whether they would be willing to offer full refunds if such incidents occur. Advertisers will then be able to filter out sources of inventory that don’t offer full refunds. This should provide a strong incentive for exchanges and networks to clean up and verify their advertising inventory.

Kevin Gallagher, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on ad tech that:

• Forecasts US programmatic revenue through 2020.
• Highlights the factors driving consolidation, and identifies new acquirers and attractive targets.
• Explores the challenges ad tech companies face including the dominance of walled gardens, ad blocking and measurement.
• Outlines emerging technologies that will help propel ad growth in the next decade.

To get the full report, subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and more than 250 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. » Learn More Now

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StockSnap / Pixabay

Explainer videos are proven to be an awesome tool to have in your content marketing arsenal. Because there are so many marketing channels and strategies out there, it can be quite easy to lose your grip on the most fundamental point: your target audience.

If you don’t know your audience and how they consume their content, you won’t even know how to make the right explainer video for them.

Let’s take a look at some practical ways to craft the best video content for your audience.

Know your target audience.

Before establishing your business, you might have thought about who your buyers are going to be — and it’s the right thing to do before starting any business. But you need to make sure that the demographic you chose is the right one for your brand and product.

It’s not enough to look at only one demographic you assumed was the right one at the beginning. Try to branch out to other demographics, learn about shoulder niches and measure interest for your products in other areas.

Free tools can help you with this data collection — American FactFinder is particularly good since it uses information from the US government’s census.

Once you have enough information to create a conclusive statement about which demographics are the most interested in your products, you can start thinking about the concept of your video, preferably one that appeals to the aforementioned target demographics.

Analyze how your competitors do their video content.

This is, in a way, an alternative to the previous point, but instead of looking at target demographics, you will be looking at other companies that target the same demographics that you do.

You want to look at how they execute their video content. What style did they use in their animated explainer videos? What tone do they use to speak to their audience? Do they publish their videos on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or all of them? How long are their videos? And most importantly, why did they make those decisions?

It’s a safe bet to assume that those companies don’t always know what they are doing either, but even then you can filter out what works and what does not. In other words, you can learn from their mistakes, not yours.

Create a customer persona for future videos.

Once you have decided your target demographics and you know how your competitors are approaching them with video content, you should create a persona for your (potential) buyers. This is meant to help your future video content be more precisely aimed at a specific group of people and therefore more enjoyable.

The difficult part of this step is that you need to have an actual buyer. When working with your client, make a little more effort to know them on a personal level.

What makes them buy stuff from you? Is it because they like your video? Do they include video content in making purchases decisions? Which platform do they visit to watch videos?

Knowing this information will help you form a persona that is more likely to buy your products. You will not be able to apply those insights to a general audience, but as you know other clients personally, you will see overlaps in their preferences and how they treat content in making purchase decisions.

Master the platforms your audience likes to visit.

In the previous step, you have learned what kind of people are more likely to buy from you. These people are your top priority, your primary audience. You have collected information about them — including which video sharing sites they visit most often.

Now, put this information to use. Before creating your next videos, you should know where you want to publish it because each video should be tailored specifically for the platform.

Do you want to publish your next video to Instagram? Then it should be less than a minute long, and very heavy on aesthetics.

Or you want to publish it to Facebook? It should probably make sense even without sound, so… subtitles and black bars for captions!

Each video publishing platform has video styles that work better on them than others — and you should use that to your benefit.

Now that you know how to create the perfect video content for your audience, do you think you can ace your next video project? Let me know.

As both the use of ad blockers and the amount of time people spend on social media continues to rise, the effectiveness of traditional advertising has taken a nosedive. So how can your brand reach consumers, and convert them?

The answer lies in influencer marketing. Consumers tend to place the most trust in recommendations from people they know. In 2016, 86% of marketers used influencer marketing, and 94% of them found it to be effective. According to a study by Tomoson, influencer marketing yields a $6.50 return on investment for every dollar spent. And the quality of customers acquired through influencer marketing is also better.

It’s no wonder that influencer marketing is considered the fastest-growing channel for acquiring customers online. Influencer marketing can also help ecommerce websites increase brand exposure, acquire more leads and drive more sales. Below, learn how to boost your conversion rate with the help of influencers, step-by-step. Here are 9 influencer marketing examples from multi-million dollar brands, exactly what they did, why it works and more.

Step One: Work with the Right Influencers

The most important part of influencer marketing is finding the right influencers. That is, having an influencer marketing strategy. Your choice of brand influencers can have a huge impact on the success of your campaign.

Just think about what would happen if you decided to work with an influencer who’s not at all relevant to your business. Your target audience may have never heard of them. And the influencer’s existing audience wouldn’t be interested in your product because it’s not relevant to them. In other words, you’ve wasted money.

Conduct Influencer Research

There are several ways to find influencers. You can conduct a normal keyword or hashtag search on social media, then check out the top accounts and top posts that show up in the search results.

Additionally, there are a variety of tools, such as BuzzSumo and Influence.co, which can help you find influencers.

On BuzzSumo, you just need to enter a relevant keyword in the search field, and the tool will give you a list of the top influencers related to that keyword. You can easily view stats like:

• Follower count
• Domain Authority
• Average comments
• Retweets

With Influence.co, you can search for influencers according to category. The search field allows you to enter keywords which will then give you relevant categories to choose from.

The tool then gives you a list of influencers, and displays details like number of followers, location, etc. You can filter results based on number of followers and location if you’re looking for something more specific.

If you want to improve your conversion rate with the help of influencers, you need to choose the right influencers to work with. Here are some of the most important questions you need to ask when shortlisting potential influencers to work with.

#1: Are They Relevant?

The first characteristic to consider when looking for an influencer is their relevance. Does the influencer have a voice in an industry or niche relevant to your brand? Do they produce content that’s related to your industry?

If so, it’s likely that their audience is also comprised of people who have an interest in that industry. By working with relevant influencers, you’ll be able to reach the right audience.

For example, Natori promoted their line of sports bras through fitness influencer Sarah Dussault. Natori is a brand that sells luxury lingerie, women’s clothing, and home décor. If they were to promote any of their other products through this specific influencer, it wouldn’t be as relevant.

But in this case, the product they were promoting was a line of sports bras, so a fitness influencer like Sarah was a good choice.

#2: Are They Engaging?

A high engagement rate is another important metric to consider when choosing influencers. Many marketers make the mistake of prioritizing the size of an influencer’s following over their engagement rate.

Just because someone has hundreds of thousands of followers, it doesn’t mean they’re good at engaging those followers.

If you want to boost conversions through an influencer, you need to make sure the influencer can effectively engage their audience.

The formula for calculating an influencer’s engagement rate is:

Their average number of (Likes + Comments + Shares) divided by (Number of Followers).

For example, let’s say an influencer with 1,000 followers gets an average of 500 likes, 100 comments, and 50 shares for each post. In this case, their engagement rate would be:

(500+100+50)/1000 = 0.65.

This works for most social media platforms. On Instagram, use the same formula without the number of shares included.

In addition to the two characteristics above, you may also set up other criteria based on your specific needs.

For example, if you want to raise brand awareness, you can first filter influencers based on the two characteristics above. Then you can look at the number of followers each influencer has to see which will work best for you.

Similarly, you can also analyze the influencer’s content and tone to see if their voice will be a good match for your brand.

Step Two: Establish Strong Relationships with Influencers

A genuine relationship between your brand and an influencer adds authenticity to your campaign. In an age when people are questioning the authenticity of ads and sponsored content, this is crucial.

You need to establish strong relationships with the influencers you work with, right from the start. Here are some tips to help you out:

#1: Be Respectful and Straightforward

Influencers are human beings too. So even if you’re approaching them for a partnership, you need to be respectful and direct.

This doesn’t mean you need to idolize them. Just avoid talking to them like subordinates. Talk to them like you would a friend, or a peer, and respect their opinions and choices.

For example, if they’re having some issues with the compensation you’ve proposed, let them know that you’ll review it and see what you can change. Getting defensive, even if you can’t increase the amount of compensation, could leave a bad impression on the influencer.

Remember that influencers aren’t obligated to work with you.

And when you email an influencer, make sure you directly tell them why you’re reaching out to them. For example, you could say something like,

“We thought you’d like to try our new product”

or

“I’m reaching out to you because you’re the perfect person to promote our new range of products.”

#2: Provide Influencers with Fair Compensation

According to Influence.co, the majority of influencers report that less than 50% of brands offer them monetary compensation.

Another study conducted by Altimeter and TapInfluence found that not offering adequate compensation is the biggest mistake brands make with influencer marketing.

To establish a strong relationship with influencers right from the start, offer them fair compensation. Consider your budget, and come up with a fair compensation model for influencers before contacting them.

You can mention your willingness to compensate influencers in your initial email outreach, and then offer to discuss the details with them later, (by email, chat or phone).

Avoid proposing your maximum compensation amount right from the start. Leave some room for negotiation.

For example, if you’re willing to spend a maximum of $500 per post, you could offer an influencer $300 per post. Then be open to negotiating with them until you reach a fair amount that works for both of you.

#3: Give Influencers Creative Freedom

One of the biggest complaints from influencers is that brands can be too controlling during the content creation process. They feel that most brands have restrictive editorial guidelines, which can impact the quality of content.

For one, the influencer will no longer be producing content in their voice, and this can easily ruin the authenticity of the campaign.

Since the influencer’s ideas are ignored, the content may no longer be engaging for their audience. The influencer may also develop negative feelings about your brand if you’re too controlling.

A Julius Works study found that 63% of influencers wouldn’t work with a brand for a second time if the brand had restrictive editorial guidelines.

And according to the previously-cited Altimeter and TapInfluence study, this is the second biggest mistake brands make when working with influencers.

Give influencers basic guidelines that you need them to follow, and then allow them to create something original.

For example, you may tell them what type of content you expect, based on your goals, such as a how-to video to educate consumers, or a product review to gain trust.

For example, when Maybelline launched their new line of mascaras at Walmart, they decided to work with a network of beauty influencers. The influencers had to create content featuring or using the product. But each influencer had the freedom to create what they thought would best promote the product. They all provided unique beauty tips and tricks implementing the product.

Kelly Baum, of A Thing of Beauty blog, for example, created a blog post that provided readers with tips to create a makeup look for any Halloween costume.

Kimberley Pavao, on the other hand, provided her followers with tips on how to get a natural look using the mascara.

Each influencer put their own ideas into the content creation, and produced content that was natural for them.

The campaign saw more than 10,000 blog page engagements, according to a Collective Bias case study. The influencers generated 73,700 content views. And the total impressions from the campaign was 35.7 million.

Step Three: Have Influencers Create Authentic, Engaging Content

Whether you decide to execute your influencer marketing campaign via blog posts, social media or both, the content should be authentic and engaging. Authenticity is important for both influencers and marketers alike, according to the TapInfluence and Altimeter study.

As mentioned earlier, you can easily achieve this by providing influencers with creative freedom. Ideally, the content should also contain eye-catching visuals, or be in a visual format for higher engagement.

Here are a few types of content you can partner with influencers to create.

#1: Content Featuring Your Products or Services

Even a simple piece of influencer content featuring your product or service can boost your conversion rate. People look up to influencers, and often emulate them. So when consumers see an influencer using a certain product, it can affect their purchase decisions.

In fact, a Twitter and Annalect study found that almost 40% of Twitter users have made a purchase resulting from an influencer’s tweet.

You could send free samples of your product to influencers, or provide them with free access to your service in exchange for a social media mention.

Some micro-influencers may not charge you anything extra for the promotion if you give them free products.

Otherwise, you may have to pay an extra amount of money to get influencers to feature the product or service in their content.

Josie Maran Cosmetics worked with lifestyle blogger Kira Paran of Northern Style Exposure to promote their brand. This influencer has a massive Instagram presence, with more than 40,000 followers.

She posted a photo of the brand’s products, and enthusiastically talked about her love for the eco-conscious brand.

The photo has already received more than 500 likes, and several positive comments during the first week after it was published.

#2: Product or Service Reviews

Consumers look to influencers for product recommendations because they’re considered experts in their respective niches. In fact, the previously-cited Twitter and Annalect study found that recommendations from influencers are considered almost as trustworthy as recommendations from friends.

One form of product recommendation is a product review, which can help consumers make informed purchase decisions.

To ask influencers for reviews, you can send out samples of your products to them. Or you can provide them with free access to your service. Some brands may have an agreement for monetary compensation in addition to free products or free access.

You should make it clear in your communication with each influencer that you want their honest review. Let them know that they’re not obligated to write only positive things about your product or service, and that you want to maintain authenticity.

An excellent example is Hello Subscription’s detailed review of their experience with Di Bruno Bros. Hello Subscription is a blog dedicated to promoting and reviewing subscription boxes.

Their Co-Editor, Tom, reviewed a “House of Cheese Pairing Club,” box from Di Bruno Bros. The review included more than 20 images, and detailed descriptions of the contents of the subscription box, about which Tom also shared his honest opinions.

#3: Promote Giveaway Contests

One of the most effective ways to engage an audience is through giveaway contests. And influencers can be a great way to promote your contests. The reason giveaways are so effective is because people will willingly engage with content if there’s a chance for them to win something.

There are no set ways to run a giveaway contest, and you can customize the rules according to your specific needs and goals.

For example, you could have influencers promote a contest in which users have to create their own content, and tag it with a unique hashtag. Or they could encourage their followers to tag their friends in the comments for a chance to win.

Either way, influencers and their followers can help bring your brand more visibility, which can pay off in a boost in conversions.

When The Body Shop wanted to promote their new range of Fuji Green Tea products in Belgium, they decided to do so through an influencer-promoted contest. With a goal to increase social media engagement, the brand challenged influencers and fans to share their #HealthyMoment on social media. And they could win the complete Fuji Green Tea product line and a mindfulness workshop.

Blogs like BEAUTYMINDED promoted the giveaway contest in posts that featured the product line.

The #HealthyMoment hashtag became a hit on Instagram, and generated 50,000+ likes, according to a 3sixtyfive case study. There was a 200% increase in engagement for the hashtag.

The campaign was executed through Belgian influencers, which increased the engagement in Belgium to 22%.

Overall, the brand was able to reach 225,000 people through this giveaway contest.

Step Four: Offer Discounts to Drive Conversions

After reading an informative review about your product, some people may buy it right away. That may not always be the case, however, especially for high-priced products.

Even if they have a strong desire to try your product, many people may hesitate to buy it because of the price, or because they’re waiting for a better deal.

You can encourage them to take action by promoting a discount code, or a free trial link through influencers. Ideally, have the influencer promote the deal along with a product review or post featuring the product.

Here are two types of deals you can have influencers promote:

#1: Unique Discount Codes

Discount codes are an excellent way to drive conversions for consumer goods. And when an influencer promotes one along with a review or content featuring the product, it can have a huge impact on your conversion rate.

OshKosh B’Gosh was able to get a lot of return on their investment by promoting a discount code through influencers. The kids’ clothing brand wanted to target parents who wanted to buy new clothes for their kids for spring break. They worked with 75 bloggers, who created content that provided tips on planning and packing for spring break.

Bloggers like Carly Anderson of Lipgloss and Crayons was part of the campaign. All the influencers in the campaign promoted a generic spring-related discount code for 25% off.

According to a case study by Everywhere Agency, the campaign generated 500+ photos, 740+ social posts, and 15,000+ engagements.

The #BreakforSpring hashtag generated more than 42 million impressions. The virality of the coupon code helped the brand get a return on investment of 8,000%.

Measure Influencer Discount Code Effectiveness

You can also assign a unique code to each influencer to help you keep track of their individual conversions and performance. You can then reassess your campaign based on their performance.

For example, you may want to renew or continue your partnership with the influencer who drives the most conversions.

Here’s how Tinitell makes this work.

#2: Custom URLs for Free Access

You can also have influencers promote free, limited-time access to your service. This type of deal is designed to give something valuable to an audience, and provide them with an experience that they’ll likely enjoy.

After enticing them with a limited-time experience, you can encourage them to sign up for your full service once the trial period is over.

Crunchyroll, for example, promoted a free 30-day trial of their premium service through influencers like Game Grumps.

The YouTube influencers, who have more than 3.8 million subscribers, created a video in which they promoted, and explained Crunchyroll in a hilarious sketch.

In the video description, they provided viewers with a unique URL through which they could get a 30-day free trial of Crunchyroll Premium. To date, the video has received more than 1.8 million views, 51K likes, and 4,600 comments.

Ecommerce retailers can apply a similar tactic, and instead provide a link to a discount code or an offer page. That’s what Dorot did when they wanted to promote their frozen cubes of herbs.

They partnered with more than 60 influencers in the food and lifestyle industry. Each of these influencers created a unique recipe implementing the Dorot products, and showcased the recipes on their blogs. They then encouraged readers to try the recipes too. They provide readers with a link to a $1 off discount coupon to purchase the Dorot products.

Here’s an example from the Eazy Peazy Mealz blog.

You can further optimize this strategy by assigning a unique, custom URL for each influencer, which you can then use to track performance.

According to a Linqia case study, this campaign resulted in almost 66,600 online engagements. The company also experienced a 15% increase in sales as a result of this campaign.

Final Word

You now have a step-by-step guide and 9 influencer marketing examples on how to work with influencers to increase your own conversion rate.

Remember: it all starts with finding the right influencers who can help you reach the right audience.

• Do you have any questions about the influencer marketing strategies mentioned above?
• Have you worked with influencers before?
• Do you have any tips or advice to share with other retailers interested in partnering with influencers for their next marketing campaign?

Please share them in the comments below.

Tumisu / Pixabay

If you’re riding the sales development wave, you’ve no doubt seen some successes. It’s a proven model that works to bring in fresh new leads, and many organizations have embraced it.

But the way you structure your organization will have a huge impact on the success of your SDRs, and your sales and marketing efforts in general. So the question is: should sales development reps report to sales or marketing?

Know your goals

In order to answer this question, you must start by answering a more basic question: What are the goals of your sales development reps?

Typically, the goal of SDRs is either: bring in and qualifying more MQLs or increase specific activity within the pipeline. And although the distinction might seem miniscule, it will help you understand who your SDRs should report to.

In the first instance, SDRs work more like a layer between marketing and sales. They take the MQLs generated by marketing and qualify them before passing the most promising on to sales. They are essentially tied to the demand generation function, and as such are more likely to find success reporting in to the marketing department.

In the second instance, SDRs are tasked with helping MQLs become something actionable that the sales team can dig their teeth into. This usually requires more outbound than inbound activity, and rather than being measured by the number of leads they bring in, they are usually measured by the number of activities they initiate. This makes them more aligned with sales functions, and they will find more success reporting to sales in this case.

If you’re having difficulty deciding how to position your SDRs, think about it this way: how are you measuring your pipeline? Is it by the number of new leads generated by marketing? If so, it probably makes sense to have your SDRs report into marketing. Is it by the number of leads passed on to sales? If so, have your SDRs report into sales.

The state of SDRs today

According to recent statistics from TOPO, 64 percent of sales development teams report to sales. However, they also found that in larger enterprises, over half of the sales development teams reported to marketing. Plus, the top-performing SDR teams performed more or less the same, regardless of where they reported in to.

So what does this mean for your organization?

Ultimately, your SDR team will be successful if you equip them for success. Whichever department you choose to have them report in to, make sure you are clear about the reporting structure, and give them the resources they need to get their job done.

CRM and Sales Force Automation are often used interchangeably. However, I think they’re really two different software with different purposes.

Here, I’ll show you why CRM is NOT really helping sales team become more productive using 2 specific examples, based on my experience as a digital marketer at my current company.

Sales Leads from Web Forms are Automatically Synced. No Problem.

Part of my job is to work closely with our sales team. We use Salesforce as our CRM, and I acquire leads from various digital channels that automatically push these leads into Salesforce from landing pages.

Every now and then, I would make a request to add more “fields” into Salesforce, on top of the “campaign” field and “lead source” field. These additional fields will tell me how well a marketing campaign is doing.

Sample data fields in Salesforce. Image credit: Salesforce Success Community

For example, I recently added a field called “Campaign Ad”. When we run Salesforce reports, this field will tell me how well different ads WITHIN a specific campaign are performing, especially when I do A/B testing.

An ad can perform well and acquire 100 leads at a low cost, but sometimes those leads may not even convert to one sale. That’s the main reason for additional fields. It gives us detailed tracking so I can focus on the right ads and generate more revenue with our sales team.

That’s the digital part. These fields are usually filled automatically when a sales lead fills out a form on our landing page.

The Challenge: Incoming Phone Calls and Emails

Another part of my job is to increase call volume and incoming emails to our sales team through digital ads. Now, I want the same kind of “fields” to track my campaign and ad performances.

For calls, I use a call-tracking and forwarding service called CallRail. I would put numbers generated by CallRail to display on ads and landing pages. Calls to the numbers will be forwarded to our sales team, and the forwarding number will be displayed as caller-ID.

For emails, I use a pre-populated email subject line, sometimes accompanied with a forwarding email address.

To see which campaigns generated revenue, I needed the help of telesales. I needed them to input caller-ID and email subject line (and sometimes forwarding email address) into Salesforce whenever they take a call or reply to an email.

That was when I got pushback from our Sales Manager.

Manual Data Entries into CRM is Killing Productivity

“Do you know how much data they (telesales) have to enter into our CRM when they get a call or email?”

On top of the basic info such as first name, last name, email, there were about 6 additional fields. I was asking for a 10^th blank data field (as opposed to a drop-down field) for telesales to input caller-ID or email subject line.

A typical process would go like this: (1) reps opens the email or answers the phone, (2) create a lead in CRM, (3) copy paste email info or manually ask for name, email address, etc… you know the rest.

If CRM is real “Sales Force Automation”, I really wonder about the “automation” part of it from a sales rep’s perspective. (Not to mention logging all the phone, meeting, and sales activities.)

In fact, according to Esna.com, sales reps spent almost 4 hours every week updating their CRM. This is consistent with a sales productivity study from 2015 that showed reps spent 20% of their time on reporting, administrative, and CRM-related tasks.

Further, many sales activities are never updated inside the CRM. In fact, RingLead showed that only 40% of sales activities were updated in CRM. There were no records of the time where reps are actually working (or slacking off).

Sometimes, it feels like sales reps are required to do more manually entry and logging than selling, all because of CRM.

What Manual Data Entries Can Be Automated?

Well, I wouldn’t just rant about CRM being unproductive without providing any solutions. I found several solutions, but I’m only going to mention the noteworthy ones.

First, for capturing incoming calls, I found DialogTech.

https://www.dialogtech.com/

It has our critical requirements: dynamic number insertion based on traffic source (or others) and integrates with Salesforce for caller profile data. It automates the manual data entry for reps when there are incoming calls. I’m not sure where they pull the caller profile data from, but I know CallRail was able to show me the caller’s first name, last name, city, and state information associated with the caller-ID.

What’s more, it also does campaign tracking. Meaning, I do not have to create a separate report that matches caller-ID from Salesforce with CallRail. That’s the main reason why I chose to mention DialogTech here.

However, because prices are not transparent, I just assumed that it’s beyond what we can spend for my small team. I’m sticking with our current manual tracking until it becomes unbearable. But if you have a chance to try it out, comment below and let me know how it goes!

As for capturing email information, I found ContextSmith.

https://www.contextsmith.com/

It has our critical requirement – automatically syncing our incoming Outlook emails (also does Gmail and more) with Salesforce contacts, without reps doing anything manual or outside their normal workflow.

A lot of apps have a similar solution. However, the reason I chose to mention ContextSmith is because it has “bi-directional” sync with Salesforce. Meaning, I can update a sales lead’s phone number either in Outlook or in Salesforce, and the data in both apps will be synced.

This is unlike other vendors that just do a one-way sync with Salesforce using BCC emails. With ContextSmith, you have two sources of truths, and data in Salesforce won’t become a mess. Reps will never need to switch between their inbox and Salesforce.

On top of automating manual data entries, ContextSmith has Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help produce sales insights and automated reminders for reps to follow-up, whether that be for a new sale or upsell. For Sales Managers, it has analytics that show how your reps are spending time on the right deals.

Although the product is free for teams up to 5 and pricing is transparent, I couldn’t use it because our company deals with sensitive financial information. We couldn’t install any apps without going through an extensive audit process. But if you have a chance to try it out, comment below and let me know how it goes!

Conclusion

If you were curious, I didn’t get the 10^th blank field added into our CRM. Our Sales Manager was too sensitive to the rep’s time spent on data entry.

I totally understand where he was coming from. More time spent on data-entry is less time spent on selling, and sometimes it can be a distraction for the sales reps. But if only we can automate the “Sales Force Automation”, I’d imagine that we have much more meaningful time for the analytics that both DialogTech and ContextSmith provide.

Again, if you have a chance to try them (or if you use other productive tools), let me know by commenting below!

A few months ago we had the pleasure of convening founders, CEOs and product leaders from some of the fastest growing SaaS startups for our annual Product Leadership forum. At the event, product leaders from Dropbox, ZipRecruiter, Expensify and elsewhere shared their advice for how to build, optimize and grow SaaS products in 2017. In reflecting on the event, here are the top seven lessons learned that you can apply now to your own SaaS business.

Understand the “One Thing” You Sell

Too many companies get distracted by ‘shiny-object syndrome’ when it comes to their product. There are always so many new requests, integration opportunities or competitor features that get added to the backlog, and never enough engineering resources to get it all done. Ian Siegel, the co-founder and CEO of rapidly growing hiring marketplace ZipRecruiter, recommends getting back to basics and identifying the “one thing” you sell. Then obsess over that “one thing” and devote as many resources to being the best at it.

That laser focus propelled ZipRecruiter to reach north of $50 million in revenue while maintaining profitability prior to raising their massive $63 million Series A funding round in 2014. Here’s how Ian puts it.

“No matter what you think your business does, your business sells one thing. If you want to find out what that one thing is, take a current customer who loves your product and put them in a room with a prospect and ask the current customer to describe your product to that prospect. Whatever that sentence is they use to explain the value they’re getting, that is what you do. Therefore, you need to be the very best at just that.”

Challenge Conventional Wisdom

Startups that make the biggest splash take a contrarian view of the world. They aren’t satisfied with the traditional way of doing things or the conventional wisdom, and instead seek out new and innovative solutions. Salesforce notably pushed the concept of “no software” and SaaS products have all but ended an era of clunky, legacy and on prem software solutions.

David Barrett, founder and CEO of Expensify, is taking an even more contrarian view with the company’s much-loved expense reporting solution. From inception in 2008, Expensify took a mobile-first approach to their product – the same year the App Store launched – and employs a bottoms-up, grassroots approach to selling into some of the country’s largest businesses.

Expensify’s love of challenging the status quo even extends to their marketing (“expense reports that don’t suck!”) and their “Expensicon” user conference, held in Bora Bora rather than the standard Vegas or San Francisco. David’s advice for others? Seek a different path.

“The challenge with good ideas is that they always look like bad ideas. If everyone knew it was a good idea, it would be what everyone does. Good ideas are the things that no one has tried. If you’re not pursuing something that everyone thinks is stupid, you’re probably doing it wrong.”

Accelerate Innovation by Incorporating Diverse Perspectives

A less talked about element of success is hiring high-performing teams that allow your company to innovate. When making hiring decisions, many companies look exclusively at candidates who look great on paper – they’ve done product management before, they went to Stanford and so on. While those candidates may be great individual contributors, over time you end up with a homogenous team that looks the same, talks the same and has the same perspective. That doesn’t sound like a team that will challenge the conventional way of operating.

Lesley Kim Grossblatt, the COO and VP of Product at theBoardlist, stresses that she’s seen time and again that diverse experiences lead to closer customer connections and more innovative product. Here’s her advice.

“Do you as a team have the diversity of experiences and insights to innovate? One of the things we can see is that that when you have teams that don’t have diverse experiences or perspectives, you tend to solve problems the same way, see all the same problems, and don’t see as many opportunities as people with different perspectives would pick up on.”

Say “No” to One-off Customization as You Move Upmarket

As SaaS companies start to move upmarket to serve larger customers, an inherent tension sets in. Large enterprises willing to pay six- or seven-figure sums frequently want customization so that the product fits their exact specifications. Those Faustian bargains may sound extremely alluring – think about the revenue, the nice logo, how pleased investors will be – but can spell ruin for a SaaS startup. That’s because they create an enormous amount of technical debt and put companies in an endless loop (enterprise customers don’t all of a sudden stop requesting new features once they’ve signed the contract).

Loren Padelford, GM at Shopify Plus, cautions against custom dev work. This was a linchpin behind the smashing success of Shopify Plus, a spin-out of Shopify’s core eCommerce solution that serves medium and larger businesses (versus Shopify’s traditional SMB audience). When Shopify Plus was launched in 2014, you could imagine the internal struggle between staying true to the core product versus introducing customization to serve large brands. Loren’s advice is to stock up on your intestinal fortitude and just say “no” – revenue be damned.

“We had to be super intentional about not building all kinds of custom stuff for individual customers because they have lots of money… Companies who start to stretch upmarket almost always fail that test because it’s very attractive. I want the cash flow, right? Wouldn’t it be nice to have this big logo on my website? So they take the money… [but] at that point their long-term technical debt just went through the roof, and that customer is ultimately fickle and won’t stop demanding things. It really takes intestinal fortitude [to say no].”

Experiment, Experiment, Experiment

In parallel with building new products, high-functioning product organizations play an important role in driving growth from existing offerings as well. Such growth could come from improving conversion rates, optimizing the onboarding flow to help new users hit the ‘magic moment,’ driving upsells within the product, reducing churn or a number of other initiatives. You can’t achieve that growth through gut feel or intuition alone. Rather, it requires an obsession with data and a culture of experimentation.

Dropbox’s VP of Product, Todd Jackson, attributes experimentation to helping fuel their unparalleled growth. In fact, Dropbox recently became the fastest SaaS company to hit a $1 billion run rate, doing so in 8 short years. It’s worth taking his advice to heart.

“Experimentation is a huge part of our growth infrastructure. In 2012 we were running 2-3 experiments per month. These days we’re doing 80 per month. We’re constantly running experiments. This is driving more than $100M in incremental revenue every year.”

Validate Whether You’re Solving a Top Five Pain Point

When you’re prioritizing your roadmap and planning what to build next, don’t forget to validate that you’re solving a real pain point in the minds of your buyers. If it isn’t a top five pain point for your buyers, then buyers won’t go to bat for it. They won’t pay for or use the feature and it ultimately won’t move the needle for your business. Cut it from your roadmap.

That’s the advice of Judy Loehr, Partner at Cloud Apps Capital and one of the pioneers behind the Salesforce AppExchange. In her position at Salesforce and experience advising SaaS companies of all sizes, Judy sees apps and integrations that fail to live up to expectations. More planning and diligence at the early stages would weed out shortcomings before the product enters development.

“There are a lot of nice to haves in the world, so many cute tchotchke integrations. But customers don’t pay for nice to haves. Ultimately you want to do a product integration that is so valuable that people either pay for that integration outright, using the two products makes customers so much stickier that they’re never going to leave (reducing churn), or that product integration is only available in a higher edition (driving upsells).”

Anticipate Changes to How Users Want to Buy and Engage with Your Product

Finally, as a product leader, you should understand and anticipate market changes so that you can seize new opportunities as they arise. Right now, traditional ways of buying software are being disrupted, as more buyers want to try out and even buy products without talking to a sales person. We’ve termed this trend product-led growth, and it puts the product at the foundation of acquiring, expanding and retaining customers.

Steve Johnson, the President and COO of Vidyard and formerly the CRO of Hootsuite, believes that product leaders need to embrace this trend as they build product experiences going forward. Here’s his perspective.

“I believe in a future where product-qualified leads, or PQL’s, are going to trump MQL’s, because buying is changing. People are getting much, much more comfortable buying on their own and don’t want to talk to somebody. Just give me the product. Let me see that. So I think that’s going to drive growth even more – you’ve got to be serving up stuff.”

What’s your best advice for fellow product leaders? Let us know in the comments!

The post Secrets to Building Successful Products in 2017: Experts Weigh In appeared first on OpenView Labs.

The following is an excerpt from The Sales Survival Handbook, the funniest sales book of all time. You can order the book here.

Unless you've actually spent time in a sales role, you have no idea how challenging it is.

You're constantly being rejected by customers, pressured by management, antagonized by your coworkers, undercut by your competitors, all while trying to get through a proverbial minefield to close a deal. You would think that no one in her right mind would want to put herself through it.

But it's important to remember the upside. In sales, you can make more money than in almost any other job. There are people making millions of dollars a year selling things, and the best part is there's no ceiling on your income. You are in control of how well or poorly you perform. It's like playing sports, except you're allowed to be fat. 

But there's only one way to get past all of the pressures, the distractions, and the negativity, and that's to adopt an irrationally optimistic attitude. This goes beyond just smiling more or brushing off setbacks. You truly need to believe, beyond all doubt, that you will be successful. You basically have to become borderline delusional. Only when you've adopted an irrationally optimistic mindset will you be the best.

Definition

You might be wondering what irrational optimism is. Merriam Webster sums it up as "Hopefulness and confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something," and I'd add, "hoping despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, and multiple, seemingly insurmountable roadblocks standing in the way."

Things Irrationally Optimistic People Say

You can usually identify irrationally optimistic people at work by how well they're performing. Those at the top have convinced themselves that they have what it takes to get there, despite all obstacles. Here are some things you're likely to hear an irrationally optimistic person say:

• "I don't care if I have to show up at their doorstep in the middle of the night covered in raccoon blood, I'm closing this deal!"
• "So what if the customer said 'no' the first time? There will be lots of opportunities for them to say 'yes' after I call every single day for a month straight."
• "I don't mind working the entire weekend. Not only do I get the opportunity to make more money, but my family doesn't like me anyway!"
• "Sleep! Who needs to sleep? This is sales, not a mattress research center."
• "I'd rather be rich and tired than broke and well rested, and if I don't hit my goal, I'll be broke and tired."
• "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, and close 1% of the leads you call."

How to Become Irrationally Optimistic

Contrary to popular belief, you don't need to be born an irrational optimist. Like any other skill, you can develop it through practice. Here are some tips to get you started. 

• Instead of focusing on obstacles, focus on the opportunities. For example, don't think about the fact that your clients don't have enough in their budget to afford your product. Instead, help them think of local banks they can rob to get the money.
• Never dwell too long on your failures. Failure is only temporary, unless you don't hit your sales goal, get fired, and then experience a series of financial setbacks that you're unable to ever fully recover from, in which case it's permanent.
• Optimism grows out of gratitude, so be appreciative of what you already have. Also be appreciative of the things you don't have, like that multimillion-dollar waterfront mansion where the jerk who owns your company lives, which you'll never be able to afford, ever.
• Always learn from your mistakes and use those lessons to become better in the future. If you lose a deal to a competitor, ask the customer where you fell short and accuse her of being a complete moron who just made the biggest mistake of her life. 
• Focus on the big picture instead of getting bogged down by things that don't really matter. Think about where you want to be a year from now, and then remember that you will probably still be here, at this same job, doing literally the exact same thing you're doing now.
• Let go of things that drain your energy. Keep toxic people out of your life as much as possible. This means you'll probably have to avoid your sales manager, but do the best you can.
• Laugh more. Studies have shown that laughing releases endorphins, which make you feel better and lead to a more optimistic attitude. If you want a really good laugh, just take a look at how much of your paycheck you get to keep after taxes.
• Invest in yourself. Do things that will help you with your spiritual fulfillment. Read a book. Pick up a new hobby. Print out a picture of your biggest competitor at work and set it on fire in your sink.

Remember, the only thing standing in the way of success is your own mind -- and the quality of your marketing department's leads, the state of the economy, your company's products and pricing, and a host of seemingly other random factors over which you have absolutely no control.

Startup founders love to experiment, especially when things aren’t going well. They map out hundreds of tests and hacks, hoping to find that one perfect path to success.

But if your startup isn’t growing as quickly as you’d expected, you might have a problem that growth hacks can’t solve.

Let’s start with an example.

A startup founder recently asked for feedback on a few experiments he wanted to run. He’d successfully landed enterprise deals for his company, but the self-service SaaS product he developed hadn't found its footing. He believed in the product, but something needed to change.

Get a free copy of Your Growth Hacks Aren't Working, which shows you how to get customers for your B2B startup with cold calling!

So the founder sent along a bunch of potential optimizations:

• Improve the onboarding experience
• Start a drip campaign based on user activity
• Sell directly over the phone
• Add new features
• In-app upgrade notifications
• Ask for a credit card up front

He wanted to know which options would grow his SaaS business

But when I reviewed their monthly KPIs, here's what I found:

• 40,000 unique visitors
• 2,000 free trial signups
• 10 paid upgrades

That’s a conversion rate of 0.5%.

In other words, 1,990 people who signed up for free trials didn’t find value in his product. And to make matters worse, nearly 5% of those paid customers churned every month.

What was my advice?

Forget about growth hacks. Forget about onboarding, drip campaigns, and new features. There’s a much bigger problem: you have no idea who your customers are.

You’re driving traffic, but no one feels compelled to purchase your product. No one wants to be your customer.

When a conversion rate is this painfully low, no amount of optimization can save you. It’s tempting to think you can test and experiment your way out of this mess, but when you’re converting 0.5% of your free trials, it’s time to start over. Direct phone sales and in-app notifications won’t move the needle. A 50% improvement only gets you 5 more conversions each month—that’s not enough to turn things around.

You need to blow everything up

The first step is to figure out who your customers are. Where can you find them? How can you market to them? How can you build a product that solves their problems?

When I asked the founder who his ideal SaaS customers were, he couldn't give me an answer. That’s because he didn’t know.

So how can you identify the right customers for your product?

Create an ideal customer profile

There’s a good chance you’re missing out on the right customers by focusing on the wrong ones. Ultimately, you want customers who:

• Get significant value from your product
• Provide significant value to your company

If you’re failing to convert free trials, you’re likely missing one (or both) of these critical factors.

To create an ideal customer profile, make a list of your 10 best customers and search for common attributes (company size, industry, how long they’ve been in business, etc.). This will help you focus on generating high-quality leads—you know, the ones that will actually pay for your product.

Do things that don’t scale

If you’re struggling to identify customers, find new ways to connect with them. Many times, that means validating your ideas with the power of hustle. At Close.io, we know one of the best ways to connect with potential customers is to do things that don’t scale.

We’ve called new signups, left voicemails after 7 days of a trial, emailed users from personal accounts, gave free hour-long training sessions and sales consulting, and offered engineering support (almost) 24/7. These weren’t optimizations for us. They weren’t growth hacks. We did these things to understand our prospects and to learn what makes them tick. To generate real customer insights—and solve real customer problems—we couldn’t rely on in-app notifications.

Visit customers

Your customers are more than a collection of data points. You can monitor usage and review feedback all you want, but if you don’t see customers using your product in the wild, you’re missing a lot of context.

Visit your customers. Build customer outreach into your schedule. Make time for the people who interact with your product every day. Ask questions. Dig deeper. Observe them in their natural work environment. How are they using your software? What’s competing for their attention? What makes them smile?

Over time, you’ll build stronger relationships with your current customers, and you’ll better understand what prospects are looking for in your product.

When should you optimize?

Before you consider possible growth hacks, you need strong conversion rates. Optimize for growth only when there’s evidence of product/market fit.

When we launched Close.io, we knew we’d built a CRM that would help sales teams close more deals. But early on, we offered practically zero reporting. And while this may have been a drawback for some people, tons of customers purchased our product.

Why? Because they loved almost everything else about Close.io. We understood how to build a powerful inside sales CRM for our customers. And those productivity gains outweighed any lack in reporting. Eventually, we knew we’d improve the platform once we gained more traction.

If your conversion rates are garbage, forget about growth hacks

Forget about onboarding and in-app upgrades. There’s no quick fix for a product that nobody wants.

Go out and find your ideal customers. What do they need? How can you empower them? How can you add value? Until you have the answers to these questions, nothing else matters. Not even that new drip campaign. 

Want more customers? Check out my latest book, Your Growth Hacks Aren't Working, to learn why cold calling is so important for startup founders. Click below for your free copy:

Download "Your Growth Hacks Aren't Working"